Today’s 420th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, October 25, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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Founders Fund has led the $6 million Series A for Summersalt, an early-stage e-commerce startup embracing the next-gen consumer’s penchant for inclusivity and affordability.

Headquartered in St. Louis, the 1-year old company sells swimsuits designed in-house with eco-friendly fabrics directly to consumers. Like other D2C brands, Summersalt cuts out the middlemen to give its customers access to its swimsuits for $95 or less. What sets it apart is its data-focused fit system. With a patent on recommending garments based on body type and consumer preference, it uses more than 10,000 scans of real women’s bodies and some 1.5 million measurements to create what it says are designer-quality garments.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Lori Coulter and her team design all the swimsuits and source the fabrics directly with factories in the U.S. and Asia. With the latest investment, Coulter says the company will launch a line of travel wear and expand its inventory to offer more sizes.

“A core value of the brand really is inclusivity and we know from an economic perspective that by moving up to size 22, we really can acquire a broader set of consumers,” Coulter told TechCrunch.

Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin, co-founder and chief brand officer, said their strategy is to cater to women like them. Chamberlin herself is an immigrant, originally from Mumbai, while Coulter, a mother of two, was born and raised in Missouri.

“We were both tired of seeing the oversexualized approach to swimwear,” Chamberlain told TechCrunch. “We wanted a brand to appeal to women like us so we could feel sexy on our own terms. We wanted to appeal to women across the country, whether that’s a mom in Missouri or a stylish girl in Brooklyn.”

“Women like us are immigrants. Women like us are moms. Women like us are size 2 and women like us are size 22,” she added.

The pair said the move to incorporate a travel line is in keeping with their wanderlust-themed brand, which appeals to younger consumers.

“It’s a unique time in retail; women prefer experiences over things,” Coulter said. “We really see this as the next frontier in retail. We want to position Summersalt as the next-generation brand focused around travel.”

It’s the Peter Thiel -owned Founders Fund’s first investment in the startup, which previously raised a $2 million seed round in March 2018. Lewis and Clark Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Dundee Venture Capital, Breakout Capital, Cultivation Capital, Victress Capital, Amplifyher Ventures, M25 and Giuliana and Bill Rancic also participated in the funding.

News rooms and studios don’t necessarily find out about breaking news through reporters. These days, a lot of them rely on real-time information discovery platforms such as the Billion...

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Armed with new capital (following a recent £8 million Series C round) and now doing £1 million per month in revenue, job meta-search engine Adzuna has acquired the U.K. tech startup job board Work In Startups.

Terms of deal aren’t being disclosed. However, it will see Adzuna take over operation of the Work In Startups website but continue to run it as an independent brand and community. Notably, the site will remain free to post jobs.

Launched in 2011 by Diana Ilinca and Alex Borbely, Work In Startups set out to create a way for startups to more easily find tech and creative talent, without having to go through recruiters or use more generic job sites. It is said to have become an important tool in U.K. startup hiring over the past few years, and, I understand, has been used by Adzuna itself.

“As we continue to grow and learn more and more about the market, we’ve realised that ‘generalist’ search is not always the best solution for all jobseekers/employers, and sometimes a focussed, niche site can offer a more tailored experience and build a stronger community,” Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter tells me.

“Tech startup jobs and companies are cutting-edge, early adopters and have very particular needs… and this is truly a really strong but underdeveloped market-leading community asset with a freemium model like Adzuna. So it’s a great way for us to learn better how we can take what we’re good at — tech, traffic acquisition, data etc. — and apply it to create more value for a site like this and its users.”

Related to this, Adzuna’s data shows there are currently 1.1 million open job roles in the U.K. and that 90,000 (more than 8 percent) are in tech.

“On a personal note, I want to make hiring great people easier and less expensive for U.K. startups,” continues Hunter. “I’ve been through ‘the struggle’ and it’s f***ing hard to attract the best talent when your company is just getting going (let alone having to compete with big banks and established tech companies for talent!). We’d like to change that by taking on this community and growing it to new heights”.

With that said, he cautions me not to expect other imminent acquisitions. “Would we do other similar acquisitions in the future? For now, it’s a one-off but maybe for right asset,” says the Adzuna co-founder.

Tado, the smart thermostat and AC control maker, has raised a further $50 million in funding from an array of noteworthy and strategic investors. Backing the Munich-headquartered company this time around is Amazon, E.ON, Total Energy Ventures, Energy Innovation Capital, Inven Capital, and the European Investment Bank.

