Entrepreneurs — particularly tech entrepreneurs — face the uphill struggle of building something new in the world. Sometimes that struggle can exact a heavy mental toll. As much as everyone knows they should be sleeping, exercising and meditating, it’s hard to keep all that up when you are trying to build a company.

As an entrepreneur whose startup is literally about maintaining good mental health, Silja Litvin is well aware of the pitfalls. And more so because she’s also a trained family therapist.

She attained her master’s in Clinical Psychology and Systemic Family Therapy in 2013 from Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich and became a Systemic Family Therapist. In 2015, she began her PhD in Clinical Psychology at LMU with the help of Oxford University College.

Born in Germany but living around the world, including California, Litvin encountered many countries and cultures as a professional model, along the way developing an interest in the human condition. This inspired her to go on to look at mental health issues as an entrepreneur.

Her mental health startup eQuoo recently became the only game in the U.K.’s National Health Service App Library and is set to shortly close its seed funding round. More recently, she’s been speaking to tech accelerators, most notably Techstars Berlin, about staying mentally healthy in tech startups.

EQuoo is an emotional fitness game that aims to teach healthy psychological skills. A U.K. doctor can formally refer eQuoo to their patients to improve their mental health and well-being. The startup has gained scientific backing for its app, going through a “three-arm,” five-week, randomized control trial with more than 350 participants with Bosch U.K. Indeed, eQuoo has also now achieved a top rating at leading health app assessment platform ORCHA and counts Barmer, Germany’s largest insurance company, among its clients.

TechCrunch: Everyone is familiar with normal work stress. What is different about being a tech entrepreneur in relation to the issue of mental health?

Silja Litvin: I think as an entrepreneur you completely identify with your job with your company; it’s very closely linked to your self-worth and how you value yourself. And so, if you fail in a normal job environment it’s just you being human, but if you fail as a startup it feels like you aren’t being the best you could be and I think that really puts a completely different pressure on people. And then you have the problem — as well as being a startup founder — that you are kind of the “lead horse,” you’re pulling the cart, and you have to have this appearance of strength towards your employees else they or your investors might freak out. And if you show any weakness, then, you know, it’ll all start to crumble. That’s the difference.

​Tamatem, the leading mobile games publisher in the Arabic speaking market, has raised $3.5 million in additional funding — essentially an extension of the startup’s earlier Series A.

The round was led by existing investor ​Wamda Capital, with participation from Modern Electronics Company (a subsidiary of AlFaisaliah Group) and North Base Media.

Tamatem says the purpose of this round is two-fold: to “double down” on its efforts in the MENA region, and to expand to other underserved markets worldwide. This will mean investing further in marketing for existing titles, including through offline events, which I’m told is an important part of the region’s marketing landscape. In addition, the company will open an office in Riyadh and launch multiple new titles in 2020.

Tamatem says it will expand internationally beyond its current regional boundaries, with plans to publish titles in other emerging and underserved markets. That’s something CEO Hussam Hammo believes isn’t always the norm for Middle East-based startups that often feel their market potential is limited to the MENA region.

“I love seeing startups expand beyond those boundaries, and I am proud that the team at Tamatem is now looking beyond just the Arabic speaking market,” he says. “I believe this latest round of funding will allow us to deliver on our vision of becoming the top mobile games publisher for every underserved emerging market in the world”.

Founded in Jordan, a country that has both Iraq and Syria as neighbours, Hammo says the country’s economy has been a bright spot in the region, in part through technology companies’ ability to cross “virtual borders.”

“Tamatem [has] led this digital economic expansion for the country and has shown that, despite tough regional conditions, commerce and high tech startups can thrive,” he tells me.

