Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you something much more blatant. When people look at young women entrepreneurs, there is this question about how this person manages children and family. What is your...

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Rob was the CEO of Intacct, which Sage has acquired. Intacct is a leader in small business ERP. Read on to learn more about the trends in that space. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our...

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London ‘proptech’ startup Goodlord, which offers cloud-based software to help estate agents, landlords and tenants manage the rental process, has raised £7 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Finch Capital, with participation from existing investor Rocket Internet/GFC, and is roughly equal in size to Goodlord’s Series A in 2017. However, it would be fair to say a lot has happened since then.

In January, we reported that Goodlord had let go of nearly 40 employees, and that co-founder and CEO Richard White was leaving the company (we also speculated that the company’s CTO had departed, too, which proved to be correct). In signs of a potential turnaround, Goodlord then announced a new CEO later that month: serial entrepreneur and investor William Reeve (pictured), a veteran of the London tech scene, would now head up the property technology startup.

As I wrote at the time, Reeve’s appointment could be viewed as somewhat of a coup for Goodlord and showed how seriously its backers — which, along with Rocket Internet (and now Finch), also includes LocalGlobe and Ribbit Capital — were treating their investment and the turn-around/refocus of the company. With today’s Series B and news that Reeve has appointed a new CTO, Donovan Frew, that effort seems to be paying off.

Founded in 2014, unlike other startups in the rental market space that want to essentially destroy traditional brick ‘n mortar letting agents with an online equivalent, Goodlord’s Software-as-a-Service is designed to support all stakeholders, including traditional high-street letting agents, as well as landlords and, of course, tenants.

The Goodlord SaaS enables letting agents to “digitize” the moving-in process, including utilizing e-signatures and collecting rental payments online. In addition, the company sells landlord insurance, and has been working on other related products, such as rental guarantees, and “tenant passports.”

If Goodlord can reach enough scale, it wants to let tenants easily take their rental transaction history and landlord references with them when moving from one rental property to another as proof that they are a trustworthy tenant.

Meanwhile, the company says new funding will be used to build new products, grow its customer base, and invest in the further development of its proprietary technology to continue to make “renting simple and more transparent for letting agents, tenants and landlords”.

This is a terrific entrepreneurial story of a women entrepreneur with no technology background who is killing it with a technology startup. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your...

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A couple of years ago YC-backed RankScience, which offers AI-enhanced SEO split-testing, put a few SEO experts’ noses out of joint when the fledgling startup brashly talked about replacing human expertise with automation.

Two years on its pitch has mellowed, with the team saying their self-service platform is “augmenting human SEO ability rather than replacing them”.

The startup has also — finally — closed a seed round, announcing $1.8M led by Initialized Capital, along with Adam D’Angelo, Michael Seibel, BoxGroup, Liquid2 Ventures, FundersClub, and Jenny 8 Lee participating.

The new roster of investors join a list of prior backers that includes Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Christina Cacioppo, and Jack Groetzinger.

So what took them so long? Founder Ryan Bednar tells TechCrunch they wanted to take their time with the seed, rather than raise more money than they needed — a position that was possible thanks to already being profitable at YC Demo Day.

“I admit that this is unusual,” he says of the slow seed, though he also says they did raise a “small amount” after demo day, before filling out the rest this month.

“I saw many YC batchmates raising massive rounds pre product-market-fit, which can end up being a mistake,” he adds. “We probably could have raised a few million at Demo Day but ultimately didn’t feel we were ready for it. I didn’t know what I would spend the money on, and we were growing without it, so we chose not to. I wanted to raise capital when I felt we were ready to use it for growth, and now’s that time.”

Bednar also says he is “selective” when it comes to investors — and “specifically” wanted to work with Initialized, saying he’s “known Garry and Alexis personally for years, and trust that they would support us in building a long-term scalable business”.

Commenting on the funding to TechCrunch, Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian tells us: “Even though so many businesses depend on traffic from search, it’s a challenge for them to be data-driven about SEO. RankScience makes it easy to test changes to your website that can lift search traffic. They also automate a growing number of technical SEO tasks, which otherwise would take engineers away from building product and infrastructure, which is really exciting.”