It brings total funding to $102 million since being founded in 2011, while the new capital will be used to develop new products and to extend its service offerings. The latter already includes “proactive” boiler maintenance via data the app collects and analyses and Tado’s 40,000 strong network of heating engineer partners.

That Amazon has chosen to invest is probably the most interesting aspect of this new financing round. The e-retail and technology giant has made multiple moves into the smart home space over the last few years, including acquisitions such as Ring (smart doorbell and security), and Blink (more smart doorbell and security cameras). Prior to buying Ring it was an investor via its Amazon Alexa Fund, and has also backed U.S. focussed smart thermostat company Ecobee.

Zooming out further, Amazon’s Echo powered by Alexa has positioned itself as the device that can bring the disparate smart home ecosystem under a single voice interface, alongside competitors Apple (Siri) and Google (Google Home), of course. (Tado supports all three digital assistants and is sold by Amazon and in Apple retail stores). Amazon has also ventured into smart home device installation and other home services, and given that Tado has a strong services component, the strategic fit looks even stronger.

In a call with Tado co-founder Christian Deilmann, he reiterated the three pillars of the company’s offering. The first is helping you manage your home’s climate to make it more comfortable and convenient/cost-effective. This includes being able to connect your existing central heating or air conditioning to the internet for remote and smartphone control, but also geo-location and other “smart” features that detect when residents are leaving or approaching home, the weather is changing, or when windows are opened.

However, as we’ve noted before, Tado’s engineering play goes deeper than simply smart phone and location-based control of your home’s heating and cooling systems alone. The startup’s smart thermostat has been painstakingly engineered to be able to connect to the digital serial interface of thousands of different boilers/manufacturers typically found in heating systems in Europe and in newer systems in general. This enables the Tado cloud to do a number of interesting things, such as modulating heating, rather than simple switching the boiler on or off, and provide remote diagnostics — which is where Tado’s second pillar, its service model, comes into play.

Longer term, a third pillar will see Tado more directly benefit energy management overall, including at the national grid level. In practice this means partnerships with local utilities companies — a number of pilots are already underway — to enable Tado and its customers to opt into ‘demand response’ schemes so that a home’s heating and cooling systems are utilised where possible outside of known peak energy times.

This could be as simple as turning your heating down by a few points without it really being noticeable or heating your home up a little ahead of time. In aggregate, this can make a tangible difference to the national grid’s ability to stabilise energy consumption, something that becomes ever more crucial as more renewable energy that is sporadic in nature, such as wind and solar, is supplied to the grid.

Meanwhile, energy company E.ON joining this latest funding round builds on a number of partnerships that Tado has with utilities companies as a route to market other than its B2C sales in retail stores. Deilmann tells me Tado can be purchased from over 30 utility companies and that B2B makes up around 50 percent of sales. The company also counts Čez Group, a multinational energy conglomerate based in the Czech Republic, and Statkraft Venture Capital, the investment company of Europe’s largest producer of renewable energy, as previous backers.

If your Instagram followers aren’t aware that you’ve voted, did you really even vote?

In 2018, the act of voting is great social media fodder. People want their friends to know they’ve registered to vote, or that they’ve just mailed in their absentee ballot or even that they’ve bought some sort of “look, I voted” t-shirt. These announcements are being shared across social platforms like it’s a required part of the voting process.

Whether or not those people only voted for the likes doesn’t really matter, the important thing is that they voted. Social media, because of the unprecedented access it grants people to the lives of their peers and influencers, is an effective strategy of pushing eligible voters to the polls. Why? Because people care about their friends and often even more about what their friends think of them. No one wants to be that friend that didn’t vote.

Vote.org and Outvote, a texting app for political campaigns, have taken note. The nonprofit platform for voter registration, information and advocacy has teamed up with the Y Combinator graduate to launch a new nonpartisan social media app that syncs with a user’s address book to help them quickly and efficiently remind their friends to check their registration status, find their polling place location and vote.

According to Outvote’s research, one text message from a known contact made people 10 percent more likely to vote versus 8 percent from a typical conversation with a political canvasser. Using the app, you can essentially perform 2 hours of canvassing in 5 minutes, from the comfort of your own bed.

“This November, reminding your friends is your new civic duty,” Outvote co-founder Naseem Makiya said in a statement. 

Outvote’s flagship app is tailored for Democrats and is meant to inspire and personalize grassroots-style campaigning. Using that app, you can send messages to your friends using Facebook Messenger, too, though the app doesn’t sync with any contacts outside of your phone’s address book.

