Another afternoon, another round of funding for a mobile banking app. This time, it’s Empower Finance, a San Francisco-based company that’s headed up by former Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth and which just closed on $20 million in Series A funding from Icon Ventures and Defy Ventures.

David Velez, who is the founder and CEO of Nubank, the largest fintech in Latin America, also joined the round.

We’d first written about the company in 2017, when Hogarth was just getting the business off the ground. Fast-forward a bit and Empower now employs 35 people and has attracted more than 600,000 active users to its platform, says Hogarth. What has drawn them in: the company’s promise of combining AI and actual human financial planners to help millennials in particular accrue some wealth, including, more newly, through its own checking account product and through a savings account that’s currently promising 1.60% in annual percentage yield with no minimums, no overdraft fees and unlimited withdrawals.

It’s all part of an overall offering that crunches through account holders’ bank and credit card accounts, and recommends how much they save into which account, how much they should spend given their overall picture, various ways they can cut costs and where and when they’ve surpassed their pre-configured budgets.

Of course, the company has so much competition it’s dizzying, but like the various upstarts against which it’s battling for mindshare, the opportunity that Empower is chasing is enormous, too. Though companies like Chime can seem overpriced given how fast investors have marked up their rounds — Chime’s newest financing, announced in December, was done at a $5.8 billion post-money valuation, which was four times more than the company was worth at the outset of 2019 — digital banks are still tiny fish in an ocean of institutional financial services, representing something like 3% of the market.

They’re gaining more market share by the day, too, including by charging far lower fees for much more.

In Empower’s case, users pay $6 a month, but Hogarth says they also save $300 a year in additional fees they would pay a brick-and-mortar bank. He insists that on average, it also helps them save $1,300 more annually, too.

As for all those other companies — Mint, Acorns, the list goes on — Hogarth sounds surprisingly sanguine. “If you look at it from the outside, it looks crowded. But the consumer financial services in the U.S. is a $2 trillion business, and we haven’t had a fundamental shift since maybe Schwab came along 30 years ago.”

Indeed, says Hogarth, because Empower and its rivals are mobile and branchless and don’t have legacy software to contend with, they’re able to take 60 to 70% of the cost structure out of the business.

What that means on an individual company level is that even if each upstart can attract 2 to 3 million customers, they can get to a multibillion-dollar market cap. At least, that kind of math is “why there’s so much interest in this space,” says Hogarth.

It’s also why people like Nubank’s Velez, who have seen this story play out in Europe and Latin America and who are seeing the early phases of it in the U.S., are apparently keeping the money spigot open for now.

Empower had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Sequoia, followed by a $4.5 million round led by Initialized Capital.

Social networks are in for a rude copyright awakening. A new European Union law called Article 17 essentially eradicates safe harbor and requires that they’ve made their “best effort” to get licenses from rights holders for all content on their platform. If a user uploads a video with a popular song in the background, tech platforms can’t just take it down if requested. They’ll be liable if they didn’t already try to get permission.

That’s good news for musicians and film producers who are more likely to get paid. But it could hurt influencers and creators whose clips and remixes might be blocked or have their revenue diverted. It will certainly be a huge headache for content sharing sites.

That’s where Pex comes in. The profitable royalty attribution startup founded in 2014 scans social networks and other user generated content sites for rightsholders’ content. Pex then lets them negotiate licensing with the platforms, request a take down, demand attribution, and/or track the consumption statistics. It’s collected a database of over 20 billion audio and video tracks found on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and more. It’s like an independent YouTube ContentID.

Today that business gets a big boost as Pex is acquiring Dubset, which has spent 10 years tackling the problem of getting remixes and multi-song DJ sets legalized for streaming on services like Spotify to some success. The $11.3 million-funded Dubset does fingerprinting of 45 million tracks from over 50,000 rights holders down to the second so the artists behind the source material get paid.

Pex has come a long way from when CEO Rasty Turek tried build a Shazam for video. “It took me years to figure out how to do it technically, but there was no market for it” he tells me. Turns out that the technology was perfect for spotting illegal usage of copyrighted songs.

Now Pex will gain Dubset’s connections to tons record labels and other rightsholders in what two sources close to the deal says is an acquisition priced between $25 million and $50 million. “There are very few companies in the music business that have successfully licensed as much catalog as Dubset, and the music rights database they’ve built is massive and rare” Pex CEO Rasty Turek tells TechCrunch exclusively before the deal’s formal announcement tomorrow.

