According to a recent Visiongain report, the global Cyber Security market is expected to generate $98.8 billion in revenues in 2018 driven by increasing cyber-attacks, coupled with the higher...

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Sramana Mitra: How much money were you able to raise and what happened after? Cooper Harris: Using that as a springboard, we parlayed that into a seed that was in the low millions. After raising a...

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You thought TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin was all about SaaS, fintech, social, blockchain and all the traditional tech topics? Of course not! I’m excited to announce that Mike Collett from Promus Ventures is going to tell you why you should care about space beyond SpaceX.

Arguably, SpaceX is the reason why many people are interested in space topics. But there’s a vibrant ecosystem of startups that are working on small and big challenges to create new use cases, launch bigger objects, travel further and open up new possibilities.

Collett in particular has been studying this (ahem) space for many years. He’s the founder and managing partner of Promus Ventures, a VC firm focused on deep tech investments.

He invests in many things, such as AI, robotics, computer vision, blockchain, healthcare, agriculture and… space. Before that, he focused on nanotechnology more specifically, with investments in quantum cascade lasers, quantum dots, photonic integrated optoelectronic devices, nano-engineered fabrics and more.

It’s clear that Collett will have plenty of interesting things to say about the current landscape of space startups. That’s why you should buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on November 29-30.

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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Mike Collett

Founder & Managing Partner, Promus Ventures

Mike Collett is Founder and Managing Partner of Promus Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Chicago and San Francisco investing in deep-technology software and hardware companies in the U.S., Europe and New Zealand. Mike has been a venture capital investor in software and hardware for over 15 years. He has invested in more than 65 private technology companies, including areas such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, space, fintech, robotics, syn bio, computer vision, connected car, blockchain, healthcare, insurance, agriculture, nanotechnology and others. Mike currently serves on numerous Boards of Directors of private technology companies, including Spire, Gauss Surgical, Dispatch, ICEYE, CrossLend, Rhombus and others.

Mike previously was Founder and Managing Partner of Masters Capital Nanotechnology Fund, a venture capital firm. Investments included companies in quantum cascade lasers, quantum dots, photonic integrated optoelectronic devices, nano-engineered fabrics and others. While at Masters Capital, a hedge fund, Mike invested in private technology software and hardware companies. Prior to venture capital, Mike was a Vice President at Merrill Lynch in their Mergers & Acquisitions group as well as an Associate at Duff & Phelps.

Mike holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Math and Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Vanderbilt University. He also holds a Masters of Business Administration in Finance from Washington University in St. Louis. Mike and his wife Paige have four children and live in Chicago.

SoftBank may soon own up to 50 percent of WeWork, a well-funded provider of co-working spaces headquartered in New York, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

SoftBank is reportedly weighing an investment between $15 billion and $20 billion, which would come from its $92 billion Vision Fund, a super-sized venture fund led by Japanese entrepreneur and investor Masayoshi Son.

WeWork declined to comment.

SoftBank already owns some 20 percent of WeWork. The firm invested $4.4 billion in the company in August 2017, $1.4 billion of which was set aside to help WeWork expand in China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

This August, WeWork raised another $1 billion from SoftBank in convertible debt. At the same time, WeWork disclosed financials to a handful of media outlets, sharing that its revenue had doubled to $763.8 million in the first half of 2018 as losses increased to $723 million.

SoftBank, for its part, seems to have a hankering for real estate tech. Not only has it become a key stakeholder in WeWork, but it has deployed significant amounts of capital to Opendoor, Compass, Katerra and others.

Last month, the Vision Fund backed Opendoor, a platform for buying and selling homes, with $400 million. The same day, it led a $400 million round for Compass, valuing the real estate brokerage startup at $4.4 billion. As for Katerra, SoftBank poured $865 million into the construction tech business in January.

WeWork, founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, has raised nearly $5 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding to date. It was valued at $20 billion in 2017, though reports earlier this summer estimated its valuation would fall somewhere between $35 billion and $40 billion with additional capital from SoftBank. A $40 billion valuation would make it the second most valuable VC-backed company in the U.S. behind only Uber.

WeWork has more than 268,000 members across 287 locations in 23 countries.

CAVU Venture Partners has led the $20 million Series B for Once Upon a Farm, which sells organic, cold-pressed baby food in 8,500 grocery stores in the U.S.

The Berkeley-based startup was originally founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz. Today, it lists actress Jennifer Garner and former General Mills president John Foraker as co-founders, too.

Both Garner and Foraker — who was the chief executive officer of the popular organic mac & cheese brand Annie’s Homegrown for more than a decade — joined the company in September 2017. Foraker had been an angel investor in Once Upon a Farm and, after conversations with Garner, decided to accept the role of CEO. Garner, widely known for her roles in Alias, 13 Going on 30 and the upcoming HBO original series Camping, was already somewhat of a Once Upon a Farm evangelist when she signed on as chief brand officer a little over a year ago.

