Now that 2020 has started, Uber, DoorDash and Lyft are taking additional steps to undermine a new California law that would help more gig workers qualify as full-time employees. These moves entail product changes, lawsuits and ramped-up efforts to get a ballot initiative in front of voters that would roll back the new legislation.

Let’s start with the most recent development; yesterday, Uber sent a note to users announcing that it’s getting rid of upfront pricing in favor of estimated prices, unless they’re Uber Pool rides.

“Due to a new state law, we are making some changes to help ensure that Uber remains a dependable source of flexible work for California drivers,” Uber wrote in an email to customers. “These changes may take some getting used to, but our goal is to keep Uber available to as many qualified drivers as possible, without restricting the number of drivers who can work at a given time.”

Uber says it also has to discontinue rewards benefits like price protection on a route and flexible cancellations for trips in California. For drivers, that means they won’t see estimated earnings and drivers in surge arteas will no longer see fixed dollar amounts.

“AB5 threatens to restrict or eliminate opportunities for independent workers across a wide spectrum of industries, including trucking, freelance journalism and ridesharing,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As a result of AB5, we’ve made a number of product changes to preserve flexible work for tens of thousands of California drivers. At the same time, we’ve put forward a progressive package of new protections for drivers, including guaranteed minimum earnings and benefits, so voters can choose to truly improve flexible work in November.”

While Uber is essentially saying this is something the company must do, it’s worth noting that this is not some requirement of the new law; this is Uber’s attempt to beef up its case that it’s legally allowed to classify drivers as independent contractors. Since much of the rationale for determining whether or not a worker is an employee comes down to control, removing upfront fares and ditching penalties for rejecting fares could help Uber make a case that its drivers are operating on their own accord.

Two years ago, we created the Matrix FinTech Index to highlight what we saw as the beginnings of a 10+ year mega innovation wave in financial services.

The trillion-dollar financial services industry was going to be turned on its head over the next decade, and we were just getting started. At the time, the top 10 publicly traded U.S. fintech companies had just surpassed the $100 billion mark in terms of total market capitalization, 12 unicorns had emerged in the category, and the U.S. VC industry had just poured in $6.7B — a record at the time.

As we predicted last year, the innovation cycle continues, and we are transitioning into its mid-phase. So what happened in U.S. fintech in 2019? In short, monster growth.

On the public side, fintechs delivered resoundingly. PayPal alone gained $26B in market capitalization. On a return basis, the public Matrix FinTech Index continued to crush every major equity index as well as the financial services incumbents. Nicely matching our forecasts, our Index delivered 213% returns over the last three years. The Index outperformed the financial services incumbents by 151 percentage points and the S&P 500 by 170 percentage points.

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

Today, we’re exploring fundraising from outside the venture world.

Founders looking to raise capital to power their growing companies have more options than ever. Traditional bank loans are an option, of course. As is venture capital. But between the two exists a growing world of firms and funds looking to put capital to work in young companies that have growing revenues and predictable economics.

Firms like Clearbanc are rising to meet demand for capital with more risk appetite than a traditional bank looking for collateral, but less than an early-stage venture firm. Clearbanc offers growth-focused capital to ecommerce and consumer SaaS companies for a flat fee, repaid out of future revenues. Such revenue-based financing is becoming increasingly popular; you could say the category has roots in the sort of venture debt that groups like Silicon Valley Bank have lent for decades, but there’s more of it than ever and in different flavors.

While revenue-based financing, speaking generally, is attractive to SaaS and ecommerce companies, other types of startups can benefit from alt-capital sources as well. And, some firms that disburse money to growing companies without an explicit equity stake are finding a way to connect capital to them.

Today, let’s take a quick peek at three firms that have found interesting takes on providing alternative startup financing: Earnest Capital with its innovative SEAL agreement, RevUp Capital, which offers services along with non-equity capital, and Capital, which both invests and loans using its own proprietary rubric.

After all, selling equity in your company to fund sales and marketing costs might not be the most efficient way to finance growth; if you know you are going to get $3 out from $1 in spend, why sell forever shares to do so?