Together, they’ll be pushing Pex’s new Attribution Engine that establishes a three-sided marketplace for content. Instead of just working with rightsholders, the fresh tech can plug directly into big platforms and instantly identify copyrighted audio and visual files as short as one second. It can even suss out cover versions of songs via melody matching, as well as compressed, cropped, and modified variations. Creators can also use it to ensure the source material they’re remixing or turning into memes is given proper attribution or a cut of revenue.

The Attribution Engine earns money by facilitating the licenses and payments between platforms, rightsholders, and creators. It’s free to register content with the service as well as for platforms to perform

The Attribution Engine is free for rightsholders to register their content and free for platforms to run identification scans on what’s uploaded to them. using our asset lookup service. The hope is that by creating a simpler path to cooperation and revenue sharing, more rightsholders will make their content accessible for use on social networks or in remixes. It could also grant platforms protection from Article 17 liability since they’ll be able to say that Pex made it best effort to get content usage approval from rights holders.

“Basically every platform in the world that operates in the EU will have to identify all copyrighted content on their platform as it comes in or go back and identify all of it” says Dubset chief strategy office Bob Barbiere. “Dubset was really built to serve at the DJ or content creator level . . . doing it purely for the purposes of mix and remix content. Pex does it in a much bigger way for the platforms.”

For up-and-coming platforms like TikTok competitors Dubsmash or Triller, Pex’s business model is a gift. They don’t have to pay for the ID service until they’re ready to cut licensing deals with rightsholders when Pex adds a fee on top. Trying to build this stuff from scratch could be slow and hugely expensive, given YouTube’s still perfecting its ContentID system eight years in.

Pex will have to manage the careful balance of staying ahead of regulation but not so far that it’s building technology people won’t need for a long time. European Union states have until June 21st 2021 to implement Article 17 with local laws. “We don’t want others to out-innovate us, but we also don’t want to out-innovate ourselves out of existence by being too early and then waiting for the market to catch up to us” Rasty explains.

The internet needs this kind of infrastructure because we’re still at the beginning of the age of the remix. TikTok has proven how recontextualizing a song or vocal track with new visuals can create chains of jokes and content that go massively viral. The app productizes the Harlem Shake phenomenon, whereby people promote their own takes on a piece of content, drawing attention to the original and all the other versions. But these webs of remixes could be severed if platforms and rightsholders can’t forge licensing agreements.

“I hope that thanks to Pex, 20 years from now people will not have to think about copyright” Turek concludes. “Any content they produce and distribute on the open internet will be automatically attributed to them and generate revenue if they so choose.” That could allow more people to turn their passion for creation into their profession, whether they’re building an app, writing a song, or remixing a song into a meme for an app.

Nvidia today announced that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.

The company’s recent launches focused on improving its support for AI, high-performance computing and accelerated computing workloads, which is surely what Nvidia is most interested in here.

“Building AI supercomputers is exciting to the entire SwiftStack team,” says the company’s co-founder and CPO Joe Arnold in today’s announcement. “We couldn’t be more thrilled to work with the talented folks at NVIDIA and look forward to contributing to its world-leading accelerated computing solutions.”

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but SwiftStack had previously raised about $23.6 million in Series A and B rounds led by Mayfield Fund and OpenView Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.

SwiftStack, which was founded in 2011, placed an early bet on OpenStack, the massive open-source project that aimed to give enterprises an AWS-like management experience in their own data centers. The company was one of the largest contributors to OpenStack’s Swift object storage platform and offered a number of services around this, though it seems like in recent years it has downplayed the OpenStack relationship as that platform’s popularity has fizzled in many verticals.

SwiftStack lists the likes of PayPal, Rogers, data center provider DC Blox, Snapfish and Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) on its customer page. Nvidia, too, is a customer.

SwiftStack notes that it team will continue to maintain an existing set of open source tools like Swift, ProxyFS, 1space and Controller.

“SwiftStack’s technology is already a key part of NVIDIA’s GPU-powered AI infrastructure, and this acquisition will strengthen what we do for you,” says Arnold.

Kinnos, a New York-based startup, was founded six years ago, but what the five-person company produces is suddenly top of mind — and a new round of funding reflects as much.

To wit, Kinnos, which makes additives that cause disinfectants to turn blue long enough to ensure a surface has actually been covered, just closed on $6 million in funding, a major chunk of which came from Prolog Ventures, though it was joined by Allston Venture Fund, Partnership Fund for New York City, Golden Seeds, MEDA Angels and numerous individual investors.

We talked this morning with co-founder and CEO Jason Kang, who started the company while still a biomedical engineering student at Columbia University. We wanted to understand the impact of the coronavirus on his business, possible competition from the likes of Clorox and whether Kinnos, which currently works mostly with hospital systems, is thinking about a consumer offering, too. Our chat has been edited lightly for length.

