Sramana Mitra: What are some of the highlights of your portfolio? Tell us about what stage and what condition you encountered when you chose to invest in them. What is it about them that caused you...

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The Amazon boogie-man has every retailer scrambling for ways to fight back. But the cost and effort to install cameras all over the ceiling or into every shelf could block stores from entering the autonomous shopping era. Caper wants to make eliminating checkout lines as easy as replacing their shopping carts while offering a more familiar experience for customers.

The startup makes a shopping cart with a built-in barcode scanner and credit card swiper, but it’s finalizing the technology to automatically scan items you drop in thanks to three image recognition cameras and a weight sensor. The company claims people already buy 18 percent more per visit after stores are equipped with its carts.

Today, Caper is revealing that it’s raised a total of $3 million, including a $2.15 million seed round led by prestigious First Round Capital and joined by food-focused angels like Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Plated co-founder Nick Taranto, Jet’s Jetblack shopping concierge co-founder Jenny Fleiss and Y Combinator. Hardware Club, FundersClub, Sidekick Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Cogito Ventures,  and Redo Ventures also invested. Caper is now in two retailers in the NYC area, though it plans to use the cash to expand to more and develop a smart shopping basket for smaller stores.

“If you walked into a grocery store 100 years ago versus today, nothing has really changed,” says Caper co-founder and CEO Lindon Gao. “It doesn’t make sense that you can order a cab with your phone or go book a hotel with your phone, but you can’t use your phone to make a payment and leave the store. You still have to stand in line.”

Autonomous retail is going to be a race; $50 million-funded Standard Cognition, ex-Pandora CTO Will Glaser’s Grabango and scrappier startups like Zippin and Inokyo are all building ceiling and shelf-based camera systems to help merchants keep up with Amazon Go’s expanding empire of cashierless stores. But Caper’s plug-and-play cart-based system might be able to leapfrog its competitors if it’s easier for shops to set up.

Inventing the smart cart

“I don’t have an altruistic reason, but I really want to put a dent in the universe and I think retail is severely under-innovated,” Gao candidly remarked. Most founders try to spin a “superhero origin story” about why they’re the right person for the job. For Gao, chasing autonomous retail is just good business. He built his first startup in gaming commerce at age 14. The jewelry company he launched at 19 still operates. He went on to become an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan but “I always felt like I was more of a startup guy.”

Caper was actually a pivot from his previous entry into the space called QueueHop that made cashierless apparel security tags that unlocked when you paid. But during Y Combinator, he discovered how tough it’d be to scale a product that requires a complete rethinking of a merchant’s operations flow. So Gao hoofed it around NYC to talk to 150 merchants and discover what they really wanted. The cart was the answer.

V1 of Caper’s cart lets people scan their items’ barcodes and pay on the cart with a credit card swipe or Apple/Android Pay tap and their receipt is emailed to them. But each time they scan, the cart is actually taking 120 photos and precisely weighing the items to train Caper’s machine vision algorithms in what Gao likens to how Tesla is inching toward self-driving.

Soon, Caper wants to go entirely scanless, and sections of its two pilot stores already use the technology. The cameras on the cart employ image recognition matched with a weight sensor to identify what you toss in your cart. You shop just like normal but then pay and leave with no line. Caper pulls in a store’s existing security feed to help detect shoplifting, which could be a bigger risk than with ceiling and shelf camera systems, but Gao says it hasn’t been a problem yet. He wouldn’t reveal the price of the carts, but said “they’re not that much more expensive than a standard shopping cart. To outfit a store it should be comparable to the price of implementing traditional self-checkout.” Shops buy the carts outright and pay a technology subscription but get free hardware upgrades. They’ll have to hope Caper stays alive.

“Do you want guacamole with those chips?”

Caper hopes to deliver three big benefits to merchants. First, they’ll be able to repurpose cashier labor to assist customers so they buy more and to keep shelves stocked, though eventually this technology is likely to eliminate a lot of jobs. Second, the ease and affordable cost of transitioning means businesses will be able to recoup their investment and grow revenues as shoppers buy more. And third, Caper wants to share data that its carts collect (on routes through the store, shelves customers hover in front of and more) with its retail partners so they can optimize their layouts.

One big advantage over its ceiling and shelf camera competitors is that Caper’s cart can promote deals on nearby or related items. In the future, it plans to add recommendations based on what’s in your cart to help you fill out recipes. “Threw some chips in the cart? Here’s where to find the guacamole that’s on sale.” A smaller hand-held smart basket could broaden Caper’s appeal beyond grocers (think smaller shops), though making it light enough to carry will be a challenge.

