In a message posted to its internal communications channel earlier this week, the massive startup accelerator Y Combinator said it will change the terms of its own PPP (the YC pro rata investment program) and investing in companies raising seed and Series A rounds on a case-by-case basis.

The company began a policy of investing in every seed and Series A round for its portfolio companies back in 2015.

Since then, it has taken a 7% stake in every company that raised a priced seed and Series A round, investing in more than 300 Y Combinator companies over nearly 500 rounds.

Under its new policy, the accelerator is reducing its investment size from 7% to 4% and is only investing on a case-by-case basis going forward.

The reason for the change is that the number of companies in its portfolio has gotten too large for it to invest and some of the limited partners who back the accelerator’s operations are balking at making commitments to the pro rata investment program.

“We have significantly exceeded the funds we raised for pro ratas, and the investors who support YC do not have the appetite to fund the pro rata program at the same scale,” the accelerator wrote in a post seen by TechCrunch. “In addition, processing hundreds of follow-on rounds per year has created significant operational complexities for YC that we did not anticipate. Said simply, investing in every round for every YC company requires more capital than we want to raise and manage. We always tell startups to stay small and manage their budgets carefully. In this instance, we failed to follow our own advice.”

For entrepreneurs who take investments from the accelerator, the change is pretty significant. On the accelerator’s internal messaging board they worried about the potential optics of having the accelerator not make a follow-on commitment.

YC addressed those concerns by saying it would not make an investment decision until a company had already received an initial term sheet from a lead investor.

The changes will take effect on May 8, 2020, the investor said.

“In the future, we will no longer invest automatically in every priced seed and Series A/B round. Instead, we will exercise pro rata rights on a case-by-case basis, like other investors on your cap table,” the accelerator wrote. “We’ve heard your feedback that YC’s pro rata allocation is bigger than what some of you would prefer. So for those investments we do make, we will reduce the size of our pro rata and simplify its calculation to be a flat 4% participation right in each priced round. To calculate the size of YC’s pro rata investment in your round, simply multiply the amount of capital you are raising by 4%. If our ownership right before the round is less than 4%, we will cap our investment in the round at our then-current ownership. Our intention is not to have a super pro-rata right.”

Even with the reduced investment size, YC said it would only make investments in roughly one-third of its portfolio.

“The YC Continuity team will manage these investment decisions and will work very hard to inform you within a day or two of receiving your materials,” the accelerator wrote. “We will honor any pending pro rata investments for term sheets signed before May 8. But we wanted to communicate this message broadly so that founders can plan accordingly.”

Starting tomorrow, 777 supermarkets in California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nevada will begin stocking the Impossible Foods plant-based meat substitute.

Fueling the increased distribution and a push to expand its product suite and geographic footprint domestically and internationally is a $500 million round of funding the company closed in March.

Some of that money is supporting the company’s debut at stores like Albertsons, Jewel-Osco, Pavilions, Safeway and Vons.

In all, the company said it would be in nearly 1,000 grocery stores by tomorrow. That includes all Albertsons, Vons, Pavilions and Gelson’s Markets in Southern California; all Safeway stores in Northern California and Nevada; Jewel-Osco stores in Chicago, eastern Iowa and northwest Indiana; Wegmans stores on the East Coast and Fairway markets in and around New York.

Since its debut in September, the company said it was the number one item sold at the locations it was available on the East and West coasts.

The company’s 12-ounce packages are sold for somewhere between $8.99 and $9.99 and it plans to soon introduce the Impossible Burger at even more stores nationwide.

“We’ve always planned on a dramatic surge in retail for 2020 — but with more and more Americans’ eating at home, we’ve received requests from retailers and consumers alike,” said Impossible Foods’ president Dennis Woodside, in a statement. “Our existing retail partners have achieved record sales of Impossible Burger in recent weeks, and we are moving as quickly as possible to expand with retailers nationwide.”

Even as the company announced its expansion, it made moves to assuage any consumer concerns over the processes in place at its manufacturing facilities.