In addition to YC backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding. The startup was founded by Makiya, formerly of startups Moovweb and DataCamp, as well as Nadeem Mazen, the former chief executive officer of a creative agency called Nimblebot.

Axios reported earlier today that while TV and email campaigns are still used by political campaigns, text messaging has proven to be a whole lot more successful. Per Opn Sesame, 90 percent of text messages are read within 5 minutes: “That intimate delivery, and the ability to target and personalize messages, is what makes them so effective for campaigns — but also annoying for many voters who didn’t sign up for them,” Axios’ Kim Hart wrote.

Social media companies, other avenues for targeted and personalized messaging, have stepped up their voter education efforts ahead of the midterm elections.

Snap announced yesterday that after adding a vote button to its app, more than 400,000 of its users registered to vote via TurboVote. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have added small reminders to their feeds, as have Reddit, Tinder, Bumble, Lyft and several other big tech companies.

Instagram, for its part, has Taylor Swift. Her recent social media campaign, beginning with a post earlier this month prodding her fans to vote, caused a big spike in voter registrations. According to Vote.org, 65,000 people registered to vote in the 24-hour period that followed her first-ever politically fueled gram.

Since then, Swift has been sharing on her Instagram story images of her fans who voted. It’s her reward to those who followed her advice to express their political opinions.

So vote, and you may be featured on a pop star’s Instagram. That’s 2018 for you.

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TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner, and I’m excited to announce that we invited Threads founder Sophie Hill to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping.

Threads is like nothing out there. It isn’t an e-commerce website with warehouses and suppliers. It isn’t a marketplace website for second-hand luxury goods. It isn’t a marketplace website for other brands. In fact, it’s not a website at all.

The startup combines a strong editorial strategy with a distribution method that is quite novel. You get recommendations through your favorite chat app on your phone. It works on services like WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram and iMessage.

On the other end of the conversation, you interact with human shopping assistants. This is what makes the experience so great. You don’t receive a newsletter, you don’t have to download an app. It integrates directly with apps that you were already using.

This way, if you feel overwhelmed and think you’re falling behind on the fashion front, Threads is much more efficient. Chances are you often browse your conversation list anyway. Accessing Threads is just a tap away.

And it’s working. The company recently raised a $20 million round and people spend $3,000 on average per shopping session. Big fashion houses, such as Dior, Fendi and Chopard started working with the startup.

By adopting a WeChat-first approach, the company managed to attract quite a few Chinese customers in particular. But Threads currently has customers in over 100 countries.

If you think you knew everything about e-commerce, come to Disrupt Berlin to listen to Hill’s novel strategy.

The conference will take place on November 29-30 and you can buy your ticket right now.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

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Sophie Hill

Founder, Threads

Sophie is founder and CEO of Threads, with a mission to pioneer the best luxury shopping experience in the world. By leveraging social media and messaging platforms, Sophie has built a £multi­million global fashion tech business, and is setting the rules for a new form of consumer buying, called chat commerce. Threads joined Future Fifty in 2017 and is now in Tech Track 100 as owner of one of the UK’s fastest growing tech growth companies. In between doubling the size of the company in 2018, Sophie is also figuring out how to sell the first $1m diamond through whatsapp.

At Disrupt SF, CEO Brynn Putnam demoed and launched Mirror, a smart gadget that sits on your wall and offers virtual fitness classes.

The $1500 device can be paired with a monthly subscription to let the user browse fitness classes, mark their progress, and follow along with other Mirror users. The idea here is that people spend thousands of dollars on gym memberships and/or huge fitness machines like the Peloton, but that Mirror offers a way to get a similar experience at home without taking up all that space.

We caught up with Putnam at the Mirror offices in NYC to check out the product and get more info.

Enjoy the video!

RevenueCat, a startup that helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions, has raised $1.5 million in new funding.

The company was part of the most recent batch at Y Combinator, and CEO Jacob Eiting said growth has been “a rocket ship” for the past few months. As of this week, RevenueCat is working with 100 live apps, and it’s crossing $1 million in tracked revenue.

The startup offers an API to address what sounds like a straightforward task, supporting in-app subscriptions in iOS and Android. As Eiting put it when I first interviewed him a few months ago, it’s “boring work” solving a “boring problem” — but that’s one of the reasons why developers don’t want to deal with it. It also means they don’t have to spend time dealing with bugs and updates on the subscription side of either platform.

And RevenueCat continues to add new features, like allowing developers to bring their revenue data into analytics and attribution services. That, in turn, makes it easier for them to see which ads are driving real revenue.