He says that Jordan has also been more welcoming to refugees than almost any other country, taking in over one million Syrian refugees (“pretty good for a population of just ten million”). However, despite Jordan making claims it has the biggest concentration of entrepreneurs in the Arab market, external venture capital investment is flowing towards the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

“Tamatem is focusing hard on creating high skilled jobs in the country and also has a plan specifically to employ more young Jordanians and refugees by giving workshops and training to over 150 university graduates in 2020,” adds Hammo. “It’s important to me that we give back to the people that need it the most. These are hard working people that have been stripped of all their freedoms while being largely neglected by a lot of Western economies, so I’m proud that we are employing a lot of them in high skilled, stable and exciting jobs”.

Simsim, a social commerce startup in India, said on Friday it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence as it attempts to replicate the offline retail experience in the digital world with help from influencers.

The Gurgaon-based startup said it raised $16 million across seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds from Accel Partners, Shunwei Capital and Good Capital. (The most recent round, Series B, was of $8 million in size.)

“Despite e-commerce players bandying out major discounts, most of the sales in India are still happening in brick-and-mortar stores. There is a simple reason for that: Trust,” explained Amit Bagaria, co-founder of Simsim, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The vast majority of Indians are still not comfortable with reading descriptions — and that too in English, he said.

Simsim is taking a different approach to tackle this opportunity. On its app, users watch short-videos produced in local languages by influencers who apply beauty products or try out dresses and explain the ins-and-outs of the products. Below the video, the items appear as they are being discussed and users can tap on them to proceed with the purchase.

“Videos help in educating users about the category. So many of them may not have used face masks, for instance. But it becomes easier when the community influencer is able to show them how to apply it,” said Rohan Malhotra, managing partner at Good Capital, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Influencers typically sell a range of items and users can follow them to browse through the past catalog and stay on top of future sales, said Bagaria, who previously worked at the e-commerce venture of financial services firm Paytm .

“This interactiveness is enabling Simsim to mimic the offline stores experience,” said Malhotra, who is one of the earliest investors in Meesho, also a social commerce startup that last year received backing from Facebook and Prosus Ventures.

“The beauty to me of social commerce is that you’re not changing consumer behavior. People are used to consuming on WhatsApp — and it’s working for Meesho. Over here, you are getting the touch and feel experience and are able to mentally picture the items much clearer,” he said.

Simsim handles the inventories, which it sources from manufacturers and brands, and it works with a number of logistics players to deliver the products.

“Several Indian cities and towns are some of the biggest production hubs of various high-quality items. But these people have not been able to efficiently sell online or grow their network in the offline world. On Simsim, they are able to work with influencers and market their products,” said Bagaria.

The platform today works with more than 1,200 influencers, who get a commission for each item they sell, said Bagaria, who plans to grow this figure to 100,000 in the coming years.

Even as Simsim, which has been open to users for six months, is still in its nascent stage, it is beginning to show some growth. It has amassed over a million users, most of whom live in small cities and towns, and it is selling thousands of items each day, said Bagaria.

He said the platform, which currently supports Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and English, will add more than a dozen additional languages by the end of the year. In about a month, Simsim also plans to start showing live videos, where influencers will be able to answer queries from users.

A handful of startups have emerged in India in recent years that are attempting to rethink the e-commerce market in the nation. Amazon and Walmart, both of which have poured billions of dollars in India, have taken a notice too. Both of them have added support for Hindi in the last two years and have made several more tweaks to their platforms to expand their reach.

Soylent, the once high-flying Los Angeles-based meal replacement startup that has raised $72.4 million in financing from investors including Google Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Andreessen Horowitz, has shaken up its executive team.

This week, the company announced in a blog post that the company’s chief financial officer, Demir Vangelov, would be taking over the top spot at the company and current chief executive Bryan Crowley would be stepping down.

“We would like to thank Bryan Crowley for his immense contributions to the company,” wrote Soylent chairman and founder Rob Rhinehart, in a statement.

Vangelov, who’s taking over from Crowley, previously served as an executive at the milk alternative company Califia Foods and at Oberto Foods, so he knows consumer packaged brands.

