Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate was in SF, Alex was in Providence and there was a mountain of news to shovel through. If you’re here because we mentioned linking to a certain story in the show notes, that’s here. For everyone else, let’s get into the agenda.

We kicked off with a look at three new venture funds. In order:

Tusk Ventures: Tusk’s new fund, worth $70 million, is an effective doubling of its prior fund’s $36 million size. The politically savvy firm has put money into Coinbase, and other companies that deal with regulated industries.Sapphire Ventures: SAP’s former corporate venture fund Sapphire Ventures announced a whopping $1.4 billion fundraise this week. Sapphire may be one of or the most successful CVC spinouts to date.Moxxie: Katie Jacobs Stanton, known for co-founding #ANGELS, just closed her debut fund on $25 million. Kate chatted with her about her experience fundraising her very own fund, some of her previous investment and her plans for Moxxie Ventures, so there was plenty to unpack here.

From there we turned to the gender imbalance in the world of venture capital. This year, companies founded by women raised only 2.8% of capital. These not-so-stellar statistics are always worth digging into.

We then took a quick look at two different venture rounds, including ProdPerfect’s $13 million Series A and Pepper’s smaller $5.6 million round. ProdPerfect’s round was led by Anthos Capital (known for investing in Honey, which sold for $4 billion). The company has $2 million in ARR and is growing quickly. Pepper, formed by former Snap denizens, is working to help other startups lower their CAC costs in-channel. Smart.

And finally, Alex wanted to bring up his series on startups that reach the $100 million ARR threshold (Extra Crunch membership required). A first piece looking into the idea led to a few more submissions. There seem to be enough companies to name the grouping with something nice. Centurion? Centipede? Centaur? We’re working on it.

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) continues to struggle to meet market expectations. The recently reported second quarter results missed revenue forecasts despite beating earnings. The market was not pleased, and...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures. Karthee and I discussed issues related to startups selling deeptech to...

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The Midwest may not be known as the fashion capital of the world (or even the U.S.), but its place in the consumer retail firmament is secure through L Brands and its Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works subsidiaries.

Now, venture investors are investing $17.3 million to establish another tent-pole clothing brand in the region, with a new commitment to the St. Louis-based clothing brand Summersalt.

Founded by a former Washington University design professor and swimwear designer, Lori Coulter, and a marketing and branding consultant, Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin, Summersalt launched in 2017 with a line of direct-to-consumer swimwear.

In the past two years, the company has expanded beyond its $95 swimsuits to include cashmere sets, packable jackets and wrinkle-free pants.

Initially backed by the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, backed by AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution investment fund, the company has gone on to attract capital from Founders Fund, Lewis and Clark Ventures and Victress Capital .

The latest round was led by Mercato Partners, a Utah-based venture capital firm.

“We could not be more thrilled with the opportunity to lead Summersalt’s latest funding found, and partner with two passionate founders who have a clear vision, are mission driven and have a track record for accelerated performance,” said Joe Kaiser, a director with Mercato Partners, in a statement. “The product, brand, team and the incredible consumers make for a winning combination.”

Summersalt calls its line of clothing “travel wear” and used its footprint in the swimsuit market to expand its reach with other items that could be taken on trips to less-sun-drenched parts of the world.

“We are building a generation defining travel brand that goes beyond swimwear and apparel to create a community of curious women who love to explore,” said Coulter, the company’s president and chief executive in a statement. “Our unparalleled experience in apparel, deep supply chain expertise and fit-technology will  be at the foundation as we continue to scale and build a brand with highly profitable unit economics.”

Lenskart, an omni-channel retailer in India that sells eyewear products, said on Friday that it has raised $275 million in a new financing round from SoftBank Vision Fund as it looks to expand its business in the nation.

As part of the new financing round — dubbed Series G — some of the nine-year-old startup’s existing investors are selling their stake, said Peyush Bansal, founder and chief executive of Lenskart in an interview with TechCrunch. He did not name the investors, though.

SoftBank Vision Fund’s investment pushes Lenskart’s all-time raise to $456 million. A person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the new round values Lenskart at over $1.5 billion.

The nine-year-old startup, which began as an e-commerce service to sell spectacles, contact lenses and eye care products, has expanded to brick and mortar stores in recent years. Today, the startup has presence in over 500 stores across more than 100 cities in India, it said. Online sales still account for more than 60% of the startup’s overall revenue, however.

