During the waning days of the first dot-com boom, some of the biggest names in venture capital invested in marketplaces and directories whose sole function was to consolidate information and foster transparency in industries that had remained opaque for decades.

The thesis was that thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger businesses in huge industries, but the reach of smaller players was limited by their dependence on a sales structure built on conferences and personal interactions.

Companies making pharmaceuticals, chemicals, construction materials and medical supplies represented trillions in sales, but those huge aggregate numbers hide how fragmented these supply chains are — and how difficult it is for buyers to see the breadth of sellers available.

Now, similar to the way business models popularized by Kozmo.com and Webvan in decades past have since been reincarnated as Postmates and DoorDash, the B2B directory and marketplace rises from the investment graveyard.

The first sign of life for the directory model came with the success of GoodRX back in 2011. The company proved that when information about pricing in a previously opaque industry becomes available, it can unleash a torrent of new demand.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee, Professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Michigan. We discussed the timeline of the...

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Deskless workers make up 80% of the global workforce, but to Desmond Lim, that job title is his entire world.

Lim grew up in Singapore and saw his father wake up every morning, six days a week, at 5 a.m. to start his job as a driver. Lim and his mom, who worked as a cleaner, joined his father from time to time in the van. Lim realized there needed to be an easier way for hourly, or deskless, workers to find jobs quickly.

Lim is the founder of Workstream, an end-to-end software solution to help small-and-medium businesses fill open positions. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $10 million Series A round, bringing its total known financing to $12.5 million.

The Bay Area-based company’s core customer is hiring managers in industries that have large turnover, like hospitality, restaurant, supermarket and delivery businesses.

Workstream automates a lot of the processes that usually take place over the span of a few weeks. The company says its technology can help businesses save 70% time on hiring. It also adds transparency, so instead of a job-seeker walking into a Target, filling out an application and hoping for the best, it provides a platform to make conversation between seekers and employers more accessible.

There are two parts to Workstream’s product. First, job-seekers can turn to the platform for the entire job searching process, from open gigs to onboarding once they secure the job. A free one-stop shop to look for reliable jobs tackles the challenges Lim’s father faced back in Singapore. The job seeker dashboard also has built-in reminders to make sure users can stay on top of interviewing.

The other part of Workstream’s business tackles the employer side. Businesses with high employee churn struggle to find reliable talent that doesn’t ghost on them. An employer can post to as many as 24 local job boards with one click, as they are integrated with Workstream. Workstream helps employers communicate more directly with potential hires through real-time messaging, video conference integration and text message reminders about topics like interview timing and paperwork.

A critical feature of Workstream is that it focuses on communication with workers through text messages instead of e-mails. Front-line and deskless workers are often the most disconnected members of the global job force due to a lack of access to company-issued e-mail addresses, and to be frank, time on their hands. Individuals who are spending long stretches of time on the go need to give real-time updates in a low-tech and inclusive way. The digital divide is real, and Workstream’s focus on mobile-based text messages can get employees hired within the same day.

An example of this in action is that anytime an applicant applies for a job, they get a text message from the employer that has additional information. The text might include background in culture or additional questions in the form of multiple choice. Questions are tailored specifically for the busy and often stacked lives of hourly workers, focusing on metrics like distance from work and ability to access reliable transportation.

The company charges employers a fee based on how many hires they make per year and what features they choose to enroll in.

While Workstream is entering the crowded space of recruiting platforms, it might be able to win simply because of its focus: local businesses. The company noted that many hiring platforms coming out of Silicon Valley are built for knowledge workers, like Lever or X. In contrast, Workstream’s focus on local businesses is tailored an inch wide and a mile deep. Ethos-wise, it is a nod to Lim’s childhood spending hours in his father’s van.

Local businesses are not dealing with as many customers right now due to shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19. Because small and medium-sized businesses have more time on their hands, Lim says they have been more open during client calls to try new software, contactless hiring and video messaging. The startup currently has 5,000 hiring managers it works with, including franchise businesses like Jamba Juice and Dunkin’ Donuts. The company is finding inbound interest from medical and manufacturing companies, too.

“We’re getting a lot fewer people saying that they don’t know how to use video conferencing,” Lim said. “They’re rethinking their systems.”