The long-term goal is to build what Eiting (who’s pictured above with his co-founder Miguel Carranza) calls a “revenue management platform.”

“Our mission as a company is to help developers make more money,” he said. “I think we do become this one-stop shop, a service that you integrate with all the payment touch points in your app to help you track your revenue and help you understand how customers are spending.”

The new funding (which is on top of the $120,000 RevenueCat received from YC) was led by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr. Eiting said it’s “an obvious fit,” since the software-as-a-service entrepreneurs who read SaaStr articles, listen to its podcasts and attend its events form “this huge community of companies that are potential customers for us.”

For Dash Radio founder Scott Keeney, streaming music and radio are two very different things. On the streaming side, Apple and Spotify dominate, and “there’s not going to be room for much else.” But when it comes to radio, he argued, “It’s the wild, wild west.”

Keeney, a.k.a. DJ Skee, was already one of the biggest radio DJs when he started Dash. For him, radio is a more curated, personality-driven, “lean back” experience — so Dash Radio focuses on live shows, with a lineup of more than 400 shows across 75 stations, with big names like Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and Ice Cube as hosts.

The startup is announcing that it’s now reaching 10 million monthly listeners, and that it’s raised an $8.8 million seed round.

Investors include Nimble Ventures, Slow Ventures, Lazerow Ventures, Muzik, Arab Angel, G Ventures, Lindzon Capital Partners, Jason Flom, Orin Snyder and Ian Schaefer. Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara and Alibaba’s former chairman of U.S. investments Michael Zeisser also invested and are joining the company’s board, as is Passport Capital founder John Burbank.

“I’m honored to be joining the board at Dash, and excited about the real change they’re driving across radio,” said Tsujihara in the funding announcement. “With their great leadership team, terrific original curated content and an offering unmatched in the market, Dash is positioned to disrupt analog radio and convert listeners to Dash users.”

Speaking of analog radio, Keeney acknowledged that there are other services (like iHeartRadio) that bring live radio broadcasts online, but he suggested that they’re coming from “legacy players” who are “all burdened by legacy infrastructure.”

Dash is able to take a different approach. For one thing, it’s cut out the long stretches of advertising — as Keeney put it, “We figured a business model that goes around these traditional insertion-based advertising models.”

That doesn’t means it’s avoiding sponsorships. In fact, it recently opened a studio in the Empire State Building (it already has a studio in Los Angeles) in partnership with Build-A-Bear, which also operates a branded kids’ station on Dash. What Dash isn’t going to do is interrupt the music and shows with ads.

Keeney also suggested that Dash might eventually introduce a paid, premium plan with features like on-demand show archives.

He made it clear that if Dash really is going to be the future of radio, it needs to allow new talent to succeed as well. That includes surfacing new artists (Keeney said Post Malone’s first radio interview was on Dash), and also new DJs. After all, Snoop Dogg is “an incredible talent,” but he’s never going to be known primarily as a Dash Radio personality.

“Now we’re starting to see people emerging, they are going to be known as somebody from Dash Radio,” Keeney said.

PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) recently reported its third quarter results that surpassed all market expectations as it continues to grow rapidly through strategic tie-ups and the launch of newer products....

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Legitimate augmented reality use cases are hard to come by. Spatial, which dubs itself as a cross-reality platform, is launching today with $8 million in seed funding from iNovia Capital, Uber co-founder and Expa founder Garrett Camp, Samsung Next, Joi Ito of MIT Media Lab, Mark Pincus and Andy Hertzfeld to bring augmented reality to enterprise customers. Spatial envisions its solution replacing tools like Google Hangouts, Zoom and the numerous other virtual workplace meeting apps.

While many companies are focused on games and entertainment, Spatial is looking at how everyday people can use AR for everyday work purposes.

“We think the future of work is going to be increasingly distributed,” Spatial co-founder and CEO Anand Agarawala told TechCrunch. “When you put on Spatial, they are in the room with you. It feels like they’re all sitting at the table, and they feel like they’ve been teleported into the space with you.”

Spatial is two things. One is a remote presence that enables people to feel like they’re face-to-face with their colleagues. The other is a suite of knowledge tools and an “infinite desktop” that uses the room as your monitor.

Spatial is purely a software platform that has partnerships with Microsoft HoloLens but is hardware agnostic. Spatial also offers both web and phone apps for people who may not have access to an AR headset.

To use Spatial, you would first pop on an AR headset and scan your current environment. From there, Spatial shares that environment with anyone you’d like and enables them to join the space. When you look around the room, you’re able to see and interact with the avatars of your co-workers. But more importantly, you’re all able to interact with a shared set of documents, websites, images and whatever else you or your teammates decide to put in the shared space.

