Today’s 471st FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, February 6 at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

___

Facebook’s (Nasdaq: FB) battle with privacy concerns are far from over. The company recently announced that it had settled a class action lawsuit by paying $550 million in fine, and it was also...

___

Abhinav Asthana: Postman is a complete platform for API development. You can collaborate with hundreds of people on the Postman platform. All of that happened through this continuous learning and...

___

In my recent post How PaaS Impacts The Stock Prices Of SaaS Companies, I mentioned an equation: Some numbers: Let us say, a SaaS platform vendor succeeds in facilitating 100 small companies to...

___

Moteefe, the e-commerce platform for on-demand production of merchandise has raised $5 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is Gresham House, and Force Over Mass Capital. It brings total funding to date to $12.5 million, and will be used to expand into new geographies including Australia and LATAM. The U.K. company also plans to launch new products for large retailers and invest in scaling its operations.

Launched in early 2016, Moteefe provides an “end-to-end” technology solution for entrepreneurs, influencers, and (micro) retailers wanting to design, create and sell customised products, such as printed t-shirts or engraved jewellery. The platform enables brands to design merchandise and sell it via their own white-labelled Moteefe store, or through their own site or app or other marketing channels.

Put simply, you upload your design to the Moteefe site and the company takes care of printing, the store, payments, customer service and fulfilment globally. Moteefe then takes a small commission on sales. However, unlike some traditional marketplaces, users can launch their own store with their own domain, maintaining the customer relationship and data.

“Launching and scaling a global e-commerce business is extremely complex and requires access to a wide variety of capabilities,” says co-founder and CEO Mathijs Eefting. “We provide a complete end-to-end solution that takes care of everything from e-commerce sites and payments up to (on-demand) production, fulfilment, and support at global scale. Everyone can start and scale their own business globally within a matter of minutes, [with] no upfront costs or inventory risk”.

Eefting says that at the heart of Moteefe’s offering is on-demand production. Typically referred to as Print-on-Demand (POD), the company works also with a range of other production methods via its network. “Since POD is difficult to implement — it requires completely different back-end and front-end processes — we have built an interface that allows anyone to leverage the functionality and start building/growing their own retail brands around the world within minutes for free”.

This has seen Moteefe build its own proprietary production software that instantaneously centralises orders via merchant sites. It then routes those orders on a per order basis directly into the production lines of its partners.

“It takes into consideration end-consumer location, partner inventory levels, capacity, quality and costs,” explains Eefting. “This enables us to deliver 10,000s of products on a daily basis anywhere in the world with a 1-2-day turnaround time”.

On competitors, the Moteefe CEO reiterates that the company isn’t a marketplace like Teespring, Red Bubble, Zazzle, or Café Press, which he says are leveraged mainly by creatives and designers uploading their own artwork onto the marketplace, and earning a small commission when someone purchases a product with their design. “They are not building a business, they’re simply monetising their creativity,” he explains.

Instead, Eefting says Moteefe is empowering brands and companies to take advantage of global on-demand production. “Our users own their brand, client relationship and marketing channels –- we provide the white label store and fulfilment technology”, he adds.

Antler is a “company builder” that emerged a couple of years ago, running startup generator programs and investing from an early stage, bringing a heady mix of technologists, product builders and operators together with its own technology stack.

Now, plenty of “company builders” have come and gone. It’s a bit like Apocalypse Now: everyone goes in thinking they will come up with the major formula to spit out startups at a prodigious rate and they come out screaming “The Horror! The Horror!”

But Antler appears to have been on an interesting run. It has so far made more than 120 investments across a wide range of companies, with several going on to raise later-stage funding from the likes of Sequoia, Golden Gate Ventures, East Ventures, Venturra Capital and the Hustle Fund.

Since its launch in Singapore two years ago, Antler now has a presence across New York, London, Singapore, Sydney, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Nairobi and Oslo.

Today, it’s announcing that it has attracted investment from British investment management company Schroders, investment house FinTech Collective and Ferd, the vehicle used by Johan H. Andresen, the Norwegian industrialist and investor.