These factors helped the company, which landed an impressive group of investors and closed the round before the pandemic slowed funding.

The latest round was led by Founders Fund and Basis Set Ventures. Other investors include Affirm CEO Max Levchin, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Lattice CEO Jack Altman and Lucidchart CEO Karl Sun. Workstream also attracted dollars from a number of former and current leaders at companies like Slack, Brex, Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest and more.

While stacked rounds have their ups and downs, an all-star group of firms is a helpful credit to have for founders who don’t necessarily come from traditional Silicon Valley networks, like Lim.

The company did not disclose valuation, revenue or profitability with this new financing round, but said investors have been telling the startup to spend more money and reinvest in growth.

The advice is a stark contrast to what we’ve been hearing from investors these days amid market turbulence and pleas to extend the runway. And perhaps that means that Workstream’s business can afford to bet on itself, the market be damned.

Founders hunting down capital in the middle of this pandemic may feel like they’re on a fool’s errand, but some investors are still offering financing, even if the terms might not be as good as they once were. One avenue that appears to remain open: corporate venture capital.

The corporate route offers its own set of unique challenges, depending on the philosophy of the organization’s investment arm. Some are looking strictly for companies that fit neatly into their platform, while others believe a solid investment is more important than a perfect fit.

Regardless of style, these firms want their investment targets to succeed on their own merits, rather than as part of the organization the funding arm represents. To get the lay of the land, we spoke to a couple of firms that take very different approaches to their investments: Dell Technologies Capital and Salesforce Ventures.

Corporate venture is a different animal

Corporate venture funds aren’t typically as large as private ones, but they have a lot to offer, such as global sales and marketing support and a depth of knowledge that offers direct benefits to a young upstart. This can help founders avoid mistakes, but there is danger in becoming too dependent on the company.

The good news is that these companies are often not leading the round, but are instead providing some cash and guidance, which leaves entrepreneurs to develop and grow on their own. While the pandemic is forcing many changes in approaches to investment, the two corporate venture capital firms we spoke to said they will continue to invest, and their theses remains pretty much the same.

If you have an enterprise focus and you can convince these firms to take a chance, they offer some interesting perks a private firm might not be able to, or at the very least provide a piece of your funding puzzle in these difficult times.

Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in the process of acquiring technology assets from same-day delivery service Deliv. The retailer is characterizing the deal as more of an R&D type of acquisition and not one that will have an immediate consumer-facing impact. Deal terms were not disclosed, but we understand the deal price is nowhere near Shipt’s $550 million ballpark, as it’s not an outright acquisition of Deliv’s business. 

Deliv had raised more than $80 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. The acquisition price is said to be immaterial to Target, which isn’t issuing a press release or an 8-K filing to note.

NBC News first reported the news about Target’s plans to acquire Deliv’s technology.

“Deliv is in the process of completing a deal to sell technology assets to Target and Deliv’s CEO along with a subset of the team will be moving over to Target,” a Deliv spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Target is not involved in the wind-down. We are working with our retail partners to transition delivery services to other providers during the next 90 days.”

The deal is expected to close in around a month. As a part of the acquisition, Target is also making offers to some of Deliv’s staff, including founder and CEO Daphne Carmeli, who is expected to accept.

Deliv, meanwhile, tells TechCrunch that employees are being given two months of pay and options to sustain their healthcare. Operations will wind down over a 90-day period, meaning that some team members will remain employed over the next couple of months while they look for their next job. Drivers will also continue deliveries during this time, but will have time to pursue other opportunities, Deliv says.

Target already had some exposure to Deliv’s technology, as it had been working with the delivery service provider in small tests in 2019 and early 2020. The retailer believes there’s long-term potential with regard to Deliv’s technology, which smartly batches orders together that are going to the same area — something its prior acquisitions of Shipt and Grand Junction in 2017 didn’t offer.

However, Target isn’t planning to integrate Deliv technology immediately into any of operations. Instead, it will research and test how the tech could aid its supply chain at scale. Target isn’t talking about what sort of orders or tests it may run following the deal’s closure, but believes the tech could be used in many ways to make its deliveries more efficient.

The news of Target’s acquisition comes just one day after The Wall Street Journal reported Deliv would be ceasing its on-demand delivery operations on or before August 4.

