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

After a short pause, we’re back on the topic of unicorn layoffs. While it’s cheery that a number of companies are chugging ahead with ARR growth powered by efficient spend, not every company has taken a similar approach. As we’ve seen in the last six months, many companies that raised big checks wound up spending too much and are now reducing headcount and other costs.

Today I want to chew over the latest news from OYO, which is beating a retreat to reduce losses. And, I’m following recent notes from venture capitalist Bill Gurley about how much money a company could raise before an IPO without engendering market speculation that it’s a money bonfire, torching cash to cast itself in good light.

Retrenchment

OYO, the SoftBank-backed budget hotel startup, is releasing staff, reducing capacity and pulling out of some locations altogether. The firm, famous for its hyper-growth and aggressive capital raises, will cut 1,450 staff, including 1,000 in its home country of India. In fact, the company is leaving several hundred cities in India and has cut tens of thousands of rooms from its rolls, according to reports.

WorkBoard, a SaaS startup that provides goal setting and management software to other companies, announced today that it has closed a $30 million Series C. The new capital comes less than a year after the startup raised a $23 million Series B. WorkBoard has raised $66.6 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Andreessen Horowitz’s David Ulevitch led the round, which saw participation from Microsoft’s M12, GGV and Workday Ventures, each of which had put money into the company in preceding rounds. 

Why did WorkBoard announce a Series C just 10 months after its Series B? That’s what we wanted to find out. As it turns out, the answer is growth. 

3x, twice

The company is growing quickly, making it an attractive investment for the venture class. However, it’s useless to explain its growth in numerical terms if we don’t understand why it is growing as quickly as it is. 

WorkBoard provides software and services to other companies relating to how they plan and track their progress against their plans. More simply, WorkBoard helps other companies set and leverage OKRs, an acronym that stands for “objectives and key results.”

If you’d like a longer-winded explanation of how the concept works, my notes on the company’s Series B are the jam. Briefly, OKRs are a planning framework that help companies set their course intelligently, and execute across smaller tasks that add up to the direction they want to go. You complete “key results” over a given period of time, which roll up into your “objectives.”

It’s a pretty okay way to set up a company’s planning system. OKRs are popular in Silicon Valley, where Google popularized the method. It was not clear, at least to your humble servant, how far the idea had spread when WorkBoard raised its Series B last year. What if the startup raised a bunch of money after selling into fertile ground (startups aware of OKRs), but struggled when it went after other, non-tech companies?

Whoops. After boosting its annual recurring revenue 3.5x in 2018, WorkBoard tripled its ARR again in 2019, according to CEO Deidre Paknad. Thinking out loud, WorkBoard raised its Series A in December of 2017. It probably had $1 million to $3 million ARR at the time, a wide but regular-ish range of ARR for a startup raising its first institutional (priced) round. Given its 3.5x and 3x results in 2018 and 2019, starting right after that Series A investment, the company’s ARR is now likely over $20 million, and probably closer to $25 million. 

So if it can double this year, the startup may begin to approach IPO scale in 2021, provided that its growth can keep up.

On that point, I asked Paknad about her market, especially in regards to how much work she and her employees had to do in terms of market education; did they have to bring the gospel of OKRs to companies, sell them on the idea and then sell its software? Or had the need to teach about OKRs themselves gone down?

She indicated that instead of needing to pull the market toward her firm, the trendlines are better than neutral. According to the CEO, it was harder to sell OKR software “five years ago” because “the need to educate” a half decade ago “was intense.” Companies were stuck on their love of PowerPoint and similar, dated tooling. However, that need for “education has declined rapidly” Paknad said. 

She says that in her company’s experience there is “ever broader recognition that if you want to drive smart growth — not growth at any cost but smart growth,” companies will need to have “everybody in the organization aligned, and you need to be able to see what they [are] aligned on.” 

OKRs are a natural and well-explored way to attempt to do so.

That market movement has helped the company have very efficient operations, in terms of the usual raft of SaaS metrics that we understand. Paknad told TechCrunch a few things that stuck out:

WorkBoard has a “hyper-efficient” enterprise sales cycle, closing new customers in “under 60 days” that are “several hundred thousand dollars in average deal size.”That its “average deal size has more than doubled since the beginning” of 2019.For every $1 that WorkBoard spends on sales and marketing costs, the company generates “about $2 in new ARR.” (That’s way better than the $0.86 in average ARR generated by $1 in new sales and marketing spend for SaaS companies more broadly.)And, it didn’t need to raise this round, with Paknad telling TechCrunch that she hasn’t “spent the 23 [million dollars] from March yet,” but that it decided to add capital because that “opportunity really is unfolding in the way we would like,” and that her firm has an “opportunity to have really definitive enterprise leadership.”