This latest investment takes the capital raised by Antler over the past six months to more than $75 million.

These investors join an existing group that includes Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Canica International and Credit Saison, the third-largest credit card issuer in Japan. The idea here is that these investors get exposure to early-stage companies as they are built.

As with most company builders and accelerators, Antler only takes 1-1.5% of the applicants

Its portfolio includes Sampingan, an on-demand workforce in Indonesia; Xailient, a computer vision technology; Airalo, a global e-sims marketplace; and FusedBone, which enables medical centers to produce bespoke, non-metal implants on-site.

Magnus Grimeland, Antler co-founder and CEO said: “With our support, our founders start refining their ideas and building new and innovative businesses. What is equally important is the deep relationship our founders build with their peers, our advisors and backers. Having accomplished investors like Schroders, Ferd and FinTech Collective on board means we can provide a more valuable network for our startups as they grow their businesses.”

Peter Harrison, Group CEO of Schroders, who will also be joining Antler’s advisory board, said: “We are in a period of unprecedented change. The visibility on venture capital activity and innovation that Antler provides is therefore leading-edge.”

Antler says more than 40% of its portfolio companies have a female co-founder and 78% of these have a female CEO.

Funko Pops. You’ve probably noticed them at your local GameStop, Hot Topic or spread out all over your co-worker’s desk. These lil’ vinyl figurines and their big ol’ heads have taken over retail shelves in the last few years. You can now find a Funko Pop! (or thirty) for just about every fandom; there are more than 8,000 different Pops, and that number never seems to stop growing.

Like most collectible things, some Pops are worth more than others — whether they’re obscure characters that didn’t get a big run, limited-edition color variations or were only sold for a day or two at a convention, the rarest Pops can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. And, like anything where people are dropping piles of cash, there are folks trying to sell fakes.

Whatnot, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 class, wants to tackle the issue of fakes in collectibles by adapting a model proven by services like GOAT and StockX: authenticated resale.

As with the aforementioned, Whatnot works as the obsessively-informed middle man between buyer and seller. Buyer makes an offer, seller sends their figurine to Whatnot, Whatnot uses its growing knowledge of what’s real (and how to flag what’s not) to make sure it’s legit. If everything looks good, Whatnot forwards the Funko Pop to the buyer and takes their cut (about 9%, plus a few bucks for shipping).

“We started out buying and reselling sneakers, actually,” Whatnot co-founder Grant LaFontaine tells me. “Then we started getting into buying/reselling Funko Pops. As we started to do this, we noticed it was much more difficult, and much more unsafe, to buy and sell Funko Pops than it was to buy and sell sneakers.”

Services like GOAT and StockX had “drastically simplified” the process for sneaker fans, LaFontaine says, helping to weed out counterfeits for buyers while limiting potential scams that could hurt sellers.

Today all sales on Whatnot are verified by a human expert. That makes sense for the rarer, more expensive figurines. The “Grails,” as Funko Pop collectors call them — like this Comic Con Sith Trooper that has been selling for around $600-700, or this 2012 “Holographic” Darth Maul that can go for thousands. For the less rare stuff, though, it’s a bit overkill.

With that in mind, Whatnot is building out its database of the red flags to look for with each transaction — things like boxes that are just slightly mis-sized, or a logo that doesn’t look quite right. In time, this could allow for more of their verification to be automated, with the human expert (and the associated higher fees) reserved for bigger transactions.

Whatnot isn’t alone in noticing this market’s potential. StockX, the authenticated resale marketplace that first focused on sneakers, expanded into collectibles late last year. Whatnot is looking to find its fan base by focusing solely on collectibles, giving collectors the exact user experience, filters and info they’d be looking for within a given category.

That’s not to say they’re focusing solely on Funko Pops, though — not in the long run, at least. The team intends to expand into other types of collectibles down the road, with Pokémon cards being the likely next candidate.

Whatnot tells me it has raised a $550,000 pre-seed round from Wonder Ventures, YC, and a handful of angel investors.