TC: Why start this company?

JK: My co-founders, Katherine and Kevin, and myself, were all undergrads at Columbia University in our junior year, and this was October 2014 during the height of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Columbia had this design challenge to help the healthcare workers there and they actually brought nurses and doctors in from the field. And one of the biggest problems they mentioned, over and over again, was that ineffective decontamination and human errors were literally killing them. That’s really how we came up with idea of colorized disinfection.

The disinfectants that people are using — bleach, alcohol — are transparent. So when you apply them to the surface, it’s actually quite difficult to make sure you’ve covered everything. A lot of the disinfectants also have a contact time, which is the time it needs to sit on the surface to inactivate the pathogens. If you touch a wet spot too early or you wipe it off too early, the pathogen can still be active, and that’s how infections can also spread.

TC: How many products are you selling?

JK: Two. The first one is called Highlight powder; it’s a patented color additive platform that’s meant to be combined with existing disinfectants that hospitals and healthcare settings are already using, so we’re not competing or replacing these disinfectants but rather combining our products with them so that they can be used more effectively. Highlight is a powder that you dissolve into bulk liquid solutions of bleach and is colorized blue, so when you apply it to a surface you [be sure you] don’t miss a spot, and the color will actually then fade from blue to colorless after a few minutes.

It was really designed to target epidemic outbreaks, so we’ve sold to humanitarian organizations that have deployed the product in Liberia and Guinea, Haiti, DR Congo and Uganda, and we recently had a couple shipments go to China for the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

Our second product, Highlight wipes, is really designed more for hospitals here in the U.S., the reason being that a lot of hospitals tend to use wipes and not sprays. You don’t see a lot of people hosing down patient rooms.

TC: Did you have have to go through myriad tests to ensure the product was safe in a healthcare setting?

JK: With any product being used in a medical or healthcare setting, you do a very rigorous battery of tests to make sure that you know it’s safe and effective, especially when lives are on the line. So we did have to do a lot of third-party testing to make sure that adding our highlight additive to the disinfectants wouldn’t reduce the potency of the disinfectant itself.

TC: How does the thoroughness of cleaning translate into savings for your customers?

JK: It’s not a direct correlation [to dollars], but studies have shown that about 50% of surfaces and healthcare settings are missed or not cleaned properly, and that if you are able to improve thoroughness of cleaning and cleaning techniques, you can reduce infections by up to 80%. At hospitals right now, it’s a $45 billion annual problem in terms of medical costs, reimbursement penalties and so on. So if you are able to effectively reduce 80% of infections, that’s on the scale of billions of dollars saved.

TC: It’s a huge market. Are you thinking about creating a consumer-facing product, as well?

JK: Definitely. We’re starting with hospitals right now because this is a big problem that happens every day. Around one out of every 25 people who stay in a hospital will actually get an infection from the hospital — which is pretty ironic considering that, you know, you go to hospital to get care and treatment, not to become more sick. Once we have established a foothold in the hospital market, the next most obvious use case would be consumer. Especially with the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, prevention and effective hygiene is kind of top of mind for everyone.

TC: This seems like a no-brainer, your product. Why aren’t companies like Clorox selling the same thing?

JK: I think that it’s definitely been on their radar. The challenge is that it’s very difficult to get a color to last in a container of disinfectant at the point of manufacture and to get it to fade on the surface at point of use, especially within a certain amount of time.

The way that we got around that is by creating a point-of-use additive, so, for example for our wipes device, only as the wipe goes through our lid, right before you use it, does it get impregnated with the chemistry. That way we have much more control over how the color is dispensed, the intensity of the color and the color fading time.

TC: What about with the other product, into which the additive is added directly?

JK: We’re very proud to say that when you add our powder to a bucket of bleach, for example, it’ll last in the bucket for five hours. And then when used on a surface, it’ll fade in about three minutes. Getting that separation of time was actually really, really hard.

The Chinese government has been removing criticism of its coronavirus response from apps like Weibo, the local equivalent of Twitter. But before it can, that content is being saved, decentralized and highlighted thanks to Arweave’s permaweb. Today it’s announcing another $8.3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.

Arweave has developed a new type of blockchain based on Moore’s Law of the declining cost of data storage. Users pay upfront for a hundred years of storage at less than a cent per megabyte, and the interest that accrues will cover the dwindling storage cost forever. More than one million pieces of data are now stored on the permaweb, and nearly 200 apps have been developed.