Founded in 2012, Deliv had been operating a same-day delivery service for things like groceries and prescriptions in 35 markets. It had partnerships in place with companies like Best Buy, Walgreens and Macy’s, but those will not remain intact.

Deliv previously had a partnership with Walmart, but that ended in February 2019. At the time, Deliv said the Walmart partnership did not make up a large chunk of its operations.

The deal marks Target’s second acquisition in the delivery space. In December 2017, Target bought same-day delivery service Shipt for $550 million. Since then, Target has launched a dedicated shopping site for same-delivery service, powered by Shipt. But as of late, Target has been under fire for its practices toward Shipt workers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. In early April, Shipt shoppers walked off work to demand an extended sick pay policy, hazard pay and personal protective equipment.

Assuming Target is able to maximize Deliv’s potential, as it expects, it could help Target to better compete with Amazon and Walmart, both which have invested in and acquired smart delivery logistics technology over the years. This area of Target’s business may become increasingly important to its bottom line as the long-term impact on consumer behavior caused by the coronavirus pandemic may shift more shopping away from brick-and-mortar to online retail.

Update, 5/7/20, 5:30 PM ET: Target announced the news on its blog after publication, adding the following statement:

“Our game-changing fulfillment services—like Order Pickup, Drive Up and Shipt—have already made same-day delivery and pickup possible for millions of guests,” said Arthur Valdez, Target’s executive vice president and chief supply chain & logistics office, in the article. “This technology from Deliv is just one more example of how Target is investing for the future of local delivery.”

Todd Chaffee has long been one of the most senior members of the late-stage venture firm Institutional Venture Partners. Chaffee joined IVP in 2000 after logging six years at Visa, and went on to lead rounds in numerous prominent later-stage companies, many (but not all) of which have gone public, including Coinbase, Compass, Klarna, Kayak, Omniture, Pandora and Twitter.

It’s a good business to be in, particularly when companies are going public at that clip. Given that the IPO window is now shut indefinitely, we wondered what that might mean for the firm’s model.

Chaffee — who, like contemporary Bill Gurley, won’t be making new investments out of his firm’s next fund — talked with us about that question and what else the pandemic means to the venture industry and to him personally. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: IVP last announced a fund in 2017. I assume one is coming soon that you cannot talk about — unless you can talk about it?

Todd Chaffee: Yeah, we’re currently investing Fund 16. That’s all I can tell you right now.

Do you think it’s time to bulk up even more, or size down? There’s maybe more opportunity but also check sizes are going to get smaller, seemingly.

Locatee, a Swiss startup that uses existing sensors and IT infrastructures to provide employers and commercial real estate owners with detailed data about how their spaces are utilized, today announced that it has raised a $4 million Series A funding round led by San Francisco-based FYRFLY Venture Partners and Zurich-based Tomahawk VC.

“We started the company based on the experience we had with the big banks,” Locatee CEO and co-founder Thomas Kessler told me. “As users, we were introduced to this new world of working. You can work from any place. You can work from Starbucks. You can work from any area. And in the office, I did not have my own desk anymore. I could choose between meeting rooms, focus areas and so on. But that also has some challenges for managing the space.”

Corporate real estate managers often don’t understand how their buildings are utilized these days because they simply don’t have the tools to gather this data. As a result, they overprovision their office spaces and large chunks of it remain empty — which organizations then unnecessarily pay for.

What makes Locatee stand out from similar players in this space is that it integrates with existing motion sensors inside a building and other data sources, like Wi-Fi networks. For Swiss Re’s Munich office, for example, Locatee was able to work with NetCloud and integrate with the existing Cisco network infrastructure. Thanks to the data it gathered, Swiss Re was able to reduce its local office space by 10%, which Locatee says allowed the company to save about €290,000 per year.

On top of the core data analytics, Locatee also offers a number of other tools, ranging from smart signage for meeting rooms and workstations, for example, to desk finders for workers who now (or at least once they return to their offices) are often not working from a single, pre-assigned cubicle every day but who roam around a building and work from a different spot every day.

As Kessler stressed, Locatee approached its first customers by trying to understand their use cases, not by trying to sell them technology. One of Locatee’s first customers was Biogen, but today, it also calls Swiss Re, Johnson & Johnson and Zurich (the financial services company, not the city) among its users.