Impossible Foods said it had instituted mandatory work from home policies for all of its employees who can telecommute; restricted visitors to its facilities and those operated by co-manufacturers; banned all work-related travel; and implemented new sanitizing and disinfection procedures at its workplaces.

“Our No. 1 priority is the safety of our employees, customers and consumers,” Woodside said. “And we recognize our responsibility for the welfare of our community, including the entire San Francisco Bay Area, our global supplier and customer network, millions of customers, and billions of people who are relying on food manufacturers to produce supplies in times of need.”

The company said it was proceeding with its research and development initiatives; accelerating the ramp of its production facilities; and moving to broadly commercialize its Impossible Sausage and Impossible Pork products.

Impossible Foods has raised $1.3 billion from investors, including Mirae Asset Global Investments, Khosla Ventures, Horizons Ventures and Temasek.

Savvy, a healthcare cooperative, has just raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Indie.vc.

Established as a cooperative that shares profits with its users, Savvy connects patients with healthcare companies and other providers looking to better serve people through products and services. Patients can take paid gigs that include tasks like interviews, focus groups and user testing.

Savvy is set up as a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Those stakeholders are divided into four classes: patients, Savvy employees, founders and investors. Up until now, Savvy has been entirely bootstrapped and sustained by its revenue, Savvy CEO Jen Horonjeff told TechCrunch via email.

“But as more and more companies are seeing that patient insights are critical to help their healthcare solutions find product-market fit, we need to scale up our operations to meet the demand,” she said. “This financing will allow us to expand our offerings, support more companies and, in turn, improve the lives of countless more patients.”

Cooperatives can oftentimes face trouble raising venture funding. That’s because their business models don’t generally align with the incentives of traditional venture capitalists, Horonjeff previously told me.

“I have to say a lot of investors are, first of all, not curious,” she said. “And those that are curious — and we’ve gone down the path with people like that — think we’re this cool new thing, but just don’t understand how it’s going to jive with the rest of their fund. So there aren’t great mechanisms in place to kind of bridge the gap between what people know and what the new economy could look like.”

For Indie.vc, which already takes a non-traditional approach to venture capital, co-ops fit into the firm’s vision. Indie.vc, which aims to be the last investment its founders need to take, is geared toward startups with founders who value preserving optionality and ownership.

As Indie.vc founder Bryce Roberts said in a statement, “Savvy represents everything we’d like to see in the future of impact business — shared ownership, diverse perspectives, and aligned incentives, tackling one of the largest industries on the planet.”

There’s a potential climate-related crisis brewing in the beer industry and Province Brands has just raised $1.6 million for its technology that purports to be a solution.

The Canadian company, which has developed a way to make beer from any plant material, is pitching itself as a solution to the increasing shortages of barley and other grains caused by global climate change.

It’s a pivot for the brand. When it launched, the company was taking its technology to cannabis brands as a way to brew beer made from bud. But when the bottom started falling out of the cannabis market, Province Brands switched the pitch to the broader brewery business.

“The cannabis industry was overvalued from an equities perspective for years,” says Province Brands’ co-founder Dooma Wendschuh. “Starting in mid-2019 we started to see that crash… this is an industry that is very capital intensive… it requires a tremendous amount of investment to set up these facilities.”

As the market became less about the puff and more about the pass, Province decided to reach out to its investor base and raise a Canadian $2.2 million convertible note.

“We didn’t want investors to take a bath on it if that could be avoided,” says Wendschuh.

Province Brands’ last funding was its Series B in 2019 when the Company raised CAD $5 million at a CAD $70 million pre-money valuation, the company said in a statement. 

“Closing this round quickly highlights the attractiveness of Province Brands’ technology, IP, and market opportunities,” said Wendschuh.  

The money which came from previous institutional and angel investors will be used to continue marketing its technology more broadly to brewers impacted by rising prices for beer staples like barley and to launch its own branded hemp lager into the market.

The company’s Cambridge Bay Canadian Hemp Lager will be the first beer brewed from hemp, according to a statement from Province Brands. Made of only hemp, hops, water and yeast, the beverage contains no THC, CBD or phytocannabinoids and can legally be sold wherever alcohol is sold, the company said. 