That includes perma-apps like WeiBlocked, which crawls Weibo for content likely to be censored. It indexes these posts and decentralizes them in the storage of hundreds of Arweave nodes operated around the world. WeiBlocked later checks back to see if the content has been censored, and then highlights them on its permaweb site you can access from a standard web browser. “By censoring it, it puts it out of the control of the censor,” says Arweave founder Sam Williams. 

It’s like the Streisand Effect in product form. The act of censorship actually causes the sensitive content to become increasingly visible. The more the Chinese government tries to hide information about Dr. Li Wenliang, an early coronavirus whistleblower who was pressured into silence by Chinese police and later died of the sickness, the more attention it receives. Williams tells me he’s excited that WeiBlocked is “Putting the censorship protection of the network into practice.”

Funding the immutable future

The potential to become the unmutable layer of the internet attracted the new $8.3 million in funding just four months after Arweave raised its last $5 million from Andreessen Horowitz, USV and Multicoin Capital. Along with video chat apps, Arweave is one of the startups benefiting from the unfortunate ripple effects of the tragic coronavirus.

Rather than providing traditional equity in exchange for cash, Arweave sold investors some of its cache of its blockchain’s tokens. These are what users spend to store data on the Arweave permaweb. There’s only a finite number in the market, so as demand for everlasting storage increases, so does the value of the tokens. Investors could later sell their stake to generate returns.

But what’s especially interesting is how Arweave is employing these token economics to build out its developer ecosystem. “We can invest fiat dollars into developers, increasing usage of the network, thereby increasing the value of the tokens,” Williams explains. “That makes it sustainable so we can do it in the future, endlessly investing in the ecosystem.” As long as investments in developers cause Arweave’s token stash to accrue more value than the size of the investment, it will always have more to deploy. “We can make it recurring, indefinitely.”

Regarding the new $8.3 million, the startup writes, “This money is for you, the Arweave community. The founding team now sees it as our primary role to dispense these funds carefully to the community.” Specifically, it will dispense Arweave Grants to fund proposals for startups, projects, organizations and marketing initiatives that will grow permaweb usage. It’s also launching Arweave Boost, which gives $50,000 worth of free storage to startups and projects trying to build on the permaweb. Both resources come with technical guidance and mentorship from Arweave and its investors.

With more than 500 nodes in operation, Arweave supports decentralized blogging platforms, indestructible documents, a social network called FEEDweave and apps that can keep running even if their owners go out of business. Unlike Bitcoin, where miners are rewarded for storing or verifying just the latest block, Arweave’s blockchain incentivizes storage of old blocks on unused server space.

“WeiBlocked maintains an up-to-date list of politically sensitive search phrases and hashtags that are being censored in Weibo searches,” its creators Aidan O’Kelly and Sam Rahini tell TechCrunch. “WeiBlocked makes use of the ‘permaweb’ capabilities of the Arweave blockchain . . . This makes it impossible to block users within China from viewing the content in the WeiBlocked archive, as there is no one host or IP that can be blocked by the firewall (or attacked by CCP hackers).”

Williams believes Arweave has hit a tipping point, with a functioning economy that means the network will keep running even without his company’s involvement. “I find it increasingly easy to sleep at night. We’re just focused on pushing adoption and the question is ‘how fast’ not ‘if.’ It’s a truly decentralized network now.”

There’s always the risk of some yet-undiscovered code problems, or another permanent approach to the web undercutting Arweave. But with countries like Russia pushing new attempts to wall themselves off from the outside internet, there’s increasing need for Arweave’s network. “Activity is exploding, expectably around where censorship resistance can be valuable.”

Next, the permaweb community wants to safeguard itself from even a disruption of internet connectivity itself. There’s an initiative to make Arweave work over high-frequency radio. Through a Morse code-like system, sensitive content could be smuggled out of a country via radio, indexed, and kept accessible forever.

When Ada Health was founded nine years ago, hardly anyone was talking about combining artificial intelligence and physician care — outside of a handful of futurists.

But the chatbot boom gave way to a powerful combination of AI-augmented health care which others, like Babylon Health in 2013 and KRY in 2015, also capitalized on. The journey Ada was about to take was not an obvious one, so I spoke to Dr. Claire Novorol, Ada’s co-founder and chief medical officer, at the Slush conference last year to unpack their process and strategy.

Co-founded with Daniel Nathrath and Dr. Martin Hirsch, the startup initially set out to be an assistant to doctors rather than something that would have a consumer interface. At the beginning, Novorol said they did not talk about what they were building as an AI so much as it was pure machine learning.