RankScience plans to use the fresh funding to hire more AI and machine learning engineers, with headcount growth targeted at its SF office.

While the founders have stepped back from pronouncing ‘the death of the SEO expert’, they are still touting the power of automation AI for SEO — noting how, after crawling a customer’s site/s, the software automatically proposes “SEO enhancements and experiments” to customers — for “one-click [human] approval”.

It also includes what Bednar bills as a “self-driving car mode” — where the tech will deploy the touted “enhancements and experiments” without customer approval. But he concedes it’s not for all RankScience users.

“For about half of our customers, we’re their only SEO vendor so we automate SEO services 100% for them, and for the other half, our software augments human SEO ability, either from in-house marketers or agencies,” he says, explaining how the team has evolved their thinking on automation vs human agency and expertise.

“When we launched we didn’t think hard enough about what sorts of controls SEO managers at larger websites would want, and we tried to automate everything without giving marketers enough control. This was a mistake and we’ve worked hard on correcting it.

“This should have been obvious but it turns out that SEO managers are highly selective about what sorts of HTML changes our software might make to their webpages. So we’ve spent the past year building tools to give SEO marketers complete control over everything our software does, and also advanced editors and tools so they can create their own SEO enhancements and run SEO split tests through the platform.”

For those who make use of RankScience’s ‘Self-Driving Car Mode’ the software is replacing SEO staff “completely”, but he adds: “This works especially well for startups and medium size businesses. But SEO is such a multifaceted problem, we want to give larger companies with marketing teams complete control over our platform, and so we work with both types of customers.”

As well as (finally) closing out its seed round now, RankScience is also launching a new self-service platform for startups and SMEs — touting greater controls.

On the customer front, Bednar says they have “hundreds” of sites on the platform now — and are serving “hundreds of millions of page views per month”. Cumulatively he says they’ve deployed “millions” of SEO split tests at this point.

“Our customers run the gamut from startups just getting started with SEO to publicly-traded companies,” he continues. “Our best industries are SaaS, ecommerce, marketplaces, healthcare, publishing, and location-based sites.

“We’ve recently been working with more consumer goods brands, and we’ve also launched a partnership program so that we can work with SEO and Digital Marketing Agencies and independent consultants.”

He says the vast majority of RankScience users are based in the US at this stage but adds that Europe is a “growing market”.

In terms of competition, Bednar name-checks the likes of Moz, Conductor (acquired this year by WeWork), BloomReach and BrightEdge — so it is swimming in a pool with some very big fish.

“Most of these products are more akin to advanced SEO analytics suites, and we differ in that RankScience is 100% focused on data-driven SEO automation,” he says, fleshing out the differences and RankScience’s edge, as he sees it. “Our software doesn’t just tell you what changes to make to your site to increase search traffic, it actually makes the changes for you. (Now with more controls!)”

WeWork has partnered with Lemonade to provide renters insurance to WeLive members.

WeLive is the residential offering from WeWork, offering members a fully-furnished apartment, complete with amenities like housekeeping, mailroom, and on-site laundry, on a flexible rental schedule. In other words, bicoastal workers or generally nomadic individuals can rent a short-term living space without worrying about all the extras.

As part of that package, WeLive is now referring new and existing WeLive members to Lemonade for renters insurance.

WeLive currently has two locations — one in New York and one in D.C. — collectively representing more than 400 units. WeWork says that both units are nearly at capacity. The company has plans to open a third location in Seattle Washington by Spring 2020.

Lemonade, meanwhile, is an up-and-coming insurance startup that is rethinking the centuries-old industry. The company’s first big innovation was the digitization of getting insurance. The company uses a chatbot to lead prospective customers through the process in under a minute.

The second piece of Lemoande’s strategy is rooted in the business model. Unlike incumbent insurance providers, Lemonade takes its profit up-front, raking away a percentage of customers’ monthly payments. The rest, however, is set aside to fulfill claims. Whatever goes unclaimed at the end of the year is donated to the charity of each customer’s choice.

To date, Lemonade has raised a total of $180 million. WeWork, on the other hand, has raised just over $9 billion, with a reported valuation as high as $35 billion.

