Deliverr doesn’t own a warehouse or a delivery truck, but the startup is helping e-commerce companies not named Amazon achieve Amazon-like two-day shipping. The startup does it with intelligent algorithms, and today it announced a $40 million Series C investment.

Activant Capital led the round. Other investors in the company include 8VC, GLP and Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Peterson. The company reports it has raised a total of $70 million.

“What we enable a merchant to do is offer free two-day delivery anywhere they sell, whether it’s Walmart, eBay, even Amazon, because we integrate into Prime or their own website,” Deliverr CEO and co-founder Michael Krakaris told TechCrunch. They also added a recent program for merchants who want next-day delivery.

The question is, how do they do this without owning a single warehouse or a single delivery truck? Krakaris says he cut his teeth at Twilio, a company that delivered message services without being a carrier. As he learned there, if you have good data and a good algorithm, you can build a business.

They have also built relationships with a network of warehouses across the country, and as Krakaris pointed out, most warehouses have unused space. So based on their understanding of markets, they move goods to different parts of the country, store them in available warehouse space and use the warehouse’s own picking systems to grab the goods.

The big thing is that they integrate into the warehouse’s Warehouse Management System software, so that orders coming through their system will integrate with the warehouse’s, get picked, processed and put on a truck. The system also helps find the fastest, cheapest way to deliver the goods on time.

This involves two algorithms, an in-bound algorithm and an outbound one. “Inbound is when a merchant is getting started sending inventory into the Deliverr network. And so we’re doing a few things. If it’s a repeat item, we already have a demand graph for that item so we’re just optimizing that existing demand,” he explained. He says there is some common sense in that you’ll see certain items tend to be consistent throughout the year, but you don’t want to put warm jackets in Florida and California.

The other piece is outbound, figuring the fastest, cheapest way to deliver that item. They have relationships with a variety of national and regional carriers, and when an order comes in, they look at the inventory and location and figure out the optimal choice, based on price and ability to get there in the delivery window. Krakaris says they have a success rate of over 95%, which is near the top of the industry.

The company launched in 2017. They are serving thousands of merchants using data with just 60 employees. That’s a testament to the power of data and good algorithms.

Like other tech giants, Google’s parent, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) too has crossed into the trillion-dollar market cap territory. This was even though the recently announced fourth quarter results did...

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This morning The Zebra, an Austin-based insurance marketplace startup, announced it has closed a $38.5 million Series C. Accel led the funding event, which was participated in by prior investors Silverton Partners, Ballast Point Ventures, and the company’s CEO Keith Melnick. Floodgate and Weatherford Capital also invested in the round.

According to Melnick, the company had targeted a final sum closer to $30 million, but interest in putting more capital into the business by the company’s extant investor set led to a larger Series C. The Zebra previously raised a number of Seed rounds, and a $17 million Series C led by Ballast and a $40 million Series B led by Accel.

The Zebra joins competing startups, including Insurify ($23 million), Gabi ($27 million) and Policygenius ($100 million) in raising new capital this year. Why are venture capitalists putting so much money into the space? When we recently posed the question, we posited revenue growth among its constituent players and a total addressable market that was attractive as likely reasons why.

Happily, The Zebra released some hard performance numbers in conjunction with its round, which not only show why the company was able to raise more capital but also why its space is hot.

Performance

When most startups raise capital they are rarely share performance results and business metrics. This leads to press releases so insipid and anodyne that many rounds are covered by precisely zero members of the media.

One way to avoid this bland fate is to share at least directional results. ARR growth, say, on a year-over-year basis. The next level of transparency — and therefore flavor — is providing real figures. Which is what The Zebra did as part of its Series C. Here they are:

It’s an impressive list of metrics. An interview with the company’s CEO helped fill in a few more details.

According to Melnick, The Zebra is improving customer acquisition costs over time, as it is also improving its revenue generation (both categories on a unit basis), implying that the company isn’t spending its capital on driving artificial growth.

Given the company’s expected growth when is the IPO? Melnick cited his time at Kayak (which went public), listening to investor Mike Moritz who was skeptical at times of going public. Melnick joked that, “Like [with] most things, Mike was right.” The Zebra isn’t focused on any particular exit, he said. Instead, it wants to execute well, which will provide the company with a number of options when the time is right.

In summation: the Zebra’s $38.5 million brings us to $185.5 million raised by four insurance marketplaces so far in 2020. It’s going to be fascinating to see where all the startups are at the end fo 2020 and if any have linked up by then.