Locatee’s data is anonymized and Kessler argues that employees don’t tend to worry about being tracked. “[Employees] have a benefit,” he said. “They have an app, for instance, where they can see available meeting rooms and desks. And they can see where colleagues are — on an opt-in basis. So it’s more like a ‘share your location’ feature like in iOS Messenger or in WhatsApp .”

With that kind of momentum, Kessler told me, finding investors was relatively easy — though it surely helped that the company closed this raise before the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe.

“Locatee’s vision to transform how space is used will ultimately elevate the quality of life for employees and can also contribute significantly to sustainable development goals,” said Philipp Stauffer, co-founder and managing director at FYRFLY Venture Partners. “Office space is only one component and increasingly all ‘work points’ matter for productivity optimization. A quantitative approach to space optimization and productivity holds both significant top- and bottom-line potential for large global organizations. Furthermore, aggregated data can help predict larger market trends, which is exciting to us.”

The company says it wants to use the new funding to become the “Google Analytics of office buildings.” And while its technology could also be used in other environments, Kessler says he wants to focus on office space for now. “There is still a lot of wasted real estate that needs to be optimized,” he said.

Zoom acquires some encryption expertise, Uber makes a big investment in scooters and we review the new 13-inch Macbook Pro.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 7, 2020.

1. Zoom acquires Keybase to get end-to-end encryption expertise

Keybase, whose encryption products include secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains. A number of Zoom security issues have come to light in the last couple of months as demand has soared and exposed security weaknesses in the platform.

Under the terms of the deal, Keybase will become a subsidiary of Zoom and co-founder and Max Krohn will lead the Zoom security engineering team, reporting directly to Yuan to help build the security product.

2. Uber leads $170 million Lime investment, offloads Jump to Lime

As part of the deal (which was reported earlier this week but is now official), Lime is also acquiring Uber’s micro-mobility subsidiary Jump. There will be more integrations between Uber and Jump in the future, but both apps will remain active for now.

3. Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch review

With this week’s news, the 13-inch becomes the third and final member of the MacBook family to get the new keyboard. It’s not “Magic” as the name implies (Apple really does love the M-word), but Brian Heater says improvements are immediate and vast.

4. Nintendo sells a lot more Switches, as people stay at home playing Animal Crossing

The company says it has sold 21 million Switch units in the past year, handily beating a 19.5 million forecast. 6.2 million of those systems were the newer, cheaper Switch Lite, which hit the market in September. All of this comes as Nintendo has run up against shortages through a combination of increased popularity and a a global supply chain knocked off balance from COVID-19.

5. How will digital media survive the ad crash?

Bustle Digital Group’s Jason Wagenheim told us that he’s anticipating a 35% decline in ad revenue for this quarter. And where he’d once hoped BDG would reach $120 or $125 million in ad revenue this year, he’s now trying to figure out “what does our company look like at $75 or $90 million?” (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Apple awards $10 million to rapidly scale COVID-19 sample collection kit production

Apple has awarded $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a company focused on producing sample collection kits for testing COVID-19 to hospitals in the U.S. The money comes from the fund that Apple established to support the development and growth of U.S.-based manufacturing — to date, the fund has been used to support companies tied more directly to Apple’s own supply chain.

7. Sonos debuts new Arc soundbar, next-generation Sonos Sub, and Sonos Five speaker

Sonos has introduced a trio of new hardware today, adding three new smart speakers to its lineup, including the Sonos Arc soundbar that includes Dolby Atmos support, as well as Sonos Five, the next version of its Sonos Play:5 speaker, and a third-generation Sonos Sub.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Stilt, a Y Combinator alum that provides financial services for immigrants without Social Security numbers or credit reports, announced today that it has closed a $7.5 million seed round. It also launched FDIC-insured pre-approved global bank accounts today.

The startup has raised equity from investors including Liron Petrushka; Hillsven Capital; Streamlined Ventures; Gokul Rajaram; Bragiel Brothers; Fundbox CEO Eyal Shinar; Next Insurance CEO Guy Goldstein; Charles Choi of SK Networks; and Y Combinator partners Dalton Caldwell and Kevin Hale.

It also raised about $100 million in debt capital, or money to be used for lending, from Smart Lenders Asset Management, FourthGreen Capital and others.

