French startup Yubo has raised a $12.3 million funding round led by Iris Capital and Idinvest Partners. Existing investors Alven, Sweet Capital and Village Global are also participating. The startup has managed to attract 25 million users over the years — there are currently tens of thousands of people signing up to the platform every day.

Yubo is building a social media app for young people under 25 with one focus in particular on helping teenagers meeting new people and creating friendships. Compared to the most popular social media apps out there, Yubo isn’t focused on likes and followers.

Instead, the app helps you build your own tiny little community of friends. Yubo wants to become a familiar place where you belong, even if high school sucks for instance.

More details in my previous profile of the company:

In addition to meeting new people, you can start conversations and create live video streams to hang out together. Each stream represents a micro-community of people interacting through both video and a live chat.

Since 2015, Yubo users have sent each other 10 billion messages and started 30 million live video streams. Overall, the user base has generated 2 billion friendships.

Soon, users will be able to turn on screensharing to show something on their phones. And at some point in 2020, Yubo should release Yubo Web in order to expand Yubo beyond your smartphone and enable new use cases, such as video game live streaming.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to attract users in new markets. Yubo is mostly active in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Nordic countries, Australia and France. Up next, the startup is going to focus on Japan and Brazil. The company plans to hire 35 new people.

When it comes to a business model, the company started monetizing its app in October 2018 with in-app purchases to unlock new features. In 2019, the startup has generated $10 million in revenue.

Yubo will also use this funding round to improve safety. It’s a never-ending process, especially when there are young people using your platform. The company already partners with Yoti for age verification. Users will soon be able to create a blocklist of certain words to customize their experience.

In addition to continuous work on flagging tools and live-stream moderation algorithms in order to detect inappropriate content, the company will also increase the size of its moderation team. The company has also put together a safety board with Alex Holmes, Annie Mullins, Travis Bright, Mick Moran, Dr. Richard Graham and Anne Collier.

Fourteen startups presented onstage today at Disrupt Berlin, giving live demos and rapid-fire presentations on their origin stories and business models, then answering questions from our expert judges.

Now, with the help of those judges, we’ve narrowed the group down to five startups working on everything from productivity to air pollution.

These finalists will be presenting again tomorrow (at 2pm Berlin time, viewable on the TechCrunch website or in-person at Disrupt) in front of a new set of judges. The winner will receive $50,000 and custody of the storied Disrupt Cup.

Here are the finalists:

Gmelius

The startup has raised funding from Dominic Smales, the CEO of influencer marketing company Gleam Futures; Bidstack co-founder Simon Mitchell; and Melody VR founder and COO Steve Hancock. Smales is also leading the creator board.

While a beta version of Wotch is already live, Sadler and Willson plan to launch a revamped version of the service early next year. You can get an early preview of the changes by using the promotional code “TECHCRUNCH.”

Machine learning is a complex process. You build a model, test it in laboratory conditions, then put it out in the world. After that, how do you monitor how well it’s tracking what you designed it to do? Arthur wants to help, and today it emerged from stealth with a new platform to help you monitor machine learning models in production.

The company also announced it had closed a $3.3 million seed round, which closed in August.

Arthur CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel says that Arthur is analogous to a performance-monitoring platform like New Relic or DataDog, but instead of monitoring your systems, it’s tracking the performance of your machine learning models.

“We are an AI monitoring and explainability company, which means when you put your models in production, we let you monitor them to know that they’re not going off the rails, that you can explain what they’re doing, that they’re not performing badly and are not being totally biassed — all of the ways models can go wrong,” Wenchel explained.

Data scientists build machine learning models and test them in the lab, but as Wenchel says, when that model leaves the controlled environment of the lab, lots can go wrong, and it’s hard to keep track of that. “Models always perform well in the lab, but then you put them out in the real world and there is often a drop-off in performance — in fact, almost always. So being able to measure and monitor that is a capability people really need,” he said.

Interestingly enough, AWS announced a new model-monitoring tool last week as part of SageMaker Studio. IBM also announced a similar tool for models built on the Watson platform earlier this year, but Wenchel says the involvement of the big guys could work to his company’s advantage as his product is platform-agnostic. “Having a neutral third party for your monitoring that works equally well across stacks is going to be pretty valuable,” he said.

As for the funding, it was co-led by Work-Bench and Index Ventures, with participation from Hunter Walk at Homebrew, Jerry Yang at AME Ventures and others.

Jonathan Lehr, a general partner at Work-Bench, sees a company with a lot of potential. “We regularly speak with ML executives from Fortune 1000 companies and one of their biggest concerns as they become more data-driven is model behavior in production. The Arthur platform is by far the best solution we’ve seen for AI monitoring and transparency…” he said.