“I am proud of the innovative business that we have built,” Garner said in a statement. “It is incredibly exciting to see so many families embracing our products. This latest round of funding allows us to continue to help busy parents give their children the most nutritious foods possible and make life a little bit easier for families across the country.”

Foraker told TechCrunch that since he and Garner joined, the business has grown 10x. Last fall, the company’s products were for sale in 300 stores; today, as mentioned, they are available in more than 8,000.

“Because she has global celebrity, the power of that, she can really help us get the message out and help lots of moms and dads find [Once Upon a Farm],” Foraker said.

Once Upon a Farm sells smoothies and applesauce for kids up to age 12 directly to consumers through its online marketplace and in stores. Pouches of its signature baby food, smoothies and applesauce are $2.99 each.

As part of the deal, CAVU’s co-founder and managing partner Brett Thomas, along with CAVU investor Jared Jacobs, will join the company’s board. S2G Ventures and Beechwood Capital also participated in the round for the startup, which raised a $4 million Series A in June 2017.

The company plans to use the funds to expand its direct to consumer business, partner with more U.S. grocers and build out a wider assortment of baby products.

“You can buy fresh pet food now in almost 20,000 stores in the U.S.,” Foraker said. “We think fresh baby food has a long way to go.”

So many new unicorns valued at $1 billion-plus, countless $100 million venture financings, an explosion of giant funds — it’s no surprise 2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for venture capital investment in U.S.-based companies.

There are more than 2.5 months remaining in 2018 and already U.S. companies have raised $84.1 billion — more than all of 2017 — across 6,583 VC deals as of Sept. 30, 2018, according to data from PitchBook’s 3Q Venture Monitor.

Last year, companies raised $82 billion across more than 9,000 deals in what was similarly an impressive year for the industry. Many questioned whether the trend would — or could — continue this year, and oh, boy has it. VC investment has sprinted past decade-highs and shows no signs of slowing down.

Why the uptick? Fewer companies are raising money, but round sizes are swelling. Unicorns, for example, were responsible for about 25 percent of the capital dispersed in 2018. Those companies, which include Slack, Stripe and Lyft, have raised $19.2 billion so far this year — a record amount — up from $17.4 billion in 2017. There were 39 deals for unicorn companies valuing $7.96 billion in the third quarter of 2018 alone.

Some other interesting takeaways from PitchBook’s report on the U.S. venture ecosystem:

Nearly $28 billion was invested into early-stage startups in 2018, with median deal size increasing 25 percent to  $7 million last quarter.Ten funds have raised more than $500 million this year and another five, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Index Ventures, have closed on more than $1 billion.Companies based on the West Coast were responsible for 54.7 percent of deal value in 3Q but other regions are catching up: New England (12 percent), the Mid-Atlantic (20 percent) and The Great Lakes (5 percent).Investment in U.S. pharma and biotech has reached a new high of $14 billion already in 2018.Corporate venture capital activity is heating up. This year, CVCs invested $39.3 billion in U.S. startups, more than double the $15.2 billion invested in 2013.VC-backed companies are exiting via buyouts more than ever.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Kanwaljit Singh was recorded in May 2018. Kanwaljit...

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Making A Murderer is coming back to Netflix on October 19.

In 2015, Netflix released the 10-episode docuseries Making A Murderer, created by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. The picture looked at the mystery surrounding the murder of Teresa Halbach. Steven Avery, a Manitowoc County man charged with the murder in 2007, was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault at the age of 22, and was exonerated by DNA evidence after serving 18 years in prison.

Making A Murderer examined the original allegations, the events surrounding the murder of Teresa Halbach, all laid within the context of Avery’s wrongful conviction and subsequent lawsuit against Manitowoc County.

The docuseries quickly gripped the attention of millions.

The trailer for Making A Murderer Part 2 shows attorney Kathleen Zellner joining Avery’s team as they seek to appeal the 2007 conviction.

You can check out the full trailer below. The series returns October 19.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated to reflect the accurate release date.

French President Emmanuel Macron came to France’s ginormous startup campus Station F to talk to the French tech community. The event is organized by La French Tech, the government initiative to promote and foster the startup community in France.

Station F director Roxanne Varza first took the stage to introduce the event. She announced that there will be more startups in the Fighters Program. Station F has created this program so that entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds get a chance to relocate to Station F.

La French Tech new director Kat Borlongan then talked for a few minutes about the public initiative. “My firm belief is that La French Tech should operate just like all the startups in this room today,” she said.

According to her, it means that La French Tech should think about its users first, have a data-driven approach, and test and iterate.