The startup, which launched out of Y Combinator’s winter 2016 batch, was founded by CEO Rohit Mittal, who previously worked as a data scientist at PopSugar, and Priyank Singh, a software developer who worked at Amazon subsidiary A9 and Microsoft.

Both experienced firsthand the challenges of renting apartments and securing student loans and other financial services as immigrants to the United States, and wanted to create a service that would help others in the same position.

Stilt’s first product was loans, and, over the past four years, Mittal said it has lent tens of millions of dollars.

“There are very few services in the U.S. that allow non-U.S. citizens to open accounts without a Social Security number, so our focus is not only giving them the best cross-border digital banking service, but one that is also very tightly integrated into a credit platform. Anyone opening a bank account with us is eligible for a whole bunch of credit products,” Mittal told TechCrunch.

The company uses proprietary technology that scores applicants without credit reports by analyzing a wide range of financial and non-financial data to create risk models. This includes data sets from universities, half a million employers and millions of job positions, plus data from credit bureaus and banks, in addition to the type of visa an applicant has (for example, an applicant on a student visa would be scored differently than someone on a H-1B visa), and their financial history. Further loans are underwritten based on the performance of the user’s first loan from Stilt.

The interest rate for Stilt’s loans is generally about 13.5% to 14%, offering applicants a better alternative to traditional lenders or payday loans.

“We’re a mission-driven company, so we won’t do business where we are charging anyone a 100% interest rate. Consumers should be able to get the best option and we try to improve our credit risk model to give the best rate possible, even if they don’t have the traditional credit criteria that other banks look for,” said Mittal.

Stilt currently focuses on personal financial services, but plans to add products for small businesses in the future. Over the past few months, Mittal says the company has seen an increase in applications because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he adds that loan performance has remained steady.

Cuckoo Internet is a new U.K. startup that aims to disrupt the U.K. broadband market. It has now raised £470,000 in seed funding, which includes funding from work.fund, a new Silicon Valley fund operator fund led by Bart Macdonald (Sapling founder). Other investors include Lorin van Nuland (early investor in Betterment), Edward Campbell-Harris (Bulb early investor) Patrick Barouki (Bulb early investor), James Bowe and GrowthInvest, among others. The key to its strategy is that it has no servers of its own, meaning it can scale faster than traditional providers.

The anecdotal evidence is that the pandemic-led lockdown in many countries has revealed that your home broadband is almost certainly not fast enough for modern use. This has become especially obvious in the U.K., where TV interviews with key figures are often interrupted by terrible buffering. Indeed, regulator Ofcom says 40% of people in the U.K. are paying more for terrible broadband merely because they are loyal customers. Complaints about broadband and mobile are almost 40% higher than every other sector in the U.K. economy, according to research from the Institute of Customer Service. At the same time, younger workers, who usually rent so move regularly, do not have broadband because of the long contracts and high exit fees.

Traditional ISPs are not set up for this new world. BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk between them own more than 90% of the broadband market. The biggest independent challengers to them today are Shell Energy, the Post Office and Vodafone. No companies are incentivized to break the pattern of long contracts, high exit fees and hidden loyalty taxes. But when you switch between most suppliers the only thing that normally changes is your router and the software you interact with. So there is now an opportunity to disrupt this space.

Cuckoo has one deal and a one-month rolling contract; simple pricing, no loyalty tax, no hidden charges. It says it also offers the fastest speed available on the network.

The startup was inspired when co-founder Alexander Fitzgerald had to take on BT to get his father’s internet to work properly and for the right price. “The broadband market is broken. Customers struggle with complex deals, high prices and bad service. There has to be a better way. Unlike the current providers, we will be transparent, with clear pricing, simple contracts and good customer service,” he said.

Fitzgerald previously helped Bulb grow to 1.5 million customers as a consultant. While working with Bulb he saw there was something missing in broadband. The Bulb founders gave him advice on his first-ever pitch deck. He then quit his job in October 2019 and founded Cuckoo.

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In the space of several weeks, COVID-19 has transformed countless industries and will continue to do so in ways we can only imagine.