The company, which is based in New York City, currently has 10 people. It launched in 2018, and has been heads-down working on the product since. Today marks the release of the product publicly.

According to a Market Study research report, the global cloud database market is estimated to grow from $7.63 billion this year to $19.8 billion by 2025 at an annualized growth rate of over 50%....

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: Rendezvous Online with Sramana Mitra November 5, 2019

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Sramana Mitra: What does the opportunity landscape look like? What are the white spaces in the scope of what you are watching carefully? Kelly White: This isn’t new, but in some ways, it is new....

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Wefox Group, the Berlin-based insurtech startup behind the consumer-facing insurance app and carrier One and the insurance platform Wefox, is disclosing $110 million in a second tranche of Series B funding. Sources tell TechCrunch that this gives the company a pre-money valuation of $1.65 billion. WeFox Group declined to comment on the financials.

The Series B extension is led by Omers Ventures, the venture capital arm of Canadian pension fund Omers. Merian Chrysalis and Samsung Catalyst Fund, also participated, along with existing investors.

It follows an earlier Series B of $125 million in March, led by Abu Dhabi government-owned Mubadala Ventures, with participation from Chinese investor Creditease. Wefox’s other existing investors include Target Global, Salesforce Ventures, Seedcamp, Idinvest and Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher’s investment vehicle Sound Ventures.

In a call, Wefox co-founder and CEO Julian Teicke told me the Wefox Group has grown revenues to over $100 million, and now services more than 500,000 customers, claiming that this makes it Europe’s “leading insurtech”.

He also revealed that the company has grown to 400 employees, which, he says means he can no longer remember every employee’s name. “That sucks,” he tells me, revealing that it was only this summer when the company was smaller that he won a company-wide bet for being able to do just that.

Breaking WeFox Group’s revenue down further, the company’s direct to consumer insurance brand, One Insurance, has increased annual revenues by nearly tenfold this year to $30 million. It also claims to be Germany’s fastest growing provider for household and private liability insurance.

Perhaps more significantly, Teicke says One’s loss ratio (what percentage of premiums earned is subsequently paid out in claims) is below 40%, which is much better than the industry as a whole. He pinned that on WeFox’s use of data, which, he says, enables One to understand risk in a much more technology-driven and granular way.

Meanwhile, Teicke says the new funding will be used to continue ramping up international expansion in 2020. Wefox is active in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain, and I understand has quietly launched in Italy.

Adds Henry Gladwyn, principal at OMERS Ventures, in a statement: “We are thrilled to continue our support of Julian and the incredibly ambitious Wefox Group team as they continue to disrupt and re-invent the insurance industry. We believe wefox Group’s approach to revolutionizing insurance – empowering the consumer and prioritizing solutions for secured data-driven experiences – will deliver significant value for the entire trade”.

Electric vehicle startup Nio is laying off 141 people at its North American headquarters. According to a filing from Employment Development Department of California, the employees at its San Jose office received notice on December 6.

Nio, whose global headquarters are in Shanghai, announced last month that it is partnering with Intel’s Mobileye to develop autonomous vehicles for consumers. Under the agreement, Nio will engineer and produce a self-driving system designed by Mobileye.

The Intel partnership was a spot of bright news after a difficult year for Nio. Nio’s third quarter saw an uptick in sales, thanks in part to competitive pricing, but its share prices have fallen about 78% since the end of February.

The company reported losses in the first and second quarters of the year and in June, voluntarily recalled 5,000 of its ES8 electric SUVs after battery fires in China, impacting its production and delivery. CEO William Li said during the company’s earnings report in September that it would implement cost-cutting measures, including reducing its workforce from 9,900 people down to 7,800 by the end of the third quarter. Nio has offices in 11 cities, including Beijing, London and Munich.

Zetwerk, an Indian business-to-business marketplace for manufacturing items, has closed a significantly large financing round as it scales its operations in the nation and also helps local businesses find customers overseas.

The 18-month-old startup said on Wednesday it has raised $32 million in a Series B financing round led by Lightspeed and Greenoaks Capital. Zetwerk co-founder and chief executive Amrit Acharya told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup has also raised about $14.2 million in debt from a consortium of banks, and others.

Existing investors Accel, Sequoia India and Kae Capital also participated in the round, which pushes the Bangalore-based startup’s total raise to date to about $41 million. Vaibhav Gupta, co-founder of business-to-business marketplace Udaan, and Maninder Gulati, one of the top executives at budget lodging startup Oyo also participated.

Zetwerk was founded by Acharya, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Rahul Sharma and Vishal Chaudhary last year. The startup connects OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and EPC (engineering procurement construction) customers with manufacturing small-businesses and enterprises.