In part two of a survey that asks top VCs about exciting opportunities in open source and dev tools, we dig into responses from 10 leading open-source-focused investors at firms that span early to growth stage across software-specific firms, corporate venture arms and prominent generalist firms.

In the conclusion to our survey, we’ll hear from:

These responses have been edited for clarity and length.

The once-polarizing world of open-source software has recently become one of the hotter destinations for VCs.

As the popularity of open source increases among organizations and developers, startups in the space have reached new heights and monstrous valuations.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen surging open-source companies like Databricks reach unicorn status, as well as VCs who cashed out behind a serious number of exits involving open-source and dev tool companies, deals like IBM’s Red Hat acquisition or Elastic’s late-2018 IPO. Last year, the exit spree continued with transactions like F5 Networks’ acquisition of NGINX and a number of high-profile acquisitions from mainstays like Microsoft and GitHub.

Similarly, venture investment in new startups in the space has continued to swell. More investors are taking shots at finding the next big payout, with annual invested capital in open-source and dev tool startups increasing at a roughly 10% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the last five years, according to data from Crunchbase. Furthermore, attractive returns in the space seem to be adding more fuel to the fire, as open-source and dev tool startups saw more than $2 billion invested in the space in 2019 alone, per Crunchbase data.

As we close out another strong year for innovation and venture investing in the sector, we asked 18 of the top open-source-focused VCs who work at firms spanning early to growth stages to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunities. For purposes of length and clarity, responses have been edited and split (in no particular order) into part one and part two of this survey. In part one of our survey, we hear from:

Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to No. 2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral, unfunded French startup Dazz saw Hoop score 2.5 million downloads.

The fact that such a dumbfoundingly simple and already ubiquitous style of app was able to climb the charts so fast demonstrates the potential of Snap Kit to drive user lock-in for Snapchat. Because the developer platform lets other apps piggyback on its login system and Bitmoji avatars, it creates new reasons for users to set up a Snapchat account and keep using it. It’s the same strategy that made Facebook an entrenched part of the internet, but this time it’s for a younger crowd.

In the first-ever interview about Hoop, Dazz’s 26-year-old co-founders Lucas Gervais and Alexi Pourret reveal that the idea came from watching user patterns in their previous experiment on the Snap Kit platform. They built an app called Dazz in 2018 that let users create polls and get anonymous answers from friends, but they noticed their 250,000 users “always ended up adding each other on Snap. So we decided to create Hoop, the app to make new Snap friends,” Gervais tells me.

Gervais and Pourret have been friends since age two, growing up in small town in France. They met their two developers in high school, and are now marketing students at university. With Hoop, they say the goal was to “meet everyone’s needs, from connecting people from different cultures to helping lonely people to feel better to simply growing your Snapchat community.”

At first, Hoop for iOS or Android looks just like Tinder. You create an account with some photos and bio information, and start swiping through profiles. If you like someone, you tap a Snapchat button to request their Snap username so you can message them.

But then Hoop reveals its savvy virality and monetization strategy. Rather than being able to endlessly “swipe right” and approach people, Hoop limits your asks by making you spend its in-app “diamonds” currency to reach out. After about 10 requests to chat, you’ll have to earn more diamonds. You do that by sharing and getting friends to open your invite link to the app, adding people on Snapchat that you meet on Hoop, logging in each day, taking a survey, watching a video ad and completing offers by signing up for streaming services or car insurance providers. It also trades diamonds for rating Hoop in the App Store, though that might run afoul of Apple’s rules.

Those tactics helped Hoop climb as high as No. 2 on the overall iOS chart and No. #1 on the Social Apps chart on January 24th. It’s now at No. 83 overall and No. 7 in social, putting it above apps like Discord, LinkedIn, Skype and new Vine successor Byte. Hoop had more than 3 million installs as of a week ago.