Crowley came to the company with grand ambitions to revitalize the Soylent brand and product line. The company had introduced a line of snack bars to complement its line of powders and drinks, while updating its drink line with a nootropic beverage containing caffeine and supplements supposedly designed to boost cognitive performance in addition to providing a meal replacement.

Soylent also set up fancy digs in Los Angeles’ arts district and established a Food Innovation Lab, which only a year ago awarded $25,000 to a few food startups working there.

Now, only a year later, the Food Innovation Lab is shuttered and Soylent has moved to a smaller office space. The company declined to comment on the news or its new strategy.

In some ways, Soylent may suffer from being a progenitor of an investment thesis which has passed it by. When the company launched in 2013, it was a fairly novel idea to start a new food brand, as Rhinehart notes in the blog post announcing the executive change:

Soylent started as a movement. In 2013, there was scarcely any innovation or attention to one of the world’s most important product sectors: our food. Today, innovative food companies are performing record-breaking IPOs, new retailers are raising massive growth rounds, and food, agriculture, and ingredient technologies are some of the most disruptive startups in the ecosystem. But we still have a lot of work to do to fulfill Soylent’s mission of nutrition for all.

Today we are making some changes at the company. We are renewing our commitment to being transparent, authentic and science-driven, all while putting the customer first. To do this we are going to re-focus on our core products. We will be improving our current product line as well as bringing some truly innovative ideas off the shelf and into the market, and we will be improving our prices by focusing on quality over quantity when it comes to distribution and marketing.

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

Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, has included more than a dozen companies that have reached $100 million ARR, along with a handful more that are close.

Today we’re adding Seismic, ThoughtSpot, Noom, Riskified and Moveable Ink to the list. As always, we have funding histories, growth metrics and interviews below on the new group. But at this juncture, as we head toward the two-dozen company mark, it’s a good time to ask, what is this list that we’re compiling?

At first, the goal of the jokingly-named “$100 million ARR club” was to highlight companies that were of real scale, an idea designed to gently push back against the “unicorn” moniker. As more and more unicorns were born and the private-capital world became adept at getting startups of all maturity levels over the requisite $1 billion valuation threshold, the term began to feel too diluted to have much signaling value.

While, in contrast, $100 million in ARR felt much more “hard” to the valuation metric’s comparable squishiness. But, since that first post, more and more companies have written in, sharing hard metrics and the series has continued. Perhaps we’re really just compiling an IPO watchlist, a grouping of firms that will probably go (or should go) public in the next 18 months.

Let’s dig into our new additions. Then, we’ll list all our prior entrants with links to our preceding coverage in case you are playing catch up. With that, here’s the entire $100 million ARR club a list of companies that we think could go public inside the next six quarters.

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is part of the Google Cloud Platform.

While Kurian was happy to announce that Looker was officially part of the Google family, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue to support multiple cloud vendors beyond Google.

“Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.

As is typical in a deal like this, Looker CEO Frank Bien sees the much larger Google giving his company the resources to grow much faster than it could have on its own. “Joining Google Cloud provides us better reach, strengthens our resources, and brings together some of the best minds in both analytics and cloud infrastructure to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners. The mission that we undertook seven years ago as Looker takes a significant step forward beginning today,” Bien wrote in his post.

At the time the deal was announced in June, the company shared a slide, which showed where Looker fits in what they call their “Smart Analytics Platform,” which provides ways to process, understand, analyze and visualize data. Looker fills in a spot in the visualization stack while continuing to support other clouds.

Looker was founded in 2011 and raised more than $280 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors included Redpoint, Meritech Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins, CapitalG and PremjiInvest. The last deal before the acquisition was a $103 million Series E investment on a $1.6 billion valuation in December 2018.

Anthony is building a very interesting programmable communication platform company that has its roots in Wisconsin. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you...

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With Google and Facebook yielding massive control over the online ad market, leaving only scraps for other ad platforms, perhaps it was only natural that tech startups would take a step back and start to look for opportunities in selling billboards.