“The technology we created to brew beer from cannabis would allow us to brew beer from any non-starch plant material,” Wendschuh said. “This could be transformative for beer companies where the price of barley has gone through the roof.”

In some cases barley is too expensive for large-scale beer production, Wendschuh noted. 

“Funds raised will help us complete Phase 1 construction of our 123,000-square-foot brewing facility and will enable us to receive additional licensing from Health Canada,” said Province Brands’ co-founder Jennifer Thomas. The company received its research and development license from Health Canada in late 2019. 

Province Brands is already working with some bigger name liquor companies on making beer substitutes from their feedstocks. In one case, the company is working with an undisclosed tequila manufacturer on a beer made from agave.

It is notable that the transaction closed in less than two months at a time when capital markets have been challenging. 

Energy demand has fallen globally. Oil prices are plummeting. Everywhere in the energy world things look fairly grim, but keeping the lights on and electrons moving remains critical to keeping even the hobbled economies of the world humming.

That’s why startups like Amperon, which use data analysis to provide predictive tools for energy retailers and grid operators, are still relevant — and still raising money.

The company raised $2 million in a round that closed in February before the pandemic hit U.S. shores. And the service, according to co-founder Abe Stanway, is still vital.

“We tell them how much electricity their customers are going to use on a short-term and long-term basis,” Stanway said of the company’s service. “When these exogenous shocks and black swan events occur we get much more valuable because you need this machine learning in order to understand how the grid is going to behave.”

The value proposition was clear to investors like Blackhorn Ventures, which led the round, and other backers, including Garuda Ventures, Intelis Capital, Powerhouse Ventures, SK Ventures and V1.VC.

“Amperon builds real-time operational grid intelligence tools via smart meters and AI for utilities, energy retailers, grid operators and institutional traders,” said Emily Kirsch, Powerhouse founder and chief executive. “Amperon’s iterative demand forecasting is able to account for never-before-seen grid volatility resulting from a global pandemic, climate disasters or an increasingly complex grid.”

Amperon is working with four major geographies, including Australia’s two major grid regions and the ERCOT regional transmission organization responsible for Texas, and PJM, which manages the mid-Atlantic’s electricity grid.

Stanway said the new money would be used to expand the company’s reach across more grid operators in the U.S.

While Amperon’s technology is incredibly useful for utilities and grid operators during times of crisis, it can help save money in normal times too. Long-term utility planners typically over-budget their energy needs by 1% every year, which adds up to billions of dollars spent on unnecessary additional generation capacity, according to Amperon.

Lower spending means reduced electricity prices for consumers. Another issue that Amperon says it can help energy providers address is the increasing complexity of grid management. Renewable energy generation adds variability to the grid that utilities and grid operators have yet to effectively manage, the company said.

In today’s grim economic climate, companies are looking for ways to automate wherever they can. Bridgecrew, an early-stage startup that makes automated cloud security tooling aimed at engineers, announced a $14 million Series A today.

Battery Ventures led the round with participation from NFX, the company’s $4 million seed investor. Sorensen Ventures, DNX Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, and Homeward Ventures also participated. A number of individual investors also helped out. The company has raised a total of $18 million.

Bridgecrew CEO and co-founder Idan Tendler says that it is becoming easier to provision cloud resources, but that security tends to be more challenging. “We founded Bridgecrew because we saw that there was a huge bottleneck in security engineering, in DevSecOps, and how engineers were running cloud infrastructure security,” Tendler told TechCrunch.

They found that a lot issues involved misconfigurations, and while there were security solutions out there to help, they were expensive, and they weren’t geared towards the engineers who were typically being charged with fixing the security issues, he said.

The company decided to solve that problem by coming up with a solution geared specifically for the way engineers think and operate. “We do that by codifying the problem, by codifying what the engineers are doing. We took all the tasks that they needed to do to protect around remediation of their cloud environment and we built a playbook,” he explained.