Bansal said the startup will use the fresh capital to improve its technology infrastructure and supply chain. “We are thrilled to have SoftBank Vision Fund with us in our journey. Their understanding of consumer and technology will help us build the next edition of Lenskart,” he said.

According to industry estimates, more than half a billion people in India are affected by poor vision and need eyeglasses, but only 170 million of them have opted to get their vision corrected.

Lenskart said it sees immense potential in growing within India, especially in smaller towns and villages that don’t have many trained optometrists. To reduce the friction, it offers free eye inspection tests to all potential customers. It also lets users book a couple of glasses and try them at home before committing a purchase. On its website, the startup uses a 3D AI model to allow users to check how different pairs of glasses would look on their face.

According to research firm Euromonitor International, India’s eyewear market is worth $4.6 billion — much of which remains unorganized.

Curve, the so-called “over-the-top” banking platform that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app, is launching a new feature to make it possible to send money to friends and contacts.

Dubbed “Curve Send,” the feature lets you send money from any of your bank accounts (via the debit cards you have linked to Curve) to any other account in more than 25 currencies. It does this by utilising the APIs of Visa and Mastercard, essentially turning the card networks into a single money transfer network via Curve as the intermediary.

“Curve Send instantly solves people’s problem of financial fragmentation by consolidating all their cards into one, eliminating the lengthy money transfer process experienced by most customers when they want to send money to their friends or peers using multiple bank accounts or multiple currencies,” says the London-based fintech.

To transfer money via Curve Send, you simply open the Curve app, choose a contact and amount and then select which of your linked bank cards you want to send the money from. The recipient will then get notified and be asked to take a photo of their bank card, and Curve will send the money directly to their bank via the card network.

Curve says it doesn’t charge fees for sending or receiving payments via Curve Send. It will also handle FX, too, at a claimed “mid-market” rate with no fees (capped at £500 per month for Curve users on its free plan, and unlimited for Curve Black and Curve Metal).

In a brief email exchange with Curve founder and CEO Shachar Bialick, he said that “Curve is basically operating like an exchange” in that it brings Visa and Mastercard together, with Curve powering communication between the two card networks for peer-to-peer payments. “We’ve done tests for the past two months and people love it,” he says.

Adds Diego Rivas, Curve’s head of OS Product, in a statement: “Customers want to send money to their friends and family with just a few touches. But with so many different options and the rise of challenger banks, the process is unnecessarily complicated and customers end up having 3-4 apps just to send money. We wanted to make this whole process ten times easier for our customers. Now they have one simple, smart platform which can move money from any account to any account, securely and fee free.”

Do you remember as a kid going to the grocery store with your parents and being just totally overwhelmed by the bright, loud packaging of products on shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle?

I certainly do. Each product had a brand — you’d recognize the Kix by its bright red box and Tide by its loud orange bottle. Every package screamed its brand name at you.

Branded packaging as we know it hasn’t been around that long. While people have been packaging goods for millennia, trademarked printed boxes, tins and shrink-wrapped containers were only invented in the late 1800s — less than 150 years ago, beginning with Uneeda Biscuits around 1896.

When branded packaging was invented, and up until very recently, its purpose and value to nearly every industry made a ton of good sense. The average consumer would shop in a catalog, browsing ads and offerings, or in a store, perusing shelves of products. The more a product stood out and set itself apart, the more memorable it would be and the more likely it would be purchased. Good packaging made products easy to recommend and spread by sharing visually.

And then, the internet came along.

Our team recently launched our new studio product, Regular, a service directed at small businesses hitting their growth inflection point. As we began to design our own website and work on branding, we did a lot of research into branding trends for consumer packaged goods, and what we uncovered was surprising.

We found was that there is a surprising movement towards “unbranding” — specifically choosing not to create a strong association between a product and its maker. Instead of bright packaging, large logos and stamped products, many companies are now going the other direction by operating without logos and offering minimal (or no) packaging.

One of the earliest companies to adopt this mindset was Japanese home goods store MUJI, whose name literally means “No Brand” (it doesn’t get more literal than that). Most of its products come unpackaged with just a small price tag, or in minimal packaging with a single informational label (e.g., “lotion,” “body soap”) to identify its contents.

But MUJI has been since the 1980s, so why are we talking about this now?

A company building a very high-tech glove has just gotten its hands on some new money.