AdQuick, a marketplace for out of home (OOH) advertising, tells TechCrunch that it has closed a $6 million Series A led by Initialized Capital with participation from WndrCo, Shrug Capital, The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund and rapper Nas. The startup has now raised $9.4 million to date.

AdQuick isn’t in the business of renting out advertising space they own. Like traditional channels, they connect the ad space owner with a buyer and take a commission on the purchase. Unlike some other channels, they’ve tried to inject the ad analytics of the web into the process so that buyers understand what they’re paying for impressions and can point brands to higher ROI locations where they might not have been looking.

“You know while the digital market is just so overbid and essentially controlled by Facebook and Google, the returns on investment from out of home ads keeps going up because people out in public have to see and experience them,” Initialized’s Alexis Ohanian, who led the deal, tells TechCrunch.

In recent months, startups like ZeroDown and Brex have coated San Francisco in outdoor advertising campaigns, while the explosion of direct-to-consumer brands has led startups with massive online ad spends to begin looking at the prices of a billboard on the 101. It’s not just ad real estate in SF or New York or LA that’s seeing increased demand; CEO Matt O’Connor tells TechCrunch that the OOH ad market is seeing big growth across the board.

“It’s the only non-online channel growing, and it’s actually growing faster in the last year than it has in the past decade,” O’Connor says. “A big tailwind is that brands are looking to spend offline earlier than they ever have in their history because it’s gotten so expensive that they’re forced to look for channels with better payback.”

The key opportunity AdQuick is tapping into is the 30-35% of OOH ad space they estimate went unused in the Unites States last year.

Taking on digital ad space sold by Google and Facebook means leveling the playing field, and part of determining that real-world ad’s ROI can mean relying on the same creepy ad analytics services that connect web habits and location data of de-identified devices for serving online ads — but such are the ills of the advertising world in 2020. These processes allow ad buyers to gain a better idea of what their investment in bench advertising in Cheyenne, Wyo. is actually going to mean in terms of impressions and how much they are paying per pair of eyeballs.

One thing AdQuick isn’t interested in is trying to find an entry point to the the non-OOH digital ad market. “That’s pretty bloody water that’s been picked over by both the duopoly and the thousands of other quote-unquote adtech companies,” O’Connor says.

Moving data to the cloud from an on-prem data warehouse like Teradata is a hard problem to solve, especially if you’ve built custom applications that are based on that data. Datometry, a San Francisco startup, has developed a solution to solve that issue, and today it announced a $17 million Series B investment.

WRVI Capital led the round with participation from existing investors including Amarjit Gill, Dell Technologies Capital, Redline Capital and Acorn Pacific. The company has raised a total of $28 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The startup is helping move data and applications — lock, stock and barrel — to the cloud. For starters, it’s focusing on Teradata data warehouses and applications built on top of that because it’s a popular enterprise offering, says Mike Waas CEO and co-founder at the company.

“Pretty much all major enterprises are struggling right now with getting their data into the cloud. At Datometry, we built a software platform that lets them take their existing applications and move them over to new cloud technology as is, and operate with cloud databases without having to change any SQL or APIs,” Waas told TechCrunch.

Today, without Datometry, customers would have to hire expensive systems integrators and take months or years rewriting their applications, but Datometry says it has found a way to move the applications to the cloud, reducing the time to migrate from years to weeks or months, by using virtualization.

The company starts by building a new schema for the cloud platform. It supports all the major players including Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It then runs the applications through a virtual database running the schema and connects the old application with a cloud data warehouse like Amazon Redshift.

Waas sees virtualization as the key here as it enables his customers to run the applications just as they always have on prem, but in a more modern context. “Personally I believe that it’s time for virtualization to disrupt the database stack just the way it has disrupted pretty much everything else in the datacenter,” he said.