There are certainly some concerns, though. Gervais claims that “We are not a meeting or dating app. We simply offer an easy way to make new Snap friends.” But because Tinder isn’t available for people under 18, they might be looking to Hoop instead. Thankfully, adults can’t see profiles of users under 18, and vice versa, and users only see potential matches in their age group. However, users can edit their age at any time.

Snap Kit keeps startups lean

Tools like Amazon’s AWS have made building a startup with a lean team and little money increasingly easy. Snap Kit’s ability to let developers skip the account creation and management process is another step in that direction. But the power to imbue overnight virality is something even Facebook never accomplished, though it helped build empires for developers like Zynga.

Another Snap Kit app called Yolo for receiving anonymous responses to questions shot up to No. 1 in May. Seven months later, it’s still at No. 51. That shows Snap Kit can offer longevity, not just flash-in-the-pan download spikes. Gervais calls the platform “a very powerful tool for developers.”

Three years ago I wrote that Snapchat’s anti-developer attitude was a liability. It needed to become a platform with a cadre of allies that could strengthen its role as an identity platform for teens, and insulate it against copycats like Facebook. That’s exactly what it did. By letting other apps launch themselves using its accounts, Stories and Bitmoji, they wouldn’t need to copy its social graph, sharing format or avatars, and instead would drive attention to the originals.

If Snap can keep building useful developer tools, perhaps by adding to its platform real-world object scanning, augmented reality filters and video calling, a Snapchat account could become a must-have for anyone who wants to use the next generation of apps. Then could come the crown jewel of a platform: discovery and virality. By building a section for promoting Snap Kit apps into Snapchat Discover, developers looking for shortcuts in both engineering and growth might join Evan Spiegel’s army.

Drone startup Wingcopter, working with partners Merck and the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, has completed a first flight of a new drone delivery trial designed to show the benefits of using drones instead of trucks or other road-faring vehicles for moving small cargo between two physically separate office facilities. This first flight covered around 25 km (roughly 15.5 miles), taking a sample of pigments from one Merck lab in Gernsheim to its headquarters in Darmstadt in Germany.

This trial is significant in more ways than one: The area it covered spanned a fairly dense metropolitan area, flying over power lines, trains, roadways and more. It also did all of this without continuous line-of-sight, something that’s been required of most drone delivery trials in a commercial setting to date. The partners involved are hoping this means it can stand as a blueprint to other similar pilot projects and trials being run all over the world.

Next up, the project will continue to fly additional deliveries and then summarize their findings in a report to be delivered in March. Already, using drones instead of trucks seems to provide advantages in terms of time (saving between an hour and even a full day in some cases) and emissions, and it can cut down on the amount of empty return trips made by large, heavy gas-guzzling vehicles, as well.

Wingcopter CEO Tom Plümmer points out in a press release detailing the news that his company has “repeatedly demonstrated” the advantages of drone delivery across a number of use cases, including for use in getting life-saving medical supplies to remote areas. Trials in the U.S. include Alphabet’s Wing, which partnered with FedEx, and UPS, which is working with Matternet, but this commercial trial shows a potentially more fruitful avenue for deploying services in the near-term that don’t require buy-in from the average consumer.

With just about one month until go-time, TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 (March 3 in Berkeley, Calif.) is going to be a true powerhouse event. Prepare to spend the day engaging with the leading innovators, makers and investors bent on shaping the future of these two game-changing technologies.

Don’t have a ticket yet? Beat the price hike at the door and book your ticket now.

Last year 1,500 attendees packed the house, and we’re on track to surpass that number come March. Talk about an opportunity for focused networking. Here’s more great news. CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s free business match-making tool, will be available to all attendees.

What can CrunchMatch do for you? Excellent question. It’s a curated, automated networking platform that helps you connect with people based on your criteria, goals and interests. No more time spent chatting up the wrong people. No matter who you’re hoping to meet with — founders, investors, technologists, researchers or engineering students — CrunchMatch makes networking a crowd as efficient and painless as possible.

Here’s how it works. When CrunchMatch opens, you’ll get an email to sign-up. Fill out your profile listing your role (technologist, founder, investor, etc.) and the type of connections you want to make at the event. The CrunchMatch algorithm will get to work and suggest people to meet and even set appointments, which you can approve or decline.