Years later, Ada is a free app, and just like the average chatbot, it asks a series of questions and employs an algorithm to make an initial health assessment. It then proposes next steps, such as making an appointment with a doctor or going to an emergency room. But Ada’s business model is not to supplant doctors but to create partnerships with healthcare providers and encourage patients to use it as an early screening system.

It was Novorol who convinced the company to pivot from creating tools for doctors into a patient-facing app that could save physicians time by providing patients with an initial diagnosis. Since the app launched in 2016, Ada has gone on to raise $69.3 million. In contrast, Babylon Health has raised $635.3 million, while KRY has raised $243.6 million. Ada claims to be the top medical app in 130 countries to date and has completed more than 15 million assessments to date.

One of the more interesting and useful applications of artificial intelligence technology has been in the world of biotechnology and medicine, where now more than 220 startups (not to mention universities and bigger pharma companies) are using AI to accelerate drug discovery by using it to play out the many permutations resulting from drug and chemical combinations, DNA and other factors.

Now, a startup called Turing — which is part of the current cohort at Y Combinator due to present in the next Demo Day on March 22 — is taking a similar principle but applying it to the world of building (and “discovering”) new consumer packaged goods products.

Using machine learning to simulate different combinations of ingredients plus desired outcomes to figure out optimal formulations for different goods (hence the “Turing” name, a reference to Alan Turing’s mathematical model, referred to as the Turing machine), Turing is initially addressing the creation of products in home care (e.g. detergents), beauty and food and beverage.

Turing’s founders claim that it is able to save companies millions of dollars by reducing the average time it takes to formulate and test new products, from an average of 12 to 24 months down to a matter of weeks.

Specifically, the aim is to reduce all the time it takes to test combinations, giving R&D teams more time to be creative.

“Right now, they are spending more time managing experiments than they are innovating,” Manmit Shrimali, Turing’s co-founder and CEO, said.

Turing is in theory coming out of stealth today, but in fact it has already amassed an impressive customer list. It is already generating revenues by working with eight brands owned by one of the world’s biggest CPG companies, and it is also being trialed by another major CPG behemoth (Turing is not disclosing their names publicly, but suffice it to say, they and their brands are household names).

Turing is co-founded by Shrimali and Ajith Govind, two specialists in data science that worked together on a previous startup called Dextro Analytics. Dextro had set out to help businesses use AI and other kinds of business analytics to help with identifying trends and decision making around marketing, business strategy and other operational areas.

While there, they identified a very specific use case for the same principles that was perhaps even more acute: the research and development divisions of CPG companies, which have (ironically, given their focus on the future) often been behind the curve when it comes to the “digital transformation” that has swept up a lot of other corporate departments.

“We were consulting for product companies and realised that they were struggling,” Shrimali said. Add to that the fact that CPG is precisely the kind of legacy industry that is not natively a tech company but can most definitely benefit from implementing better technology, and that spells out an interesting opportunity for how (and where) to introduce artificial intelligence into the mix.

R&D labs play a specific and critical role in the world of CPG.

Before eventually being shipped into production, this is where products are discovered; tested; tweaked in response to input from customers, marketing, budgetary and manufacturing departments and others; then tested again; then tweaked again; and so on. One of the big clients that Turing works with spends close to $400 million in testing alone.

But R&D is under a lot of pressure these days. While these departments are seeing their budgets getting cut, they continue to have a lot of demands. They are still expected to meet timelines in producing new products (or often more likely, extensions of products) to keep consumers interested. There are a new host of environmental and health concerns around goods with huge lists of unintelligible ingredients, meaning they have to figure out how to simplify and improve the composition of mass-market products. And smaller direct-to-consumer brands are undercutting their larger competitors by getting to market faster with competitive offerings that have met new consumer tastes and preferences.

“In the CPG world, everyone was focused on marketing, and R&D was a blind spot,” Shrimali said, referring to the extensive investments that CPG companies have made into figuring out how to use digital to track and connect with users, and also how better to distribute their products. “To address how to use technology better in R&D, people need strong domain knowledge, and we are the first in the market to do that.”

Turing’s focus is to speed up the formulation and testing aspects that go into product creation to cut down on some of the extensive overhead that goes into putting new products into the market.

Part of the reason why it can take upwards of years to create a new product is because of all the permutations that go into building something and making sure it works as consistently as a consumer would expect it to (which still being consistent in production and coming in within budget).

“If just one ingredient is changed in a formulation, it can change everything,” Shrimali noted. And so in the case of something like a laundry detergent, this means running hundreds of tests on hundreds of loads of laundry to make sure that it works as it should.