Sramana Mitra: Did you make any moves on the monetization of this half a million users? Abhinav Asthana: Not really. We used to have an in-app purchase. It used to be for $10 at that time. We...

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Early-stage European VC firm Blossom Capital is fresh from closing a $185M fund— a big jump up on its prior close. The firm makes just a handful of investments per year, mostly at the Series A stage, working very closely with founders in its portfolio, a strategy it refers to as “high conviction” investing.

One of its chosen few is Inne, a Berlin-based femtech startup that’s building a novel, hormone-tracking subscription product for fertility-tracking and “natural” contraception. The aim is to offer a high-tech alternative to taking hormones to prevent pregnancy or using an established barrier method (such as a condom).

Inne came out of stealth last fall to announce $8.8M in funding, giving us the first glimpse of the medical device it’s been working on since 2017. This test-at-home hormone tracker is slated to launch in select markets in Scandinavia this year, but at a scale akin to a limited beta. The startup said it would be iterating the product based on feedback from the first users

We chatted with Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet, who led the fund’s investment in Inne, to get the inside track on that deal and further understand how the fund thinks about femtech and the key challenges and opportunities she sees for founders building products targeted to women.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: How does the fund approach femtech?

Samet: The way we define femtech is products that are built for women. But I think the definition of the term is not necessarily important. The more important thing is the problem the founders are focusing on solving.

Following Tier Mobility’s $60 million Series B late last year, the e-scooter rentals startup has been busy bolstering its C-suite.

The Berlin-based company is announcing that Moritz Werner has joined as chief commercial officer (CCO), and Roger Hassan has joined as chief operational officer (COO). Werner will be responsible for revenue related activities across all markets, while Hassan will be responsible for the cost side of the business including all operations.

Both recruits will report to Tier co-founder and CEO Lawrence Leuschner. The leadership team also comprises Matthias Laug, co-founder and CTO, and Alex Gayer, CFO. Tier says the group will continue building Tier’s new executive team; therefore, we can likely expect more senior hires to be announced in the coming months.

Hassan, 38, most recently served as CEO of London-based Echo, the U.K.-based medication management and repeat prescription app recently acquired by McKesson (owners of Lloyds Pharmacy). Previously, he was COO International of HelloFresh, the now publicly traded meal-kit company where he spent nearly 4 years establishing the operations and supply chain expertise across 10 markets.

Werner, 38, joins from the Boston Consulting Group, where he has worked for more than 10 years. Most recently, he held the role of Partner and Managing Director for its corporate venture builder BCG Digital Ventures. In 2011, he founded 21Diamonds, a mass-customisation jewelry company funded by Rocket Internet, which was acquired in 2019.

(Fun fact: Julian Blessin, another one of Tier’s co-founders, was instrumental in setting up now defunct electric roadside scooter rental service Coup, a subsidiary of Bosch and backed by BCG Digital Ventures.)

Instamojo, a Bangalore-based startup that helps merchants and small businesses accept digital payments and sell on the web, has acquired Gurgaon-based startup GetMeAShop.

The deal is worth $5 million and includes conglomerate Times Internet making an investment in Instamojo, Sampad Swain, co-founder and chief executive of the Bangalore-based startup, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Hundreds of millions of people have come online in India in the last decade thanks to proliferation of low-cost Android smartphones and availability to some of the world’s cheapest mobile data plans. But most small businesses, especially neighborhood stores and merchants, remain offline.

A wave of startups in the country today are trying to make it easier for these merchants and businesses to come online. GetMeAShop is one such startup. It runs a platform that allows businesses to set up their website, build an online store, and make it easier for merchants or individuals to engage with — and sell to — their customers through social apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook.

For Instamojo, this acquisition is not surprising. The seven-year-old startup began its journey as a payments provider for small businesses. Over the years, it has launched an online store, and a lending service to serve more needs of a business.

Two years ago, the startup added logistics service to the platform through partnership with a handful of firms in the nation, allowing its merchants to have their packages picked up from their doorstep.

“This acquisition will allow us to become a full-fledged operating system for businesses,” said Swain.

Instamojo has amassed 1.2 million merchants on its platform. “It took us seven years to get a million merchants on the platform. Now we are adding more than 2,000 a day. We are on track to hit 2 million merchants by the end of this year,” he said.

The startup also operates an app store that allows developers to use Instamojo’s system to build their own apps and make money. Instamojo currently does not charge any commission to its developers, but in the future it plans to explores monetization opportunities.