Currently, there are a handful of companies using Spatial’s technology. One of those companies is Ford’s incubator, Ford X, which is piloting the software to enable its teams working on mobility to collaborate remotely. As it stands today, Spatial can handle about 15 to 20 people at a time, but the goal is to scale up to be able to manage hundreds of people at once.

Unlike other types of collaboration software, Spatial doesn’t have a presenter mode because the company wants “social etiquette to take over” and make the experience as realistic as possible, Agarawala said.

You can check it out in action below.

Access to timely, quality mental health services can be a struggle. Octave, a mental health studio founded by Sandeep Acharya, One Medical’s former head of strategy, is launching today to help with just that.

“The mission of Octave is to create a society where people are as proactive about their mental well-being as they are about their physical well-being,” Acharya told TechCrunch.

Octave offers individual therapy, a stress management coaching program and daily, drop-in classes for people seeking mindfulness, help with insomnia and general coping skills. Drop-in classes start at $15 per class while coaching is $75 per session. Octave, however, is still quite costly for ongoing therapy ($180 a session) — and cost is often a significant barrier for people seeking mental health services.

Octave is designed to address people’s therapy needs who may not already have a relationship with a therapist.

“We certainly don’t want to disrupt existing relationships,” Acharya said. “But if you’re already in therapy, you can still take our classes or use the coaching format.”

It was during his time at One Medical when Acharya realized younger professionals were struggling from anxiety and depression, he said. But that’s not something One Medical actively addresses.

Upon signing up, Octave does an intake call within a couple of days and aims to get people seen by a therapist within a couple of weeks. Acharya says Octave is in line with market averages in New York, but that Octave hopes to help people save money by producing faster results. It’s worth noting that Octave does not take insurance, but that many insurance companies do offer reimbursement.

Octave’s first studio is located in New York City. The plan is to operate six to eight locations within the next two years. Octave has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round from Felicis Ventures and angel investors.

Sramana Mitra: You got an offer to join YCombinator. What was your acqui-hire deal? Was it an earn-out deal? Karn Saroya: We didn’t completely vest. It was okay with us largely because we had quite a...

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Startup Battlefield Africa is set for December 11 in Lagos and investor Marieme Diop and ICT expert Shikoh Gitau will be there to lend their perspective and expertise. The Lagos TechCrunch event is a return to Africa for the Startup Battlefield series after its debut on the continent in Nairobi, Kenya.

Diop — who is a VC investor in early-stage African startups at Orange Digital Ventures — will speak on venture capital in Africa. And Gitau, who is head of product at Safaricom’s Alpha incubator, joins TechCrunch to discuss talent, innovation, and repatriate entrepreneurs in Africa’s expanding startup landscape.

Alpha opened in 2017 and Gitau led a Pan-African and global search for candidates to form its team. The incubator was established to innovate new products and apps for Safaricom: Kenya’s largest telecom, globally recognized for its M-Pesa mobile money product with 27 million customers.

In April this year, Gitau and her colleagues rolled out Alpha’s first product, called Bonga, to leverage M-Pesa’s extensive financial web as a social and e-commerce network.

Marieme Diop will share insights with the Startup Battlefield crowd on Africa’s VC market. Under her tutelage, Orange Digital Ventures (ODV) participated in a $16 million round for South African fintech startup Yoco and the $8.6 million round to Africa’s Talking—a Pan-African business enterprise software startup.

Formed in 2017 as the venture arm of French telco Orange, ODV is a €150 fund with €50 allocated for Africa, according to Diop. It has made 17 investments globally, with 2 in Africa. These follow pre-fund Orange investments in startups Jumia (Africa’s first unicorn), Afrimarket, and Afrostream.

Orange has €40 left for African startup investments, according to Diop. “Our target is to make 4 African investments each year,” she told TechCrunch.

Diop will join Startup Battlefield Africa to discuss investment at a time when VC rounds and funds on the continent are surging. A recent Crunchbase survey found 51 viable Africa-focused VC funds globally, with 22 (or 43 percent) located on the continent. Of those 22, nearly half (41 percent) were formed since 2016, with 9 in Nigeria.

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Africa in Lagos will be a day-long affair and include a competition with pitches from Africa’s top early-stage startups. TechCrunch will also offer panel discussions to explore the continent’s rapidly growing tech ecosystem, including venture capital. You don’t want to miss out. Buy your tickets here.