While you’ve probably spent a lot of today thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth remembering that other health issues aren’t going away — and that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States.

Heartbeat Health is a startup working to improve the way that cardiovascular care is delivered, and it announced today that it has raised $8.2 million in Series A funding.

Dr. Jeffrey Wessler, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, is a cardiologist himself, and he told me that he “stepped off the academic cardiology path” about three years ago because he “saw some of the work being done in digital health space and became incredibly enamored of doing this for heart health.”

Wessler said that the delivery methods for cardiovascular care remain almost entirely unchanged. To a large extent that’s because the existing model works, but there’s still room to do better.

“As of the last seven or so years, we’re in a new era where we’ve figured out how to treat people well once they get sick,” he said. “But we’re doing a very bad job of keeping them healthy.”

To address that, Heartbeat Health has created what Wessler described as a “digital first” layer, allowing patients to talk with experts via telemedicine, who can then direct them to the appropriate provider — who might be a “preferred Heartbeat partner” or not — for in-person care.

This initial interaction can help patients avoid “a lot of inefficiencies,” he said, because it ensures they don’t get sent to the wrong place, and “kick[s] things off right with evidence-based, guideline-based testing, so that they’re not just falling into the individual practice habits of random doctors.”

In addition, Heartbeat Health tries to collect all of a patient’s relevant heart data (which might come from wearable consumer devices like an Apple Watch or Fitbit) in one place, and to track results about which treatments are most effective.

“Ultimately, we want to be the software, the technology powering it all, but we don’t want to leave any patient behind at the beginning,” Wessler said.

He added that the program works with most commercial insurance and is already involved in the care of 10,000 New York-area patients. And apparently it’s been embraced by the cardiologists, who Wessler said always tell him, “We’ve been waiting for that layer to come in and unify this incredibly fragmented system, as long as it works with us and not against us.”

The funding was led by .406 Ventures and Optum Ventures, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Designer Fund and Max Ventures.

Fintech startup Revolut has introduced a new trading feature for premium users. Starting today, Premium and Metal users can access gold exposure from the app.

Revolut works with a gold services partner (London Bullion Market Association) so that money you spend on gold exposure is backed by real gold held by this partner. In other words, you’re not going to receive gold coins in the mail. You can just invest money based on the price of gold.

The startup has been building a financial hub and already lets you purchase cryptocurrencies and buy public shares. Gold is part of a new feature called Commodities.

There are multiple ways to invest in gold. You can purchase gold exposure directly at market price, set a limit price to auto-exchange gold when it reaches a certain price or get cashback in gold for Metal customers.

At any time, you can convert your gold investment back into fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. If you spend money with your Revolut card and you only have gold, Revolut will use your gold exposure automatically. You can also transfer gold exposure to another Revolut user.

According to the company’s website, Revolut charges a 0.25% markup when you trade gold during the week and a 1% markup from Saturday at midnight to Monday at midnight U.K. time.

It’s worth noting that gold isn’t protected through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the U.K. “However, in the unlikely event of Revolut’s insolvency, all Precious Metals holdings will be sold and proceeds will be credited to your e-money account,” Revolut says. You’ll have to trust their word.

Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth.

You’ve probably heard of the Seven Deadly Sins, but I bet you’ve never wondered how they apply to starting a company. The answer: surprisingly well!

Over the years, I’ve talked about the seven habits every company should try to avoid and the seven (non-biblical) virtues each company should strive for. Done right, they will help founders focus, save time and avoid some common — and painful — mistakes.

For the purpose of this post, I’ve paired each sin with its closest corresponding virtue.

Sin No. 1: Lust (don’t focus on what other companies have)

As a founder, you have to pay attention to your competitors. Just don’t let that attention turn into lust for what they have — whether it’s a flashy marketing campaign, a fancy office or a killer staff.

Executive lust: Lusting after leadership can be especially tempting. So your competitor hired a rockstar executive who seems to be doing all the right things. It’s easy to think you need your own COO, or CRO, or CCO right now — and they need to be just like the person filling that role at the other successful company that looks nothing like yours.

Think carefully about what you need, why and what role that person will play day in and day out. What strengths and weaknesses do they have? What gaps do you need to fill? And what matters most to your customers and your business? It’s also important to think about your stage and your go-to-market model. When it comes to personnel, one size never fits all.

Today’s 476th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, March 12, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. PASSWORD:...

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Grégoire discusses two key trends in e-commerce: B2B and marketplaces. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company. Grégoire Chauvin: I’m the Founder...

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YC-backed Giveaway lets folks give away their unused or unnecessary items in a marketplace. Unlike other buy and sell or donation platforms, Giveaway uses a virtual currency on the platform to reward people for listing their products for free on the app.