The Turing platform brings in historical data from across a number of past permutations and tests to essentially virtualise all of this: It suggests optimal mixes and outcomes from them without the need to run the costly physical tests, and in turn this teaches the Turing platform to address future tests and formulations. Shrimali said that the Turing platform has already saved one of the brands some $7 million in testing costs.

Turing’s place in working with R&D gives the company some interesting insights into some of the shifts that the wider industry is undergoing. Currently, Shrimali said one of the biggest priorities for CPG giants include addressing the demand for more traceable, natural and organic formulations.

While no single DTC brand will ever fully eat into the market share of any CPG brand, collectively their presence and resonance with consumers is clearly causing a shift. Sometimes that will lead to acquisitions of the smaller brands, but more generally it reflects a change in consumer demands that the CPG companies are trying to meet. 

Longer term, the plan is for Turing to apply its platform to other aspects that are touched by R&D beyond the formulations of products. The thinking is that changing consumer preferences will also lead to a demand for better “formulations” for the wider product, including more sustainable production and packaging. And that, in turn, represents two areas into which Turing can expand, introducing potentially other kinds of AI technology (such as computer vision) into the mix to help optimise how companies build their next generation of consumer goods.

Neil Gurnhill: Secondly, we bring in managed service providers to join us in the conversation. Depending on how that conversation goes, the insured would contract directly with the service provider....

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Today’s 475th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, March 5, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. PASSWORD:...

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In my day job as founder of PipeCandy, where we discover and track online retailers and D2C brands, I speak to founders and the support ecosystems they depend on for growth. The large fashion retailers and leading commercial retail real estate companies vying for the attention of D2C brands take our help in discovering them.

There is so much going on in the “taking D2C brands offline” space that there are companies dedicated to doing just that. But the dynamic is a bit like my kid trying to postpone preparing for exams until the moment of reckoning comes and she realizes that no amount of reading Harry Potter is going to alter reality.

The reason for the existence of Retail as a Service (RaaS) revolves around the premise that wholesale channels are not conducive for D2C brands. The reality, though, is that D2C brands will eventually embrace wholesale. I am unsure where that would leave RaaS.

We explore some inconvenient questions. Retail as a Service is great for brands to test ideas. But are they going to make venture-scale money? Most of these companies run on VC dollars.

Today’s 475th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, March 5 at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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Cobalt.io wants to change the way companies purchase and pay for pentesting services, which test an application for vulnerabilities before it goes live. Today, the company announced a number of enhancements to the platform.

Jacob Hansen, CEO and co-founder at Cobalt, says the pentesting business typically involves an expensive and time-consuming exercise, which culminates with the delivery of a PDF listing the issues that the tester found. When he and his co-founders launched the company in 2013, they wanted to bring a digital element to that whole process.

“What we have built is two things. The first is a marketplace of vetted, verified pen testers. So, basically freelance security testers in the marketplace that we have vetted and verified and taken ownership of. And secondly, we built a software platform where you can schedule and manage tests,” Hansen told TechCrunch.

He says that one of the bottlenecks with this process is simply getting started, and understanding the basic parameters of the test. This is often done via a number of emails or phone calls. Cobalt built a kind of getting started wizard to streamline the process.

“It’s a little bit like a Turbo Tax for pentest planning. It’s similar in that it speeds up and streamlines the requirements gathering and set up of the test, which brings a lot of convenience to both sides of the transaction between the pen tester and our clients,” he explained.

Once the testing starts, instead of gathering all of the data, and delivering a list of issues at the end, Cobalt can take advantage of the platform to deliver the issues to developers in a way that integrates more smoothly with their development environments. That means that as the tester finds an issue, it automatically gets flagged and sent to Jira, where it becomes part of the developer’s normal workflow where they can address it almost in real time.

“This is where we differ from the traditional pen testing industry. We’re building a modern pentest as a Service platform. And that means that it’s real time, integratable, and it’s just a different and better workflow,” he said.

Finally, the company is offering a new flexible pricing model. Instead of paying by the test, customers can buy credits ahead of time, which gives them virtual vouchers to consume the service whenever they need to. It gives the customer, who are regular consumers, a sense of cost certainty and availability up front, and it helps Cobalt because it’s getting paid ahead of the actual service usage.

Cobalt.io was founded in 2013. Its headquarters are in San Francisco with offices in Boston and Berlin. It has 500 customers today and reports it did 1,000 tests last year. It hopes to triple that number this year. The company has raised $8 million, according to Crunchbase data.

After going “back to the future” with a $600 million fund last year, VC firm Kleiner Perkins is aiming for some “returns of the Jedi” with its freshest (and refocused) fund.