The investor perspective

TechCrunch got Ulevitch, WorkBoard’s newest lead investor, on the phone. Ulevitch called Paknad “a force of nature” who “really connects to customers.” That was all well and good, but more fun were his notes on how the round came together.

Paknad told Ulevitch after WorkBoard’s March 2019 Series B that her company would triple in the year. When it did, Ulevitch said he didn’t want to wait any longer to put money into the firm. And the investment came together quickly, with the Andreessen Horowitz investor noting a roughly one-month time frame for the deal’s life cycle.

This round isn’t hard to figure out. Fast-growing, efficient SaaS companies make investors dream of the next Slack. Let’s see if WorkBoard can double or triple in 2020. If so, we’ll be chatting with Paknad about exits and IPOs, not middle-sized, middle-stage rounds.

Sramana Mitra: What is the limited partner scenario for AgTech? This $75 million and the rounds before, is there a set of limited partners that are particularly interested in AgTech? Francisco...

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Epsagon, an Israeli startup that wants to help monitor modern development environments like serverless and containers, announced a $16 million Series A today.

U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), a new investor, led the round. Previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and StageOne Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $20 million, according to the company.

CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says that the company has been expanding its product offerings in the last year to cover not just its serverless roots, but also provide deeper insights into a number of forms of modern development.

“So we spoke around May when we launched our platform for microservices in the cloud products, and that includes containers, serverless and really any kind of workload to build microservices apps. Since then we have had a few significant announcements,” Shapira told TechCrunch.

For starters, the company announced support for tracing and metrics for Kubernetes workloads, including native Kubernetes, along with managed Kubernetes services like AWS EKS and Google GKE. “A few months ago, we announced our Kubernetes integration. So, if you’re running any Kubernetes workload, you can integrate with Epsagon in one click, and from there you get all the metrics out of the box, then you can set up a tracing in a matter of minutes. So that opens up a very big number of use cases for us,” he said.

The company also announced support for AWS AppSync, a no-code programming tool on the Amazon cloud platform. “We are the only provider today to introduce tracing for AppSync and that’s [an area] where people really struggle with the monitoring and troubleshooting of it,” he said.

The company hopes to use the money from today’s investment to expand the product offering further with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in the coming year. He also wants to expand the automation of some tasks that have to be manually configured today.

“Our intention is to make the product as automated as possible, so the user will get an amazing experience in a matter of minutes, including advanced monitoring, identifying different problems and troubleshooting,” he said

Shapira says the company has around 25 employees today, and plans to double headcount in the next year.

The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) started its incubator two years ago, helping launch companies like Xnor.ai, Blue Canoe and WellSaidLabs. Their success has attracted funding from not just local Seattle VC outfit Madrona, but Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Two Sigma Ventures as well, resulting in a new $10 million fund that should help keep the lights on.

The AI2 Incubator, led by Jacob Colker since its inception in 2017, has focused on launching a handful of companies every year that in some way leverage a serious AI advantage. Blue Canoe, for instance, does natural language processing with a focus on accent modification; Xnor.ai is working on ultra-low-power implementations of machine learning algorithms, and was just acquired yesterday by Apple for a reported $200 million.

“We think the next generation of so-called AI-first companies are going to have to graduate into building long-term, successful businesses that start with an AI edge,” said the program’s new managing director, Bryan Hale. “And the people who can help do this are the ones who have helped build iconic companies.”

Hence the involvement of household names (in the startup community, anyhow) Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, and Two Sigma Ventures from New York. Seattle-based Madrona also recently invested in AI2 company Lexion. It’s a pretty solid crowd to be running with, and as Colker pointed out, “they don’t often come together.”

“But also, they looked up into the northwest and said, what’s going on up there?” added Hale. Indeed, Seattle has over the last few years blossomed into a haven for AI research, with many major tech companies establishing or expanding satellite offices here at least partly concerned with the topic: Apple, Google, Nvidia and Facebook among others, and, of course, local standbys Amazon, Microsoft and Adobe.