Gao says that with merchants already seeing sales growth from the carts, what keeps him up at night is handling Caper’s supply chain, as the product requires a ton of different component manufacturers. The startup has to move fast if it wants to be what introduces Main Street to autonomous retail. But no matter what gadgets it builds in, Caper must keep sight of the real-world stress their tech will undergo. Gao concludes, “We’re basically building a robot here. The carts need to be durable. They need to resist heat, vibration, rain, people slamming them around. We’re building our shopping cart like a tank.”

Mastermind Jordan Peele is a very busy man these days, working on new projects including the movie “Us,” an upcoming Twilight Zone reboot, a Netflix stop-motion animated movie called “Wendell and Wild,” as well as two Amazon shows. But the Academy Award winner is also making time for YouTube.

The first trailer for “Weird City,” a sci-fi anthology series with an absolutely amazing cast, dropped today.

The series was created by Peele and “Key and Peele” writer Charlie Sanders, and follows the lives of various characters in the future city of Weird, where the middle class has disappeared and left only the rich (living “above the line”) and the poor (“below the line”).

The Weird City cast includes Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Ed O’Neill, Awkwafina, Laverne Cox, Steven Yeun, Dylan O’Brien and Gillian Jacobs.

The show drops February 13 on YouTube Premium.

The London fintech industry is pretty close-knit, full of strong personalities and, at times, fiercely competitive. Within this context it is quite common for employees — and sometimes even founders — to swap sides. The latest such move sees André Mohamed, previously CTO and a co-founder of Freetrade, join rival Revolut as its new Head of Wealth & Trading Product.

Freetrade launched its “zero-fee” trading app in October last year, four months after Revolut announced its intention to add commission-free trading to its banking app, in a bid to compete with Silicon Valley’s Robinhood. That feature has yet to see the light of day, although I’m told it is still on track to launch this quarter. That makes the hiring of Mohamed from Freetrade all the more noteworthy. He joined Revolut in November.

The circumstances that saw Mohamed depart Freetrade remain unclear. According to my sources, his contract was terminated last year and the two parties settled, with Freetrade accepting no liability. Companies House records show that the former CTO resigned as a director of Freetrade on 7 September 2018. According to one person familiar with Mohamed’s side of the story, the former CTO had a difference in philosophy to that of Freetrade co-founder and CEO Adam Dodds. Founder disputes are not uncommon, after all (and I should know!).

Freetrade declined to comment on the specific reasons for Mohamed’s departure, but did provide TechCrunch with the following statement:

“In the first half of last year, it became clear to us we were not shipping the Freetrade product fast enough. We decided to bring in new technical leadership. Ian Fuller joined us as our new VP Engineering in July. Coming from Snap, and Amazon before that, he arrived with deep experience in shipping and scaling mobile products to millions of users. Under his leadership, we’ve finally launched our app and have been working on a new investment platform, which we are excited about rolling out in the coming months.”

Meanwhile, Mohamed’s background suggests he is a good fit for Revolut’s soon-to-launch trading product, and not just based on inside experience as a co-founder of Freetrade (it’s curious that Mohamed doesn’t appear to have signed a non-compete clause). He has a Computer Science degree from UCL, coupled with 20 years industry experience where he has worked at a number of leading fintech startups, SMEs, tier 1 investment banks and capital markets technology consultancies. He is also a former colleague of Revolut co-founder and CTO Vlad Yatsenko, from their time at Lab49.

“It’s a company that you don’t come across very often, so I jumped at the opportunity,” says Mohamed in a statement. “Revolut has a huge customer base and global ambitions, at a completely different scale to any company I’ve worked at before. It’s extremely exciting to be part of a fast-growing scale-up that is growing rapidly and getting worldwide recognition. The products we are building are truly disruptive, and we can’t wait for the trading products to join the roster of other fantastic money-saving financial products on offer at Revolut.”

As head of Wealth & Trading Product, Mohamed is said to be focused on delivering Revolut’s commission-free trading platform as well as a complementary robo-advisor offering.

If you have tips regarding London’s fintech scene, get in touch confidentially by emailing me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

If you thought the on-demand laundry space had run out of startup steam, here’s a bit of a conditioner: Spanish startup Mr Jeff has bagged a $12 million Series A, led by All Iron Ventures.