The playbooks are bits of infrastructure as code that can resolve many common problems quickly. When they encounter a new problem, they build a playbook and then that becomes part of the product. He says that 90% of the issues are fairly generic like following AWS best practices or ensuring SOC-2 compliance, but the engineers are free to tweak the code if they need to.

Tendler says he is hiring and sees his product helping companies looking to reduce costs through automation. “We are planning to grow fast. The need is huge and the COVID-19 implications mean that more and more companies will be moving to cloud and trying to reduce costs, and we help them do that by reducing the barriers and bottlenecks for cloud security.”

The company was founded 14 months ago and has 100 playbooks available. It’s keeping the crew lean for now with 16 employees, but it has plans to double that by the end of the year.

The economy may be contracting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but promising startups are still continuing to raise money to shore up their finances for whatever may lie ahead.

In the latest development, Stripe, a well-known payments unicorn, today announced that it had raised another $600 million in new capital, money that it plans to use to continue investing in product development, further global expansion and strategic initiatives.

The company has become an active investor in a number of startups, some which are strategic partners for the company as it moves into new areas to complement its core online payments business.

It also added in its announcement that it currently has $2 billion on its balance sheet, a key number that underscores the message that the company is taking this investment not to survive but to further thrive, and that it may well choose to do so by remaining a private company, as it does not appear to have any need to go to the public markets to raise funds.

Making it easier to integrate payments into an online service has long been one of the reasons why Stripe has been on a growth tear: it arrived at a time when other solutions were still too fragmented and complicated, and its impact on the wider e-commerce market has seen a number of its competitors and other new entrants offer equally simplified products.

But its ease of use has taken on a new significance in recent times, with a huge surge of business coming online from consumers and businesses who can no longer transact in person because of the current pandemic, leading to a new plethora of use cases for Stripe and other payments companies.

“People who never dreamt of using the internet to see the doctor or buy groceries are now doing so out of necessity. And businesses that deferred moving online or had no reason to operate online have made the leap practically overnight,” said John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe, in a statement (his brother Patrick, the co-founder and CEO, is pictured above). “We believe now is not the time to pull back, but to invest even more heavily in Stripe’s platform.”

The figure is also important because Stripe has never been very transparent about how many customers it has or any of its financials: this is one hint of how it is doing for the public to see.

This latest funding — its largest to date by a large margin — is coming from a number of its existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, GV and Sequoia. It is an extension to the company’s Series G round, which was first confirmed in September 2019 with $250 million raised. The company’s valuation is holding steady with this new investment, and it now stands at $36 billion post-money (it confirmed a $35 billion pre-money valuation seven months ago).

The payments giant has raised around $1.6 billion with this new investment, according to known investment totals.

Stripe was recently in the news when one its investors, Sequoia, put $21 million into a payments company called Finix. It’s still not entirely clear what happened, but Sequoia walked away from the Finix deal, effectively turning its check into a grant.

In the meantime, Stripe — which started life by providing an easy to use API-based payments service for startups like itself to use in their online or app-based payment services — has continued to ramp up the size of its customers alongside overall growth of its customer base. Its users today include Zoom, Caviar, Coupa, Just Eat, Keap, Lightspeed, Mattel, NBC and Paid.

Today’s 481st FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, April 16, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. PASSWORD:...

___

Today’s 481st FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, April 16 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

___

Sramana Mitra: Given that you are in a sector that is very relevant to what we are going through right now, what do you see is going to happen? There is a furious effort to come up with all kinds of...

___

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global cyber security market is expected to grow from $112.01 billion in 2019 to $281.74 billion by 2027. The growth is expected to be driven by the demand...

___

Sprout.ai, an insurtech incubated at London’s Imperial College that is applying AI to insurance claims,, has raised $2.5 million in additional seed funding. Leading the round is Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Playfair Capital, and Techstars.

Founded in 2018, Sprout.ai has developed AI-based software that it says enables insurance claims to be settled within “just 24 hours”. Specifically, it uses natural language processing and optical character recognition to understand unstructured insurance claim data, and then combines this with real-time external data such as weather, geolocation, business and medication information, to automate claims or escalate them for further human analysis.