Your options

Before we dig in, there are many players in what we might call the alt-VC space. Lighter Capital came up again and again in emails from founders. Indie.vc has its own model that is pretty neat as well. In honor of starting somewhere, however, we’re kicking off with Earnest, RevUp and Capital. We’ll dive into more players in time. (As always, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you have something to share.)

Anu Shukla had found the perfect VP of Engineering to help her build her latest startup, a company called RewardsPay. By that point, she had founded or cofounded several venture-backed startups (she’s up to five). The standard, she knew, was a roughly 1.5% to 2% stake for a key employee at the executive level.

But Shukla knew sometimes you need to give up more to get the right person. “At that point, there wasn’t much cash in the company,” Shukla says of RewardsPay, the company she founded in 2010 to help consumers convert rewards points into a commodity they could spend elsewhere. “This is the person we were asking to come in and build the technology and build our technology team,” she adds. He was also someone with experience who could command a sizable salary from a more established company.

Shukla ended up giving him a 3% equity share in the company. He needed to remain motivated to stick around for the long-run, Shukla explains, “and we also knew through subsequent rounds of funding he would become diluted.”

Tech’s main currency is built on a range of factors

Equity, typically in the form of stock options, is the currency of the tech and startup worlds. After dividing initial stakes among themselves, founders use it to lure talent and compensate employees for the salary cut that they almost inevitably will take when joining a startup. It helps keep employees motivated with the tantalizing prospect of a big payday when the company is sold or goes public.

But how much equity should founders grant the first engineers hired to help them build their product and the new hires that follow? What about that highly coveted VP of Sales brought on once a company has a product to sell? And what about others a young startup seeks to enlist in the cause, including key advisors whose insights and connections might increase its chances of success or perhaps an outside director with the right expertise to join a nascent board of directors?

Properly parceling out equity is a challenge for first-time founders. What stake an employee deserves depends on a range of factors, from skills to seniority and employee badge number.

“Is this employee #5 we’re talking about or employee #25?” asks serial entrepreneur Joe Beninato, who has founded or cofounded four startups and worked at another four. “What’s the experience of the person coming over? You have to look at each situation individually.”

1% or .05%? It depends on position and seniority

Yet while complex, several online guides provide compensation benchmarks that help founders think about the size of each slice of the company they give away when recruiting talent. Index Ventures, for instance, has published a handbook aimed at helping entrepreneurs figure out option grants at the seed level. At a company’s earliest stages, expect to give a senior engineer as much as 1% of a company, the handbook advises, but an experienced business development employee is typically given a .35% cut. An engineer coming in at the mid-level can expect .45% versus .15% for a junior engineer. A junior biz dev person should expect .05%, which is the same for a junior person coming in as a designer or in marketing.

And just because someone gets a big title, it doesn’t mean you should give away the store. “We see a lot of role and title inflation going on at the seed stage, which is best avoided,” warns Reshma Sohoni, co-founder and general partner at Seedcamp, a European seed fund quoted in the Index handbook. “At this stage, you are unsure of who is going to continue the adventure with you.”

Timing trumps seniority and experience

When Shukla was building her team at RewardsPay, she gave the earliest engineers joining her team an equity share of between .5% and 1%, depending on both experience and a person’s salary requirements. Some were willing and able to work for a minimal salary and higher equity, whereas others asked for higher cash compensation because of their personal circumstances. Regardless, Shulka says, “the early team you put together definitely gets a lot more stock than later employees.”

Indeed, in many circumstances, the timing of an employee’s decision to join has a disproportionate impact on how much equity is offered. It makes sense: the earlier someone commits to your startup, the more risk the hire is taking on.

If a key hire is the third person joining a two-person team, he or she can almost be considered a co-founder and may get as much as 10% of the company. But if a head of sales or VP of marketing joins once a startup has a product to sell and promote, they may get between 1% and 2%, depending on experience.

“The percentages really vary dramatically,” Beninato says. “I don’t want to say it’s like a decaying exponential, but it’s something like that. The first people get more, and it goes down over time.”