The 2016-founded firm currently offers home laundry and dry cleaning services, including on-demand and monthly subscription options, in seven countries, with a focus on LatAm. Last August it acquired Brazilian laundry franchise Lava é Leva to move into another market in the region.

The franchise model sets the approach apart from some other on-demand laundry startups that already folded. That and a focus on markets with lower rates of washing machine ownership. Ergo, they’re disrupting trips to the laundromat.

The company closed 2018 with more than 1,000 franchises operating, and more than 150 direct employees plus 2,400+ indirect employees working to turn the customer’s in-app tap into clean and ironed clothes returned to them within 48 hours.

Flush with new funding, Mr Jeff says it’s aiming to have franchises operating in 30 countries by the end of 2019, looking east to Asia. It also plans to consolidate its LatAm position by expanding its operations in Panama, Costa Rica and Uruguay.

Prior to the Series A, it had raised around $3.5 million in seed funding, including from European entrepreneurs such as Albert Armengol (CEO of Doctoralia), Jeroen Merchiers (managing director of Airbnb Europe, Middle East and Africa) and Kim Jung ( CEO of NXC Corp.).

It adds that a majority of its earlier investors have opted to continue to support the company by participating in the Series A.

This report was updated with a correction after the company told us it is in fact headquartered in Valencia, rather than Madrid as its PR implied.

A recent Research and Markets report estimates the global dockless bike sharing market to grow 21% annually over the period 2017 to 2022. But while global forecasts may sound appealing, China is...

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Should you let AI help you pick your roommates? Barcelona-based urban room rental startup Badi thinks so, and it’s just closed a $30 million Series B funding round less than a year after a $10 million Series A — suggesting algorithm-aided matchmaking is resonating with its target millennial(ish) “Generation Rent” demographic as they hunt for their next flatmate.

The 2015-founded startup has now raised circa $45 million in total, while its platform has passed 12 million rental requests. Badi also tells us it passed one million registered users last November, up from around 700,000 in February 2018.

It currently offers a service in key cities in four European markets: Spain, France, Italy and the U.K.

The business was set up to respond to the rising trend of urban living (and indeed tourism) that’s been driving rents and squeezing more people into shared houses to try to make city living affordable.

Badi CEO and founder Carlos Pierre points to estimates that by 2050 the total population living in cities will increase from 54 percent to 66 percent. “There will likely be a shortage of homes for people looking to live in cities and as a result, this will lead to an increase in smaller living units or rooms. This is where Badi comes in,” he suggests in a statement.

On the AI front, Badi applies machine learning technology to help with the flatmate matching process — learning from users of its platform as they match and agree to become flatmates, and then feeding “compatibility insights” back in to keep improving its recommendations.

The Series B is led by U.S.-based consumer tech VC firm Goodwater Capital, making its first investment in a Spanish startup. Also investing are Target Global and existing VCs Spark Capital and Mangrove Capital.

Badi says the funding will be put toward consolidating its services in Barcelona, Madrid, London, Paris and Rome, and also to open new offices in London.

It says it’s spying a big opportunity there (despite Brexit) on account of the U.K. capital being one of the most expensive for renters in the region.

Two other cities it operates in, Barcelona and Madrid, are similarly in demand with renters (and tourists), with Badi noting the rental market in Spain has grown by 130 percent in the last 10 years and represents 23 percent of the entire real estate industry.

Paris and Rome are also major tourist destinations, and short-term tourist rentals have been widely linked to increased rents for locals.

Badi’s business is positioned to benefit from the tourist-inflated rent trend as it stands, though cities like Barcelona are also looking at what they can do, policy-wise, to curb rising rents and ensure there is affordable and adequate living space for local families, such as via social housing quotas on developers and even buying vacant buildings themselves to convert to housing stock.

But despite increased political attention on the problem of a lack of affordable housing in cities in desirable urban hotspots, it’s highly unlikely that housing pressures are going to let up any time soon.

Badi says the Series B will also be used to expand the size of its team, up to 100 percent, and also to develop additional extra services intended to make life easier for landlords and tenants.

“In the first quarter of 2019, we will work on improving our product to offer possibilities for professionals and private owners to make their experience on Badi far more efficient. Secondly we are redesigning and launching a new booking system around April 2019 to enhance the booking experience to make it more streamlined and user-centric,” it tells us.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder of Goodwater Capital, added: “We are extremely excited to partner with Badi in their mission to solve the looming urban housing crisis — there simply aren’t enough homes in cities and housing has become too expensive. Badi provides a unique end-to-end rental platform that builds trust and convenience directly into the customer experience, which has enabled them to unlock thousands of new rooms in cities around the world.”