Macron gave a very short speech and then held a Q&A sessions with tech entrepreneurs. This is a surprising format for Macron.

He mostly reassured entrepreneurs that things are changing and France is on the right path. He announced that the French Tech Visa would be simplified by March 2019.

Some entrepreneurs said there were paying too many taxes to hire talent in France. Macron refuted that. “I like to compare a researcher in Harvard with a researcher in France,” he said. “[In France], school is free and excellent, healthcare is free, there’s a retirement system. On the other side, there’s nothing.”

He also promised stronger antitrust rules at the European level. Tech giants sometimes dominate in Europe living no room for competition.

Macron finished by saying that tech companies also need to promote France’s system. They need to pay fair taxes, they need to think about tech’s effect on society. “I know one thing, the system will implode if you’re not responsible enough,” he said.

Things have changed in just over a year. When Macron first came to Station F for its grand opening, it was shortly after the elections. He was a popular President.

Now, most people dislike him, just like his predecessors François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy when they were in office. According to a source, he even thought about canceling today’s event given that he’s about to appoint some new faces in his government.

But Macron built his reputation on the so-called startup nation. He first became a public figure thanks to a grassroots approach built on top of the startup community. That’s why the startup community is still overwhelmingly in favor of Macron’s policies. And yet, there’s now a clear divide between the startup nation and the middle class at large, who think the President is out of touch and doesn’t care about them.

Try before you buy is the new name of the game. With items costing upwards of $100, people want to know what they’re getting themselves into before they commit to a costly gizmo — at least that’s what Google is betting on right now. Aligned with Google’s Made by Google event, the company is partnering with startup b8ta to create an interactive experience around its products.

These experiences are live at seven of b8ta’s flagship locations, which enable people to try out new tech products. Each demo experience is modeled after the different rooms of a home — living room, kitchen, home office and so on.

“We’re excited that Made by Google products are now available in the majority of b8ta locations across the country,” Google Director of Retail Marketing Janell Fischer said in a statement. “We’re always looking to make it easier for customers to try and shop our products, and this is a great example of that coming to life.”

It’s been a big year for b8ta. In April, the startup unveiled a Shopify-like solution for retailers called Built by b8ta, with Netgear as one of its first customers. Then, in June, Macy’s partnered with b8ta to enhance its experiential-based retail concept and went on to lead the startup’s $19 million Series B round.

Rob Reid: At the enterprise level, what you have is Oracle with their enterprise ERP solution, SAP, and Workday. What’s really interesting is that from an overall targeted addressable market, Intuit...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 418th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, October 11, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Women-focused co-working space The Wing has made its way to California, opening its first of two planned locations in the state this morning.

On Sansome Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, The Wing hopes to attract professional women able to shell out $215 per month for access to its 8,000-square-foot workspace, which is complete with conference rooms, a cafe, a library stocked with books on feminist theory, a lactation room and more.

In addition to its chic decor and feminist messaging, The Wing is also known for its programming. Headquartered in New York City, where the company operates three of its four existing spaces, The Wing has hosted events with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actress Jennifer Lawrence and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, to name a few. The San Francisco location will be no different.

A spokesperson for The Wing tells me they have a fully booked calendar of politics, tech, entertainment and lifestyle-focused events prepped for members. In the first month, San Francisco Mayor London Breed will stop by, as will Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.

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As a brand founded by women — Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan — and inspired by the women’s club movement of the 19th century, The Wing and its majority female staff very carefully and skillfully practice what they preach. In building their spaces, for example, they hire female architects to design and perfect the location. Their conference rooms are named for notable women. One, in particular, named for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, stands out.

The dozens of art pieces scattered throughout The Wing are by female artists. The menu at The Wing’s cafe, which has a sign above it that reads “I’ll have what she’s having,” showcases women of the Bay Area’s food and beverage industries. Even the wines served at The Wing are made by female wine makers in California.

If there’s on thing about The Wing that stands out, it’s the startup’s attention to detail.

Founded in 2016, The Wing plans to open its next location, in West Hollywood, in early 2019.

The Wing is backed by venture capital firms NEA, Kleiner Perkins and BBG Ventures, as well as co-working unicorn WeWork. It has raised just over $40 million to date to expand its co-working spaces throughout the U.S. and beyond.

“The Wing answers a desire by women to connect with each other in an environment that aims to promote learning and camaraderie,” Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green told TechCrunch. “It’s both a timely and timeless need. With so much focus on entrepreneurship and start-ups here in the Bay Area, The Wing offers the community that many independent women are looking for and can benefit from.”

Netlify wants to revolutionize the way developers build websites, abstracting away the web server and breaking web sites into microservices, making the process more like building a mobile application than a traditional website. Today, the company announced a $30M Series B investment to help continue to build on that vision.