HaptX is building a sensor-packed glove for VR and robotics applications that simulates haptic and resistance feedback for enterprise users.

The Seattle startup has raised $12 million in new funding from Mason Avenue Investments, Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, Upheaval Investments, Votiv Capital, Keiretsu Forum, Keiretsu Capital, NetEase and Amit Kapur of Dawn Patrol Ventures. HaptX has now raised $19 million to date.

The company says this funding will go toward the company’s next generation of glove hardware.

I got a chance to demo the company’s glove last year and there are certainly some bizarre experiences that are enabled by the product, which uses an external pneumatic box to expand and contract air pockets inside a glove form factor to make it feel like the virtual object you’re holding onto in VR is actually in your hand.

Needless to say at this point, the virtual reality industry’s consumer ambitions haven’t quite panned out as expected. The enterprise space has found slightly more enduring success, though much of the enterprise use hasn’t expanded too far beyond “internal innovation hubs” and pilot programs. HaptX seems to have zeroed in on the same enterprise customer base as other VR startups, with a lot of its customers using the gloves in design and visualization processes. HaptX has moved away from marketing itself as a VR-only company and has expanded into robotics, reshaping its offering into a solution framed by real-world input and real-world output.

Alongside the funding announcement, HaptX is sharing that it has partnered with Advanced Input Systems to collaborate on “product development, manufacturing, and go-to-market.”

The company is focused on enterprise and unfortunately doesn’t seem to be building a mech suit for Jeff Bezos, although they sent me a great gif of him demoing the technology earlier this year at a conference.

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

Today, we’re digging into a host of data concerning the East Coast venture capital scene, specifically looking into the performance of its two key startup markets.

It’s 12 degrees Fahrenheit as I write this in my office situated between Boston and New York City — a perfect vantage point for studying these vibrant tech ecosystems. Let’s see what the data tells us.

The information we’re examining today comes from White Star Capital (often via CBInsights), a venture capital firm that describes itself as “transatlantic” and takes part in seed, Series A and Series B rounds around the globe. The group last raised a $180 million fund that TechCrunch covered here, noting at the time that capital pool was “oversubscribed from an initial target of $140 million” and would be invested into “around 20 new companies from the new fund, writing opening cheques of between $1 million and $6 million.”

With boots on the ground in New York, White Star cares about the East Coast, so the fund’s put dossier on the region isn’t unexpected. What it includes, however, is.

We’ll start with NYC and its surprising 2019 before turning to Boston, digging into its super-giant venture totals and hearing from Founder Collective’s Eric Paley on the state of things in urban Massachusetts.

New York City

White Star’s report details record-breaking figures for NYC’s current year. Off of effectively flat deal volume (New York City sees around 775 venture deals per year at the moment, or a little more than two per day), the overgrown town should set record venture dollar volume in 2019.

Observe the following, astounding chart detailing the abnormality of 2019 from a comparative venture dollar perspective:

By smashing 2017’s local maximum, 2019 appears set to crush the city’s record — and rich — venture investment totals. The graphic also manages to point out (somewhat embarrassingly) that Gotham will manage to best a number of European countries’ aggregate venture dollar investments by itself this year.

That’s is a useful bit of context as in the United States, New York City is always Number Two to Silicon Valley. But, this chart argues, being number two in the number-one market is still a hell of a lot of capital.

Putting New York City’s venture into even sharper comparative perspective, observe the following table:

Scott Wolfe, chief executive officer of Levelset, the New Orleans-based money management and payment startup for contractors in the construction industry, always thought he’d be in the grocery business.

His family owned a number of grocery stores around New Orleans and he was readying himself to go into the family business when Hurricane Katrina hit.

As the family business faced significant losses in their stores, the construction and contracting service they’d built to develop the land the stores were on had a tremendous opportunity. Within the span of a year, Wolfe had pivoted the family’s operations to focus on renovations and restorations and launched fully into construction.

It was during that time that Wolfe saw the need for some sort of software service that could manage cash flow and payment for the tens to hundreds of small business contractors involved in getting a project done.

So he built Levelset to be that service.

Now the company has closed on $30 million in financing from Horizons Ventures, the investment firm backed by Li Ka-shing, who is one of the world’s wealthiest billionaire property developers.

When Bart Swanson, an advisor to Horizons, met Levelset through a mutual friend who did some investing around the New Orleans-based Tulane University ecosystem, he immediately felt it was an opportunity that the Horizons investment committee would understand.