Users earn Karma coins each time they list an item on the website. Folks can then use that Karma to claim items listed on the app.

The first person to try to claim an item offers zero Karma for the item. From there, a countdown begins, allowing others to offer more Karma for the item until the clock runs out. The user who offered the most Karma gets to claim the item. They are then connected to the giver via the app and can set a time and place to meet for the transaction. The person who claimed the item can inspect it and then approve the transaction, triggering the exchange of Karma coin.

Users can also rate and review each other on the platform for the quality of their items.

The app promotes giving items away to earn Karma but does offer a flow for purchasing the virtual currency. One Karma coin is equal to about $.30.

Giveaway was founded by Artem Artemiuk, Siarhei Lepchankou, and Siarhei Stasilovich. The idea came to them when traveling in Austria and coming across a store that allowed customers to choose one item for free.

After building the platform, the trio launched the app in their home market of Belarus and saw strong early growth. Since then, Giveaway has expanded to Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and now the United States.

Artemiuk, Giveaway’s CMO, said the company is laser focused on pre-moderation, which uses a combination of machine learning and human input to ensure that inappropriate items don’t make it on the platform, including drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and weapons.

In terms of business model, Giveaway takes a percentage of all Karma coins purchased on the platform, which account for about 30 percent of all Karma. Giveaway also sees the opportunity to generate revenue through an enterprise product within the app, allowing big corporations to opt for Giveaway over sometimes costly recycling options, and pay for the opportunity to do so.

Giveaway has raised $150K from Y Combinator and will present at the accelerator’s upcoming demo day.

Amazon and others have raised awareness of how the in-store shopping experience can be sped up (and into the future) using computer vision to let a person pay for and take away items without ever interacting with a cashier, human or otherwise. Today, a startup is announcing funding for its own take on how to use AI-based video detection get more insights out of the retail experience. Deep North, which has built an analytics platform that builds insights for retailers based on the the videos from the CCTV and other cameras that those retailers already use, is today announcing that it has raised $25.7 million in funding, a Series A round that it plans to use to continue expanding its platform.

Deep North’s AI currently measures such parameters as daily entries and exits; occupancy; queue times; conversions and heat maps — a list and product roadmap that it’s planning to continue growing with this latest investment. It says that using cameras to build its insights is more accurate and scalable than current solutions that include devices like beacons, RFID tags, mobile networks, smartphone tracking and shopping data. A typical installation takes a weekend to do.

The funding is being led by London VC Celeres Investments (backer of self-driving startup Phantom AI, among others), with participation also from Engage, AI List Capital and others. The startup is not disclosing its valuation, and previously Deep North has not disclosed how much it has raised.

Previously known as VMAXX, the Bay Area-based startup, according to CEO and co-founder Rohan Sanil, currently is in use by customers in the US and Europe. It does not disclose customer names, but Sanil said the list includes shopping centers, retailers, commercial real estate businesses and transportation hubs.

There are a number of retail analytics plays on the market today, but up to now the vast majority of them have been based on using other kinds of non-visual (and non-video) data to build their pictures of how a business is working, including logs of sales, card payments, in-store beacons, in-store WiFi and smartphone usage.

This list is, indeed, extensive and already provides a startling amount of data on the average shopper, but it has its drawbacks. Some people don’t use in-store WiFi; beacons are not as ubiquitous as CCTV; certain shopping data is a false positive, in the sense that if you don’t buy anything, it’s harder to track why not and where everything went wrong in getting you to shop; and perhaps, most importantly, you can’t see how shoppers are behaving, where they are looking and walking.

“The data collected [by these other means] is only 30-60% accurate and then extrapolated,” Sanil notes in a blog post. And that is not the only challenge. “The other is the enormous cost of the technology along with the software – which requires a team of programmers to get anything beyond stock analysis – plus being locked into a single vendor.”

Video systems “make a lot more sense,” he adds, and so does using those that are already installed in retailers’ locations. “The customers we see have no interest in deploying and paying for additional infrastructure, when the average store has several cameras already, and a typical big box store has dozens. Making our vision work means quantifying what a camera can see – and seeing through the cameras already in use.” The company typically integrates with 60-70% of a company’s installed cameras to run its analytics.

It’s that differentiation that has attracted investors. “Deep North’s platform allows retailers to gain real time insights on data points that were previously unattainable in the physical world. By leveraging existing video footage to understand activity and behavior, operators can now make informed decisions with the help of their prescriptive analytics engine,” said Azhaan Merchant of Celeres Investments, in a statement.