Practically speaking, the new fund will let the incubator continue on its current path, but with a bit more runway and potentially bigger investments in the startups it works with.

“We just have a lot more resources now to help our companies succeed,” said Colker. “Previously we were able to write up to about a $250,000 check, but now we can write up to maybe $800,000 per company. That means they have a lot more time to build out their team, aggregate training data, test their models, all these points that are important for a team to raise a bigger, better VC funding round.”

AI2 prides itself on its large staff of PhDs and open research strategy, publishing pretty much everything publicly in order to spur the field onwards. Access to these big brains, many of which have bred successful startups of their own, is no less a draw than the possibility of more general business mentorship and funding.

Colker said the incubator will continue to produce three to five startups per year, each one taking “about 12-18 months, from whiteboard to venture funding.” AI, he pointed out, often needs more time than a consumer app or even enterprise play, since it’s as much research as it is development. But so far the model seems to work quite well.

“There are very few places in the world where an entrepreneur can come to take advantage of the brain power of a hundred PhDs and support staff. We’ve got a new research center with 70 desks, we’ve got plenty of space for those teams to grow,” he said. “We’re incredibly well-positioned to support the next wave of AI companies.”

According to an Ibisworld report, the online recruitment sites industry is estimated to have grown at 15% CAGR from 2015 to $10 billion in 2020. The growth in the industry is attributed to the...

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Cyral, an early-stage startup that helps protect data stored in cloud repositories, announced an $11 million Series A today. The company also revealed a previous undisclosed $4.1 million angel investment, making the total $15.1 million.

The Series A was led by Redpoint Ventures. A.Capital Ventures, Costanoa VC, Firebolt, SV Angel and Trifecta Capital also participated in on the round.

Cyral co-founder and CEO Manav Mital says the company’s product acts as a security layer on top of cloud data repositories — whether databases, data lakes, data warehouse or other data repository — helping identify issues like faulty configurations or anomalous activity.

Mital says that unlike most security data products of this ilk, Cyral doesn’t use an agent or watch points to try to detect signals that indicate something is happening to the data. Instead, he says that Cyral is a security layer attached directly to the data.

“The core innovation of Cyral is to put a layer of visibility attached right to the data endpoint, right to the interface where application services and users talk to the data endpoint, and in real time see the communication,” Mital explained.

As an example, he says that Cyral could detect that someone has suddenly started scanning rows of credit card data, or that someone was trying to connect to a database on an unencrypted connection. In each of these cases, Cyral would detect the problem, and depending on the configuration, send an alert to the customer’s security team to deal with the problem, or automatically shut down access to the database before informing the security team.

It’s still early days for Cyral, with 15 employees and a handful of early access customers. Mital says for this round he’s working on building a product to market that’s well-designed and easy to use.

He says that people get the problem he’s trying to solve. “We could walk into any company and they are all worried about this problem. So for us getting people interested has not been an issue. We just want to make sure we build an amazing product,” he said.

Clara Piloto: Corporate education is also growing quite a bit. We’re focusing on high-end quality experience for our corporate clients. That includes very customized programs in which we can provide...

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Bolt, the billion-dollar startup out of Estonia that’s building a ride-hailing, scooter and food delivery business across Europe and Africa, has picked up a tranche of funding in its bid to take on Uber and the rest in the world of on-demand transportation.

The company has picked up €50 million (about $56 million) from the European Investment Bank to continue developing its technology and safety features, as well as to expand newer areas of its business, such as food delivery and personal transport like e-scooters.

With this latest money, Bolt has raised more than €250 million in funding since opening for business in 2013, and as of its last equity round in July 2019 (when it raised $67 million), it was valued at over $1 billion, which Bolt has confirmed to me remains the valuation here.

Bolt further said that its service now has more than 30 million users in 150 cities and 35 countries and is profitable in two-thirds of its markets.

The timing of the last equity round, and the company’s ambitious growth plans, could well mean it will be raising more equity funding again soon. Bolt’s existing backers include the Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi, Creandum, G Squared and Daimler (which owns a ride-hailing competitor, Free Now — formerly called MyTaxi).

“Bolt is a good example of European excellence in tech and innovation. As you say, to stand still is to go backwards, and Bolt is never standing still,” said EIB’s vice president, Alexander Stubb, in a statement. “The Bank is very happy to support the company in improving its services, as well as allowing it to branch out into new service fields. In other words, we’re fully on board!”