You never know who you’ll meet at a TechCrunch event or where that connection might lead. Wet your networking whistle with a look at some of the companies attending TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020:

While you’re at it, check out our program agenda for more than 17 presentations, including live robot demos, panel discussions, interviews and Q&As — where the audience gets to ask speakers their most burning questions.

Oh, and one more game-changer. We’ve added Pitch Night — a mini pitch-off competition that takes place the night before the conference starts.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3, and with CrunchMatch at your side, you’ll network better than ever before. Don’t miss this opportunity to spend a full day connecting and engaging with your community of movers, makers and influencers. Buy your ticket today!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-a4fad19c68e846fecc75f11477e3b068') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-a4fad19c68e846fecc75f11477e3b068' }, "https:\/\/tcprotectedembed.com" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'tcprotectedembed.com' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

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

Casper, the well-known D2C mattress company, has lowered its IPO price range in a new S-1/A filing made public this morning. The repricing leads to a lower expected valuation for the former startup and a lower IPO raise.

The decision by Casper to shoot lower in its IPO comes after One Medical priced its own public offering conservatively last week, but it was rewarded by the public markets with a dramatic gain in value. That positive reception does not appear to have been enough to help Casper’s IPO pricing cycle.

Let’s calculate Casper’s new valuation range and expected fundraise, figure out its implied revenue multiples, and see if the resulting figures make sense when compared to Purple, its public competitor. For tech-enabled companies heartened by One Medical’s public offering, this is the other side of the coin.

New math

With a fresh commitment of $5 million for its on-demand staffing and care management service for at-home healthcare and nursing facilities, Los Angeles-based Gento is looking to grow.

The new financing came from Palisades Growth Capital, and the company said it would use the money to expand nationally and invest more capital in research and development.

“Gento has been consistently growing,” says Palisades Growth Capital’s Jeff Anderson. “I attribute this success to their user-friendly technology platform, meticulous attention to operations, and passion for their customers’ success. In a vastly changing regulatory landscape, Gento is providing highly cost-effective solutions to the growing in-home healthcare market.”

Founded as Nursing Without Walls, Gento is the brainchild of Victor Gajendran, who worked as a senior director of technology at Zynx Health, a Los Angeles-based technology company working on data analysis of clinical research to improve outcomes in healthcare.

“Recent payment reforms require that home health agencies and skilled nursing facilities operate with the highest level of efficiency,” said Gajendran in a statement. “Gento’s tech-empowered staffing and care delivery management solution is a win-win for the home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, clinicians and especially the patients.”

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 3,600 customers. If you think about the industry trend, you have modernized the use of data in enterprises quite significantly. What is the adoption level in your...

___

The growing ubiquity of open-source software has been a big theme in the evolution of enterprise IT. But behind that facade of popularity lies another kind of truth: Companies may be interested in using more open-source technology, but because there is a learning curve with taking on an open-source project, not all of them have the time, money and expertise to adopt it. Today, a startup out of Finland that has built a platform specifically to target that group of users is announcing a big round of funding, underscoring not just demand for its products, but its growth to date.

Aiven — which provides managed, cloud-based services designed to make it easier for businesses to build services on top of open-source projects — is today announcing that it has raised $40 million in funding, a Series B being led by IVP (itself a major player in enterprise software, backing an illustrious list that includes Slack, Dropbox, Datadog, GitHub and HashiCorp).

Previous investors Earlybird VC, Lifeline Ventures and the family offices of Risto Siilasmaa (chairman of Nokia), and Olivier Pomel (founder of Datadog), also participated. The deal brings the total raised by Aiven to $50 million.

Oskari Saarenmaa, the CEO of Aiven who co-founded the company with Hannu Valtonen, Heikki Nousiainen and Mika Eloranta, said in an interview that the company is not disclosing its valuation at this time, but it comes in the wake of some big growth for the company.