Time for an employee option pool

Eventually, founders need to think about creating an employee option pool — a more disciplined way to award equity over shaving off more shares with each new hire. “After a seed round, you want to have that employee pool at around 10% or 12%, plus or minus,” says James Currier, a four-time founder who is now a managing partner at NFX, an early-stage venture capital firm. Calibrating the precise size of that option pool, Currier and others say, depends on a company’s hiring ambitions over the coming 12 to 18 months — through a next funding cycle.

Again, online guides can help. The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation, for instance, is an 80-page handbook that explains arcane terms such as “cliffs,” “claw backs,” “single trigger” and “double trigger” that any entrepreneur must know to even understand what their lawyers and advisors are telling them. The guide also identifies landmines to avoid and breaks down the equity ownership of a pair of sample companies whose employee pools range from 9% to 20%.

Over time, founders will need to tinker with the option pool as everyone’s shares are diluted with each venture round. “After an A, you want to put it back to 10 to 15%, depending on how many managers you need,” Currier says. Adds Anu Shukla, “Usually, the VCs are going to ask for a completely empty option pool where every share is available.”

Prepare to negotiate

The size of the option pool must be part of the negotiations with any venture capitalist — and founders would be wise to have thought about the issue before sitting in a VC’s conference room. “VCs often sneak in additional economics for themselves by increasing the amount of the option pool on a pre-money basis,” warn Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson in their book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. At that point, the option pool is coming from the founders’ shares and those of their earliest investor so Feld and Mendelson encourage founders to push back if they feel the VCs are asking for an unduly large option pool.

“The entrepreneur can say, ‘look, I strongly believe we have enough options to cover our needs,’” Feld and Mendelson advise. To protect the VCs, they say, offer full anti-dilution protection in case the founders are wrong, and they need to expand the option pool before the next financing.

No one gets everything at once

Equity awards, regardless of their form, are subject to vesting schedules. Traditionally, startups have used a four-year benchmark with a one-year cliff: no ownership until an employee has worked twelve months, and then 25% for each year worked (or an additional 1/48th for every month worked). Yet there’s also the growing recognition that building a successful company usually takes a lot longer than four years, and options are about retaining people to build something great. As a result, longer vesting schedules are becoming more commonplace.

The growing time it takes companies to go public or be acquired is also affecting other stock option terms. Typically, employees have had up to 90 days after leaving a company to exercise their options, which can be costly and come with a large tax bill. Now companies are sometimes extending that period well beyond 90 days so that an employee won’t end up with nothing if they leave long before they can turn their equity into cash.

Boards of advisors and directors

Equity is also suitable for drawing a different kind of talent to your company: experienced people in the field who won’t come to work for you full-time but, if their interests were aligned with yours, might serve as advisors who increase your chances of success. (At this stage of a company, non-founder board members are likely to be its investors, so their equity will be commensurate with the size of their investment.)

Currier, the serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, says he typically offered between .1% and .3% of the company to attract an advisor to one of his companies. “What you’re hoping for is that one advisor who tells you something that triples the value of your company,” he says. “The problem is you don’t know which one of the five or six people you’d brought in as advisors will be that person. So you pay them all .2% and hope one gives you that idea that more than pays for itself.”

The takeaway: cash is limited, but so is equity

Giving out equity may feel painless. After all, it’s an easy way to preserve your cash as you staff your startup with top-notch hires that can significantly increase your chances of success. But take the time to understand the value of what you’re giving away, and bring discipline to the process early by creating an employee pool. Then if you have to spend a little extra to get someone really exceptional, as Shukla’s RewardsPay had to do, you’ll know where you stand.

BuzzFeed’s technical team has a new leader — incoming chief technology officer Peter Wang, who’s leaving his role as CTO of healthcare community The Mighty.

Wang has plenty of experience in the media industry, having served as CTO at Refinery29 and at Narrativ, a startup that helps publishers make money through commerce. He told me that he was “skeptical” when a recruiter first approached him about the position at BuzzFeed, but as he talked to the team, he was increasingly impressed by the vision and strategy.

For example, he pointed to CEO Jonah Peretti’s recent memo about his plans for 2020, in which Peretti said the company is “fighting for truth and joy, in a world where both are under threat.”