“Our mission is to enable insurers to pay out successful claims inside 24 hours,” Sprout.ai co-founder and CEO Niels Thone tells me. “Currently the average claims settlement time in the U.K. is 25 days. This is mainly caused by a lack of information at the start of the claims journey and a lot of manual touch points throughout the journey. This causes two problems: bad customer experiences and high operational costs for claims teams”.

To remedy this, insurance companies can plug their existing systems into Sprout.ai’s “Contextual AI” solution, which provides what Thone says is a much more complete data capture at the start of the claims process, and then is able to automatically validate incoming claims and predict the next necessary steps in the process.

This sees the big bulk of claims sent straight through for processing, resulting in them being settled in record time. “This way claim handlers only have to focus on the really complex claims, where their specialised skill set is actually needed,” says the Sprout.ai CEO.

“The secret lies in accessing the underlying unstructured data, such as pdfs, images, documents, etc.,” he adds. “This is where all the actual ‘data gold’ or, as we call it, ‘data sprouts’ lie, so it’s pertinent that you have the means to extract and structure this data as well as leverage it for further claims verification. Sprout.ai has developed proprietary algorithms in both the OCR and NLP fields to enable very accurate and fast extraction of this underlying data”.

Asked about Sprout.ai’s revenue model, Thone says the insurtech operates via a transactional model, whereby it charges a fee per claim processed. “The fee is volume dependent, which means that the more claims we process for a client, the cheaper the price per claim becomes,” he explains.

Meanwhile, Sprout.ai, which was previously called BlockClaim, says it will use the investment to further build out its data science and engineering team, and expand its sales operations. The U.K. startup is also making plans for U.S. expansion.

Food delivery — be it ready-made restaurant meals, groceries, or anything in between — has seen a huge surge of activity in the last few weeks as people have sheltered in place to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. Today, one of the startups that’s built a business specifically in meal-kits in the UK is announcing funding to double down on its growth.

Gousto, a London-based meal-kit service, has closed £33 million ($41 million) in funding, money that it’s going to be using to continue investing in its technology — both in the AI engine that it says customers use to get more personalised recommendations of what to cook and eat, and in the backend tech used to optimise its own logistics and other operations — and in building more capacity to meet rising demand and expanding next-day delivery in the near future (it mainly operates on a three-day turnaround between ordering and delivery currently).

The company said that it’s currently delivering some 4 million meals to 380,000 UK households each month and is on course to cross 400 million meals delivered by 2025. It offers currently a choice of more than 50 recipes each week and gives people the option to tailor what they get, with the whole system running in an automated packing process, working out to average price per meal per person to £2.98 at its cheapest.

The funding — which was being raised before the novel coronavirus hit — is being led by Perwyn, with participation also from BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures and Joe Wicks — a hugely popular YouTube fitness coach who has built a lifestyle brand around healthy eating. This brings the total raised by Gousto to around £130 million ($162 million). It’s not disclosing its valuation with this round. It has 100 employees today and plans to expand that to 700 by 2022.

CTO Shaun Pearce said that Gousto was in high-growth mode before COVID-19, operating on forecasts of growing 70% year-on-year. That number — as with so many other delivery and specifically food-based delivery businesses right now — has spiked upward in recent weeks, not just from paying customers but also for Gousto’s own efforts to do something for the relief efforts, with food businesses like Gousto’s some of the remaining “key” businesses that have been allowed to stay open when others like restaurants have closed.

“We continue to be laser-focused on our vision to become the UK’s most-loved way to eat dinner. This additional investment is not only a validation of our track record, but it is also an endorsement of our strategic vision of the future which is rooted in investing in innovative technology to transform the way we search for, shop for, and cook our food,” said Timo Boldt, CEO and founder, in a statement. “In these challenging times, we want to continue offering people more choice and especially more convenience. We will maintain our close relationships with the government and other charitable partners to ensure those already struggling don’t see their situation worsen.”

In the last several weeks, Pearce said Gousto has also seen big changes in customer behavior from pre-existing customers, with a 28% increase in family boxes. “Those who buy from us want to buy more,” he said. Like some other smaller food delivery companies (and small can be as big as the online grocery Ocado) it’s also no longer accepting new customer sign-ups and is focused just on meeting the demand of pre-existing customers.