Of course, part of the reason for that lofty valuation is the fact that WeWork is a real estate behemoth, with Re/Code reporting that the company is Manhattan’s second biggest private office tenant. But beyond sheer square footage, WeWork has spent the past few years filling its arsenal with various service providers for its services store.

With 175,000 members (as of end of 2017, so that number is likely much higher now), WeWork has a considerable userbase with which it can negotiate deals with service providers, from enterprise software makers to… well, insurance providers.

Lemonade is likely just the beginning of WeWork’s stretch into developing a suite of services and partnerships for its residential members.

Brock Pierce, Co-Founder of Blockchain Capital, discusses his worldview of the Blockchain investment opportunity. Brock is one of the pioneers of investing in Blockchain companies.

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According to a NASSCOM-KPMG report, the Indian FinTech market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22% to be worth $2.4 billion in 2020 and is a hot favorite for VC funding. PolicyBazaar is a recent...

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Well, that was quick: A little over two months since we reported that Mosaic Ventures was in the middle of raising a second fund, TechCrunch can reveal that fund two has in fact now closed, as the London-based venture capital firm looks to double down on backing “Europe’s most ambitious entrepreneurs”.

We began hearing from sources late last week that news was imminent, and in a call on Saturday morning Mosaic founding partners Simon Levene and Toby Coppel confirmed the details. Fund two totals $150 million, as per an earlier SEC filing, and will be used to continue the firm’s Series A remit, which will see it back 5-10 new companies each year, as lead or co-lead, typically with a $3-7 million first check.

Four years since launching, Mosaic has invested in over 20 startups, and in a range of sectors. These include blockchain/crypto startups Blockstream and Blockchain (the firm remains bullish with regards to the space), fintech startup Habito, open source drone company Auterion, period tracking app Clue, and data startup Infosum. The firm has also invested directly in deep tech company builder Entrepreneur First, alongside Reid Hofflan with Greylock, a deal Mosaic helped instigate.

“I think what we do is very unique,” says Coppel, when I ask how the VC differentiates itself from competing early-stage firms in London and Europe, especially since — only just on fund two — it is somewhat unproven. “What we do is focus very much at the early-stage, Series A, where founders have built an early product, they’re a long way ahead of themselves in terms of building out their team and their got-to-market. We roll up our sleeves and get stuck in with them in many of the foundational pieces of building a company. That’s our entire focus”.

He also argues that when Mosaic write a cheque, the firm’s interests are more aligned with the founders it backs than larger venture capital firms.

“Given our fund size and the cheques we write at Series A, we think working with us is a very strong choice because of our experience and because we are willing to take risk and because of our network and so forth. And we’ll give everything — we’re entrepreneurs ourselves. As you say, it is early for Mosaic and therefore whatever we do at this point we are going to give 150 percent.

“There are firms that are much bigger in terms of fund size and for them, often writing a $3 million cheque is not the same, it’s a very small part of their fund, you don’t necessarily get the same focus and effort and alignment. And I think that is what sets us apart”.

To that end, Levene and Coppel, who both built much of their career in Silicon Valley, most notably in senior positions at Yahoo, tell me that Mosaic will continue to invest thematically, specifically outlining five areas. They are: “blockchain, crypto and the decentralized web” (it’s the decentralised aspect of blockchain where no one vendor needs to own or have control over the platform, that the pair say is attractive), “computational health”, “machine intelligence”, “mobility and location services”, and “finance 2.0”.

Elaborating on how Mosaic views health tech, Coppel says that over the next five to ten years the cost of sensors that enable “continuous bio tracking” will continue to drop and therefore we’ll all be collecting huge amounts of data from our bodies, such as our metabolism or cardiovascular systems, so that we can monitor our own health. Combined with various “-omics data” and that the fact that sequencing the genome can be done for less than $100, we’ll be able to generate new drugs or help adapt personalised treatments based on that data. “When you’re collecting all that data it creates significant new things and opportunities in new areas. That’s the transformation that healthcare is going to go through,” he says.

Regards “finance 2.0,” Levene and Coppel don’t entirely disagree with my assertion that much of the low and mid-hanging fruit in fintech has already been picked (Coppel himself was an early investor in Transferwise), as the banks and financial services continue to be unbundled. However, they say there are still opportunities to build “best-of-breed services” both for consumers and businesses.