The funding streak for educational startups in Asia continues into 2019 after Emeritus, a U.S-Indian company that partners with universities to offer digital courses, landed a $40 million Series C round led by Sequoia India.

The deal includes participation from existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments, and it takes Emeritus — founded in 2010 as offline management program company Eruditus — to around $50 million from investors to date. It also follows notable rounds in December for India-based education companies Byju’s ($540 million) and Toppr ($35 million).

Emeritus is the online branch of Eruditus. It was founded in 2014 as a response to the growth in digital learning. Specifically, it took the core elements of Eruditus — which include helping educational institutions design new curriculums — and applied them to the online space to develop certificate courses and online degrees.

The company has offices in Boston — where it works to develop curriculum content — as well as Dubai, Mexico, Mumbai and Singapore. In total, it has some 350 employees, while its partners include MIT, Columbia, Tuck at Dartmouth, Wharton, UC Berkeley and London Business School.

Today, Emeritus accounts for most of the business’s growth potential and is really the focus of this investment, co-founder and director Ashwin Damera told TechCrunch in an interview.

“We’re helping working professionals who can’t otherwise come to these schools to access high-quality educational content online,” Damera said. “It’s very different from a MOOC [such as Coursera or Udemy], we are a SPOC — small, private, online course.”

For one thing, all Emeritus courses are run in collaboration with universities, they tend to attract older students — because they are master’s degree level — and their completion rates are around 90 percent, according to Damera. Students on a course, he said, are broken down into sections of around 100, and then smaller working groups of around six, much like traditional offline courses.

Emeritus said it will enroll 30,000 students from 80 countries during this current financial year. That’s a figure that Damera wants to grow ten-fold over the next five years.

The company’s strategy to reach that lofty goal revolves around widening its reach to new audiences. A key part of that focus is to expand its existing English and Spanish content libraries, and develop content in Portuguese and Mandarin for the first time. Interestingly, in the case of China, Emeritus is open to a potential acquisition or a joint venture to get a local business up and running.

Right now, Damera said that just 70 percent of students are based overseas. In addition to accommodating additional international languages, he said that global push will mean the company will develop its tech stack to enable greater, more mobile-based content for students.

But, beyond those perhaps obvious areas, Emeritus is examining the potential to offer newer products and courses at more affordable prices. In particular, Damera believes there is a “huge opportunity” to apply itself to bachelor’s degree education, although he plans to expand its master’s degrees first.

TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer company, is applying for a new licence in Brussels, in a bid to navigate a possible “no deal” Brexit as the U.K. prepares to leave membership of the European Union on March 29 this year.

One of the definite benefits of EU membership, and something that has undoubtedly benefited U.K. fintech startups, is so-called “passporting” of financial services. This sees a certain level of financial regulatory harmony across the EU and means that companies authorised in any EU (or EEA) state can offer their services freely in any other, and with minimal additional authorisation.

Furthermore, these “passports” are the foundation of the EU single market for financial services. Therefore, if the U.K. leaves the single market, which a no deal Brexit and other likely forms of Brexit will result in, then fintech companies in the U.K. that trade in the EU/EEA or have plans to do so will need to obtain new licenses from an EU/EAA country.

In TransferWise’s case, the plan is to open a small, additional satellite office in Brussels, with the company applying to the Belgium regulator, The National Bank of Belgium, for a “Payment Institutions Licence.”

And, in a sense, this isn’t such a big deal for a large company like TransferWise: the money transfer service already has nine offices and employs 1,400 people globally, with 230 posted to its HQ in London.

However, for much smaller startups, the loss of passporting could be prohibitively expensive to mitigate, depending at which stage of growth a company is and how much runway it still has left. For new companies, it makes setting up shop in London’s fintech much less attractive, as regulatory authorisation will need to be duplicated for EU trading.

Meanwhile, it’s notable that TransferWise has chosen to apply to be regulated in Belgium, and not somewhere like Ireland (as, for example Starling Bank has done) or Lithuania (as Revolut has done). It could be argued that both are easier options. Lithuania especially touts itself as the fintech regulator with the lowest barriers and lightest touch.

Cue quote from TransferWise co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann: “Brussels is at the heart of all EU affairs, so establishing an office in the city makes great sense for us. The National Bank of Belgium impressed us with its understanding of the payments sector and openness to innovation, while at the same time being a strong and trusted regulator. We’re keen to build a similarly productive relationship with the NBB to the one we already have with the UK’s FCA.”