It now has 500 companies as customers, including Atlassian, Comcast, OVO Energy and Toyota, and over the previous two years it doubled headcount and tripled its revenues.

“We are on track to do better than that this year,” Saarenmaa added.

It’s a surprising customer list, given the size (and tech DNA) of some of those companies. Indeed, Saarenmaa even said that originally he and the co-founders — who got the idea for the startup by first building such implementations for previous employers, which included Nokia and F-Secure — envisioned much smaller, and less tech-centric organisations using Aiven.

But in truth, the actual uptake speaks not just to that learning curve you get with open-source projects, but to the fact that even if you do have the talent to work with these, it makes more sense to apply that talent elsewhere and use implementations that have been tried and tested.

The company today provides services on top of eight different open-source projects — Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Redis, InfluxDB and Grafana — which cover a variety of basic functions, from data streams to search and the handling of a variety of functions that involve ordering and managing vast quantities of data. It works across big public clouds, including Google, Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean and more.

Aiven is running two other open-source technologies in beta — M3 and Flink — which will also soon be added on general release, and the plan will be to add a few more over time, but only a few.

“We may want to have something to help with analytics and data visualisation,” Saarenmaa said, “but we’re not looking to become a collection of different open-source databases. We want to provide the most interesting and best to our customers. The idea is that we are future-proofing. If there is an interesting technology that comes up and starts to be adopted, our users can trust it will be available on Aiven.”

He says that today the company does not — and has no plans to — position itself as a system integrator or consultancy around open-source technologies. The work that it does do with customers, he said, is free and tends to be part of its pre- and after-sales care.

One primary use of the funding will be to expand its on-the-ground offices in different geographies — Aiven has offices in Helsinki, Berlin and Sydney today — with a specific focus on the U.S., in order to be closer to customers to continue to do precisely that.

But sometimes the mountain comes to Mohamed, so to speak. Saarenmaa said that he was first introduced to IVP at Slush, an annual tech conference in Helsinki held in November, and the deal came about quickly after that introduction.

“The increasing adoption of open-source infrastructure software and public cloud usage are among the incredibly powerful trends in enterprise technology and Aiven is making it possible for customers of all sizes to benefit from the advantages of open source infrastructure,” Eric Liaw, a general partner at IVP, said in a statement.

“In addition to their market potential and explosive yet capital-efficient growth, we were most impressed to hear from customer after customer that ‘Aiven just works.’ The overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers is a testament to their hiring practices and the strong engineering team they have built. We’re thrilled to partner with Aiven’s team and help them build their vision of a single open-source data cloud that serves the needs of customers of all sizes.”

Liaw is joining the board with this round.

Clear is an early-stage startup with a big ambition. It wants to build a blockchain for high-volume transaction systems like payments between telcos. Today it announced a $13 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Eight Roads with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom, HKT and Singtel Innov8.

That the strategic investors were telcos is not a coincidence. The early use case for Clear’s blockchain transaction network involves moving payments between worldwide telcos, a system that today is highly manual and prone to errors.

Clear co-founder Gal Hochberg says what his company does is to take commercial contracts and turn them into digital representations, often known in digital ledger terms as a smart contract.

“What that lets us do is create a trusted view of the true status of the relationship within the company’s business partners because they’re now looking at the same pricing and usage. They can find any issues in real time, either in commercial information or in service delivery, and they can even actually resolve those inside our platform,” Hochberg explained.

By putting these high-volume, cross-border transactions onto the blockchain with these smart contracts to act as automated enforcer of the terms, it means that instead of waiting until the end of the month to find errors and begin a resolution process, this can be done in real time, reducing time to payment and speeding up conflict resolution.

“We use blockchain technology to create those interactions in ways that it is auditable, cryptographically secure and ensures that both sides are synced and seeing the same information,” Hochberg said.

For starters, the company is working with worldwide telco companies because the number of transactions, and the way they cross borders make this a good test case, but Hochberg says this is only the starting point. They are not in full-blown production yet, but he says they have proven they can process hundreds of millions of billable events.