The EIB is the nonprofit, long-term lending arm of the European Union, and this financing in the form of a quasi-equity facility.

Also known as venture debt, the financing is structured as a loan, where repayment terms are based on a percentage of future revenue streams, and ownership is not diluted. The funding is backed in turn by the European Fund for Strategic Investments, as part of a bigger strategy to boost investment in promising companies, and specifically riskier startups, in the tech industry. It expects to make and spur some €458.8 billion in investments across 1 million startups and SMEs as part of this plan.

Opting for a “quasi-equity” loan instead of a straight equity or debt investment is attractive to Bolt for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that the funding comes without ownership dilution. Two is the endorsement and support of the EU itself, in a market category where tech disruptors have been known to run afoul of regulators and lawmakers, in part because of the ubiquity and nature of the transportation/mobility industry.

“Mobility is one of the areas where Europe will really benefit from a local champion who shares the values of European consumers and regulators,” said Martin Villig, the co-founder of Bolt (whose brother Markus is the CEO), in a statement. “Therefore, we are thrilled to have the European Investment Bank join the ranks of Bolt’s backers as this enables us to move faster towards serving many more people in Europe.”

(Butting heads with authorities is something that Bolt is no stranger to: It tried to enter the lucrative London taxi market through a backdoor to bypass the waiting time to get a license. It really didn’t work, and the company had to wait another 21 months to come to London doing it by the book. In its first six months of operation in London, the company has picked up 1.5 million customers.)

While private VCs account for the majority of startup funding, backing from government groups is an interesting and strategic route for tech companies that are making waves in large industries that sit adjacent to technology. Before it was acquired by PayPal, IZettle also picked up a round of funding from the EIB specifically to invest in its AI R&D. Navya, the self-driving bus and shuttle startup, has also raised money from the EIB in the past, as has MariaDB.

One of the big issues with on-demand transportation companies has been their safety record, a huge area of focus given the potential scale and ubiquity of a transportation or mobility service. Indeed, this is at the center of Uber’s latest scuffle in Europe, where London’s transport regulator has rejected a license renewal for the company over concerns about Uber’s safety record. (Uber is appealing; while it does, it’s business as usual.)

So it’s no surprise that with this funding, Bolt says that it will be specifically using the money to develop technology to “improve the safety, reliability and sustainability of its services while maintaining the high efficiency of the company’s operations.”

Bolt is one of a group of companies that have been hatched out of Estonia, which has worked to position itself as a leader in Europe’s tech industry as part of its own economic regeneration in the decades after existing as part of the Soviet Union (it formally left in 1990). The EIB has invested around €830 million in Estonian projects in the last five years.

“Estonia is as the forefront of digital transformation in Europe,” said Paolo Gentiloni, European Commissioner for the Economy, in a statement. “I am proud that Europe, through the Investment Plan, supports Estonian platform Bolt’s research and development strategy to create innovative and safe services that will enhance urban mobility.”

Getsafe, the German insurtech that offers home contents insurance via an app, has launched in the U.K., despite an increasingly competitive market for insurance in the country, and the thorny regulatory issue of Brexit.

This has seen Getsafe incorporate an independent British subsidiary based in London, in order to shield it ahead of future political decisions about the future trading relationship between the U.K. and the European Union.

To launch its flagship home contents insurance in the U.K., the startup has also partnered with with Hiscox. It currently partners with Munich Re and AXA for other markets.

Founded in May 2015 by Christian Wiens and Marius Blaesing in Heidelberg, Getsafe initially launched as a digital insurance broker before pivoting to a direct to consumer insurance offering of its own (its brokerage business was sold to Verivox).

Pitching itself as a digital insurer aimed at millennials — and one of the fastest growing digital insurance apps in Germany — Getsafe’s flagship product offers flexible home contents insurance, along with other “modules,” such as personal possessions cover (which insures possessions out of home) and accidental damage cover. The idea is that you build and only pay for the exact cover you need.

Earlier this week, I took the Getsafe on-boarding process for a spin and signed up for basic home contents insurance. The process was just about as painless as it could be, and within just a few minutes I had cover for less than £5 per month, which felt very competitive.

Of course, the startup isn’t without digital competitors here in the U.K. — Brolly Contents is one, for example — and the proof of any insurance product is when you need to make a claim. To do this, Getsafe has developed a claims chatbot called Carla, which is available 24 hours a day to answer questions and report claims. Let’s hope I never have to chat to Carla.