Fintech startup N26 is raising a Series D round of $300 million. Following this new funding round, the company is now valued at $2.7 billion. Insight Venture Partners is leading the round, with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and a few existing investors also participating.

N26 is building a retail bank from scratch. The company lets you open a bank account and get a card in just a few minutes. You can then control everything from your phone or computer. And it’s a much better user experience compared to traditional banks.

This round comes as a surprise as the startup announced a $160 million funding round 10 months ago. I talked with N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf about this, and there are several reasons why raising money made sense.

First, N26 is a very different company now compared to early 2018. The user base has tripled and people are using their N26 accounts more and more. Around a third of N26’s customers are paying every month for a premium account.

The startup’s valuation has exploded as well. “The previous valuation was below $1 billion,” Stalf told me. In other words, N26 is in great shape and it made sense to grab more money before expanding to new markets around the world.

N26 is currently live in 24 European markets and has 2.3 million customers. The company plans to expand to the U.S. in the coming months, as well as other markets around the world. Customers currently hold €1 billion in N26 accounts overall. And the company has processed €20 billion in transaction volume since its creation.

I interviewed Valentin Stalf about today’s funding round. This interview has been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.

TechCrunch: Your list of investors is becoming more and more global. Does it mean that, in addition to the U.S., we can expect other countries and other regions as well?

Valentin Stalf: Absolutely. Our goal now for the next couple of years is to transform N26 from being a European company to being a global company. We started in Germany and Austria as you know. We’re now in 24 markets including the U.K., where we’re offering our product in a different currency.

And now the next step will be the U.S. in 2019. We would like to bring N26 to four to six new markets outside of the U.S. and Europe in the next couple of years. But this year is really about the U.S., and then by the end of the year one more market or a couple of markets probably. But we see the opportunity to take the business global. And that’s also what everybody who invested in this round signed up for.

TC: It’s the first time you’re sharing the valuation, which is quite high. Does it mean that the financials of the company are looking good? Are you making money, and from what?

Stalf: Two things led to the success of this funding round. One is tremendous growth. We’ve more than tripled the number of customers in the last year. Globally, I think we’re the fastest growing mobile bank on the market now. It’s one driver of the valuation — the future potential that there are many more customers searching for a banking alternative.

We’ve also worked on the profitability of our company. We’re definitely today the most advanced player on the market in terms of profitability per customer. Obviously, we’ll be consuming cash in 2019 — that’s why we raised a round to invest in new markets. But if you look at our company on a per-customer basis, we’re profitable on a per-customer basis. And I think it’s very important.

Where is the revenue coming from today? We’re very much focused on the daily usage of our product. So one is really from card transactions and the interchange fee. Second is our subscription model. Depending on the market, up to 32 to 35 percent are choosing one of the premium products that we’re offering — it’s a really important revenue driver. And then you have the daily usage of financial products, such as overdraft, savings and consumer credit and these things that we have on the German market, the French market. We’re bringing that now to the U.K. and other markets.

TC: On the product front, are there other products that you’re going to roll out or are you more focused on launching the entire lineup of products across all your markets?

Stalf: I think we want to internationalize existing products to new markets and bring our financial products that we have to more of the markets that we’re in.

But I think the strong focus that we have in order to internationalize is really to innovate more on the product. We’ve launched Spaces before Christmas — I would say version one. The big update that is coming out in the next two months is really about sharing a space, creating a shared account either long term with your partner or short term with friends.

We’ll add much more functionality to Spaces. We’ll be adding virtual cards that you can add per account. We’ll be adding different account numbers.

TC: Let’s go back to the funding round. You’ve raised $160 million a year ago — it’s quite quick. If I read that correctly, does it mean that you’re thinking that competition is fierce or that you should get a war chest in case there’s an economic downturn?

Stalf: I wouldn’t call it an economic downturn, but if you look at the equity market, obviously valuations have been challenged over the last couple of weeks. And I think we were lucky in terms of when we raised funding. I think it was good timing.

Independent of that, we’ve never raised because of any timing thing. Our company managed to do incredibly well in the last year in terms of profitability and growth. And we’ve had a lot of people approaching us, we’re always in contact with different investors. I always think the best time to raise is when you don’t need to raise. GIC and Insight are the best investors we could have thought of.

TC: Let’s talk about the future. You’ve got a ton of funding in your bank account. How do you see N26 in a couple of years as a product, as a company and as a brand?