Wang acknowledged that it’s been a tough couple years for digital media, with BuzzFeed itself laying off 250 people at the beginning of 2019. However, he’s hopeful that in the last year, “that tide against publishers … started to turn around.”

Wang added, “It didn’t matter what the environment has been for publishers, [BuzzFeed] has always found a way to position itself and adapt along the way.”

During our conversation, he also echoed Peretti’s recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he said that BuzzFeed was slightly unprofitable in 2019 but has plans to turn a profit this year. Similarly, Wang said he wants to help BuzzFeed establish itself as a “profitable, trusted” media company.

“I’m really hoping to see that we can collectively make BuzzFeed the example in the media space — that you can make it happen and build a sustainable company in the media space by combining these components,” he said.

Wang is replacing BuzzFeed’s previous CTO, Todd Levy, who joined health startup Ro last summer. The company’s CTO role is also expanding — where it was previously limited to overseeing engineering, Wang said he’s now in charge of engineering, product, data, design and project management, and that he’ll be “a true business partner and sitting on the executive team.”

He’s scheduled to start on February 3 and will be reporting to Publisher Dao Nguyen.

“Peter’s broad skillset and deep understanding of digital media make him the perfect fit to both lead our Tech team and serve as a strategic partner to our executive team,” Nguyen said in a statement. “I’m confident that his entrepreneurial spirit and knack for innovation will enhance the user experience for our audience as well as drive meaningful growth for the company as we continue to strengthen and diversify our business.”

Lily AI, a startup focused on using deep learning to help brands better convert customers through emotionally tailored recommendations, announced this morning that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A led by Canaan Partners. Prior investors NEA, Unshackled and Fernbrook Capital also took part in the funding event.

Prior to its Series A, Lily had raised just a few million, according to Crunchbase data.

The round caught our eye for a few reasons. First, the investor leading the round — Maha Ibrahim — also led The RealReal’s Series A. That company, which also sports a focus on the sartorial, went public in 2019. (Ibrahim has also dropped by TechCrunch from time to time, including here.) To see the investor lead an early round in a company operating in a related space was notable.

And the technology that co-founders Purva Gupta (formerly Eko India and UNICEF) Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan (formerly of Box) have built is neat.

TechCrunch first covered Lily back in 2017 when it raised $2 million from NEA. At the time it had an iOS application, along with a web app and API designed to help retailers “better understand a woman’s personal preferences around fashion” in their “own catalogs and digital storefronts.”

In a phone call with TechCrunch, Gupta said that she and Narayanan decided that “from a business model perspective” their technology was “better for an enterprise product.” The iOS app was eventually deprioritized (in “less than a year” after launch according to the CEO), with the company making a formal move to focus on enterprise offerings in early 2018.

So what does Lily AI do and what is it selling to large retailers? An e-commerce power-up.

How it works

Lily’s founding hypothesis came from Gupta’s time exploring fashion in New York, asking hundreds of women about what they had bought recently (more on the company’s founding story here). What came out of that exercise was the idea that every customer is “roaming around with [their own] emotional context,” how “they think about their body” and “how they react to different types of details and items.”

The CEO thought that if you could get that context into an online shop, it would probably help consumers find what they want, and help the store sell more at the same time. That’s the hypothesis behind Lily AI, according to Gupta, who wants to know the “individual emotional context” of “each customer” when they shop online.

It’s that idea that helped the company raise $12.5 million in its A, more capital by far than it had raised before in total.

The service works in three steps, starting with tech that can pull out myriad more attributes from items in a catalog; the more variables you have the more you can know about any particular product. Gupta told TechCrunch in an email that her company’s “approach captures significantly more detail on each product based on the traits customers look for when buying apparel,” including “style, fit, occasion” and the like.

Then, Lily uses “hashed customer data” that brands already collect, married to its item attribute data to “create a high-confidence prediction of each customer’s affinity to every attribute of every product in the catalog,” she continued. From there it’s a recommendation game.

The result of all this work is that “100 percent” of Lily’s customers have seen a “step gain in metrics,” not “just incremental” improvements, according to Gupta. (The company’s website claims a “10x ROI” on customer spend on its products.)

Lily charges for its service on a volume basis.