“Insurance is one of those,” says Coppel. “Today the experience is pretty poor because most insurance companies have gone through channels and therefore they’re not consumer-centric. But also the underlying insurance product itself hasn’t really been geared for trust where they’ve created these products that have suited their own internal risk models not necessarily what the customers need. So there is a whole series of opportunities to reinvent the core underlying… risk and protection product to tailor it to the customer’s needs”.

Pressed to be more specific, he says that today many people are overinsured in the wrong products, such as phone insurance, and underinsured in what really matters, such as life insurance or critical illness insurance.

Another area Mosaic is eyeing up is SME financing, where the “attack vector” could be building a great accounting or invoicing product, and then by using the data passed through those services, offering more flexible business financing.

A common thread throughout a number of Mosaic’s existing portfolio — and just about any VC firm these days — is machine learning, and the Mosaic founders says they remain firm in their belief that the impact of machine learning will be pervasive across all industries and businesses. “We’ve gone deep into machine learning and machine intelligence-based businesses,” adds Levene. “Obviously there’s the investment in EF… that, if you like, is an index of that whole sector. At least half a dozen of the portfolio have a strong machine learning vector as to how they are attacking a particular vertical”.

On that note — and given that AI is an area where Europe and the U.K. in particular excels — I turn the topic to Brexit and ask the pair what they make of the current Brexit mess (actually, I used a far less polite word).

“Entrepreneurs at this point still don’t understand what Brexit means,” says Coppel. “It hasn’t come to fruition and most entrepreneurs are focused on the next week, the next month, the next quarter, rather than what’s going to happen in a year and a half to the U.K. economy. That’s certainly true of the early-stage companies. [For] the later stage companies, there are some more significant decisions. It’s not easy to move hundreds of people around.

“We don’t really know what Brexit means yet and it obviously creates havoc for people who are trying to plan. But at this point we haven’t seen any evidence from entrepreneurs saying ‘I’m not going to start my company in London, I’m going to start my company in Barcelona or Berlin’ and we haven’t seen companies move from London to the continent because of Brexit. Could we see that in six months from now? Possibly”.

Adds Levene, less optimistically: “The biggest single risk that we foresee is… if it changes the hiring market. If you don’t have access to 300 million people you can bring on your books tomorrow. If you have to go through a visa process that is cumbersome, that would stymie startups being able to hire talent quickly and scale up. So the capital follows talent and if we put up the walls around immigration then that’s going to be a problem”.

I suggest that, given the current trajectory and the music coming from the U.K. government, whatever the immigration mechanism put in place post-Brexit, it won’t be as optimal for U.K. startups as the status quo. Levene doesn’t refute my logic. “It’s shooting ourselves in the foot,” he says, “and it’s not just in tech but I think it’s also going to be in other verticals… So I think the government is gonna have a reckoning if they create friction for hiring, not just in tech but in many other industries”.

Varjo Technologies, the Finnish startup that made a splash earlier this year with news it had developed a virtual reality headset capable of “human-eye resolution,” has raised $31 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Europe’s Atomico, with participation from Siemens-backed venture capital firm Next47. Existing Series A investors EQT Ventures and Lifeline Ventures also followed on. It brings total funding for the Helsinki-based company to $46 million.

Founded in 2016, Varjo (which means “shadow” in Finnish and is pronounced “Var-yo”) aims to bring to market “the world’s first” human-eye resolution virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (XR) product, which will be orders of magnitude higher in resolution than existing consumer headsets, such as Magic Leap or Microsoft’s HoloLens. However, unlike those existing devices — and courtesy of a claimed 20x bump in resolution — Varjo is targeting industrial use-cases for its wares.

In a call, co-founder and CEO Urho Konttori — who was previously at Nokia and Microsoft, where he played a pivotal role in the Meego N9 smartphone and the high-end Lumia devices, respectively — told me that Varjo is looking to sell into “design-driven” industries including simulation and training, architecture, automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, engineering, and construction — along with industrial design more generally.