From there, they can start developing more modern applications in the cloud, but he says that his company can get them to the cloud faster and cheaper than was possible before, and without disrupting their operations in any major way.

Waas founded the company in 2013 and it took several years to build the solution. This is a hard problem to solve, and he was ahead of the curve in terms of trying to move this type of data. As his solution came online in the last 18 months, it turned out to be good timing as companies were suddenly looking for ways to move data and applications to the cloud.

He says he has been able to build a client base of 40 customers with 30 employees because the cloud service providers are helping with sales and walking them into clients, more than they can handle right now as a small startup.

The plan moving forward is to use some of the money from this round to build a partner network with systems integrators to help with implementation so that they can concentrate on developing the product and supporting other data repositories in the future.

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Mass is money when it comes to the rocket launch business, and any small savings you can eke out can add up to big savings. That’s been the driving force behind the growing commercialization of space and the rapid rise of the small satellite industry. Now Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space has received a $3 million grant from the Australian government to help improve rockets in a way that could add significant savings to the launch process.

Gilmour has spent the past seven years launching a hybrid rocket powered by 3D-printed fuel in 2016, working with NASA and developing a commercial use mobile launch platform for flexible, fast launch capabilities last year. This new award will be used to fund the development of lightweight rocket fuel tanks that are flight-ready and could save as much as 30 percent of the weight of current designs, while saving up to 25 percent off the cost of launch.

The project is a collaboration between Gilmour, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and Teakle Composites. It is supported by $12.5 million in total investment. The “cryotanks” (so-called because they store super-cold fuel) that result will be constructed of carbon fibre, which is set to be wound using a robot designed for the purpose, using “exotic” filament materials that can stand up to extreme temperatures, radiation and other stresses of space.

Gilmour Space and USQ entered into a strategic partnership last year to work together on research and development of fundamental new rocket technologies, and this project, along with its work on hybrid fuels and other areas of investigation, will culminate in a plan to launch Gilmour’s first commercial rocket into orbit sometime in 2022. The goal of the company is to reduce the cost of access to space, and changing the cost dynamics of fundamental components of the rocket system is likely the best way to do that, even if it requires a significant amount of research and funding up front to make that happen.

YC-backed Astranis has raised $90 million of new combined debt and equity funding in a Series B round led Venrock, with a sizeable contribution by existing investor (and lead of their 2018 round) Andreessen Horowitz. The funding will be used to help the company launch its first commercial satellites, the bedrock of its future internet service offering, aimed at connecting the massive market of underserved populations around the world.

Astranis emerged from stealth in 2018 when it announced $13.5 million in funding led by Andreessen and revealed its plan to offer low-cost, reliable internet using geostationary satellites – a different strategy from the increasingly numerous entrants in the satellite internet race who plan to deploy large constellations of satellites into low Earth orbit that don’t stay at a fixed point relative to a specific location on Earth, but that instead hand off their connection via a kind of relay system through ground stations to offer continued service.

The geostationary model that Astranis is embracing is somewhat more similar to the existing way of offering internet connectivity from space, which employs very large communications satellite parked in geostationary orbit fairly far away from Earth. Astranis’ novel approach uses small satellites that are 20 times smaller than the traditional variety and weigh in at around 770 lbs compared to over 14,000 lbs for legacy satellites.

Astranis has made it possible to use smaller satellites thanks to its proprietary ultra-sideband software-defined radio tech, which can provide more bandwidth on much smaller and less complicated hardware, using digital vs. analog technologies. These not only save a ton of space, but can be built and launched with a turnaround time of just months rather than years for the large, geostationary telecommunications spacecraft of yore.

As mentioned, this is a combined debt and equity round, including $40 million of equity funding with participating by Y Combinator and others in addition to Venrock and Andreessen. The remaining $50 million of debt facility comes from TriplePoint Capital. Astranis will be looking to this year and next as the time to grow its internet service provider partnerships, as well as build out its relationships with governments and the rest of the industry.