Gousto’s has also been trying to do its part in relief operations. It’s been working with the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to produce meal kits for vulnerable people, and it has donated some 6,000 meals to The Trussell Trust foodbank network and to the homeless charity, Shelter. It’s also ensuring that when its system is overcrowded that NHS employees get priority access to its ordering platform. (This is in addition to the contactless and other safety procedures that Pearce said that Gousto has put in place to minimise the risk of spreading the virus both to its workers and customers.)

Meal kit services in recent years have taken a beating in recent years, typified perhaps most publicly by Blue Apron, which saw its stock drop drastically after going public in part because of the huge amount of competition (not just from other pure-play meal kit companies but a plethora of others like Amazon that have added on meal kits to other existing business lines such as other grocery delivery).

Pearce said that Gousto’s growth and popularity and flexibility that it offers users by way of the AI engine to craft recipes they might actually want to use sets it apart from current competition, which in the UK includes HelloFresh, Mindful Chef, offerings from most major grocers, and many more.

“We continue to be impressed by Gousto and its dedication to its customers,” said Andrew Wynn, founder and managing partner at Perwyn, in a statement. “The business has adapted quickly to continue providing an essential service to so many. This reaffirms the decision we took far before COVID-19, that we’re investing in the right people and a business set for even greater success.”

 

Berlin-based startup Taxfix has raised a $65 million Series C funding round. Index Ventures is leading the round with Neil Rimer joining the board. The company started its fundraising process before the coronavirus process and managed to sign all contracts a few days ago.

As the name suggests, Taxfix thinks filing taxes remains broken in many countries. The company has built a mobile app that helps you through the process. There’s also a web version if you prefer.

The app asks you simple questions to maximize your tax refunds. As you start answering questions, Taxfix selects the next relevant questions and hides questions that don’t apply to your current situation. Taxfix accepts photos of your payslip so that you don’t have to file forms. It then submits your filing to the tax office.

Taxfix costs €34.99 when the app calculates at least €50 in tax returns. It’s a pretty low threshold, so most users probably pay €35 at the end of the process. Taxfix is currently live in Germany, France and Italy.

Overall, the startup has helped collect €270 million for hundreds of thousands of users. The company isn’t competing with people who have already been filing tax returns every year. Many people are just too lazy to file tax returns altogether — they represent the core audience of Taxfix.

Many software companies have built tax return apps for U.S. taxpayers. But Europe is a fragmented market when it comes to taxes. That’s why there are fewer tax return apps in Europe than in the U.S. Taxfix now plans to expand to more European countries, adapting its product to local regulation in different markets.

The company plans to expand its team by adding 100 employees on top of its team of 200 employees. Existing investors Valar Ventures, Creandum and Redalpine are also participating in today’s funding round.

Previse, a fintech focused on helping suppliers get faster payment, announced that it has raised $11 million in new funding led by Reefknot Investments and Mastercard. Returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Hambro Perks and Augmentum Fintech also participated.

Founded in 2016, Previse says it currently processes about 100,000 invoices a day, and its goal is to handle payments for five million suppliers within the next five years.

This round brings Previse’s total raised so far to more than $21.8 million and will be used to expand its InstantPay product to more corporate buyers around the world. Previse is taking part in Mastercard’s Start Path accelerator program. Reefknot was founded by Temasek Holdings and Kuehne + Nagel last year to invest in logistics and supply chain startups.

Paul Christensen, the founder and CEO of Previse, told TechCrunch that InstantPay allows corporate buyers to send quick payments to suppliers by using machine-learning based technology to analyze historical data and predict which invoices can be paid immediately, and which ones are potentially higher risk and need to be checked manually.

Traditional invoice payment methods used by large buyers can take up to months to complete, putting pressure on the cash flow of small- to medium-sized businesses. Christensen said this is due to a combination of corporate policy, including the terms and conditions of a sale, and the amount of administrative tasks, including inputting, checking and approving invoices, that need to be performed. InstantPay can reduce that timeframe down to a day.