CCTV has had a problematic profile in the world of data privacy, where people pinpoint it as enemy number one in our rapidly expanding surveillance economy, and have ironically pointed out that it rarely is fit for the purpose it was originally set out to serve, which is deterring and identifying shoplifters. It’s notable to me that Deep North doesn’t actually ever use the term CCTV. (“Customers use a variety of terms for their cameras including CCTV, camera networks and loss prevention cameras so we’ve chosen to use a broader term that encompasses them,” a spokesperson said.)

Whatever you choose to call them, if a retailer has already made the leap into having these cameras installed, using them for analytics gives that business another way of getting a better return on investment. Sanil says that in any case, its platform is respectful of privacy.

“Deep North is not able to ascertain the identity of any individual captured via in-store footage,” he said. “We have no capability to link the metadata to any single individual. Further, Deep North does not capture personally identifiable information (PII) and was developed to govern and preserve the integrity of each and every individual by the highest possible standards of anonymization. Deep North does not retain any PII whatsoever, and only stores derived metadata that produces metrics such as number of entries, number of exits, etc. Deep North strives to stay compliant with all existing privacy policies including GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.” (It has operations in Europe where it would need to comply with GDPR.)

Still, Deep North’s combination of computer vision with retail technology is a signal of a bigger trend. Many providers of security cameras have started to incorporate retail analytics into their wider offerings, and those that are concentrating on check out, like Amazon but also startups like Trigo, are likely also to consider this area too. Longer term, as retailers, but also their IT providers, look to get more intelligence about how their businesses are working in a bid for better margins, we’re likely to see even more players in this space.

For Deep North, that might mean also expanding into a wider set of products that not only are able to generate insights into how people shop, but then to use to those to build recommendations into how stores are laid out, or prompts to shoppers for what they might consider next as they browse.

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

A few weeks ago, Uber and Lyft, kicking bags of the 2019 stock market and regularly cited as examples of venture-backed excess, were back to fighting form.

After encouraging Q3 2019 reports from both ride-hailing giants that included fresh profitability promises and timelines, Uber upped the ante by moving its profitability goal up when it reported Q4 results earlier this year. Shares of the famous company rallied. When Lyft failed to mimic the declaration in its own Q4 earnings report, it was dinged by investors. But from the time of their Q3 2019 earnings reports to recently, Uber and Lyft were coming back up for air.

Suddenly, it was perfectly reasonable to be optimistic about the two ride-hailing companies that had become more famous for their sticky losses than their growth potential; as the pair had matured from upstart to public company, their money-losing methods appeared increasingly permanent, making the Q3 2019 and Q4 2019 profit declarations investor balm.

But after the rally came the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. Since then, the two companies have lost huge amounts of ground. Their shares fell 9.8% (Uber) and 11.8% (Lyft) yesterday alone. In pre-market trading this morning, they are down even more. I wanted to get my head around what could be causing this, so let’s run through each company’s most recent profit forecasts, results, share price gains and losses, and what investors are telling the world through their recent selloff. (Hint: DoorDash’s IPO probably isn’t happening soon.)

Legionfarm, a YC-backed company, is looking to bring coaches to the competitive gaming world. Esports teams at the very top often have coaches, but the rest of the massive competitive gaming scene has to find a way to improve on their own, either via sheer time played or with creative new training platforms.

There is a huge demand for skilled teammates that can help you hone your skills, while at the same time, there is a broad community of near-pro gamers who haven’t landed a spot on an esports team and want to earn a living with their skills.

Legionfarm is a platform built to solve both problems.

The company was founded by Alex Belyankin, who is a former pro gamer and was once in the top .01 percent of World of Warcraft players.

Competitive gamers can sign up to become a coach on the platform, going through a process that looks at their stats within a particular title. Less than the top 0.1 percent are accepted as coaches and told how to manage sessions, including asking the customer’s goal at the beginning of the session.

On the other side, gamers can pay to play with one (or two) of these coaches in hour-long increments. Legionfarm allows users to specify if they want to play with two coaches, one coach and a friend, or one coach and another customer.

Users can also determine what kind of lobby they want to enter, such as a public or a ranked lobby.

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Here’s how it works.

When a user buys a session on the website, they are given instructions to join a Discord bot, which puts them in game chat with the coaches and asks for their gamertag for that specific title. The coaches then invite the customer to a lobby, and fire up the match.

To be clear, Legionfarm coaches are not coming from the same pool of streamers and pro gamers we’ve come to know and cheer on in the esports world. Rather, Legionfarm seeks out the very best and most skilled amateur players based on the publisher’s rankings and stats to become coaches. These are people who otherwise aren’t making money via Twitch or a salary via an esports organization, but are still in the top 0.1 percent of gamers by skill.