Stalf: I think we have the opportunity to really build a business with a hundred million customers globally. I truly believe in this. And that means that we’ll have to build the brand that you need for such as business. It’s going to be a big focus.

If you look more at our company, we have now 700 employees in three locations around the world — Berlin, Barcelona and New York. We will open a couple of offices throughout the next year in Europe and maybe somewhere else in the world. So it’s really awesome to transform our company to be more global — we already have 50 different nationalities.

French startup Ledger unveiled a new hardware wallet at CES this week. While the device isn’t going to ship until March, the company let me play with a prototype version of the device. The Ledger Nano X feels just like using the Nano S, but on mobile.

When the company’s previous hardware wallet first came out, that was before the cryptocurrency boom, before Ledger raised $75 million. And the user experience wasn’t great.

You had to install multiple Chrome apps to manage multiple cryptocurrencies, switch between each app when you wanted to access your balance and manage your crypto assets. But things got much better when the company released Ledger Live on macOS, Windows and Linux.

With this new app, you could finally view your portfolio balance and manage multiple crypto assets from the same desktop app. The logical next step was mobile. And you have to get a new hardware wallet for that.

The Ledger Nano X looks more or less like the Ledger Nano S, but slightly bigger. It’s shaped like a USB key and it has a tiny screen to confirm transactions on the device. There’s a tiny 100 mAh battery in it and a slightly bigger screen. The battery should last a couple of months when you’re not using the wallet, and around 8 hours of active use. The microUSB port has been replaced by a USB-C port. The buttons are now on each side of the screen instead of on the side of the device.

After you pair the device with your phone, you can control everything from your iOS or Android phone. You can install apps on the Ledger Nano X, access your wallets and send cryptocurrencies. On iOS, you can lock the app using a password and optionally Face ID or Touch ID.

When you need to validate a transaction on your Ledger Nano X, your phone will pair with your Ledger device over Bluetooth. You can then view transaction information on your Ledger device and approve the transaction on the device itself.

What makes Ledger so secure is that your private keys never leave your Ledger device. Transactions are signed directly on the device. Your private keys are never sent over Bluetooth and your cryptocurrencies remain safe even if your smartphone is compromised.

Ledger now uses an ST33 secure element, which is slightly more secure than the previous version ST31. Now, there’s only a single chip, connected directly to the screen and buttons, which reduces the risk of having someone compromise the information on your screen.

The screen is now twice as tall, which lets you view full public addresses without a scrolling view. You can now install up to 100 different cryptocurrency apps. You can still plug the device into a computer and use the desktop app, as well. The device costs $120/€120.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

The government shutdown has entered into day 19, making it the second-longest shutdown in U.S. history. With President Donald Trump slamming his hands down on a table and storming out of negotiations with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer earlier today, a fast-approaching end feels unlikely.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are out of work as U.S. leaders struggle to reach a fair agreement on the federal budget, including employees of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission . The government agency, responsible for protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, shut down on December 27 and has just 285 of its 4,436 employees on the clock.

“Due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, the SEC is currently operating in accordance with the agency’s plan for operating during a shutdown,” the agency wrote on its website. “The SEC has staff available to respond to emergency situations involving market integrity and investor protection, including law enforcement.”

EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system that allows companies to electronically file crucial documents, including paperwork for initial public offerings, has remained up and running. That’s led to a “large and growing” backlog of filings, reports CNBC, that could cause a delay in several IPOs, as well as a lasting impact on the state of the IPO market in 2019.

Several major technology companies have taken steps toward early-2019 IPOs, all of which are at risk of a delay. A poor performing stock market is only adding fuel to the flames in a year that many had expected would bring record amounts of liquidity to investors via high-profile offerings. Uber, Lyft, Slack and Pinterest have all begun IPO prep, for example, with Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi recently claiming turbulent public markets would not delay the ride-hailing company’s float.

“The good news is that we’ve got a strong balance sheet so we don’t need to go public this year,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a desire [but] if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen. I’d be disappointed and I think our shareholders would be disappointed but the company would be just fine.”

He didn’t comment on the potential resonating effects of a government shutdown, per The WSJ. Uber and its largest U.S. competitor Lyft both filed confidentially with the SEC in December, just weeks before the shutdown began. During the shutdown, companies are still permitted to file confidentially, a method preferred by many companies as it allows them to refrain from disclosing key IPO details and financials to the public ahead of an exit.