Astranis signed an agreement with launch provider SpaceX last year for a ride for their first commercial satellite, with the aim of having that mission take place sometime as early as the fourth quarter of 2020. The company has raised $108 million to date, but it has deep-pocketed competitors eyeing the same opportunity with different technologies, including SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper.

Tozny, a Portland, Oregon startup that wants to help companies more easily incorporate encryption into programs and processes, introduced TozID today. It is an identity and access control tool that can work independently or in conjunction with the company’s other encryption tools.

“Basically we have a Security as a Service platform, and it’s designed to help developers and IT departments add defense in depth by [combining] centralized user management with an end-to-end encryption platform,” Tozny CEO and founder Isaac Potoczny-Jones told TechCrunch.

The company is introducing an identity and access solution today with the hope of moving beyond its core developer and government audience to a broader enterprise customer base.

Under the hood, TozID uses standards identity constructs like single sign-on, SAML and OpenID, and it can plug into any existing identity framework, but the key here is that it’s encryption-based and uses Zero Knowledge identification. This allows a user (or application) to control information with a password while reducing the risk of sharing data because Tozny does not store passwords or send them over the network.

In this tool, the password acts as the encryption key, which enables users or applications to control access to data in a very granular way, only unlocking information for people or applications they want to be able to access that information.

As Potoczny-Jones pointed out, this can be as simple as one-to-one communication in an encrypted messaging app, but it can be more complex at the application layer depending on how it’s set up. “It’s really powerful to have a user make that decision, but that’s not the only use case. There are many different ways to enable who gets access to data, and this tool enforces those kinds of decisions with encryption,” he explained.

Regardless of how this is implemented, the user never has to understand encryption or even know that encryption is in play in the application. All they need to do is enter a password as they always have, and then Tozny deals with the complex parts under the hood using standard open source encryption algorithms.

The company also has a data privacy tool geared towards developers to build in end-to-end encryption into applications, whether that’s web, mobile, server and so forth. Developers can use the Tozny SDK to add encryption to their applications without a lot of encryption knowledge.

The company has been around since 2013 and hasn’t taken any private investment. Instead, it has developed an encryption toolkit for government agencies, including NIST and DARPA, that has acted as a funding mechanism.

“This is an open source toolkit on the client side, so that folks can vet it for security — cryptographers like that — and on the server side it’s a SaaS-type platform,” he said. The latter is how the company makes money, by selling the service.

“Our goal really here is to bring the kind of cybersecurity that we’ve been building for government agencies into the commercial market, so this is really work on our side to try to, you might say, bring it down market as the threat landscape moves up market,” he said.

Cloud-based communication services provider RingCentral (NYSE:RNG), which is one of our Top 20 Cloud Stocks for 2020, reported its fourth quarter results this week that blew past all market...

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Sramana Mitra: What year was that? Zain Jaffer: That was 2006. I had been highly obsessed with internet startups for the last five years. It’s time for me to really enjoy myself and be a student and...

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Intuition Robotics, the company best known for its ElliQ robot, a digital home companion for the elderly, today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series B round co-led by SPARX Group and OurCrowd. Toyota AI Ventures, Sompo Holdings, iRobot, Union Tech Ventures, Happiness Capital, Samsung Next, Capital Point and Bloomberg Beta also participated in the round. This brings the total funding for the company, which was founded in 2016, to $58 million.

The company, which sees it as its mission to build digital assistants that can create emotional bonds between humans and machines, also disclosed it is working with the Toyota Research Institute to bring its technology to the automaker’s LQ concept. Toyota previously said that it wanted to bring an empathetic AI assistant to the LQ that could create a bond between driver and car. Intuition Robotics’s Q platform helps power this assistant, which Toyota calls “Yui.”

Intuition Robotics CEO and co-founder Dor Skuler tells me that the company spent the last two years gathering data through ElliQ. In the process, the company spent more than 10,000 days in the homes of early users to gather data. The youngest of those users were 78 and the oldest 97.