Kleiner Perkins led the round. Andreessen Horowitz and the founders of Slack (Stewart Butterfield), Yelp (Jeremy Stoppelman) and Figma (Dylan Field) all participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $44 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Chris Bach, co-founder and president and Matt Biilmann, co-founder and CEO see the change they are trying to make as part of the larger shift to an API economy. They want to take the same ease of development APIs have given programmers in a mobile context and bring that to web development.

As I wrote earlier this year when they announced support for AWS Lambda, they want to reduce the complexity around web development:

“Netlify has abstracted away the concept of a web server, which it says is slow to deploy and hard to secure and scale. By shifting from a monolithic website to a static front end with back-end microservices, it believes it can solve security and scaling issues and deliver the site much faster.”

The founders have a grand vision, “We are basically out to replace all web servers with a with a global application delivery network,” Bach explained.

Mamoon Hamid, general partner at investor Kleiner Perkins says that while the website backend has evolved over recent years, the front end has remained static, and that’s what Netlify is addressing with their microservices-based approach to web development. “Netlify smack dab hits our view of where we need to go for the web to flourish,” Hamid told TechCrunch.

He believes the last shift of this magnitude in web development at the presentation layer was the advent of the CMS 15 years ago, and we are starting to see developers attracted to the Netlify approach in a big way. “We really believe that with this 300,000 strong developer force that’s already behind Netlify that they’re showing early signs of tapping into what could be  the platform from which a significant portion of the web content is served from [in the future],” Hamid said.

Netlify is working to increase the number of websites running on their approach in the coming years and see this as a mission to change the web. “For us, it’s very important to keep being a place where developers want to go and very easily can get something up and running. And then you can scale from there,” Bach said.

The company wants to build out a more organized sales and marketing team to sell the Netlify approach to larger organizations, while continuing to build out the product and developer outreach. All of this takes money and that’s why they went for such a large round today.

Billion Dollar Unicorn Smartsheet (NYSE: SMAR), went public in April this year. Analysts have big expectations from the company given that it has a modest 1% penetration in the cloud-based work...

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Sramana Mitra: What is the concept that you started this around? Cooper Harris: The reason I had it came from a very mundane moment. I was on my phone. I saw an ad for a really cute pair of shoes. I...

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Miriam Rivera, Partner at Ulu Ventures, a firm committed to diversity as its core investment philosophy.

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Data is valuable — if you know how to access it and reap the insights from it. That’s where Machinify comes in. The artificial intelligence company just raised a $10 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures with participation from GV and Matrix Partners.

“Our core notion is that today, enterprises are collecting a ton of data,” Machinify founder and CEO Prasanna Ganesan told TechCrunch. “But if you look at how many of them are successful in turning it into smarter decision-making to drive efficiency, very few companies are succeeding.”

With Machinify, enterprise customers feed the system raw data, specify what they’re trying to optimize for — whether that be revenue or some other goal — and then the machine figures out what to do from there. Based on past decisions, the machine can figure out the right thing to do, Ganesan said.

A good example of how companies use Machinify is in the healthcare space, where businesses are using the tool to increase the accuracy and speed with which they process claims. By doing so, these companies have been able to increase revenue and reduce costs.

“Machinify is laser-focused on the critical operational issues created by the deployment of what we often call Software 2.0 within enterprises,” GV general partner Adam Ghoborah said in a statement. “Software 2.0 is software that is not written by humans like traditional software but is dynamically driven by AI models and large enterprise datasets. Software 2.0 requires a completely different approach, and we believe that the Machinify platform holds the key to unlocking its value.”

Zocdoc founder Cyrus Massoumi and Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin have created a new $30 million fund called Humbition aimed at early stage, founder-led companies in New York.

“The fund is focused on connecting startups with investors and advisors experienced in building and growing successful businesses,” said Rubin.

“We are seeking to fill a void in NYC, where the vast majority of early stage investors have no significant experience building and scaling businesses,” he said. “The fund’s main areas of investment include marketplaces, consumer and health tech. But the primary criteria for investments is high quality founders. The fund is also seeking out mission-driven businesses because the companies that are socially responsible will be the most successful in the coming decades.”

The fund has brought on ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia, Warby Parker founder Neil Blumenthal, Charity: Water CEO and founder Scott Harrison, and Casper founder and CEO Philip Krim as advisors. They have already invested some of the $30 million raise in Burrow, a couch-on-demand service.

“New York City is home to a tremendous number of mission-driven startups that are simply not receiving the same level of support as their peers in the Bay Area. This void presents a unique opportunity for humbition to reach the incredible local talent who need the funding and guidance to build and grow their businesses in New York City,” said Rubin.