Unlike the more common e-commerce firms we come across every day, Zetwerk sells goods such as parts of a crane, doors, chassis of different machines and ladders. The startup operates to serve customers in fabrication, machining, casting and forging businesses. Currently, Zetwerk works with more than 100 enterprises and 1,500 small and medium-sized businesses. It delivers more than 15,000 parts each month.

“These are all custom-made products,” explained Acharya. “Nobody has a stock of such inventories. You get the order, you find manufacturers and workshops that make them. Our customers are companies that are in the business of building infrastructure.”

“We index these small workshops and understand the kinds of products they have built before. These indexes help bigger companies discover and work with them,” he added.

Once a firm has placed an order, Zetwerk allows them to keep a tab on the progress of manufacturing and then the shipping. This “hand-holding” is crucial, as in this line of business, manufacturing and shipping typically take more than two to three months.

Zetwerk has also enabled manufacturers in India to discover and find clients overseas. Today, manufacturers on the platform export their goods to North America and Southeast Asia, Acharya said. “India has a lot of depth in manufacturing, but much of it has not been tapped well,” he said.

Helping these manufacturing workshops find clients online is still a new phenomenon in the nation. Acharya said Zetwerk largely competes with domain project consultants in the offline work. “They specialize in certain products and geographies. So let’s say someone wanted to buy a machine XYZ in Orissa, they reach out to consultants who help them find workshops and estimate how much time it would take to get the project done.”

According to industry reports, manufacturing today accounts for 14% of India’s GDP. But the nation lacks a supporting ecosystem to execute projects in an efficient manner.

Vaibhav Agarwal, a partner at Lightspeed, said it was unusual to come across a market that is as large as $40 billion to $60 billion in India and global trade-tailwinds that creates opportunity to serve international demand.

The startup plans to infuse portions of the fresh capital into expanding its international operations. Acharya did not share exactly how many clients it has outside of India but said exports currently account for less than 5% of the startup’s GMV, or gross merchandize value.

He said the startup will continue to focus on helping Indian manufacturers find clients outside, as it is better suited to address this, as opposed to helping Indian companies find manufacturers overseas.

The startup will also explore helping its manufacturing workshops access working capital, though Acharya cautioned that it is not something that would happen anytime soon.

In a statement, Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel, said, “the use of technology in project planning, procurement, audits, and supply chain transparency is the core offering of Zetwerk which is completely original. Accel is very fortunate to be part of Zetwerk journey since very early on.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Away CEO is stepping down in light of reports of toxic culture

Steph Korey is stepping down from her role as CEO, although she will remain on-board as executive chairman. She’ll be replaced by Lululemon COO Stuart Haselden.

The timing of the announcement comes just a few days after The Verge published an in-depth story about management practices at the luggage startup, which included extensive quotes from Korey’s Slack messages. However, the company says that the executive search has been underway for months.

2. VSCO acquires video editing startup Rylo

The photo-sharing app behind the 2019 meme craze “VSCO girls” has acquired Rylo, a video editing startup founded by the original developer of Instagram’s Hyperlapse. Founded in 2015, Rylo is best known for its 360° camera capable of creating cinematic video in 5.8K resolution.

3. Apple Card’s interest-free iPhone installment plan goes live, now with 6% back on Apple holiday purchases

The company already announced its plans for the program — allowing cardholders to purchase a new iPhone, then pay it back over 24 months with no interest — but now it’s actually opening up to all Apple Card customers. In addition, Apple is sweetening the deal with 6% back on all Apple purchases made from December 10 through December 31.

4. India proposes new rules to access its citizens’ data

India has proposed new rules that would require companies to obtain consent from Indian citizens before collecting and processing their personal data. At the same time, the new rules also state that companies would have to hand over “non-personal” user data to the government, which would also hold the power to collect any data about its citizens without consent.

5. Waze adds unplowed road reporting feature for better awareness of winter driving hazards

Waze says it developed this update after it received a recommendation from the Virginia Department of Transportation, working with the municipal agency through its “Waze for Cities Data” partnership and data-sharing program.

6. Jiji raises $21M for its Africa online classifieds business

Buyers and sellers use Jiji to make purchases ranging from real estate to car sales. The classifieds site says it has 2 million listings on its Africa platforms and hit 8 million unique monthly users in 2018.

7. AWS is sick of waiting for your company to move to the cloud

AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference last week in Las Vegas, where CEO Andy Jassy made it clear he’s tired of the slow pace of change inside the enterprise. The company also announced some big bets designed to accelerate cloud adoption. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

We’ve talked about securing your startup, the need to understand phishing risks and how not to handle a data breach. But we haven’t yet discussed one of the more damaging threats that all businesses large and small face: the insider threat.