On average, users interacted with ElliQ eight times per day and spent about six minutes on those interactions. When ElliQ made proactive suggestions, users accepted those about half the time.

“We believe that we have been able to prove that she can create an enduring relationship between humans and machines that actually influences people’s feelings and behaviors,” Skuler told me. “That she’s able to create empathy and trust and anticipate the needs of the users. And that, to us, is the real vision behind the company.”

While Intuition Robotics is most closely identified with ElliQ, that’s only one area the company is focusing on. The other is automotive. In the car, the empathetic AI assistant will adapt to the individual user and, for example, provide personalized suggestions for trying out new features in the car or suggest that you open the window and get some fresh air when it senses you are getting tired. As Skuler stressed, the car is actually a great environment for a digital assistant, as it already has plenty of built-in sensors.

“The agent gets the data feed, builds context, looks at the goals and answers three questions: Should I be proactive? Which activity should I promote? And which version to be most effective? And then it controls the outcomes,” Skuler explained. That’s the same process in the car as it would be in ElliQ; indeed, the same code runs in both.

In order to allow third-parties to build these interactions, the Intuition team decided that it needed to develop specialized tools and a new language that would help designers — not programmers — create the outlines of these interactions for the platform.

Unlike ElliQ, though, the assistant in the car doesn’t move, of course. In Toyota’s example, the car uses lights and a small screen to provide additional interactions with the driver. As Skuler also told me, the company is already working with another automotive company to bring its Q platform to more cars; however, he wasn’t ready to disclose this second automotive partner.

“Intuition Robotics is creating disruptive technology that will inspire companies to re-imagine how machines might amplify the human experience,” said Jim Adler, founding managing partner at Toyota AI Ventures, who will also join the company’s board of directors.

Intuition Robotics’ team doubled over the course of the last year and the company now has 85 employees, most of whom are engineers. The company has offices in Israel and San Francisco.

Unsurprisingly, the plans for the new funding focus on building out its assistant’s capabilities. “We’re the only company in the world that can create these context-based, nonlinear personalized interactions that we call a digital companion,” Skuler told me. “We assume people will start doing similar things. There’s a lot more work to do. […] A big part of the work is to increase our research activities and increase the tools and the performance of the runtime engine for the agent.” He also told me that the team continues to gather data about ElliQ so it can prove that it improves the quality of life of its users. And in addition to this, the company obviously also will continue to build out its work around cars.

“We cracked something nobody’s cracked before,” Skuler said. “And now we’re on the verge of getting value out of it. And it will be hard work because this is not an app. It’s really hard work but we want to capture that value.”

Vedantu, a Bangalore-based startup that operates a learning app aimed at students aged between 12 to 18, has secured an additional $24 million as part of its Series C financing round. With the infusion of cash, Vedantu looks to serve more students and make its brand a household name.

The fresh infusion to its Series C, which Vedantu first unveiled in August last year, was led by global VC firm GGV Capital. Some existing investors also participated in the round. The $24 million extension broadens the five-year-old startup’s Series C round to $66 million and its total raise to date to $82 million.

Vedantu offers live and interactive courses for students in grades 6 though 12. Students who have enrolled for the interactive sessions are required to answer questions every few minutes by tapping on their smartphone screen or on the desktop. They also can raise their doubts at the end of the session.

Some of these sessions are free for students, but a selection of it requires a subscription, Vamsi Krishna, co-founder and CEO of the startup, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The app has amassed over 75,000 paying subscribers, a figure that Krishna expects to surpass 100,000 this year. The cost of these subscriptions can vary from Rs 100 ($1.4) for students looking for sessions around a particular topic, to Rs 50,000 ($700) for long-term courses that focus on training students for undergraduate-level courses. More than 25 million users come to Vedantu’s app or website each month to consume free lessons.