Ultimately, tech’s most buzz-worthy unicorns will be the least affected by Trump and co.’s discordance. Well-funded businesses with strong balance sheets, as Khosrowshahi pointed out, have a safety net ready if IPO plans go awry. Smaller businesses, particularly those in need of an infusion of capital to continue operating, will bear the brunt of any IPO delays.

“There’s an implosion of early-stage VC funding, and no one’s talking about it,” was the headline of a viral article posted on this site in late 2017. Venture capitalists are deploying more capital than ever, the author explained, yet the number of deals for early-stage startups has taken a nosedive.

Roughly one year later, little has changed. Seed activity for U.S. startups has declined for the fourth straight year, according to venture data provider CB Insights‘ and PwC’s MoneyTree report, as median deal sizes increased at every stage of venture capital. In 2018, seed activity as a percentage of all deals shrank from 31 percent to 25 percent — a decade low — while the share and size of late-stage deals swelled to record highs. Total annual global VC funding, for its part, shot up 21 percent to $207 billion as deal activity only increased by 10 percent to 14,247 transactions.

The median U.S. seed deal was the highest on record in the fourth quarter of 2018, growing to $2.1 million after kicking off the year at an average of $1.7 million. Early-stage financings — i.e. Series A and Series B fundings — experienced the same trend, expanding to a median of $8 million in Q4, a significant increase from the $5.5 million median recorded in the first quarter of 2017.

The decline in seed deals and the simultaneous increase in deal size began in 2012, and is far from an anomaly at this point. What’s caused the end of seed investing as we know it? A record amount of dry powder in the venture ecosystem has pushed VCs downstream, where they can deploy large sums of capital in more mature companies. Even firms specializing in seed investments are muscling their way into Series A deals. Many seed firms have grown up and become more strategic in their bets, often opting to invest in startups that have found product/market fit rather than those still at the idea stage, despite the fact that historically, idea-stage companies were the target of seed financings. Fortunately, pre-seed, a newer stage of investing consisting of investments of around $500,000, has emerged to support those projects.

Not only are deals fewer and fatter, but companies earning seed investments are older, too. In 2016, for example, companies raising seed deals were older than the median age of a company raising a Series A deal 10 years ago, and Series A companies were older than the median age of Series B companies a decade prior, too.

Fundraising activity suggests deal sizes will only continue to inflate, rather than adjust. Firms in the $100 million to $500 million range are currently the most active fundraisers, and if you pay any attention to the tech press, you know there’s no shortage of fresh billion-dollar funds. Investors at those funds aren’t able to deploy small bits of capital into early-stage startups — not only because the return on the investment isn’t meaningful, but they don’t have the time to devote to those projects, which typically require more support and oversight than their late-stage counterparts.

One thing could send deal sizes back to their normal ranges, however, and that’s the market downturn many VCs are expecting in 2019. Median deal sizes shrank during the Great Recession in 2008, and investors tend to turn away from riskier bets when market conditions grow cold. That means, in a bear market, more attention will be paid to stable, later-stage businesses while early-stage companies are left to their own devices.

Electric scooter startup Bird is said to be nearing a deal to extend its Series C funding with an additional $300 million led by cross-over investor Fidelity, according to an Axios report. Bird declined to comment.

Fidelity has not previously invested in Bird and is reportedly doing so at a flat pre-money valuation of $2 billion, which Bird earned with a $300 million Sequoia-led financing in June. Santa Monica-based Bird has raised more than $400 million in venture capital funding to date from investors, including Accel, CRV, Greycroft, Index Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Craft Ventures and Tusk Ventures.

The investment comes at a time when many investors are losing faith in scooter startups’ claims to be the solution to the problem of last-mile transportation, as companies in the space display poor unit economics, faulty batteries and a general air of undependability. Lime, Bird’s biggest e-scooter competitor, has at least expanded its suite of micro-mobility offerings from bikes and scooters to LimePods, a line of shareable vehicles available in Seattle, to peak investor interest. San Francisco-based Lime has been seen pitching to investors in Silicon Valley recently, too, with reports indicating it’s looking for a $400 million investment at a $3 billion valuation — more than three times the valuation it garnered with a $335 million round in July.

Sramana Mitra: We just announced a partnership with EIT Health. They are going to be accelerating 115 companies with us. The first 15 have been named. Spencer Crawley: How did that come about? That...

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Bowery Valuation, a New York-based company that we told you about last year, has raised $12 million in Series A funding for its tech-enabled real estate appraisal platform. The 3.5-year-old company raised the capital from Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Navitas Capital, Fika Ventures and Builders.