“This is a global issue,” says Swanson. “Sixty-four percent of construction businesses fail in their first five years because they have nowhere to turn for help,” when it comes to ensuring payment.

For now, Levelset is focused on digitizing billing and payments and providing insights into who is actually on a job site and the responsibilities that those workers have on site, according to Wolfe.

“There’s a ton of investment that has gone into the field,” says Wolfe. “What has seen a lack of as prolific an investment are things behind the scenes outside of the field that happen in the office. This is the accountants and administrative workers who have to take the information that’s in the field and turn it into money.”

For developers like Cheung Kong Holdings, Li’s development business, the promise of Levelset’s software is a huge boon. The construction industry runs on small businesses that lack software and services to process payments quickly. The time it takes to deal with paperwork can delay a project and ultimately cost developers money.

Horizons was joined in the new round by S3 Ventures, Operating Venture Capital, Altos Ventures and Darren Bechtel of Brick & Mortar Ventures. As a result of the investment, Swanson will take a seat on the company’s board.

In a recent survey of contractors by Levelset and T-Sheets by Quickbooks, more than half of contractors stated they were not paid on time and had significant cash flow challenges, and more than 75% craved more transparency in the payment process. This is no surprise, given PWC’s working capital studies in the past decade demonstrating that construction industry payment speeds are the slowest of all (83+ days). 

“The effort required to get paid, and the cash stress put on contractors is unbelievable,” said Wolfe, in a statement. “The world’s biggest industry is full of small and medium businesses who are the fabric of our economy. It’s crucial that they can do their work without worrying about cash.”

Leapfin, a startup selling corporate finance tooling, announced a $4.5 million round this morning. The funding event was led by Bowery Capital, and included dollars from a number of former technology executives.

Before its newly announced investment, the company had raised just a small seed round. The small capital amounts may seem inconsequential, but they’re more strategic than anything. According to Leapfin CEO Raymond Lau, the company is running lean and keeping an eye on profitability.

After being founded in 2015 and starting commercialization of its product in 2018, the company is stepping a bit further out of the shadows this morning. Let’s talk about what it does, and why both its product and business philosophy are neat.

What it does

Leapfin helps companies track their revenue and cost of revenue expenses.

In more human terms, Leapfin helps companies track sales, and how much it costs to create and distribute its goods and services to customers. “Cost of revenue,” also known (roughly) as “cost of goods sold,” may sound like a jargony accounting term, but in reality it’s a bedrock business concept that anyone involved with startups needs to understand.

Let’s explain why. Once you deduct costs of revenue from revenue itself, you’re left with gross profit. That’s what businesses use to cover their operating costs. And, crucially, the larger a company’s gross profit is in relation to its revenue, the higher margin its revenue is; investors love high gross margin revenue.

In part, their high gross margins are why software startups are worth so much.

Back to Leapfin, its product is a shot at making business a more limpid process. In a call with TechCrunch, Leapfin’s Lau explained that many companies only have “one-in-thirty” visibility into their operations; that business owners only manage to fully collate their revenue and cost of revenue results monthly, meaning that the rest of the time they are flying at least partially blind.

The goal of Leapfin, according to Lau, is to provide a “single source of truth” for ongoing business results, using “robotic process automation” to help companies cut down on repetitive work. So Lepafin does two things: helps companies know where they stand financially, and saves them time on rote tasks that tend to come with accounting.

The company is pretty happy with its ability to sell its product so far. Lau told TechCrunch that it has found “very, very strong product market fit,” for example. Asked to describe when he felt that Leapfin had gelled with the market, Lau explained that in his view, product market fit is more “process” than a “tipping point,” but that he was confident in Leapfin’s product-market harmony when its customers began referring other companies (to a product that costs six-figures annually), and its sales cycle tightened.

Why the company is cool

Leapfin is run a bit differently from most SaaS companies that we cover. Instead of raising lots to invest in blow-out sales and marketing expenses, Leapfin is running pretty lean.

TechCrunch asked Lau why he only raised $4.5 million in the new round, which, given the product progress his company has made, felt modest. He said that the Leapfin staff “are outsiders in a way,” and that while his “peers are raising tens of millions,” his company could be profitable by the third quarter of next year. So Leapfin doesn’t need more money, and selling shares ahead of growth is an expensive way to raise capital.