In other words, Legionfarm is creating pro gamers, rather than hiring them.

The average cost of a session is $16/hour, with Legionfarm taking half of the revenue and the rest going to the coach.

Legionfarm currently offers nine titles to choose from, including Apex Legends, Fortnite, CoD: Modern Warfare 2019, League of Legends, and Destiny 2. The company has run more than 300,000 gaming sessions with its 7,000 coaches.

Legionfarm is currently available via the web and through a Facebook Messenger bot, with plans to launch an app soon. Founder and CEO Alex Belyankin also teased new functionality that would allow Twitch viewers to request a session with the streamer directly from the chat.

Legionfarm has raised a total of $1.7 million from TMT Investments and Y Combinator, and will present at Y Combinator’s upcoming demo day.

Square’s (NYSE: SQ) CEO Jack Dorsey is having a tough time these days. A recent activist shareholder action had investors questioning his dual role as the CEO of Twitter and Square. For now, the...

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Vault, an at-home healthcare practice specializing in men’s medicine has announced the raise of $30 million in funding from Tiger Capital Group, Declaration Capital and Redesign Health to reach more potential patients and expand to more areas beyond New York, Florida, Tennessee and Texas, where it currently offers treatments.

Founder and CEO Jason Feldman, who formerly headed Amazon’s Prime Video Direct and Global Innovation teams before launching Vault last summer, told TechCrunch his startup aims to bring specialized medicine into men’s homes to give them “a better body, better sex and a better brain.”

He tells TechCrunch he started the company after noticing how many of his male friends seemed embarrassed about medical conditions or simply didn’t know they could do something about it.

Vault operates on the assumption men face certain barriers to going to the doctor for things like hormonal imbalance and erectile dysfunction. The startup tries to remove these barriers by making it easy to book at-home appointments and get a work-up with a nurse practitioner.

“I want to de-stigmatize men’s health.” Feldman told TechCrunch. “You tell a guy to go see the doctor about his heart health and he likely won’t but you tell him you’ll bring him a doctor to help his penis and it’s a different story.”

Like many new concierge medical services that have popped up in the last few years, Vault does not take insurance, instead signing patients up via membership for $133 to $300 per month, depending on the type of service you sign up for. Compare that to Forward, which caters to both men and women and offers unlimited in-office visits and testing for $149/month or Roman, a men’s “digital clinic,” which offers free online evaluations, $15 doctor’s visits and prescription medications for similar services to Vault like erectile dysfunction, hair loss and testosterone support — although Roman requires patients see a physical doctor of their choosing within the last three years before they’re able to get prescriptions via digital services.

But Feldman doesn’t think his startup is anything like what’s out there right now, claiming it as the first national men’s healthcare provider. Vault offers specialty packages like testosterone therapy or the “sex kit” for an increased sex drive or stronger erections, something that sometimes diminishes as men age.

So far, Feldman has signed up over 500 medical practitioners to come to various home locations and has hired a chief medical officer to ensure medical standards are being met. He now plans to use the new funding to open up operations in 42 cities across the U.S. and work on spreading the word to all men nationwide that Vault is here for them.

Blade, the French startup behind Shadow, announced plans to overhaul its subscription tiers back in October. The company is now bringing the new plans to the U.S. with a new entry tier at $11.99 per month as well as more powerful options in the coming months.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can access a gaming PC in a data center near you. Compared to other cloud gaming services, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 instance. You can install anything you want — Steam, Photoshop or Word.

The current subscription tier, now called Shadow Boost, offers the same performance for a lower price. You get an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU, 3.4GHz with 4 cores CPU, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage. It costs $11.99 per month if you sign up to a 12-month plan or $14.99 per month if you pay on a monthly basis.

Later this year, Shadow will also offer two additional plans:

These plans will cost $24.99 and $39.99 per month respectively if you subscribe to a 12-month plan — or $29.99 and $49.99 per month on a monthly basis.

Shadow Ultra and Shadow Infinite will roll out gradually starting this summer — only a limited number of users will be able to subscribe at first.

It’s worth noting that you’ll be able to add an option to get more storage with any plan. Storage plans include 256GB of SSD performance — anything above that will perform like a more traditional HDD.

The company now has four data centers in the U.S., which means that anybody in the U.S. can now access the service — not just people living on the West Coast or the East Coast.

In Europe, Shadow has had issues rolling out the new plans. While the company originally promised to deliver the new options in February, users who pre-ordered the new plans will only be able to access their new instance by the end of the summer.

Shadow offers apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Apple devices. Apple recently pulled Shadow’s apps from the App Store on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS. The company is still trying to find a solution with Apple to re-release the apps in the App Store.