Rapid payment to suppliers is even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.

“The pandemic has put a huge strain on the working capital of companies, large and small, all over the world, causing a severe cash crunch. Previse’s platform can unlock working capital, meaning that the tens of thousands of SME suppliers who supply to a large corporate chain can be paid on day one, rather than having to wait weeks or months,” he said.

“This is critical now when supply chains have been disrupted, but it will also be critical when we come out the other side and there is a demand surge and supplier supplies have to fulfill large orders.”

Airwallex, a Melbourne-based cross-border financial startup that achieved “unicorn” status last year, announced today that it has raised a $160 million Series D. The round included ANZi Ventures, the investment arm of ANZ Bank, and Salesforce Ventures, along with returning investors DST Global, Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital and Horizons Ventures.

Founded in 2015, the company’s financial services include foreign currency accounts that let businesses receive money from around the world. Airwallex’s system uses inter-bank exchanges to trade foreign currencies at a mid-market rate and targets companies that do business in several different countries. The new funding will be used on potential acquisitions; expansion in American, European and Middle Eastern markets; and the launch of new products, including payment acceptance tools.

Airwallex reached a valuation of more than $1 billion last year when it closed its Series C funding, and has now raised a total of $360 million. Since that round, it has launched new operations in Tokyo, Bangalore and Dubai, and introduced products including Airwallex Borderless Cards in partnership with Visa and integration with accounting platform Xero. The company also now offers an API that enables companies to issue their own virtual cards.

In a press statement, Salesforce Ventures’ head of Australia Rob Keith said, “Being able to transact and do business with customers all over the world is a key criteria for companies who are going through a digital transformation. We’re excited to partner with Airwallex at this critical time in its growth, expanding both its footprint globally and its product capabilities.”

Other startups that have also raised funding to help small to medium-sized businesses deal with the challenges of doing trade in different currencies include Brex, another unicorn, and Hong Kong-based Neat.

Earlier today a grip of new data presented a sharply negative picture of the American economy. And this afternoon, news broke that a trio of well-known, heavily-backed unicorns were cutting staff.

With stocks down as well, we’ve received negative signals from the private market, the public market and the economy as a whole in the same day. Let’s take a minute to set the macro stage, and then go over the latest cuts from Carta (first reported by Bloomberg), Zume (Business Insider broke that particular story) and Opendoor (via The Information).

Economic malaise

The backdrop for today’s cuts is a faltering American economy. A glance at recent news is sufficient. In the last few hours, home builder confidence recorded the “biggest drop in history,” while retail sales fell 8.7% in March, what CNBC noted was “the most ever in government data,” and CNN Business reported that American factories’ output fell 5.4% in March, “their steepest one-month slowdown since 1946.”

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that we’ve seen unicorn layoffs all year. In January the news was Vision Fund-backed companies cutting burn to skate closer to profitability. Then, the first round of COVID-19-forced staff cuts landed at big companies; firms like Bird and TripActions slashed staff as their companies were rent by a slowdown in their core operations by the pandemic and its related economic and social changes.

Slimmer cuts at smaller companies have happened on a nearly chronic basis, something that TechCrunch has covered, as well.

Today, however, saw three cuts from three unicorns (private companies worth $1 billion or more) that have long been objects of TechCrunch’s attention. So, let’s talk about them briefly:

Opendoor, a San Francisco-based home sales-focused startup with backing from SoftBank, announced deep cuts to its staffing today. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, the company’s CEO Eric Wu said that 35% of its employee base would be eliminated to “ensure that we can continue to deliver on our mission.” The CEO also said that exiting staff would get paid for eight weeks and “reimbursement of 16 weeks of health insurance coverage.” Wu is also donating his 2020 salary to a fund to support staff. Opendoor was most recently valued at $3.8 billion in a $300 million funding round announced last March.Carta, a San Francisco-based private company equity service platform, announced cuts worth 16% of its staff, or 161 roles, according to a memo that the company shared publicly. Previously eShares, Carta has grown from a provider of equity management for small private companies into a larger, broader service and software play supporting yet-private firms. Carta most recently raised $300 million at a $1.7 billion valuation last May.And finally, Zume. Zume didn’t respond to a request for comment by the time of publication and did not post a public note that we could find. Still, Business Insider reports that the company is cutting 200 more staff after earlier 2020 personnel reductions. The firm will be left with around 100 employees, working on compostable boxes. Zume last raised $375 million at a valuation of just under $1.9 billion (post-money) in November 2018.