Bowery caught our attention initially because, like a lot of real estate technology companies, it’s tackling some clunky processes that you might imagine would have been solved long ago. For example, its mobile app enables appraisers to tick off items, rather than write everything down. It automatically pulls in public record data so that appraisers needn’t surf the web to find what they need. It enables passive databasing, meaning that rental and sales comps that are often lost today can be found via a map-based search. It also uses natural language generation to help its appraiser clients produce reports.

What has changed since we last talked: the company was beginning to sell a white-label version of its app to customers, and it has since shifted toward focusing its entire product and engineering team on its own internal software.

It has also expanded its footprint more slowly than it thought it might. Though the company is currently licensed and working throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, it hasn’t reached numerous farther-flung cities that continue to remain in its sights, including L.A. and Chicago.

Both are “still our first two choices for expansion,” says co-founder Noah Isaacs, adding that Bowery’s goal is now to “be in at least one of those two markets within the next nine to 12 months, with the other to follow shortly. We held off on expanding into new geographies prematurely, as we felt we had a lot more room to grow just in the tri-state area.” (Isaacs says the company has more than tripled its customer base and revenue since we last talked with the company last March.)

Though Bowery today focuses on multi-family and mixed-use assets, it also plans to expand to other commercial properties this year, says Isaacs.

Isaacs and his best childhood friend, John Meadows, founded Bowery in 2015 after working together at the same appraisal firm in New York and seeing plenty about the business on which they could improve. After bringing aboard as CTO Cesar Devers, a Princeton grad who’d studied economics and worked on several startups after graduating, the three got to work, applying and gaining acceptance shortly afterward to MetaProp NYC, a local accelerator program that focuses exclusively on real estate.

Bowery, where Meadows and Isaacs are co-CEOs, has since raised $18.8 million altogether, including from real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield.

Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory.

Aurora, the developer of a full-stack self-driving software system for automobile manufacturers, is raising at least $500 million in equity funding at more than a $2 billion valuation in a round expected to be led by new investor Sequoia Capital, according to a Recode report. A $500 million financing would bring Aurora’s total raised to date to $596 million and would provide a 4x increase to its most recent valuation.

The company, founded in 2016, raised a $90 million Series A last February from Hoffman’s Greylock Partners and Index Ventures . Hoffman and Index general partner Mike Volpi joined Aurora’s board as part of the deal. Greylock and Index are Aurora’s only existing investors, per PitchBook data. The young business has a lean cap table often characteristic of startup’s led by experienced entrepreneurs able to secure financing deals briskly from top VCs.

Aurora’s C-suite is chock-full of veteran AV workers. Urmson, for his part, formerly headed up the self-driving vehicles program at Google, now known as Waymo. Chief technology officer Drew Bagnell was head of perception and autonomy at Uber and Sterling Anderson, Aurora’s chief product officer, directed the autopilot program at Tesla from 2015 to 2016.

Managed by Q, the office management platform that launched back in 2013, has today revealed that it raised an additional $25 million as a part of its Series C, led by existing investors RRE and Google Ventures, with participation from new investors DivCo West, Oxford Properties and others. The fresh capital brings the total round to $55 million.

Managed by Q launched as an all-encompassing platform for office management, offering IT support, supply inventory management, cleaning and equipment repair. Since, the company has added a full-fledged marketplace, allowing office managers to choose vendors for various needs around the office.

But for 2019, the company is focused on tools and services.

“We want to spend 2019 putting even greater focus on the tools used by our vendors and workplace management teams, like task management tools,” said co-founder and CEO Dan Teran . “We want to build the first set of collaboration tools for the workplace team, the same way that designers use InVision and engineers use GitHub and salespeople use Salesforce. Something purposely built for the workplace team.”

Teran described tools that would allow for employee requests, work orders, task management, inventory management and budgeting to all live on the same platform.

The company hasn’t shared much by way of revenue or customer growth, but Teran told TechCrunch that the marketplace business has been doubling since it launched and is on track to continue on that trajectory. He also wrote in a company blog post that Managed by Q’s top five vendor partners have done more than $1 million in business on the Managed by Q platform, and more than 30 partners will have earned over $100,000 on the platform in 2018.

The NY-based startup also brokered a partnership with Staples to provide office supplies to clients, and acquired Hivy and NVS to further fill out their office management suite of products.

Managed by Q has raised a total of $128.25 million, according to Crunchbase.