Pushkal Srivastava, founder and chief executive of GetMeAShop, said the acquisition will give the startup access to “distribution specific to the target segment we’ve been going after for all these years.” He added, “with our full-stack SaaS offering for MSMEs with web and commerce builder [and] CRM and analytics built-in, we augment the existing offerings of Instamojo perfectly.”

Fearing weak fundraising options in the wake of the WeWork implosion, late-stage startups are tightening their belts. The latest is another Softbank-funded company, joining Zume Pizza (80 percent of staff laid off), Wag (80 percent),  Fair (40%), Getaround (25 percent), Rappi (6 percent), and Oyo (5 percent) that have all cut staff to slow their burn rate and reduce their funding needs. Now freight forwarding startup Flexport is laying off 3 percent of its global staff.

“We’re restructuring some parts of our organization to move faster and with greater clarity and purpose. With that came the difficult decision to part ways with around 50 employees” a Flexport spokesperson tells TechCrunch after we asked today if it had seen layoffs like its peers.

Flexport had raised a $1 billion Series D led by SoftBank at a $3.2 billion valuation a year ago, bringing it to $1.3 billion in funding. The company helps move shipping containers full of goods between manufacturers and retailers using digital tools unlike its old-school competitors.

“We underinvested in areas that help us serve clients efficiently, and we over-invested in scaling our existing process when we actually needed to be agile and adaptable to best serve our clients, especially in a year of unprecedented volatility in global trade,” the spokesperson explained.

Flexport still had a record year, working with 10,000 clients to finance and transport goods. The shipping industry is so huge that it’s still only the seventh largest freight forwarder on its top Trans-Pacific Eastbound leg. The massive headroom for growth plus its use of software to coordinate supply chains and optimize routing is what attracted SoftBank.

But many late-stage startups are worried about where they’ll get their next round after taking huge sums of cash from SoftBank at tall valuations. As of November, SoftBank had only managed to raise about $2 billion for its Vision Fund 2 despite plans for a total of $108 billion, Bloomberg reported. LPs were partially spooked by SoftBank’s reckless investment in WeWork. Further layoffs at its portfolio companies could further stoke concerns about entrusting it with more cash.

Unless growth-stage startups can cobble together enough institutional investors to build big rounds, or other huge capital sources like sovereign wealth funds materialize for them, these startups might not be able to raise enough to keep rapidly burning. Those that can’t reach profitability or find an exit may face down-rounds that can come with onerous terms, trigger talent exodus death spirals, or just not provide enough money.

Flexport has managed to escape with just 3 percent layoffs for now. Being proactive about cuts to reach sustainability may be smarter than gambling that one’s business or the funding climate with suddenly improve. But while other SoftBank startups had to spend tons to edge out direct competitors or make up for weak on-demand service margins, Flexport at least has a tried and true business where incumbents have been asleep at the wheel.

Sramana Mitra: One of the things I’m hearing in your description is that there is the infrastructure layer of making this data available. Then there is an application layer to make use of that data....

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Osayi Igharo, Managing Partner at Ripple VC, discusses startups and venture capital in Africa.

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Last week, SAP (NYSE:SAP) reported results of its fourth quarter, which beat analyst expectations. The results were driven by strong cloud bookings. SAP’s Financials SAP’s fourth quarter revenues...

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Sramana Mitra: From a product strategy point of view, what did you start building to address that? In an open source mode, what were the pieces that you were putting out there? Abhinav Asthana: We...

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As Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs cluster around the worldview that artificial intelligence is poised to change how we work, investors are deciding which use cases make the most sense to pump money into right now. One focus has been the relentless communication between companies and customers that takes place at call centers.

Call center tech has spawned dozens if not hundreds of AI startups, many of which have focused on automating services and using robotic voices to point customers somewhere they can spend money. There has been a lot of progress, but not all of those products have delivered. Cresta is more focused on using AI suggestions to help human contact center workers make the most of an individual call or chat session and lean on what’s worked well for past interactions that were deemed successful.

“I think that there will always be very basic boring stuff that can be automated like frequently asked questions and ‘Oh, what’s the status of my order?,’ ” CEO Zayd Enam says. “But there’s always the role of the person that’s building the relationship between the company and the customer, and that’s a really strategic role for companies in the modern age.”

Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun is the startup’s board chairman and is listed as a co-founder. Enam met Thrun during his PhD research at Stanford focused on workplace productivity. Cresta is launching from stealth and announcing that they’ve raised $21 million in funding from investors including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The company recently closed a $15 million Series A round.