In other news, the startup has signed a strategic partnership with LG Electronics. Details are thin, but LG is now a shareholder of the company. LG will also offer Shadow with some of its products.

Unitary, a startup that’s developing AI to automate content moderation for “harmful content” so that humans don’t have to, has picked up £1.35 million in funding. The company is still in development mode but launched a trial of its technology in September.

Led by Rocket Internet’s GFC, the seed round also includes backing from Jane VC (the cold email-friendly firm backing female-led startups), SGH Capital, and a number of unnamed angel investors. Unitary had previously raised pre-seed funding from Entrepreneur First, as an alumnus of the company builder program.

“Every minute, over 500 hours of new video footage are uploaded to the internet, and the volume of disturbing, abusive and violent content that is put online is quite astonishing,” Unitary CEO and co-founder Sasha Haco, who previously worked with Stephen Hawking on black holes, tells me. “Currently, the safety of the internet relies on armies of human moderators who have to watch and take down inappropriate material. But humans cannot possibly keep up.”

Not only is the volume of content uploaded increasing, but the people employed to moderate the content on platforms like Facebook can suffer greatly. “Repeated exposure to such disturbing footage is leaving many moderators with PTSD,” says Haco. “Regulations are responding to this crisis and putting increasing pressure on platforms to deal with harmful content and protect our children from the worst of the internet. But currently, there is no adequate solution”.

Which, of course, is where Unitary wants to step in, with a stated mission to “make the internet a safer place” by automatically detecting harmful content. Its proprietary AI technology, which uses “state of the art” computer vision and graph-based techniques, claims to be able to recognise harmful content at the point of upload, including “interpreting context to tackle even the more nuanced videos,” explains Haco.

Meanwhile, although there are already several solutions offered to developers that can detect restricted content that is more obvious, such as explicit nudity or extreme violence (AWS, for example, has one such API), the Unitary CEO argues that none of these are remotely good enough to “truly displace human involvement”.

“These systems fail to understand more subtle behaviours or signs, especially on video,” she says. “While current AI can deal well with short video clips, longer videos still require humans in order to understand them. On top of this, it is often the context of the upload that makes all the difference to its meaning, and it is the ability to incorporate contextual understanding that is both extremely challenging and fundamental to moderation. We are tackling each of these core issues in order to achieve a technology that will, even in the near term, massively cut down on the level of human involvement required and one day achieve a much safer internet”.

Augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap has struggled with the laws of physics and failed to get to market. Now it’s seeking an acquirer, but talks with Facebook and medical goods giant Johnson & Johnson led nowhere according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Ed Hammond.

After raising over $2 billion and being valued between $6 billion and $8 billion back when it still had momentum, Hammond writes that “Magic Leap could fetch more than $10 billion if it pursues a sale,” according to his sources. That price seems ridiculous. It’s the kind of number a prideful company might strategically leak in hopes of drumming up acquisition interest, even at a lower price.

Startups have been getting their valuations chopped when they go public. The whole economy is hurting due to coronavirus. Augmented Reality seems less interesting than virtual reality with people avoiding public places. Getting people to strap used AR hardware to their face for demos seems like a tough sell for the forseeable future.

No one has proven a killer consumer use case for augmented reality eyewear that warrants an expensive and awkward-to-wear gadget. Our phones can already deliver plenty of AR’s value while letting you take selfies and do video chat that headsets can’t. My experiences with Magic Leap at Sundance Film Festival last year were laughably disappointing, with its clunky hardware, ghostly projections, and narrow field of view.

Apple and Facebook are throwing the enduring profits of iPhones and the News Feed into building a better consumer headset. Snapchat has built intermediary glasses since CEO Evan Spiegel thinks it will be a decade before AR headsets see mainstream adoption. AR rivals like Microsoft have better enterprise experience, connections, and distribution. Enterprise AR startup Daqri crashed and burned.

Magic Leap’s CEO said he wanted to sell 1 million of its $2,300 headset in its first year, then projected it would sell 100,000 headsets, but only moved 6,000 in the first six months, according to a damning report from The Information’s Alex Heath. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai left Magic Leap’s board despite Google leading a $514 million funding round for the startup in 2014. Business Insider’s Steven Tweedie and Kevin Webb revealed CFO Scott Henry and SVP of creative strategy John Gaeta bailed in November. The company suffered dozens of layoffs. It lost a $500 million contract to Microsoft last year. The CEOs of Apple, Google, and Facebook visited Magic Leap headquarters in 2016 to explore an acquisition deal, but no offers emerged.