The pandemic has also spurred many to find new ways to work and keep society moving amid physical distancing, stay-at-home orders and mass hospitalizations. For years, robotics and automation have been a looming presence in a number of fields ranging from shipping and fulfillment to construction sites and operating rooms. But the novel coronavirus could well be the disruption that accelerates the adoption of these technologies.

These changes take time, but because COVID-19 won’t be disappearing any time soon, it seems likely that this era will transform many of the robotics- and automation-curious into full-fledged converts. How different would this moment be if we were bolstered by a workforce that couldn’t transmit viruses or call in sick?

Following recent surveys exploring COVID-19’s impact on media, fintech startups and esports, along with an earlier exploration of robotics investments, we’ve asked the category’s top VCs to discuss how the pandemic will impact their portfolio companies:

Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital

How has COVID-19 impacted automation and the robotics investing landscape?

We just closed on a fresh $1 billion and are actively making new investments in automation. COVID-19 revealed that our just-in-time manufacturing and logistics infrastructure cannot react to unexpected change. We expect the best practices of tech companies: rapidly adopting new tools and quickly iterating on their products and processes to become common in the realm of manufacturing and logistics. Engineers will be handed credit cards to try the latest tools, building on open source will be widely embraced, and making bets on products from startups will become the norm in this industry which has its roots in the industrial revolution.

COVID-19 will also encourage employers to rethink workspace layouts; keeping workers at a distance makes for a safer work environment. Automation enables that distance, and we continue to seek amazing teams aiming to empower human workers through automation. COVID-19 has created a period of uncertainty relating to demand, which will impact manufacturers’ ability to purchase automation to meet that demand. We encourage automation startups to revisit their assumptions on customer purchasing patterns, knowing that automation will become a priority in our new normal.

Zoom announced this morning that it has acquired Keybase, a startup with encryption expertise. It did not reveal the purchase price.

Keybase, which has been building encryption products for several years including secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains.

The company has faced a number of security issues in the last couple of months as demand as soared and exposed some security weaknesses in the platform. As the company has moved to address these issues, having a team of encryption experts on staff should help the company build a more secure product.

In a blog post announcing the deal, CEO Eric Yuan said they acquired Keybase to give customers a higher level of security, something that’s increasingly important to enterprise customers as more operations are relying on the platform, working from home during the pandemic.

“This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as we attempt to accomplish the creation of a truly private video communications platform that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants, while also having the flexibility to support Zoom’s wide variety of uses,” Yuan wrote.

He added that that tools will be available for all paying customers as soon as it is incorporated into the product. “Zoom will offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to all paid accounts. Logged-in users will generate public cryptographic identities that are stored in a repository on Zoom’s network and can be used to establish trust relationships between meeting attendees,” he wrote.

Under the terms of the deal, the Keybase will become a subsidiary of Zoom and co-founder and Max Krohn will lead the Zoom security engineering team, reporting directly to Yuan to help build the security product. The other almost two dozen employees will become Zoom employees. The vast majority are security engineers.

It’s not clear what will happen to Keybase’s products, but the company did say Zoom is working with Keybase to figure that out.

Keybase was founded in 2014 and has raised almost $11 million according to Crunchbase data.

Lime has announced that it has raised a $170 million funding round. Uber is the leading investor with existing investors Alphabet, Bain Capital Ventures, GV and others also participating. The Information first reported on the new funding round before the official announcement.

As part of the deal, Lime is also acquiring Uber’s micromobility subsidiary Jump. There will be more integrations between Uber and Jump in the future, but both apps will remain active for now. It’s still unclear whether you’re going to be able to unlock Lime electric scooters in the Uber app, and Jump scooters and electric bikes in the Lime app.

“We’re glad that our customers will continue to have access to bikes and scooters in both our apps because we believe micro-mobility is a critical part of the urban landscape, now more than ever,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release.

Yesterday, Uber announced a massive round of layoffs. Around 14% of the company have been laid off — it represents 3,700 employees. Cuts come mostly from community operations, recruiting and Greenlight hubs, the company’s in-person help centers for drivers. Uber Eats is also pulling out of seven markets around the world.

Uber is trying to cut costs as usage has been plummeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns around the world. With today’s deal, the company is also going to save on operating costs as Jump employees transition from Uber to Lime.