Lau also said, however, that his company’s small raise “doesn’t mean that [it] won’t raise more down the road.” Another check in 2020 to ward off any downturn fears would make some sense. But Leapfin probably won’t sweat a crash too much, as the company keeps profitability and cash flow positivity “in sight,” according to its CEO.

Despite that, the company expects to hire quickly, expanding from around 20 people today to 50 by the end of next year. What we need next from Leapfin is an ARR number so we can vet just how much product market fit it really has.

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Sramana Mitra: Where has Tennessee been an advantage? It sounds like you’re not scaling on the basis of these telephone calls. But you had to pound the pavements from a sales point of view through an...

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“We were in the back washing blenders so they could keep taking Snackpass orders,” recalls co-founder and CEO Kevin Tan. The team from order-ahead food startup Snackpass was willing to get their hands dirty to keep up with demand at one of their first restaurant partners, Tropical Smoothie Cafe on the Yale University campus.

Why were people so eager to pay for takeout through Snackpass? Because it lets them earn loyalty points to redeem for free food — both for themselves and as gifts for their friends. Sending people Snackpass rewards became a new way to flirt or show gratitude at Yale. And through the Venmo-esque Snackpass social feed, users could keep up with a fresh form of gossip while discovering restaurants.

“Anywhere someone is standing in line to order something, we can solve that with Snackpass,” says Tan. “Consumer spending will be social in the future.”

That future is already taking hold. Two years after launch, Snackpass is on 11 college campuses across the U.S., often boasting a 75% penetration rate amongst students within six months. It takes a cut of every order and keeps margins high because users pick up the food themselves rather than waiting for delivery. While other food ordering startups battle to offer discounts as marauding users deal-hop between apps, Snackpass keeps users coming back through its loyalty program.

Its momentum, retention and opportunity to expand from colleges to dense cities has now won Snackpass a $21 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen. The round was joined by other heavy hitters, like Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Inspired Capital and First Round, plus angels, including musician Nas, NFL star Larry Fitzgerald and legendary talent agent Michael Ovitz. Building on Snackpass’ $2.7 million seed, the cash will go toward hiring up with the goal of reaching 100 campuses in two years.

“Takeout is an important market because it’s huge — also in the hundreds of billions — and fragmented,” writes Chen. “The opportunity complements the food delivery market in a big way: For the average restaurant, there are 6 takeout orders for every delivery order!”

“Its own language”

Like many of the best startup ideas, Snackpass was born out of the founders’ own needs at Yale. Slow and expensive food delivery services didn’t make sense for smaller orders like a coffee, ice cream or a pepperoni slice on campuses small enough for customers to walk or bike to the restaurant. Tan says, “I was dabbling in several side projects, including helping a friend who managed a local pizza shop build a website to help better reach the local student community.” He realized how tough it was for restaurants around colleges to retain and reward customers, especially as regulars graduated.

Tan joined up with neuroscience student and Thiel Fellow Jamie Marshall, who became Snackpass’ COO. “I had grown up calling in every order,” Marshall tells me. “Waiting in line didn’t make sense for me. I used every order-ahead platform and thought this was the future.” Jonathan Cameron, a serial entrepreneur who’d built his own order-ahead app called Happy Hour, rounded out the founding team.

Snackpass offers users a list of nearby restaurants from which they can order ahead, with special tags for ones offering deals. Menu items include counts of how many people have ordered them and how many rewards points you’ll earn buying them. You pay in the app, skip the line at the restaurant and grab your order from the counter. Each restaurant can configure their own rewards system with how much items earn and cost, such as giving you a free coffee for every 10 you buy.

Users can then spend their points to get themselves free menu items, or send a virtual Snackpass gift card to any of their phone contacts or people they find via search. This gives Snackpass a way to grow virally that most food apps lack. Thankfully, you can block people on Snackpass if they get creepy showering you with gifts.

Each purchase and gift on Snackpass shows up in its social feed unless you make it private. “That’s become its own language. People use it to flirt with each other, or bond and connect with someone new,” Tan tells me. “There’s some drama or intrigue there seeing who’s sending gifts to who. People even look at the feed in the way they look at someone’s Instagram to see what’s going on with them.”