Is AR eyewear part of the future? Almost surely. And is this startup valuable? Certainly somewhat. But Magic Leap may prove to be too little too early for a company burning cash by the hundreds of millions in a market newly fixated on efficiency. A $10 billion price tag would require one of the world’s biggest corporations to believe Magic Leap has irreplicable talent and technology that will earn them a fortune in the somewhat distant future.

The fact that Facebook, which does not shy from tall acquisition prices, didn’t want to buy Magic Leap is telling. This isn’t a product with hundreds of millions of users or fast-ramping revenue. It’s a gamble on vision and timing that looks to be coming up snake eyes. It’s unclear when the startup would ever be able to deliver on its renderings of flying whales and living room dinosaurs in a form factor people actually want to wear.

With all their money and plenty of time before widespread demand for AR headsets materializes, potential acquirers could likely hire away the talent and make up the development time in cheaper ways than buying Magic Leap. If someone acquires them for too much, it feels like a write-off waiting to happen.

Superpeer is giving YouTube creators and other experts a new way to make money.

The startup announced today that it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from angel investors including Steven Schlafman, Ankur Nagpal, Julia Lipton, Patrick Finnegan, Justin De Guzman, Chris Lu, Paul Yacoubian Cheryl Sew Hoy and Chris Messina. It also launched on ProductHunt.

The idea is that if you’re watching a video to learn how to paint, or how to code, or about whatever the topic might be, there’s a good chance you have follow-up questions — maybe a lot of them. Ditto if you follow someone on Twitter, or read their blog posts, to learn more about a specific subject.

Now you could try to submit a question or two via tweet or comment section, but you’re probably not going to get any in-depth interaction — and that’s if they respond. You could also try to schedule a “Can I pick your brain?”-type coffee meeting, but again, the odds aren’t in your favor, particularly when it comes to picking the brain of someone famous or highly in-demand.

With Superpeer, experts who are interested in sharing their knowledge can do so via remote, one-on-one video calls. They upload an intro video, the times that they want to be available for calls and how much they want to charge for their time. Then Superpeer handles the appointments (integrating directly with the expert’s calendar), the calls and the payments, adding a 15% fee on top.

So a YouTube creator could start adding a message at the end of their videos directing fans who want to learn more to their Superpeer page. And if you’re a founder who wants to talk to an experienced designer, executive coach, product manager, marketing/sales expert, VC or other founder, you could start with this list.

Of course, there might be some wariness on both sides, whether you’re an expert who doesn’t want to get stuck on the phone with someone creepy or annoying, or someone who doesn’t want to pay for a call that turns out to be a complete waste of time.

To address this, co-founder and CEO Devrim Yasar (who previously founded collaborative programming startup Koding) said the company has created a user rating system, as well as a way to ask for a refund if you feel that a call violated the terms of service — the calls will be recorded and stored for 48 hours for this purpose.

Superpeer launched in private beta two weeks ago, and Yasar said the startup already has more than 100 Superpeers signed up.

What do you do when you’re rich in cryptocurrencies but you don’t want to sell your positions? The company named Blockchain thinks it has found a solution. It lets you borrow money against cryptocurrencies held in your Blockchain wallet.

As soon as you lock cryptocurrencies in your wallet, you receive USD PAX, a stablecoin that is pegged against USD. You can then convert, send and do whatever you want with your stablecoins. You can pay back your loan whenever you want.

The minimum loan size is $1,000 and Blockchain requires a collateralization ratio of 200%. It means that if you want to borrow $5,000, you need to put down the equivalent of $10,000 in cryptocurrencies as collateral.

Blockchain charges interest on loans. Your interest rate may vary but the company tries to be transparent about it before you accept the loan. By default, Blockchain uses your collateral to collect interest. Be careful with the value of your cryptocurrencies, as your collateral could end up losing a ton of value even though you still owe USD.

Behind the scene, Blockchain is running a lending desk for institutional investors. The company launched this feature back in August. Blockchain thinks that it has built a strong liquidity pool that it can leverage with retail investors.

Users in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. are not eligible to the feature for now. Blockchain only accepts collateral in BTC for now.

Meet Alma, a French startup that helps you offer a new payment option for your expensive goods. Like Klarna, clients can choose to pay over three or four installments. But the comparison stops here, as Klarna isn’t available in France. Alma just raised a $14.1 million (€12.5 million) funding round.

Idinvest, ISAI and Picus Capital are investing in today’s funding round. Additionally, Alma has opened a $19.2 million (€17 million) credit line to finance merchant payments.

As a merchant, when you integrate Alma in your payment flow, your customers can choose Alma to make it less intimidating. Instead of getting charged when you pay, you can choose to buy now and pay over three or four installments. Merchants get paid instantly.