Getsafe CEO and founder Christian Wiens says the U.K. is an attractive market (despite Brexit) because consumers are used to buying financial products digitally. He cites the U.K. being by far the largest market in Europe for e-commerce, noting that mobile payments are also standard here, and “neo-banks” such as Monzo, Revolut, Starling and N26 are well-established. In contrast, he argues that insurance is yet to catch up. “With our smartphone app, Getsafe will aim to close this gap in the market,” says Wiens.

In June 2019, Getsafe raised $17 million (€15 million) in a Series A funding. The round was led by Earlybird, with participation from CommerzVentures (and other existing investors).

Xnor.ai, spun off in 2017 from the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (AI2), has been acquired by Apple for about $200 million. A source close to the company corroborated a report this morning from GeekWire to that effect.

Apple confirmed the reports with its standard statement for this sort of quiet acquisition: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” (I’ve asked for clarification just in case.)

Xnor.ai began as a process for making machine learning algorithms highly efficient — so efficient that they could run on even the lowest tier of hardware out there, things like embedded electronics in security cameras that use only a modicum of power. Yet using Xnor’s algorithms they could accomplish tasks like object recognition, which in other circumstances might require a powerful processor or connection to the cloud.

CEO Ali Farhadi and his founding team put the company together at AI2 and spun it out just before the organization formally launched its incubator program. It raised $2.7M in early 2017 and $12M in 2018, both rounds led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, and has steadily grown its local operations and areas of business.

The $200M acquisition price is only approximate, the source indicated, but even if the final number were less by half that would be a big return for Madrona and other investors.

The company will likely move to Apple’s Seattle offices; GeekWire, visiting the Xnor.ai offices (in inclement weather, no less), reported that a move was clearly underway. AI2 confirmed that Farhadi is no longer working there, but he will retain his faculty position at the University of Washington.

An acquisition by Apple makes perfect sense when one thinks of how that company has been directing its efforts towards edge computing. With a chip dedicated to executing machine learning workflows in a variety of situations, Apple clearly intends for its devices to operate independent of the cloud for such tasks as facial recognition, natural language processing, and augmented reality. It’s as much for performance as privacy purposes.

Its camera software especially makes extensive use of machine learning algorithms for both capturing and processing images, a compute-heavy task that could potentially be made much lighter with the inclusion of Xnor’s economizing techniques. The future of photography is code, after all — so the more of it you can execute, and the less time and power it takes to do so, the better.

 

It could also indicate new forays in the smart home, toward which with HomePod Apple has made some tentative steps. But Xnor’s technology is highly adaptable and as such rather difficult to predict as far as what it enables for such a vast company as Apple.

If you’re a current student and you love robots — and the AI that drives them — you do not want to miss out on TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. Our day-long deep dive into these two life-altering technologies takes place on March 3 at UC Berkeley and features the best and brightest minds, makers and influencers.

We’ve set aside a limited number of deeply discounted tickets for students because, let’s face it, the future of robotics and AI can’t happen without cultivating the next generation. Tickets cost $50, which means you save more than $200. Reserve your student ticket now.

Not a student? No problem, we have a savings deal for you, too. If you register now, you’ll save $150 when you book an early-bird ticket by February 14.

More than 1,000 robotics and AI enthusiasts, experts and visionaries attended last year’s event, and we expect even more this year. Talk about a targeted audience and the perfect place for students to network for an internship, employment or even a future co-founder.

What can you expect this year? For starters, we have an outstanding lineup of speaker and demos — more than 20 presentations — on tap. Let’s take a quick look at just some of the offerings you don’t want to miss:

Saving Humanity from AI: Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley professor and AI authority, argues in his acclaimed new book, “Human Compatible,” that AI will doom humanity unless technologists fundamentally reform how they build AI algorithms.Opening the Black Box with Explainable AI: Machine learning and AI models can be found in nearly every aspect of society today, but their inner workings are often as much a mystery to their creators as to those who use them. UC Berkeley’s Trevor Darrell, Krishna Gade of Fiddler Labs and Karen Myers from SRI International will discuss what we’re doing about it and what still needs to be done.Engineering for the Red Planet: Maxar Technologies has been involved with U.S. space efforts for decades and is about to send its fifth robotic arm to Mars aboard NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. Lucy Condakchian, general manager of robotics at Maxar, will speak to the difficulty and exhilaration of designing robotics for use in the harsh environments of space and other planets.