Cresta wants to use AI to school customer service workers and salespeople on how to close the deal.

There’s quite a lot of turnover in contact center jobs and that can leave companies reticent to spend a ton of time investing in each employee’s training. Naturally, there are some inherent issues where the workers interacting with an individual customer might not have the experience necessary to suggest a solution that they might if they had more experience. In terms of live feedback, for many, fumbling through paper scripts at their desk can be about as good as it gets. Cresta is hoping that by tapping improvements in natural language processing, their software can help alleviate some stress for contact center workers and help them move conversations in the direction of selling something else for their company.

Cresta is entering a field where there’s already quite a bit of interest from established software giants. Salesforce, Google and Twilio all operate AI-driven products for contact centers. Even with substantial competition, Enam believes Cresta’s team of 30 can offer its customers a lot more individual attention.

“We’re one of the few technical teams where we’re just obsessed with the customer, to the point where it’s normal for people on our team to fly to the customer and live by a call center in an Airbnb for a week,” Enam said. “When Greylock led the Series A, they had heard that and said that’s what gave them so much conviction that we were the team to solve the problem.”

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Mark Leslie and Vivi Nevo are also investors in Cresta.

HPE announced today that it has acquired Scytale, a cloud native security startup that is built on the open-source Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) protocol. The companies did not share the acquisition price.

Specifically, Scytale looks at application-to-application identity and access management, something that is increasingly important as more transactions take place between applications without any human intervention. It’s imperative that the application knows it’s OK to share information with the other application.

This is an area that HPE wants to expand into, Dave Husak, HPE fellow and GM of cloudless initiative wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “As HPE progresses into this next chapter, delivering on our differentiated, edge to cloud platform as-a-service strategy, security will continue to play a fundamental role. We recognize that every organization that operates in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment requires 100% secure, zero trust systems, that can dynamically identify and authenticate data and applications in real-time,” Husak wrote.

He also was careful to stress that HPE would continue to be good stewards of the SPIFFE and SPIRE (the SPIFFE Runtime Environment) projects, both of which are under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Scytale co-founder Sunil James, writing in a blog post about the deal, indicated that this was important to the founders that HPE respect the startup’s open-source roots. “Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us. We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform,” he wrote.

Scytale was founded in 2017 and had raised $8 million, according to PitchBook data. The bulk of that was in a $5 million Series A last March led by Bessemer. The deal closed today.

Small business lending is a huge market that has attracted massive attention from VC investors in recent years. Startups like Kabbage have raised more than a billion dollars in venture capital and debt to create lending platforms for businesses, and others in the space like Fundbox for lending and BlueVine for banking are trying to build new, digital-first models for helping SMB owners grow their businesses.

While startups targeting the U.S. and European markets have proliferated, other international markets have seen less attention. Portal Finance raised $200 million to help businesses with lending in Latin America, and First Circle raised a $26 million round to do the same in the Philippines.

Now Jenfi wants to enter the mix. The company, founded by Jeffrey Liu, who sold his past startup GuavaPass to ClassPass for a few million, and Justin Louie, who was one of the first employees at GuavaPass, wants to expand access to small and medium business loans for owners in Southeast Asia, starting with their first base of operations in Singapore.

“Even in a market like Singapore which is quite well-established … half of these companies are still underbanked, [and] they don’t have access to credit,” Liu explained to me in an interview. “We realized there was a big problem there.”

The company raised a US$1 million angel round of debt and equity, and is currently going through YC’s accelerator program. So far, the startup has 50 borrowers on its platform according to Liu, and has lent SGD$600,000 so far since launch last year.

In terms of its product, the company either lends directly to a small business, or offers a virtual Jenfi Mastercard that can be used for purchases.

What’s more interesting right now, though, is Jenfi’s model, which is something that you don’t see all the time in the lending space. The company is approaching SMB lending purely from a growth perspective. The startup wants to help owners invest in the growth of their businesses primarily through digital marketing, and takes a small percentage of future revenue in lieu of a fixed repayment schedule.

Liu says that “part of the value-add is that we can help them be more effective in their alternative marketing channels…” He said that the startup doesn’t want to become a service provider, but has been building partnerships with other marketing agencies and services that can help owners find the right growth strategies for them, and then execute on them funded by Jenfi capital. “Our goal is to be able to build a network,” Liu says. “Marketing growth is our initial product focus for this company.”