It’s getting hard to keep track of all the cuts. Heck, I helped break Modsy layoffs recently with TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas, and we were first to the BounceX cuts as well. It’s a rough, bad economy, and it’s harming growth-oriented companies that like startup unicorns.

More when we have it, probably sooner than we’d like to report.

As silently and swiftly as it has devastated families and communities around the world, COVID-19 has also left many startups gasping for air. Emerging companies with strong 2020 revenue forecasts have seen their high-confidence plans reduced by 60%-80% in a matter of days. Even in the best of times, startups must reach value-unlocking milestones to successfully raise new capital. But today, a globally synchronized halt to business activity has made irrelevant normal benchmarks for financing rounds.

Obtaining payroll support from the recently enacted special government programs for small businesses will not resolve the cascading problems startups are grappling with, regardless of whether or not they are VC-backed.

Product development roadmaps in many innovation-driven industries are changing in ways that may permanently alter a company’s future strategic direction. Merger and acquisition discussions are being shelved. Normal financing rounds, in process and contemplated, are contracting or being abandoned altogether. Many venture funds, including corporate venture programs, have unilaterally “taken a pause” to reevaluate the radically changing landscape for their early-stage company portfolios.

I last experienced this phenomenon in the aftermath of the Great Technology Bubble: 2002-2003. And all signs show that we are at the beginning of a new round of punitive “incentives” for venture investors to keep their companies alive.

Several of my current portfolio companies have recently proposed “emergency bridge” convertible note financings of between $5 million and $15 million, each featuring a painful feature for non-participants: multiple liquidation preferences benefiting only the new money above 3x, with discounts greater than 20% on conversion in a new equity financing. Of course, these financings are open to both existing and new investors. But the likelihood of another round is actually diminished by this type of structure.

Israel-based Pileus, which is officially launching today, aims to help businesses keep their cloud spend under control. The company also today announced that it has raised a $1 million seed round from a private angel investor.

Using machine learning, the company’s platform continuously learns about how a user typically uses a given cloud and then provides forecasts and daily personalized recommendations to help them stay within a budget.

Pileus currently supports AWS, with support for Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming soon.

With all of the information it gathers about your cloud usage, the service can also monitor usage for any anomalies. Because, at its core, Pileus keeps a detailed log of all your cloud spend, it also can provide detailed reports and dashboards of what a user is spending on each project and resource.

If you’ve ever worked on a project like this, you know that these reports are only as good as the tags you use to identify each project and resource, so Pileus makes that a priority on its platform, with a tagging tool that helps enforce tagging policies.

“My team and I spent many sleepless nights working on this solution,” says Pileus CEO Roni Karp. “We’re thrilled to finally be able to unleash Pileus to the masses and help everyone gain more efficiency of their cloud experience while helping them understand their usage and costs better than ever before.”

Pileus currently offers a free 30-day trial. After that, the service shows you a $180/month or $800 per year price, but once you connect your accounts, it’ll charge 1% of your savings, not the default pricing you’ll see at first.

The company isn’t just focused on individual businesses, though. It’s also targeting managed service providers that can use the platform to create reports and manage their own customer billing. Karp believes this will become a significant source of revenue for Pileus because “there are not many good tools in the field today, especially for Azure.”

It’s no secret that Pileus is launching into a crowded market, where well-known incumbents like Cloudability already share mindshare with a growing number of startups. Karp, however, believes that Pileus can stand out, largely because of its machine learning platform and its ability to provide users with immediate value, whereas, he argues, it often takes several weeks for other platforms to deliver results.