On April 30, Lime also laid off 13% of its workforce, representing about 80 employees. “Almost overnight, our company went from being on the eve of accomplishing an unprecedented milestone — the first next-generation micro-mobility company to reach profitability — to one where we had to pause operations in 99% of our markets worldwide to support cities’ efforts at social distancing. Needless to say, while we thought we had planned for all possibilities this year, we did not anticipate a global pandemic,” the company’s CEO wrote at the time.

According to The Information’s report, Lime’s valuation is down 79% to $510 million with this round. In April 2019, Lime raised at a $2.4 billion valuation.

In other news, Lime has a new chief executive officer — Wayne Ting is getting a promotion as he joined Lime in October 2018 as Global Head of Operations and Strategy.

Last year, Lime co-founder Toby Sun stepped down from the CEO role. Brad Bao, another co-founder of the company, assumed chief responsibilities. Following today’s news, Bao will remain chairman of the board with Sun taking on the CEO position.

Uber’s stock is currently trading up 6.61% compared to yesterday’s closing price during pre-market trading.

Savings and investing apps are having a moment. While many startups are struggling in the wake of COVID-19 and its economic impacts, services that help regular folks save a bit more or invest their funds are seeing a demand boom.

Coming into 2020 on the back of a huge fundraising year for the fintech cohort, it’s a welcome result for investors and founders alike

Public, a startup whose app allows consumers to invest for free, is enjoying the updraft. So much so that it accelerated a feature release to help capitalize on changing consumer behavior. This morning let’s explore how quickly Public has grown in recent weeks, and why it’s doubling-down on the social side of its service, something that many of its peers lack.

Growth

Public launched out of beta last September and saw rapid consumer adoption right away, according to Jannick Malling, the startup’s co-founder and co-CEO. “We’ve been growing very, very quickly since September,” Malling told TechCrunch.

But Public’s service is a different from other investing apps that you might be familiar with. Users can buy fractional shares, invest in ETFs, and invest in themes for free, as you’d expect in 2020. But it also has a social element that makes its application more than just a place to take stock of your portfolio’s performance.

Users can display their investments and stocks that they are interested in on a public page (here’s one). They can also explain their investment choices in a public feed (the company’s name is rather on-the-nose).

Those social tools became more than a neat feature when the markets began to gyrate earlier this year. According to Malling, users were coming to app to handle the market’s ups-and-downs alongside their investing peers. Public’s users “are going through [the turbulence] together,” Malling told TechCrunch, adding that he and his company believes that investing through a downturn with fellow investors is a “a much better way” than hacking it alone.

But Public wanted to provide more social tools to its users, and quickly, once the markets stopped merely going up and began to bounce up and down instead. So the startup accelerated the rollout of private and group messaging, which it launched this morning.

Public had messaging capabilities on the roadmap before COVID-19, but the changing world “made the need so much more apparent,” Malling said. “Times of great uncertainty [are] really when you do need community,” the co-CEO explained in an interview. “You need people that you can have dialogue with.”

Community in trying times is welcome, and public-market investors are a famously chatty bunch, so messaging might prove to be a smart call for Public. From day trading chat rooms in the 1990s to today’s WallStreetBet denizens, folks putting money to work like to talk about where they are deploying capital and why. Public is not designed for day traders, mind, but that doesn’t mean its longer-term investing users won’t want to talk amongst themselves.

And there are more Public users than ever. Like its competitors (Robinhood, Wealthfront, M1 Finance, Betterment, it’s a list) Public has seen its userbase boom in recent weeks. According to the company, it saw “new customer growth” of +80% in April when compared to March’s results, along with a doubling (+100%) of trading activity and a tripling (+200%) of time spent in its app by users.

That recent growth has been organic, according to Malling. Noting that he views Public as a social network, Malling said that his company “predominantly” grows via organic channels, including user referrals, because it is an “app that gets better with friends on it.”

Looking ahead, TechCrunch asked the company if messaging would be followed up by other, socially focused features in the future. It will, according to Malling, who told TechCrunch the new messaging feature will be prominently featured in the app itself, which he felt was “indicative that [the new feature] is the start of something, and there will be many more exciting updates that we will roll out in the coming months.”

The social aspirations of Public are serious. Malling explained TechCrunch that folks today have Slack for work, for example, and Twitch and Discord for for gaming, but that “there isn’t really that social network for investing and that is ultimately what we think we can build with Public.”