“We handle risk and cash advance in house,” co-founder and CEO Louis Chatriot told me. “When it comes to the risk of non-payment, we have implemented a series of verifications, filters and algorithms in order to detect fraud and high-risk profiles.”

The company creates multiple categories depending on your profile. It can ask for more information if Alma has some doubts, such as API access to your bank statement. Assessing risk is particularly difficult in France, as there’s no central credit scoring system.

Merchants can choose to pay the processing fees in full — 3.8% of the transaction for a payment in three intallments, 4.2% for a payment in four installments. But they also can share the processing fees with the end customer.

Alma is compatible with most e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, Magento and Prestashop. Merchants can also offer Alma as a payment option in retail stores.

Over 1,000 merchants are using Alma already — the startup processes tens of millions of euros of transactions per year. Clients include Bobbies, Asphalte, Cowboy, Weebot, The Cool Republic and The Socialite Family.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to attract more merchants and launch two new payment options — pay later and a more traditional option to pay now. In addition to that, Alma currently redirects customers to its own checkout page. The startup wants to integrate its payment widget directly on e-commerce websites.

“Smart” cameras are to be found in millions of homes, but the truth is they’re not all that smart. Facial recognition and motion detection are their main tricks… but what if you want to know if the dog jumped on the couch, or if your toddler is playing with the stove? Visual One equips cameras with the intellect to understand a bit more of the world and give you more granular — and important — information.

Founder Mohammad Rafiee said that the idea came to him after he got a puppy (Zula) and was dissatisfied with the options he had for monitoring her activities while he was away. Here she is doing what dogs do best:

“There were specific things I wanted to know were happening, like I wanted to check if the dog got picked up by the dog walker. The cameras’ motion detection is useless — she’s always moving,” he lamented. “In fact, with a lot of these cameras, just a change in the lighting or wind or rain can trigger the motion alert, so it’s completely impractical.”

“My background is in machine learning. I was thinking about it, and realized we’re at a stage where this problem is starting to become solvable,” he continued.

Some tasks in computer vision, indeed, are as good as solved — detecting faces and common objects such as cars and bikes can be done quickly and efficiently. But that’s not always useful — what’s the point of knowing someone rode their bike past your house? In order for this to have value, the objects need to be understood as part of a greater context, and that’s what Rafiee and Visual One are undertaking.

Unfortunately, it’s far from easy — or else everyone would be doing it already. Identifying a cat is simple, and identifying a table is simple, but identifying a cat on a table is surprisingly hard.

“It’s a very difficult problem. So we’re breaking it down to things we can solve right now, then building on that,” Rafiee explained. “With deep learning techniques we can identify different objects, and we build models on top of those to specify different interactions, or specific objects being in specific locations. Like a car in the wrong spot, or a dog getting on a couch. We can recognize that with high accuracy right now — we have a list of supported objects and models that we’re expanding.”

In case you’re not convinced that the capabilities are that much advanced from the usual “activity in the living room” or “Kendra is at the front door” notifications, here are a few situations that Visual One is set up to detect:

If one of those doesn’t make you think “actually… that would be really good to know,” then perhaps a basic security camera is enough for your purposes after all. Not everyone has a knife-curious toddler. But those of you who do are probably scrolling furiously past this paragraph looking for where to buy one of these things.

Unfortunately Visual One isn’t something you can just install on any old existing system — with the prominent exception of Nest, into which it can plug. Camera workflows are generally too locked down for security and privacy purposes to allow for third-party apps and services to be slipped in. But the company isn’t trying to bankrupt everyone with an ultra-luxury offering. It’s using off-the-shelf cameras from Wyze and loading them with its own software stack.

Rafiee said he pictures Visual One as a mid-tier option for people who want to have more than a basic camera setup but aren’t convinced by the more expensive plays. That way the company avoids going head-on with commodity hardware’s race to the bottom or the brand warfare taking place between Google and Amazon’s Nest and Ring. Cameras cost $30-$40, and the service is $7 per month currently.

Ultimately the low-end companies may want to license from Visual One, while the high-end companies will be developing their own full stack at great cost, making it difficult for them to go downmarket. “Hardware is hard, and AI is specialized — unless you’re a giant company it’s hard to do both. I think we can fill the gap in the market for mid-market companies without those resources,” he said.

Of course privacy is paramount as well, and Rafiee said that because of the way their system works, although the AI lives in the cloud and therefore requires the cameras to be online (like most others), no important user data needs to be or will be stored on Visual One servers. “We do inference in the cloud so we can be hardware agnostic, but we don’t need to store any data. So we don’t add any risk,” he said.

Visual One is launching today (after a stint in YC’s latest cohort) with an initial set of objects and interactions, and will continue developing more as it observes which use cases prove popular and effective.