And there should be lots of that. According to Canaan’s Ibrahim, e-commerce “will continue to grow between 15-20% annually and will represent ~20% of all retail spending in 2020 […] off of an enormous absolute number base of ~$4T of e-commerce spend.” That means Lily has a pretty big market to grow into, which is just what venture investors love to see.

One final thing. During our call, I asked Gupta about privacy. After all, her company is pairing consumer preferences with other information for the benefit of a brand. In our discussion about how her startup protects customer privacy, she said something interesting that I asked her to expand on. Here’s how she described how her firm is built around understanding the feelings of others, or what’s better known as empathy:

We started Lily AI with the goal of helping customers look and feel their best. And I’m so proud that we use ‘Empathy’ as the guiding principle for everything: building products, hiring, retaining talent and establishing company culture.

Not a bad place to build from.

Update: Post updated to reflect that Canaan led The RealReal’s Series A, not C.

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is pure content subscription versus interactive tutoring or teaching? In 1M1M, we have a digital curriculum. Our basic program is a monthly subscription. In the...

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Sisense, an enterprise startup that has built a business analytics business out of the premise of making big data as accessible as possible to users — whether it be through graphics on mobile or desktop apps, or spoken through Alexa — is announcing a big round of funding today and a large jump in valuation to underscore its traction. The company has picked up $100 million in a growth round of funding that catapults Sisense’s valuation to over $1 billion, funding that it plans to use to continue building out its tech, as well as for sales, marketing and development efforts.

For context, this is a huge jump: The company was valued at only around $325 million in 2016 when it raised a Series E, according to PitchBook. (It did not disclose valuation in 2018, when it raised a venture round of $80 million.) It now has some 2,000 customers, including Tinder, Philips, Nasdaq and the Salvation Army.

This latest round is being led by the high-profile enterprise investor Insight Venture Partners, with Access Industries, Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ Growth and others also participating. The Access investment was made via Claltech in Israel, and it seems that this led to some details of this getting leaked out as rumors in recent days. Insight is in the news today for another big deal: Wearing its private equity hat, the firm acquired Veeam for $5 billion. (And that speaks to a particular kind of trajectory for enterprise companies that the firm backs: Veeam had already been a part of Insight’s venture portfolio.)

Mature enterprise startups have proven their business cases are going to be an ongoing theme in this year’s fundraising stories, and Sisense is part of that theme, with annual recurring revenues of over $100 million speaking to its stability and current strength. The company has also made some key acquisitions to boost its business, such as the acquisition of Periscope Data last year (coincidentally, also for $100 million, I understand).

Its rise also speaks to a different kind of trend in the market: In the wider world of business intelligence, there is an increasing demand for more digestible data in order to better tap advances in data analytics to use it across organizations. This was also one of the big reasons why Salesforce gobbled up Tableau last year for a slightly higher price: $15.7 billion.

Sisense, bringing in both sleek end user products but also a strong theme of harnessing the latest developments in areas like machine learning and AI to crunch the data and order it in the first place, represents a smaller and more fleet of foot alternative for its customers. “We found a way to make accessing data extremely simple, mashing it together in a logical way and embedding it in every logical place,” explained CEO Amir Orad to us in 2018.

“We have enjoyed watching the Sisense momentum in the past 12 months, the traction from its customers as well as from industry leading analysts for the company’s cloud native platform and new AI capabilities. That coupled with seeing more traction and success with leading companies in our portfolio and outside, led us to want to continue and grow our relationship with the company and lead this funding round,” said Jeff Horing, managing director at Insight Venture Partners, in a statement.

To note, Access Industries is an interesting backer which might also potentially shape up to be strategic, given its ownership of Warner Music Group, Alibaba, Facebook, Square, Spotify, Deezer, Snap and Zalando.

“Given our investments in market leading companies across diverse industries, we realize the value in analytics and machine learning and we could not be more excited about Sisense’s trajectory and traction in the market,” added Claltech’s Daniel Shinar in a statement.

Last year Insight Partners invested $500 million in cloud data management company Veeam. It apparently liked the company so much that today it announced it has acquired the Swiss startup for $5 billion.