Hub Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that developed a software and hardware platform for cryptographic operations, today announced that it has raised a $5 million Series A round led by AXA Ventures. Crowdfunding platform OurCrowd also participated in this round. Like most companies at the Series A stage, the company plans to use the investment to expand its team and technology offerings.

On the hardware side, Hub Security is building both a relatively standard Hardware Security Module (HSM), using FPGAs to accelerate various processes and to create a physical separation between the part of the machine that holds the secrets and the outside world.

But it’s also building a mini-HSM, which is basically a small hardware wallet with a built-in firewall, EMI shield and tamper-resistant case. On the software side, the company offers tools for managing the signing and authorization workflows, as well as a machine learning-based tool that has been designed to anticipate cyberattacks on the system.

Like most Israeli cybersecurity companies, most of Hub Security’s founding team got its start in the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200. The team founded the company in 2017, but co-founder Andrey Iaremenko had started working on the problem a few years earlier. “He was trying to figure out a way to deal with secrets in motion for anything that’s not military, anything that doesn’t require a lot of resources and can be relatively cheap and can be commoditized easily,” Eyal Moshe, Hub Security’s CEO, told me.

In the early days, the company focused a lot of its marketing on the blockchain market, but as Moshe told me, it has evolved its messaging quite a bit since then. “The vision didn’t change. What changed was the focus and how we pitch it, but the vision didn’t change much. What I think is changing recently is some understanding of how we can market it alongside how we can add value to cloud customers without interfering too much with their setup,” said Moshe.

Unsurprisingly, Hub Security’s focus today is on working with fintech and cloud companies. It already has a strategic partnership with Seagate Technology’s Tel Aviv-based Lyve Labs, which focuses on partnering with local companies that work on building new solutions for managing exabytes of data.

“I was actively looking for a ‘software-defined HSM’ platform company in Israel for the past twelve months and I was very pleased when I met Hub Security and learned about their unique offering. We agreed very quickly to partner and invest,” said Moshe Raines, partner at OurCrowd and Labs/02 managing partner. That investment came together just around the time Israel went into its strict COVID-19 lockdown

Today at 10am PDT, two-thirds of the Equity crew are sitting down with Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist with Homebrew and well-known seed-stage investor.

Continuing TechCrunch’s running series of Extra Crunch Live discussions with prominent people in the tech industry, bringing Walk in for a discussion is fitting. Our recent chat with Sequoia Roelof Botha’s gave us a slightly later-stage look at the world of startups, for example. And our conversation last week with Mark Cuban gave us an anti-VC perspective on startup growth and profitability.

Danny and Alex will dig through the health of the seed-stage market with Walk, working to understand which cohort of super early-stage startups are the best capitalized, and the best prepared, to survive the COVID-19 era’s worsening economy and changing consumer and business spending patterns.

Fintech is also on the docket, given that Homebrew has put money into Chime (a popular neobank that has raised an ocean of capital), Finix (a payments infra startup that recently annoyed Stripe), and Plaid (which Visa bought for billions earlier this year).

And we will also talk about whether now is a good time to begin a startup — does the economy bode well for new startups?

Plus, we will take your questions, so come prepared with them.

Details for Extra Crunch members are below. You can grab a trial for a few bucks here if you need one. See you all later today!

Schedules, links

Extra Crunch crew, your details are below:

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

As the economy has worsened, the market for many goods and services has slowed. Some SaaS products have found themselves immune, or even boosted by recently changes in consumer and business consumption patterns and travel habits. Software that aids in remote work, for example, have seen demand for their products rise sharply.

But on balance, private-market investors had told TechCrunch that they expect SaaS customer loss (churn) to rise and growth to slow. SaaS revenue, often sold on year-long contracts, is generally expected to hold up reasonably well in the current downturn; you can see this in the rapid rebound in the value of public SaaS stocks, for example. But what can data tell us?

Today we’re turning once again to statistics from ProfitWell, a Boston-based software startup that helps other companies track their subscription businesses and reduce churn. The company has provided TechCrunch with updated performance charts detailing how SaaS in the B2B world is performing.

Let’s examine what the data says, and we’ll close with a hint of how consumer SaaS is itself holding up.

A recovery, a plateau