That’s just a sample — take a gander at the event agenda to help you plan your time accordingly. We’ll add even more speakers in the coming weeks, so keep checking back.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3 at UC Berkeley. It’s a full day focused on exploring the future of robotics and a great opportunity for students to connect with leading technologists, founders, researchers and investors. Join us in Berkeley. Buy your student ticket today and get ready to build the future.

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

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Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about stage. You started off by saying that you like early stage. Define early stage for me. Are we talking seed? Are we talking pre-seed or concept stage? Francisco Jardim:...

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According to a recent report, the global cyber security market is estimated to grow at 15% CAGR to $267.73 billion by 2024 from $118.78 billion industry in 2018. The growth in the industry is...

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Sramana Mitra: Who’s paying? Is it all companies paying? Clara Piloto: It’s a combination. A lot of individuals are self-funding but there are a lot of companies that have tuition assistance. I...

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The venture-backed insurance world is more than the Lemonades and MetroMiles of the world. There’s more room in the industry for startups to shake things up. One such company, Cambridge-based Insurify, is out today with a new venture round that greatly expands its capital base.

The startup, which had accepted just $6.6 million over two rounds before its latest investment, has raised $23 million in a Series A led by MTECH Capital and VIOLA FinTech. Prior investors MassMutual Ventures and Nationwide took part in the new investment.

TechCrunch hasn’t caught up with the company since our own Sarah Buhr covered its first $2 million deal back in early 2016. As you’d expect, a lot has changed in the last four years.

What’s Insurify?

To get under the skin of the new round, TechCrunch caught up with Insurify’s CEO and founder, Snejina Zacharia.

Zacharia, formerly of Gartner, came up with the idea for Insurify after she had an accident years ago. Following an unsatisfying experience working with the insurance industry after the fact, she discovered that consumers “have very, very little idea of how much coverage they need,” and that insurance providers (Insurify started out working with car insurance and is expanding to life and home insurance, as well) were “really struggling to [access] digital consumers because they have very poor UIs, [and] their APIs [were] not up to date.”

Enter Insurify, which bridges that gap. Working to build “automation behind insurance,” Insurify wants to help people find the coverage that they need, online, at a fair price; it’s a good business for the startup, which gets paid when consumers buy new insurance through its tooling.

Insurify, according to Zacharia, operates as a licensed agent for the various types of insurance it helps consumers find.

It’s more than a middleperson, however. The startup wants to bring the buying of insurance more firmly into the digital world. Today, Insurify completes 65% of its new policies online, and provides pre-loaded information to carriers when it passes a consumer over to their side of things.

Insurify is also building out its own technology products that exist a little past insurance, including a “wallet” that lets users manage multiple policies in one place.

New capital

TechCrunch asked Zacharia why she decided to raise capital now. According to the CEO, after doing “a lot with almost nothing,” her company is ready to accelerate its go-to-market motion.

In practical terms, the new capital will help Insurify with “horizontal expansion,” like “launching new verticals” that will include home, rental and other types of insurance, she said. Even more interesting, the Series A will also be used to fuel the startup’s marketing arm, which Zacharia says is run like a “hedge fund.” Insurify’s marketing efforts are “automated through [an] artificial intelligence model,” she told TechCrunch, which estimates “the value of every click” through a set of algorithms that it tunes regularly.

(We’ll avoid making a joke about hedge fund returns at this juncture.)

The CEO went on to say that “putting more money and more fuel behind [Insurify’s] marketing engine could really help us tremendously at this point,” helping to explain why Insurify decided to take on more capital when it did.

The startup had options when it came to investor selection, with Zacharia telling TechCrunch that her firm “had multiple, different term sheets” from which to choose. Why MTECH and VIOLA as lead investors? Zacharia emphasized venture partner selection as key, also highlighting the experiences and expertise of each firm (insurance with MTECH, and fintech with VIOLA).

It will be fascinating to see what happens at the meeting point of new capital, an operating marketing engine and an expanding set of products. Presumably Insurify can grow like heck from that confluence of factors. We’ll ask in a few months.

Grover, the Berlin-based startup that offers “pay-as-you-go” subscriptions to the latest consumer tech, including e-scooters, has closed a new “asset-backed” financing deal, topping up an existing debt facility with Varengold Bank to a total of €250 million.