The insider threat is exactly as it sounds — someone within your organization who has malicious intent. Your employees will be one of your biggest assets, but human beings are the weakest link in the security chain. Your staff are already in a privileged position — in the sense that they are in a place where they have access to far more than they would as an outsider. That means taking data, either maliciously or inadvertently, is easier for staff than it might be for a hacker.

“Organizations need to understand that the threats coming from inside their organizations are as critical as, if not more dangerous than, the threats coming from the outside,” said Stephanie Carruthers, a social engineering expert who serves as chief people hacker at IBM X-Force Red, a division of Big Blue that looks for breaches in IoT devices before — and after — they go to market.

Insider risks can become active threats for many reasons. Some individuals may become disgruntled, some want to blow the whistle on wrongdoing and others can be approached (or even manipulated) by career criminals over debts or other matters in their private life.

There are plenty of examples, many not too far back in recent history.

Back in 2017, Y Combinator began offering a 10-week, once-a-year online course called Startup School. Part forum community and part video classroom, the program offers a variety of lectures on topics like raising money or evaluating startup ideas, as led by YC partners and other entrepreneurs from their network.

Three years and 40,000+ students later, they’re switching up the schedule; beginning in 2020, Startup School will now be running multiple times per year. It’s also shifting from being a 10-week program to being an eight-week program.

In its first few years, Y Combinator set a hard cap on the number of founders it accepted into each Startup School session. After acceptance letters were accidentally sent to the wrong teams in 2018, the company opted to let in everyone who applied, modifying the program to focus less on personal advising and more on small peer-to-peer advice groups. It sounds like they’re sticking with this strategy moving forward, as an FAQ on the Startup School site notes that they “do not have a limit on the number of participants” with this year’s sessions.

Did you take part in Startup School previously and are curious if it’s worth doing again? YC says that while “a few lectures will be updated or replaced,” the video content of 2020’s Startup School will be largely the same as 2019. The structure of the course itself will see some changes, though: they’ll be doing fewer group video chat sessions, but introducing weekly Q&A sessions with YC partners.

Just how many times “multiple times per year” will actually be still seems to be up in the air; YC tells me that they’re still working that out. In a post announcing the change, YC notes that its first 2020 course will start in January (whereas previous sessions have started closer to mid-year).

Also still a bit up in the air is YC’s Startup School grant program. In previous years, graduates of the course were able to apply for an equity-free grant (initially $10,000, later increased to $15,000). With Startup School now occurring multiple times per year, YC says it’s “in the process of evaluating the grant program.”

In the same post, YC outlined some stats from this most recent year — like, of the 41,777 founders who took part in the course, 10,193 graduated; 57% of the founders worked on their startups full-time; and 62% of founders were from outside the U.S.

That last bit seems key to YC’s strategy here. Startup School is at least partly meant to serve as a potential funnel into the core YC accelerator program. By putting everything online, they’re letting people from around the world get their foot in the door and get the ball rolling without making the massive commitment of moving to the U.S.

Open source is a great source of free tools for developers, but as these projects proliferate, and some gain in popularity, the creators sometimes look for ways to monetize successful ones. The problem is that it’s hard to run a subscription-based, dual-license approach, and most developers don’t even know where to start. Enter Israeli startup xs:code, which has created a platform to help developers solve this problem.

“Xs:code is a monetization platform for open-source projects. Unlike donation platforms which are pretty popular today, xs:code allows open-source developers to provide added value in exchange for payments. That comes on top of what they offer for free. This added value can be a different license, more features, support services or anything they can think of,” Netanel Mohoni, co-founder and CEO of xs:code told TechCrunch.

This does not mean the open-source part of this goes away, only that the company is providing a platform for those developers who want to monetize their work, Mohoni said. “Companies pay for accessing the code, and they enjoy better software created by motivated developers who are now compensated for their work. Because our solution makes sure that the code remains open source, developers can continue accepting contributions so the community enjoys better code than ever before,” he explained.

What’s more, project owners can even distribute to community contributors funds earned from subscriptions, if they wish to do so, giving them a way to pay contributors, who help make the project better.

The way it generally works is that the open-source developers create a dual license model. One has the raw open-source code, and one is the commercial version, which could have additional functionality or support that customers would be willing to pay for via a subscription.

The developers create a private repository on GitHub, and connect to xs:code, where they can share a link to the paid version. Users hit the paywall and can subscribe. Xs:code collects the money and distributes it in whichever way the developers have indicated. The company takes 25% as a commission for maintaining the platform and collecting the revenue.

The platform is available for the first time starting today in beta. You can sign up for free. Xs:code has raised $500,000 in pre-seed money to date.

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of penetration of your technology in the healthcare system right now? Matt Johnson: The answer is very low but very rapidly growing. Let’s say we have a million...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: Rendezvous Online with Sramana Mitra Oct 15, 2019

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