These use-cases require VR and XR to mimic the human eye as closely as possible, and demand “extreme precision” and visual fidelity. Konttori says the status quo in resolution is like asking designers or engineers sporting headsets to work or train “half blind”. In contrast to existing lower resolution headsets, the startup’s prototype already claims “an effective resolution of 50 megapixels per eye”.

But to really understand the impact Varjo hopes to make, consider how complex design and engineering projects are undertaken today. In car design, for example, clay models are still used at key points of the design stage and form an important part of the creative loop. However, producing these slows down the design iteration process and in some ways stifles creativity because of the lag between tweaking a drawing or 3D CAD file and experiencing it in clay form in real life. Moving this to a high resolution virtual reality domain via VR and XR will remove this obstacle and enable designers to take more risks and try new things. This, in the longer term, should lead to better design and more innovative products.

What is also noteworthy, given VR and AR’s penchant for being the promise that keeps on promising, is that Varjo isn’t a “moonshot” investment, even though Atomico does do moonshot investments from time to time. Instead, the company says it is on track to commercially launch its VR headset later this year, with an AR/XR add-on to the headset available in the first half of 2019.

I’m also told it is already working in partnership with companies such as Airbus, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and Lilium, who have had early access to prototypes and have been feeding back and helping iterate the product.

After I note that it is refreshing to see a new hardware company based in Europe, and that Varjo, with its ties to ex-Nokians, appears to be benefiting from European hardware talent, Konttori says that European VC firms have seemingly lost their appetite for truly innovative hardware. In Varjo’s case, he says Atomico was the exception, and that — along with flying taxi company Lilium (which Atomico has also invested in) — he hopes it can be the start of a European hardware startup renaissance.

Update: Faraday Future has responded to Evergrande Health’s filing with a public statement claiming that “contrary to what Evergrande has told the press and its shareholders, neither FF’s CEO YT Jia [Jia Yueting] nor anyone else ‘manipulated’ the board of Evergrande in reaching these agreements.”

Evergrande Health, the investor that bailed out besieged electric vehicle startup Faraday Future in a deal worth $2 billion this summer, is now accusing it of attempting to break an agreement it made with previous backer Season Smart. In June, Evergrande Health announced that would it take over the financial commitment made by Season Smart last November that saved Faraday Future from running out of cash. Now Evergrande Health says Faraday Future Jia Yueting has started arbitration in Hong Kong in an attempt to renege on its agreement with Season Smart.

Evergrande Health agreed in June to buy Season Smart’s 45% stake in Faraday Future for $860 million, an increase over the $800 million Season Smart originally paid, and then complete the deal with additional installments of $600 million in both 2019 and 2020.

But in a new filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange first reported by Reuters, Evergrande Health says it was informed in July by Faraday Future that the $800 million it received from Season Smart had already been spent, and that Smart King, the joint venture set up between Faraday Future and Season Smart, had been asked to provide another $700 million. As a result, Season Smart had entered into a supplemental agreement to advance $700 million.

Evergrande Health now accuses Faraday Future of “manipulating Smart King” by using its majority seats on Smart King’s board of directors to begin arbitration in Hong Kong claiming that Season Smart hasn’t fulfilled its payment conditions. Evergrande Health says Faraday Future is using this as a pretext to deprive Season Smart of its shareholder rights to approve Faraday Future’s future financing plans and terminate its agreements with Season Smart.

As a result, Season Smart has “engaged a team of international lawyers and will take all necessary actions” to protect its rights, as well as Evergrande Health’s interests.

Despite its deals with Season Smart and Evergrande Health, The Verge reports that Faraday Future’s financial woes have continued, with some of its company’s vendors and suppliers claiming that they have not been paid in weeks, and that Faraday is also contemplating layoffs. The Verge’s sources say at least three companies have filed liens with the California Secretary of State over payments owed by Faraday Future.

Meanwhile the company is facing a host of other legal and financial issues. These include a legal battle with its former CFO, Stefan Krause, who Faraday Future claims stole intellectual property (Krause has accused Faraday Future of defamation). Jia is also under fire over debts incurred by LeEco, the failed tech conglomerate he founded. The Chinese government froze his assets in 2017 and, in an unusual move, publicly ordered him to repay LeEco’s investors.

TechCrunch has contacted Faraday Future for comment.

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