The additional capital will fuel the next phase of growth as the German company has entered scale-up territory. Specifically, it is an increase of an existing €55 million debt facility with Varengold, via an unnamed supporting debt investor, and will be used to expand Grover’s product range and for the purchasing of assets. Buying the latest gadgets to then rent them out is pretty capital intensive, after all.

Operating in Germany and Austria, with other markets to be launched in 2020, Grover pitches itself as part of the so-called “circular economy” whereby people rent things rather than outright own them. The idea is that it offers a more sustainable form of consumption, since items can have several owners during their lifespan, and can be more cost effective, depending on your penchant for the latest consumer electronics.

As well as targeting consumers direct, offering subscriptions via its own website, Grover also partners with major electronics retailers. This sees it essentially become a form of point-of-sale finance by letting consumers rent the item they were considering buying, with the option to purchase it outright later.

The company says it is currently present in the online-channels of eight leading European electronics retailers and in more than 500 brick-and-mortar stores across Germany. It is hoping to build on this go-to-market strategy in 202.

In addition, Grover plans to expand its B2B offering to meet continued demand from business customers. It also says it will continue to develop its e-mobility category, with the aim of making future micro-mobility vehicles accessible to consumers on a flexible monthly basis.

Anyline, the Vienna-based provider of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that developers use to build OCR functions into their websites and apps, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The company has also unveiled plans for a U.S. expansion.

Leading the round is Berlin-based VC firm Project A, with participation from Anyline’s existing investors, including Johann “Hansi” Hansmann, Senovo, and the Gernot Langes-Swarovski Foundation.

Founded in 2013, Anyline offers specialised OCR solutions that it says the big tech vendors are not set up to supply. This has seen the Austrian startup pick up a portfolio of international clients such as Canon, Porsche and E.On, as well as national governments and the United Nations.

Its OCR functionality can be built into any modern website or app and is being used by businesses to scan and collect various “analogue” information, such as identity documents, serial numbers and utility meters, using any standard mobile device.

The upside of such an approach is obvious: by using proven OCR tech that actually works, businesses can make considerable savings in terms of time and resources by eliminating manual data entry, which is prone to costly mistakes.

From a customer point of view, anybody who has used OCR to add a debit card to an app or submit a meter reading knows it provides an infinitely less painful experience than having to manually type long numbers on a phone.

Anyline says the new capital will primarily be used to double its headcount, and to open a first U.S. headquarters in Boston in early 2020. This will enable Anyline to bring its mobile OCR solutions to new international markets and industries, including smart manufacturing, KYC services and fintech, says the company.

“As businesses move to an increasingly virtual world, it is vital they have access to advanced technologies that enable them to digitise previously analog mediums,” says Lukas Kinigadner, CEO and co-founder of Anyline, in a statement.

“We are proud to say European-born technology is helping businesses across the world to reduce the errors, inefficiencies and frustrations that come with manual input. By becoming the market leader in mobile OCR, Anyline plans to be the technology partner businesses need to meet these challenges on the horizon”.

Meanwhile, Anyline’s planned U.S. launch as seen the company found Anyline Inc., and hire Bryan Boatner, the former Global Sales Director of Cognex Corporation, as its new VP of Sales and Business Development.

Oviva, the health tech startup that provides a digital solution for Type 2 diabetes treatment in Europe, has raised $21 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is MTIP, with participation by new investor Earlybird, and existing investors AlbionVC, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures and Partech.

Oviva says the new capital will be used to further develop its technology, and continue expanding in Europe to serve more patients not able to currently aaccess treatment. It brings the total raised by Oviva to date to $34 million.

Claiming to have treated 90,000 patients in the last three years across the U.K., Germany, France, Switzerland and the UAE, Oviva offers an “evidence-based” digital solution to stop the progression of and reverse Type 2 diabetes and obesity-related conditions. Patients receive tailored nutrition advice and personalised coaching via their phone, at lower costs and better outcomes compared to face-to-face therapy, says the startup.

“With your consent, your doctor sends Oviva your diagnosis, relevant lab reports, background and contact details,” explains Oviva co-founder and CEO Kai Eberhardt. “We then contact you, either directly to ask you to download our app or via phone, onboard you and initiate treatment. You are then treated typically for four to nine months, depending on your condition and local reimbursement. After that time you can continue, paying yourself, or get another referral (typically annually, as our behaviour-change treatment is recommended in most guidelines each year and reimbursement is provided each year)”.