The timing could be propitious. A study by Google and Bain late last year pegged Southeast Asia as a massive opportunity for digital services, with deep smartphone penetration but still a relatively limited array of digital services across a range of categories. Online marketing channels exist, but are under-optimized, particularly in comparison to the large sums devoted to them in countries like the U.S.

Over the next two years, Liu and Louie hope to expand to more geographies, build out their product offering and continually build long-term partnerships with business owners.

Senior citizens are not early adopters of new technology; many of our 65+ friends and family might not use much tech in the first place. That said, two-thirds of America’s 50 million seniors use the internet and more than 40% own a smartphone, according to a 2017 Pew study.

So where’s the disconnect? Why are modern software companies largely non-compatible with one of the nation’s largest demographics?

Starting with day-to-day care

The most notorious venture-funded elder tech startups were historically focused on building better healthcare and day-to-day living solutions. Honor built a managed marketplace for in-home care; YC startup GoGoGrandparent is Uber for people who don’t use apps; Umbrella* helps seniors get tasks done around the house.

The concept behind these companies is that daily basics are the root of other problems affecting seniors. If you have any issues with your home or mobility, for example, you end up exposing yourself to scams that frequently plague seniors, as well as health and safety risks. That’s not to mention the financial burden — most retirees have a modest budget or fixed income. Even if a service like TaskRabbit is somehow accessible to a senior, it’s not affordable in the long-term when lifespans and future costs are impossible to predict.

This is it, startup fans. It’s your very last chance to scoop up the few remaining tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize — the best Silicon Valley startup soiree, bar none. If you want to join this fun gathering of 1,000+ like-minded startuppers on February 7, you’d best act quickly. Exhibitor tables have long sold out. Don’t get left behind — buy your ticket now before they’re gone for good.

A big shout out to our sponsors Calgary, Uncork Capital, Brex, Galvanize and Snap Fiesta for helping us throw this bash. You’re in for an unabashed night of fabulous food, delicious drinks and festive foolishness. Time to loosen your collar and network in a relaxed setting with some of the Valley’s brightest entrepreneurs, founders and investors — attendees span the entire startup ecosystem.

You never know when a casual conversation could develop into a serious opportunity, and TechCrunch parties have a strong track record for making startup magic.

Here are just five of the many companies with whom you can meet and greet — talk about an opportunity to connect: Deloitte, Perkins Coie, Ceres Robotics, Samsung, Okta, Facebook. And while you’re at it, don’t miss meeting the 10 outstanding startups that will exhibit their tech and talent. More connections equal more opportunity.

Here’s the essential 411 on the party details:

As always, you’ll find plenty of fun. Bust out your karaoke skills, play games, and plenty of photo ops will let you light up your Insta. You might even win one of the many door prizes, including TC swag and free passes to Disrupt SF in September 2020.

The 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize takes place in just three days. We have only a few tickets left, so don’t waste another minute. Buy your ticket today and come join the fun!

Is your company interested in sponsoring the 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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When siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the U.S., they would have had no idea they’d go on to launch a technology company together.

But as adults, the pair set up attacking the $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category, which hasn’t evolved much since the older business systems from Cisco and Polycom . By integrating their Solaborate device with Smart TVs, the entrepreneurs have come up with a drastically cheaper device and platform.

Solaborate has now closed a $10 million Series A funding round from EPOS and Demant Group. EPOS is a newly established company under the healthcare tech company Demant Group in Denmark, which makes high-end audio solutions designed for enterprise and gaming. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Solaborate’s new product line of all-in-one HELLO devices and its cloud communication platform.

After two successful Kickstarter campaigns, Solaborate will now work with EPOS to combine compute, microphones, speakers and Smart TVs with their technology to create products fully owned by and branded under EPOS. These will include Solaborate’s patented auto echo-cancellation delay.

Labinot Bytyqi, founder and CEO said: “We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right and that’s why we engineered HELLO devices with video and audio built-in hack-proof privacy controls and end-to-end encryption for everyone’s protection and peace of mind.”

A HELLO device require only two cables — HDMI and power — and then turns any TV into a voice-controlled open cross-platform communication and collaboration device supporting video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom, Skype, Cisco WebEx, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, BlueJeans, Fuze, Unify and several more.

The partnership will focus on video collaboration to deliver integrated audio/video solutions to the platforms of EPOS’ current strategic partners, such as Microsoft.

They are pushing at an open door. The video conferencing market is predicted to grow from an estimated $1.8 billion to more than $2.8 billion by 2022, according to some studies.