With Star Wars references on the forefront in its announcement, the firm today announced that it has closed its largest fund to date: KP 19, a $700 million venture fund to invest in early-stage startups. Per the firm, it will invest in startups tackling issues like security, digital identity and the future of work.

KP 19 is the second season of KP in a post-Mary Meeker world. When the legendary investor departed KP in September 2018, the firm refocused from late stage to early stage and brought on a crop of new talent. 

In 14 months, it spent KP 18, a $600 million fund, across 34 investments (sans follow-up money reserved), according to general partner Ilya Fushman. Of those 34 investments, 30 were Series A and seed-stage companies.

“One fun fact — we did about 18 competitive Series A’s in 2018,” Fushman told TechCrunch. “And we wrote 18 term sheets for that, so we have a 100 percent win rate.”

Despite the overcrowding of the early-stage market, Fushman pointed to KP’s legacy, reputation and focus on technical talent as key reasons startups choose the firm. Since KP pivoted to early stage, it has brought on at least three team members to bolster how it can help companies from business development to communications.

With more early-stage investment comes more board seats than Kleiner Perkins’ traditional past is used to. For example, Monica Desai, who joined Kleiner from Blockchain, is currently on the board of Bison Trails, Loom, Pillar, Propel and Nova Credit.

“Taking on a board role is what we like to do,” Fushman said. “And obviously as companies raise follow-on funding, you get to partner with other great investors who join and help you share the load. Overall we feel pretty good about load across the partnership.” 

It’s too soon to gauge how KP 18’s portfolio is performing or whether KP’s return to early stage will pay off, but the close of KP 19 gives us some hints. 

KP 19 will focus on consumer, healthcare, enterprise, hardware, fintech infrastructure and consumer. The fund looks to follow a two- to three-year investment cycle, and Fushman said the firm plans to invest across 34 to 35 companies. Perhaps most notably, Fushman and Desai both said the same thing: not much is changing. 

“We’re heading into interesting times so it’ll be interesting to see where macro environment trends, and what that means for pace, check size, and for the kinds of businesses that will be built for the next phase,” Fushman said. “But overall, as boring as it sounds, it’s really just the same old.”

Emma, the personal finance management app that bills itself as your best “financial friend,” has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Connect Ventures led the round, with participation from Ithaca Investments, Tiny.vc and existing investor, Aglaé Ventures. The fintech previously raised $700,000 in angel funding in June 2018.

Launched in the U.K. in early 2018 — and most recently expanding to the U.S. and Canada — the Emma app connects to your bank accounts (and crypto wallets) to help you budget, track spending and save money.

It aims to let you understand how much money you have left to spend until payday, track and find wasteful subscriptions or alert you when you are paying over the odds on utility bills, and preemptively help you avoid going into your bank’s overdraft.

For those who like to be more hands-on with tracking their finances, Emma also offers a paid subscription version of its app dubbed “Emma Pro”. It lets you do additional things like create custom categories, add emojis to custom categories, export your data between specified time ranges, create manual accounts in any currency, create manual transactions, and split transactions,

“In a world where 70% of mental health issues are derived by financial problems, Emma is defining a new category, financial therapy,” says Emma founder and CEO Edoardo Moreni. “Our mission is to remove anxiety regarding money matters and bring instant gratification whenever our users interact with money regardless of their financial situation”.

Noteworthy, Connect Ventures is also an investor in open banking platform TrueLayer, which Emma uses to power its account aggregation in the U.K. (it uses Plaid in the U.S.). Describing TrueLayer as the “infrastructure layer,” Connect’s Rory Stirling says Emma represents investing in the “application layer” – perhaps as it is just the kind of app open banking promised.

“The team at Emma have built a product people love and as a result they have the highest engagement and retention we’ve seen in this category,” he says in a statement. “That’s really exciting to us – better tools for financial education and empowerment are only valuable if people engage with them”. (Users open the app on average five times a week, twice a day).

“We have about 200,000 users now and are growing pretty fast in the U.S., Canada and U.K.,” Moreni tells me. “We’ll be launching in every english speaking country and we’ll raise our Series A in the next 12 months. If you think about it, every single generation in history had a tracker. At Emma, we want to become the abacus for the modern world”.

According to a recent report, the global healthcare cloud computing market is estimated to grow by $25.5 billion, or 23% annually over the next four years. Earlier this week, Veeva (NYSE: VEEV)...

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Sramana Mitra: How much maturity do you want the project to reach? What is the benchmark that you use before you spin something out? Lauri Kinkar: When the first few enterprise customers with a...

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An Indonesian startup called Newman’s is using telemedicine to help patients get care for stigmatized health issues. Part of Y Combinator’s winter 2020 batch, the startup launched last month with prescription hair loss treatments and plans to expand into other verticals, including erectile dysfunction and smoking cessation.