The money should help the company get into full carrier-grade production some time in the first half of this year, and then begin to expand into other verticals beyond telcos with the help of today’s investment.

Amidst the staggering rise of on-demand delivery services, the convenience store has been left relatively untouched. Until very recently.

Foxtrot, founded in 2013, is looking to reimagine the corner convenience store, offering customers the option to buy in-store or order online for delivery.

The company today announced the close of a $17 million growth round, co-led by Imaginary and Wittington Ventures, with investment from previous backers Fifth Wall, Lerer Hippeau, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, M3 Ventures, The University of Chicago, Collaborative VC and Wasson Enterprise, as well as new investors Bluestein Associates and Barshop Ventures.

Foxtrot offers a wide variety of products to customers, including craft beer and natural wines, familiar brands like Oreo and everyday goods like Bounty paper towels, as well as products under the Foxtrot label like sandwiches, prepped meals and coffee. It’s an impressive mix of local, emerging and heritage brands all under one roof. In total, Foxtrot works with more than 100 vendors to supply customers with upwards of 800 different products.

Founder and CEO Mike LaVitola says that there is an even breakdown between Foxtrot’s own products (coffee, sandwiches, gummy candies), emerging brands (Hims, MatchaBar, etc.) and staple products and brands (Bud Light and Oreo).

But the roof isn’t necessarily all that important. Foxtrot offers on-demand delivery of its full product suite via an app. And moreover, Foxtrot’s loyalty program offers free delivery for a month for folks who spent more than $100 (either in-store or online) last month at Foxtrot.

[gallery ids="1942166,1942160,1942165,1942164,1942163"]

Foxtrot has stores in Dallas and Chicago, with plans to expand its footprint in those markets, as well as launch in D.C.

The company says it’s experiencing 2x year-over-year revenue growth, with 150% YOY growth of its e-commerce customer base. Its revenue is split 50/50 between offline and online sales.

In terms of employment, the workers inside the store who pick and pack and serve offline customers are W2 employees. Couriers are contractors but are employed directly by Foxtrot based on the company’s own best practices around on-demand delivery.

LaVitola identifies maintaining a cohesive experience across retail and online as one of the greatest challenges.

“They’re fundamentally different,” said LaVitola. “The things that make one successful are very different from the things that make the other side successful. Going forward, to be as successful as we’ve been in these first markets, we need to make sure that the customer is coming to us online and in the store, and that they feel that they’re seeing the same brands and the same ecosystem.”

Spanish startup Bnext is expanding beyond its home country. The company is currently rolling out its product in Mexico, and 170,000 people signed up to a waiting list. Bnext is going to invite those 170,000 potential users first before opening signups to everyone.

Bnext is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts. Customers can open a Bnext account in minutes using a mobile app. A few days later, users receive a payment card. You can then upload money to your Bnext account, and send and spend money all around the world.

You can receive notifications for each transaction with your card, temporarily lock and unlock your card and more. In other words, Bnext does many of the things that you expect from a neobank.

Unlike many traditional retail banks, Bnext plans to attract customers with cheaper international transactions. For instance, Spanish customers traveling abroad can withdraw money up to three times per month and spend as much as €2,000 per month without any foreign exchange fee. When you reach those limits, you pay 1.15% to 1.5% in foreign exchange fees. Mexican customers get two free withdrawals per month.

The startup has put together a local team in order to expand to Mexico. There are currently 12 employees working for Bnext in Mexico City.

But Bnext doesn’t want to stop at providing a current account with a card. In Spain, the company is building a financial hub to help you manage your money across multiple financial services. You can lend money to small and medium businesses and earn interest through October, you can save money using Raisin, you can get a loan, a mortgage, an insurance product, etc.

Bnext expects to launch its marketplace in Mexico at some point during the second half of 2020. The company also expects to expand to other countries in Latin America in the future.

When it comes to numbers, Bnext has attracted 300,000 active users in Spain. In the last 12 months, the startup has processed €430 million across 11.6 million transactions.