Veeam helps customers with cloud data backup and disaster recovery. The company, which has been based in Baar, Switzerland, says that it had $1 billion in revenue last year. It boasts 365,000 customers worldwide, including 81% of the Fortune 500.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says that data management is an increasingly important tool for companies working with data on prem and in the cloud. “This is a smart move, as the data management space is rapidly consolidating. There’s a lot of investment in managing hybrid clouds, and data management is key to enterprise adoption,” Wang told TechCrunch.

The deal is coming with some major changes. Veeam’s EVP of Operations, William H. Largent, will be promoted to CEO. Danny Allan, who was VP of product strategy, will be promoted to CTO. In addition, the company will be moving its headquarters to the U.S. Veeam currently has around 1,200 employees in the U.S., but expects to expand that in the coming year.

New CEO Allan says in spite of their apparent success in the market, and the high purchase price, he believes under Insight’s ownership, the company can go further than it could have on its own. “While Veeam’s preeminence in the data management space, currently supporting 81% of the Fortune 500, is undeniable, this commitment from Insight Partners and deeper access to its unmatched business strategy [from its scale-up] division, Insight Onsite, will bring Veeam’s solutions to more businesses across the globe.”

Insight Onsite is Insight Partners’ strategy arm that is designed to help its portfolio companies be more successful. It provides a range of services in key business areas, like sales, marketing and product development.

Veeam has backup and recovery tools for both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, along with partnerships with a variety of large enterprise vendors, including Cisco, IBM, Dell EMC and HPE.

The company, which was founded in 2006, had a valuation of more than $1 billion prior to today’s acquisition, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter this year.

Outlier.org, a startup that allows students to take online classes for college credit, is announcing that it has raised $11.7 million in Series A funding.

GSV Ventures led the round, with participation from Harrison Metal, Tectonic Capital and Jackson Square Ventures. If you add this round to previously undisclosed seed funding led by Harrison Metal, Outlier has now raised a total of $16 million.

As part of the investment, GSV’s Julia Stiglitz is joining Outlier’s board of directors.

Founder and CEO Aaron Rasmussen previously helped to popularize online learning as co-founder and creative director at MasterClass. When Outlier launched last year, Rasmussen told me his goal is to address the growing cost of higher education by offering a more affordable alternative.

The alternative takes the form of entry-level college classes, starting with Calculus I and Introduction to Psychology, which are taught by professors and other instructors from institutions like Yale, MIT, Columbia and Cornell. They’re also shot specifically for online viewing, and they include dynamically generated problem sets and one-on-one tutoring.

Outlier only charges $400 per class (that includes all costs, including textbooks), which is much more affordable than a class you’d take at a residential college. And if you pass, you get transferable college credits from the University of Pittsburgh.

The startup held its first classes during the fall semester, and it now says that students in those classes “achieved a C grade or better at the same rate as those in comparable courses within traditional classrooms.”

Outlier also just announced that it’s extending its partnership with the University of Pittsburgh into the spring and summer terms of 2020.

“Our mission is to increase access to high-quality education and reduce student debt,” Rasmussen said in a statement. “With this funding and the insight that we have gained from our two pilot courses in the 2019 fall semester, we will continue building more intro-level courses and expanding to accommodate more students and more experts in their fields who can provide top-quality education at a reasonable cost.”

According to a Grand View Research report, the global medical imaging market is expected to grow from $33.7 billion in 2016 at 5.7% CAGR through 2025. Growth is expected to be driven by the...

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Karthee Madasamy was recorded in December 2019....

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Bux, the Amsterdam-based fintech that wants to make investing more accessible, has acquired the European “social” cryptocurrency investment platform Blockport.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Bux says the move paves the way for the company to launch its own branded cryptocurrency investment app. Dubbed “BUX Crypto,” it will be available in the nine countries in which Bux operates, and is planned to go live in Q1 this year.

In addition, we are told the founders and core team members of Blockport will join Bux and “take ownership” of the Bux cryptocurrency offering.

Once launched, BUX Crypto users will be able to access a variety of financial assets and markets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP. The Blockport Token will also be rebranded to the BUX Token.