India has the largest school-age population in the world and households in the nation are willing to invest in their children’s education to advance their lives. About a million students look to pursue undergraduate courses each year, for instance.

But the quality of education and its affordability are two major challenges that millions of students, especially those living in smaller cities and towns, have to confront. An offline coaching centre can have as many as 100 students sitting in the room, with most not getting a chance to engage with the teacher. But for some, it also means there aren’t many teachers left to teach them.

In recent years, a wave of tech startups including Byju’s, which was valued at $8 billion in its most recent fund raise last week, have emerged to tackle these challenges as low-cost Android handsets flood the Indian market and mobile data prices become incredibly affordable.

Vedantu allows students to interact with their teachers through the microphone and camera on their smartphone or desktop and also through a chat box on the app. These teachers also have assistants who work with students.

Since it’s a virtual class, Vedantu is also able to accommodate more students in a session. A paid session may have as many as 600 students while the free lessons could have 2,000, said Krishna, who is a teacher himself. Until early 2014, he  also ran Lakshya Institute, which helped students prepare for undergraduate-level courses, before selling a majority stake to Mumbai-based K-12 tutoring and test preparation firm MT Educare.

Running a tech platform has also enabled Vedantu to offer its subscription service at a more affordable price than a typical offline coaching equivalent that can cost users anything between a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

To ensure that students are paying attention and identify their weaknesses, Vedantu says it has built a patented system called WAVE that evaluates about 70 parameters, including whether the student is looking at the screen. More than 90 percent of its students engage with the session, said Krishna.

Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, who is joining the board of Vedantu as part of the investment, said he thinks Vedantu has reached the inflection point with its WAVE product. WAVE enables teachers to deliver “superior results as it can offer personalized education to many students at once,” he said. “We are excited to partner with Vamsi and the Vedantu team and share GGV’s global expertise and network to help them scale and shape learning outcomes for millions of students in India and beyond.”

Krishna said the startup has grown phenomenally in recent years, so it is beginning to spend some money to better market its brand. In December, the startup ran some commercials on TV channels. In addition to that, Vedantu has also started to add courses to serve even younger students. The new courses are in pilot stage and would be broadly launched in a few months, he said.

Following the departure of its CTO last month, Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, has lost another key member of its team: chief product officer Matt Ford, who is departing for a career in venture.

Ford joined Santander InnoVentures, the venture capital arm of the Spanish incumbent bank, in December, TechCrunch has learned. He has been recruited for his entrepreneurial and operator experience as Santander InnoVentures looks to bolster its perceived founder-friendliness.

Confirming the move, Ford tells TechCrunch: “Yes, I left Tandem before Christmas. I’ve moved across into venture capital and have taken up a really exciting opportunity at Santander InnoVentures, the VC fund of the bank. We’re building out a really great founder-friendly fund, and it’s a brilliant chance to apply all my entrepreneurial learnings to investing and to help support great fintech founders and teams”.

Prior to Santander, Ford held the role of CPO at Tandem, charged with helping strengthen the challenger bank’s various existing and future product lines. He was viewed (and presented to the press) as an important lieutenant to Tandem founder Knox.

Noteworthy, Ford joined Tandem by means of an acquisition after the bank acquired Pariti, the money management app, in early 2018. According to LinkedIn, Pariti’s other co-founder, Peter Townsend, remains an employee of Tandem, where he holds the position of Head of Engineering.

Meanwhile, Ford’s confirmed departure from Tandem follows a report this week from Sifted that the bank’s Chief Technical Officer Paul Clark also stepped down last month. He’s been replaced by Noam Zeigerson, the challenger bank’s Chief Data Officer.

Separately, TechCrunch understands that Santander has hired Trish Burgess as its new global Head of Peer-to-Peer Payments. Trish joins from Apple — where I gather she was involved with Apple Card — and will lead the bank’s future P2P payments efforts. Her appointment is expected to be announced soon.