CRM software accounts for one-quarter of all enterprise IT spend. But ironically, while a lot of money is spent on platforms like Salesforce or SAP to manage incoming calls and outgoing marketing and sales activity, not a lot of attention is given to the issue of how to help the teams using all that software work better.

What are the peak times for calls? What are the most common questions? Which staff are best skilled at what kinds of questions? And who is actually working at any given time? These are just some of the issues, but in many cases, there isn’t much in the way of tools used to help with these at all — organisations often just hack a spreadsheet platform like Google Sheets or a calendar app to get by, or do nothing at all.

Today, a startup called Assembled is coming out of stealth mode to address that gap in the market, with a platform that’s built specifically to address the kinds of questions and issues that customer support teams encounter and — answered well — can help them work much better.

Out of the gate, Assembled is announcing $3.1 million in seed funding led by Stripe — where the founding team previously worked — with participation also from Basis Set Ventures, Signalfire and several angel investors (who are also mostly former Stripe employees).

Assembled’s longer-term ambition is to build tools for what co-founder Ryan Wang describes as “the logistics of customer support.”

“We want to become the operating system for support teams,” he said. Most immediately, the company’s focus will be on agent performance. “Teams want to learn about their top performers and how they spend their time, and offer data to empower their decision-making.”

Stripe — the payments and related services provider that is now valued at $35 billion — has developed a sizable operation funding startups adjacent to its own interests in cultivating relationships with startups and other smaller businesses. You could consider it a strategic investor in Assembled: alongside Grammarly, Gofundme, Hopper and Harry’s, Stripe is one of Assembled’s marquee customers.

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Wang, an ex-Stripe engineer who co-founded Assembled with his brother John and Assembled’s CEO Brian Sze (both also ex-Stripe), said in an interview that the idea for the startup came directly out of the pair’s experiences as early employees at Stripe.

The approach at the startup in its early days was very grass-roots: employees would get together outside the office to go through support tickets as a way of identifying trends and to talk through them to figure out what might need fixing, how to handle issues in the future and so on.

It was probably a great way for the team to really stay in touch with what customers needed and wanted. But eventually this approach presented a problem: How do you scale this kind of process? To a tech person, the solution would be obvious: build a platform that can help you do this.

“Within the landscape of CRM, we could see that tech hadn’t really been applied to the business of supporting customer support,” Wang said. “That is why we left. We’d understood that it was a broad problem.”

A tool to help improve workforce management for customer support teams is a no-brainer for a company already trying to address these issues through its own home-baked solutions. Wang noted that one of its current customers had built out such an extensive map of data on Google Sheets trying to address customer support workforce management that “they broke Google Sheets. It was just too big.”

Indeed, Bob van Winden, Stripe’s head of operations, noted: “Millions of businesses rely on Stripe every day. To support them, we obsess over every detail of delivering fast, reliable customer service, including free 24×7 phone and chat support. This led us to Assembled, which our global support teams are using to stay coordinated and focused on helping Stripe’s users thrive.”

Less obvious is the use case when a company has never identified these issues, or sees them but haven’t made efforts to try to solve them because it seems too difficult. (The classic issues here are that Assembled is “too clever by half,” or “too ahead of its time.”) That presents both an open market for Assembled, but also a greenfield challenge.

One route to customers has been to integrate with more established CRM packages. Currently Assembled integrates with Salesforce, Kustomer and Zendesk, so that it can source data from these to provide more insights to users.

Another is to provide a set of tools that speak to the wider trend for analytics and data-based insights that can be used to improve how a company works. Indeed, just as Kustomer has disrupted the idea of a CRM being focused on a narrow funnel of inbound requests, Assembled also is rethinking how to parse data to figure out what a customer support person should be doing and when. 

The startup provides a way to forecast inbound support query volumes, and to map that into staffing plans that cover multiple channels like chat, email, phone and social media. The staffing plan, in turn, also acts as a scheduling tool to set up group and single calendars for individuals.

A team’s activity, meanwhile, is tracked through a set of metrics the whole team can see and use to calibrate their work better.

Going forward, you can imagine Assembled expanding in a couple of different directions. One might be to offer workforce management to more teams beyond customer support, but that also have to work out how to manage inbound requests and turn them into more efficient work plans. Another might be to continue expanding the kinds of tools it might provide to customer support teams to continue complementing basic CRMs, in particular as customer support comes to mean different things, depending on who the “customer” actually is.

“We see the term ‘customer support’ evolving,” Wang said. “The big struggle is what the encompassing term should be instead. Generally, our view is that we want to transform and elevate what customer support means. It’s not just about call centers, but any drivers of customer experience related to your products.”