“This will remain integrated in the platform and will also keep its trading discount function, which offers users a discount on trading fees,” says Bux. Users will also be able to use the BUX Token in the future when more premium features become available, such as “advanced social community features” (whatever that means).

The move is especially interesting in context of competitors such as Robinhood and, to some extent, Revolut, which, alongside Freetrade, compete with Bux in the U.K. in the fee-free trading space for public markets (well, once Robinhood launches in Europe), and soon crypto.

“Bux users have long expressed interest in investing in cryptocurrency and we have been presented with an opportunity to bring on a committed and enthusiastic team that aligns clearly with our mission at Bux,” says Nick Bortot, CEO and founder of Bux, in a statement. “This mission is to help young Europeans do more with their money. With BUX Zero and BUX X firmly positioned in Europe as the place to invest and trade, taking on a fully established cryptocurrency partner that can deliver the experience that our Bux users have come to expect was a natural fit for us.”

Meanwhile, Bux says it believes cryptocurrency will play a “vital role” in the future of the financial ecosystem. And that by including the crypto asset class, the company can position itself as a “360-degree solution” for all the investing needs of European millennials.

BUX Crypto will register with the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) as a cryptocurrency services provider.

Startup founders, set your sites on TC Sessions: Robotics+AI, which takes place on March 3, 2020. This annual day-long event draws the brightest minds and makers from these two industries — 1,500 attendees last year alone. And if you really want to make 2020 a game-changing year, grab yourself a demo table and showcase your early-stage robotics or AI startup in front of those big names and serious influencers.

Simply purchase an Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package — the price includes four tickets to the event, so bring your crew, flex your networking mojo and take in some of the many discussions throughout the day. Get yours before they’re gone — only eight left.

The day’s programming covers a wide range of crucial issues focused on robotics and AI. TC editors conduct in-depth interviews and moderate panel discussions and Q&As with the industries’ leading minds, makers, technologists, researchers and investors. You’ll enjoy workshops, demos and plenty of networking opportunities.

We’re talking topics that appeal to every hungry startup founder. Like a panel discussion on investing featuring Eric Migicovsky, Kelly Chen and Dror Berman — all top VCs in robotics and AI.

These folks have their fingers on the pulse of robotics, AI and automation. They’ll be on hand to share insights on future industry trends, talk about the most compelling startups and what they look for when it comes to funding.

We’ll be sharing details and the names of plenty more speakers in the coming weeks, so keep checking back. You can always check out last year’s program to get a sense of what to expect.

Did you know we have a new twist to this year’s Session? It’s a pitch competition — Pitch Night. It takes place the night before, it doesn’t cost a thing and it’s open to founders of early-stage startups focused on robotics and AI. There’s only one small hoop to jump through: apply here by February 1.

TC Sessions: Robotics+AI takes place on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley. Buy your Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package today, and come impress the top technologists, makers, thinkers, researchers and investors. Make 2020 your game-changing year.

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Shares of Chicago-based food delivery service Grubhub are sharply higher in regular trading today after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company has hired external advisers to explore its “strategic” options, inclusive of a possible sale.

Investors, heartened by the news, bid its equity up 17% as of the time of writing, valuing the firm at around $57 per share, or $5.2 billion.

The news comes during a difficult time for the company. Grubhub’s value fell sharply last October after it reported its third-quarter earnings. At the time, the company cited new and rising competition as growth-related difficulties, as well as noting that, in its view, “the supply innovations in online takeout have been played out and annual growth is slowing and returning to a more normal longer-term state.” It expected “low double digit” growth in the future.

Investors dumped its shares after reading the growth warnings, sending Grubhub equity from the high $50s per share to the mid-$30s. Since then, the company’s share price has recovered; with today’s news, Grubhub is effectively back to where it was before the Earnings Report from Hell.

So what?

All this may sound a bit boring, frankly, to regular TechCrunch readers. What do Grubhub’s troubles have to do with startups, private capital and high-growth companies? A lot, as it turns out.

Grubhub competes with a number of startup darlings, including Postmates (trapped in Schrodinger’s Exit at the moment), DoorDash (aggressively valued, under fire for payment practices and theoretically considering a direct listing despite unprofitability) and Uber Eats (a deeply unprofitable portion of Uber’s larger Red Ink empire).