Newman’s was founded by Elsen Wiraatmadja, Alfred Ali and Anthony Suryaputra and motivated partly by their own experiences with hair loss in their twenties.

“It was a rather depressing period. It affected our confidence, our jobs and we didn’t know who to talk to and what to do,” says Suryaputra. “Even going to the doctor for treatment was an awkward process and it was expensive to pay for medications. We talked to other men and they faced the same issues.”

Hair loss treatments with minoxidil and finasteride, the two most common clinically-proven ingredients, require a prescription in Indonesia, and it can be difficult to book consultations since the country has a relatively low number of physicians. The price of a doctor’s visit, which the founding team says is usually about US $30, and treatments, is also prohibitive for many people.

Newman’s works directly with manufacturers for its hair loss products, which contain minoxidil and finasteride. By cutting out distribution and retail middlemen, their margins are higher, and they use some of that revenue to pay doctors on the platform. This enables them to make consultations free and also offer a 100% money-back guarantee to encourage patients to use products for at least three months, since it usually takes that amount of time to see results.

For doctors, online consultations through Newman’s platform saves time and allows them to see more patients. Before booking an appointment for hair loss, Newman’s users complete a questionnaire and upload photos, which help their doctors determine treatments and shorten consultation times to as little as five minutes. There are currently about 15 doctors on Newman’s (with plans to add more from a waiting list) who see about 10 to 15 patients through the platform per day.

The startup will launch in other men’s health verticals before expanding into women’s health, with an emphasis on issues that patients are often reluctant to seek help for because of stigma or cost.

“Right now we’re focused on hair loss because it personally affects us and a lot of other men,” says Suryaputra. “With other verticals, like erectile dysfunction, there are the same dynamics. It’s embarrassing and in Southeast Asia, the taboo around erectile dysfunction is a lot stronger than in the United States.”

Newman’s will continue to focus on Indonesia, where data from the World Bank shows there are much less physicians per 1,000 patients than in the United States or nearby countries like Thailand and Singapore.

“We cannot create more doctors, so we have to make seeing patients more efficient for them,” says Suryaputra.

Boosted, the startup behind the Boosted Boards and, more recently, the Boosted Rev electric scooter, has laid off “a significant portion” of its team, the company announced today. The company is now actively seeking a buyer.

Boosted attributes the layoffs to the costs of developing, producing and maintaining electric vehicles and the “unplanned challenge with the high expense of the US-China tariff war,” Boosted CEO Jeff Russakow and CTO John Ulmen wrote in a blog post.

“The Boosted brand will continue to pursue strategic options under new ownership,” they wrote.

Boosted, which got its start back in 2012, made its first foray outside of electric skateboards last year with the launch of an electric scooter. Boosted says more than 100,000 riders have traveled tens of millions of miles on the company’s vehicles.

“We are extremely proud of what our company has accomplished, and gratified to see so many happy customers riding their Boosted vehicles every day,” Russakow and Ulmen wrote.

This perhaps should not come as a surprise. For starters, micromobility is a hard business — one that no company can confidently say it has cracked. Meanwhile, The Verge reported earlier this month that the company was at risk of running out of money. On top of that, Boosted reportedly struggled to pay its vendors for the electric scooter.

“To Boosted’s customers and community, we’d like to thank you for your passionate support and encouragement over the last nine years,” Ulmen and Russakow wrote. “It’s been the thrill of our lives to spend time with you and help shape the future of mobility together. To the Boosted team, you made this company a special place, created multiple generations of incredibly innovative products, and created a compelling global brand; thank you so much for your hard work and dedication over the years.”

Today after the bell, Zoom reported its Q4 earnings. The company’s recorded revenue of $188.3 million and its adjusted per-share profit of $0.15 were ahead of expectations, including $176.55 million in revenue and earnings per share of $0.07, according to Yahoo Finance averages.

Down several points during a broad market rally, Zoom has been a hot company to track in recent months. Its profile was heightened due to its position as an incidental benefactor of the world’s grappling with the novel coronavirus — as more countries and companies stressed staying home and working remotely, respectively, Zoom’s video conferencing tool was expected to see rising usage and demand.

The company’s shares were down sharply after reporting its earnings.

What follows is a dive into Zoom’s Q4 earnings, its expectations for the coming period and what those figures may have to say about the infection and its impacts. We’ll wrap with notes from startups that are building remote-work friendly products, sharing what they are seeing on the ground regarding demand for their services during this bleakly fascinating period of history.

Q4 and the future