Snackpass has also done some integration work specifically for the college market that sets it apart from other order-ahead and delivery services. It can sync with students’ campus meal plans so they can spend them through the app. And student groups from clubs to fraternities can pre-load and replenish accounts for their members. Snackpass works with the same organizations to launch on new campuses. “We host parties, sponsor tailgates and make it feel like a student-led effort so it grows organically across campus communities,” Tan explains. “These efforts, combined with the social feed which would give anyone FOMO if they’re not in the app.”

Network effect commerce

With all the competition in the space, restaurants can be inundated with apps to manage, some of which just exacerbate spikes in demand that overwhelm kitchens. “There is certainly a risk that local restaurants will start to get platform fatigue, finding that using some apps will take too big of a bite out of their margins,” says Tan. That’s why Snackpass built features that let restaurants batch orders and control how many come in at a certain time so dine-in patients and non-app users aren’t stuck with unreasonable delays.

Snackpass has recruited talent from Uber Eats and an advisor from Yelp’s executive team to help it navigate the tricky SMB sales process. One ace up its sleeve is that it can offer to send push notifications to announce recently signed partners or specials they’re launching, driving the new customers restaurants are desperate for. Tan says his startup is considering if it could charge for this kind of promotion down the line. Most customers who walk into restaurants are effectively in incognito mode, but Snackpass provides its partners with analytics to help them improve their own businesses.

“At the surface level there is a lot of competition in this space,” Tan admits. “The social aspect of the app has been the key differentiator for us. Other companies have been focused on creating the fastest, cheapest, most efficient delivery service, but it’s really hard to make those margins work and consumers are trained to shop around on different apps to get the best deal or fastest delivery time . . . Eating food is supposed to be fun and social, and our generation grew up online and in social networks. We’re combining the social aspect of eating with the utility of order ahead, which has helped us build loyalty and enable retention amongst our users.”

It will still be a battle to overtake long-running competitors like Allset, Level Up and Ritual, plus incumbents that offer takeout pickup like Uber and Grubhub. Logistics is a cut-throat business, and plenty of startups have already failed in the restaurant loyalty space.

Having Andreessen Horowitz’s support could give Snackpass some extra firepower. “A16z has better support and services for their portfolio companies than any other VC we’ve come across and they’ve delivered,” Tan tells me. “We knew that Andrew Chen understands growth and marketplaces from his blog and his Twitter.” That’s critical in a crowded space where such a precise balance of customer acquisition and lifetime value is necessary.

Snapchat, TikTok and Fortnite have all tapped into the youth market with a lighthearted nature that keeps users coming back until they develop network effect. Snackpass is managing to do the same, not with a messaging app or game, but a commerce platform. “We play up creativity, silliness and delight in areas where most companies focus on utility and convenience,” Tan concludes. “We built Snackpass for ourselves and our friends. We’ve carried on this philosophy: if something makes us laugh, we put it in the app.”

Risk and compliance startup Osano, which earlier this year debuted on the Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, has raised $5.4 million in its Series A round.

The company told TechCrunch that the round was led by LiveOak Venture Partners and Next Coast Ventures, both of which invested in the company’s seed round. Its Series A fundraise also included participation from several individual investors, putting Osano’s total amount raised to date at $8.4 million.

The Austin, Texas-based startup bills itself as a privacy platform that helps businesses understand and address their compliance with state and international privacy laws, like Europe’s GDPR and California’s new statewide privacy law, set to take effect on January 1. One of the company’s flagship features is providing cookie and consent management on customer websites, allowing users to choose their privacy settings in their own language.

To date, the turnkey platform is used by more than 750,000 companies — including some Fortune 500 companies — to secure over 3.5 million websites.

Osano plans to use the new funds to further invest in research and development, marketing and hiring to meet “growing demand” for its service, the company said.

“We are proud to continue into the next round with our original investors,” said Arlo Gilbert, Osano’s co-founder and chief executive. “Heading into 2020, we are moving quickly to add talent to our growing team and to deepen Osano’s position as a leading data privacy platform.”

“There is a definitive need to bring transparency to the process of how companies deal with privacy, and we are very excited about taking on this challenge to empower both individuals and organizations,” said Gilbert.

According to a recent report by Payoneer, earnings for freelancers in the US grew by 78% in 2018, making it the fastest growing freelance market in the world. The growth of freelancers is attributed...

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We’ve discussed all kinds of creative bootstrapping mechanisms in this series. My #BigIdeas2020 contribution is yet another technique that I believe would be particularly relevant and powerful going...

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