So what happens to Grubhub could impact two unicorns looking to go public, and another post-IPO unicorn looking to shore up its income statement. As CNBC noted following the Grubhub report, “Uber shares also spiked on the news, as investors bet consolidation in the crowded food-delivery industry would help the company.”

Consolidation could assist remaining players squeeze out more margin from their market. More margin means smaller losses. And as smaller losses are hot now in the IPO world, the move could help some yet-private companies get public.

After years of beating each other up, one key player in the on-demand food delivery space is willing to sell, or join up with someone else. That’s big news, given the sheer scale of the venture bet on companies that compete with Grubhub.

Over the past several years, surgical has become one of the hottest — and best funded — categories in robotics. That’s thanks, in no small part, to the massive success of companies like Intuitive. Virtual Incision Corporation has also had a pretty solid fundraising streak since its 2006 founding.

Today the Lincoln, Neb. startup announced its latest funding round. The $20 million Series B+ brings its total funding up to $51 million. This time out, things were led by Bluestem Capital, with participation from PrairieGold Venture Partners and Genesis Innovation Group.

VIC’s primary product is the MIRA (“miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant”), a two-pound robot designed for minimally invasive abdominal surgery. Among is biggest value propositions is the relative portability of the product, versus many existing surgery robots, which are downright massive.

“We designed the MIRA Surgical Robotic Platform with the fundamental understanding that minimally invasive procedures offer tremendous benefits to patients,” president and CEO John Murphy said in a release. “We believe our portable and affordable abdominal robot has the potential to bring these benefits to many more patients. The planned IDE clinical study of MIRA is the critical next step for the company.”

The round will to helping prep the product for an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) with the FDA. VIC will also use it to help get the device ready for commercialization.

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1. ClassPass, finally a unicorn, raises $285 million in new funding

ClassPass launched in 2013 to give people an easier way to work out. The company partners with boutique fitness studios, letting users search through that inventory and book a class all from their smartphone.

Since launch, ClassPass has implemented several different business models, trying to find the right unit economics. More recently, the company has introduced variable pricing — instead of users paying a monthly fee for three, five or 10 classes per month, they could use their virtual ClassPass currency to sign up for classes and pay based on the demand around those classes.

2. Sonos sues Google over alleged patent infringement on smart speaker tech

The lawsuit specifically calls out Google for five alleged patent violations, including technologies that allow their speakers to wirelessly communicate and synchronize with each other. Sonos also claims that Amazon is infringing on its IP, but that the company can only afford to take on one tech titan.

3. App Store customer spending hit record $1.42B from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Eve

Apple this morning released a year-end retrospective of its Services business, which includes the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud and, new in 2019, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, Apple News+ and Apple Card. To date, App Store developers have earned more than $155 billion, Apple says — and a quarter of those earnings came in the last year alone.

4. Here’s everything Google announced at CES 2020

Just about everything Google is showing off at CES 2020 is focused around the company’s voice-powered AI helper, Google Assistant, with new features like webpage reading, scheduled actions, sticky notes and speed dial.

5. What to expect in digital media in 2020

As we start 2020, the media and entertainment sectors are in flux. New technologies are enabling new types of content, streaming platforms in multiple content categories are spending billions in their fight for market share and the interplay between social platforms and media is a central topic of global political debate. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Getaround is latest SoftBank portfolio company to announce layoffs

The Information, which first reported the news, pegs the layoffs at 150 employees, amounting to around a quarter of the company. In the report, CEO Sam Zaid seemed to lay at least some of the blame for the layoffs on the effects of SoftBank’s recent struggles.

7. Ben Horowitz will explain how to create and sustain culture at TC Early Stage SF

In addition to authoring multiple books with practical advice for entrepreneurs, Horowitz sits on the boards of 14 portfolio companies, including Okta, Lyft, Foursquare, Genius, Medium and Databricks. So there should be plenty to learn from him at TC Early Stage come April 28 in San Francisco.

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing on your platform? What are the top topics that people are teaching and what are the top topics that people are learning? Greg Smith: This is a question I get...

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