Eberhardt says that in most of the countries Oviva currently operates in, it is the patients’ health insurance that pays for the service, and in the U.K. the NHS pays for access. “Typically for patients to access our treatment requires a doctors’ prescription,” he says. “Most referrals are made by the patient’s general practitioner, or in some cases also specialists, e.g, an endocrinologist. A typical scenario is that the patient’s doctor makes a referral when they are diagnosed, or as part of a regular check up for their chronic condition”.

Once Oviva has been sent the patient “goal,” such as losing weight, better blood sugar control etc., and the patient has been on-boarded, they start logging anything that is important related to their lifestyle and disease. This includes photos of meals, activity, weight and symptoms. They can also connect a step counter, weight scale or blood glucose meter to the app to complete most of the data collection automatically.

“You will agree specific behaviours you want to change over the course of the treatment with your dietitian (e.g. more vegetables and fruits, portion control, activity levels),” says Eberhardt. “Your dietitian and a group of peers will support you in achieving those goals. On the one hand that is motivation and emotional support, on the other hand with specific pointers targeted to your needs, e.g. around how you time meals and portion sizes over the day to avoid lows or hunger periods”.

Over the course of treatment, a patient can also have video-call appointments with their dietitian, and review a curriculum of videos and other content supporting the management of their condition, as part of a “behaviour change journey”.

Meanwhile, Christoph Ruedig, Partner at AlbionVC, says that despite compelling evidence that digital treatments improve patient access and outcomes while reducing costs for health systems, “Europe is investing a fraction” in digital health compared to the U.S. “We’re excited to continue to support Oviva’s accelerated roll out across Europe,” he says.

For Silicon Valley’s potential startup millionaires, compensation packages staked on future promises of wealth are where the action is. But what happens when these employees get laid off or have to leave before an exit?

When Wouter Witvoet left a startup that he had joined as employee #4, he felt relatively prepared, having set aside $50,000 to exercise his available stock options, only to be informed by HR that he was also liable to pay taxes on said options so he was about $1.8 million short with 90 days to settle up.

“I ended up losing my entire equity stake,” Witvoet tells TechCrunch.

Witvoet later founded Secfi, which is just one of a handful of entities looking to establish itself in the hot “pre-wealth” management space with what it calls forward purchase agreements enabling startup employees to exercise stock options and wait until an IPO or exit to make payments.

Looking to leverage paper wealth is hardly a new trend, but more institutional investors are eyeing the non-traditional opportunity as high-growth startups get harder to access. For some of the hedge funds and private equity funds playing around in this space, these deals represents a back door into the paydays of mature IPO-bound startups at a discount.

There are a number of players with hundreds of millions at play. Section Partners has $120 million in committed capital and calls it option exercise financing a “lifeline” for employees facing option expiration. Troy Capital Group’s Quid has partnered with Oaktree Capital Management on a $200 million fund. The Bay Area ESO Fund has been providing this financing to startup employees since its founding in 2012.

Secfi, which has raised $7 million in venture funding from investors including Rucker Park Capital, Social Leverage and the Weekend Fund, had previously been acting as a go-between for multiple firms, but is announcing today that they’ve partnered with New York hedge fund Serengeti Asset Management, locking down a $550 million debt facility.

Taking out run-of-the-mill loans to exercise options with the assumption that a great exit inevitably awaits your startup is an awful call. These forward purchase agreements are backed by the options themselves so the recourse is limited to the options in question. If your startup succeeds, you’ll be paying the company back the principal, plus an interest rate and an equity rate, i.e. a good chunk of your upside. If your startup endures a WeWork-like fiasco, no one is coming after your car.

With more late-stage startups pumping the brakes on spending and eyeing layoffs, there aren’t many great resources for affected employees looking to see what their options are worth. Many end up finding themselves going down Quora rabbit holes, browsing for information that is rarely one-size-fits-all. Educating on an individual basis has its merits, but most of these options financing firms are also trying to get HR departments at companies to do a bit of the marketing for them through partnerships with the startups themselves.

As more money gets directed from these behemoth funds toward “pre-wealth” financial services, you can expect to see more startups like Secfi popping up hoping to offer potential startup millionaires a platform that extends beyond the pathway to options upside.