Harlem Capital has upgraded from angel syndicate to full-fledged venture capital fund, closing its debut effort on an oversubscribed $40.3 million.

The firm was launched by managing partners Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in 2015. The pair have since graduated from Harvard Business School and hired two venture partners, Brandon Bryant and John Henry, and two senior associates to help expand their portfolio. The over-arching goal: invest in 1,000 diverse founders over the next 20 years.

“We fundamentally believe we are a venture fund with impact, not an impact fund,” Pierre-Jacques tells TechCrunch. “The way we generate impact is to give women and minority entrepreneurs ownership.”

Capital from Harlem Capital Partners Venture Fund I, an industry-agnostic vehicle that invests in post-revenue businesses across the U.S., will be used to lead, co-lead or participate in $250,000 to $1 million-sized seed or Series A financings. To date, the team has backed 14 companies, including B2B feminine hygiene product Aunt Flow, gig economy marketplace Jobble and pet wellness platform Wagmo. Harlem Capital plans to add another 22 businesses to Fund 1.

With its first fund close, Harlem Capital becomes one of the largest venture capital funds with a diversity mandate. Despite an increasing amount of punishing data exposing the gender and race gap in venture capital, minority founders continue to rake in just a small percentage of funding each year. According to a RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC report released earlier this year, most VC dollars are invested in companies run by white men with a university degree. Other recent data indicates startups founded exclusively by women raised just 2.2% of overall VC funding in 2018, with numbers on pace to increase only slightly in 2019. Meanwhile, the median amount of funding raised by black female founders, as of 2018, was $0.

The stark contrast in funding for female versus male entrepreneurs or white women versus black women founders is in part a result of a lack of diversity amongst general partners at venture capital funds and amongst the limited partners that choose which venture capital funds to provide capital. While there’s little data available on diversity of LPs, 81% of VC firms didn’t have a single black investor as of 2018.

“There’s no rational reason why this problem exists,” Tingle tells TechCrunch. “It persists because VC funds in general have been closely held and clustered around Silicon Valley. They come from particular schools with particular networks with a small head count that doesn’t turn over frequently. Some firms have strategically added a few partners here and there, but not enough to change the organization. You need diversity funds like ourselves to get this market anywhere close to parity.”

“A lot of investors are frankly missing out on opportunities,” Tingle adds.

Having met through the Management Leadership for Tomorrow Program, a nonprofit organization identifying a new generation of leadership, Tingle and Pierre-Jacques have built a prolific internship program at the firm. With as many as six interns admitted each quarter, the goal is to train future investors of color.

Limited partners in Harlem Capital Partners Fund I include TPG Global, State of Michigan Retirement Systems, the Consumer Technology Association and Dorm Room Fund .

Have we got a Cyber Monday deal for you. TC Sessions: Robotics+AI (March 3) and TC Sessions: Mobility (May 14) are coming back to California in 2020, with early-bird tickets starting at $275 and $250 respectively. But if you buy your pass today, you’ll save an extra 15% on each event. How sweet is that?

Don’t delay, startuppers. Buy your pass to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI and/or TC Sessions: Mobility before this one-day deal expires promptly tonight at 11:59 pm PT.

Oh, and did we mention that all startup exhibitor tables are also 15% off? Tables are good for early-stage startups and come with four (4) tickets and demo area at the conference. Book your table for Mobility here or one for Robotics here.

It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to recognize great opportunity, and you’ll find plenty of it at our day-long exploration of the latest issues, trends, tech and products in robotics+AI and mobility. At each of last year’s events, 1,000+ of each category’s top minds and makers gathered for live interviews, demos and workshops featuring world-renown technologists, founders and investors — not to mention world-class networking.

Past Robotics+AI Speakers:

Past Mobility Speakers:

We’re just getting started on building out the event agenda and we’ll announce plenty more speakers and panelists over the coming months, so keep checking back.

Mark your calendar, join us at UC Berkeley on March 3 for TC Sessions: Robotics or come to San Jose on May 14 for TC Sessions: Mobility and spend an entire day with the best and brightest minds and makers. Don’t miss this Cyber Monday opportunity to save an extra 15% on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI and/or TC Sessions: Mobility.

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

___

Accel, one of the world’s most influential venture capitalist firms, is getting more bullish on India.

The Silicon Valley-headquartered firm, which largely focuses on early-stage investments, said today it has closed $550 million for its sixth venture fund in India.

This is a significant amount of capital for Accel’s efforts in the country, where it began investing 15 years ago and has infused roughly $1 billion through all its previous funds.

Anand Daniel, a partner for Accel in India, told TechCrunch in an interview that the VC fund will continue to focus on identifying and investing in seed and early-stage startups.

But the fund realized it needed more money so it could actively participate in follow-on rounds (later-stage financing rounds) of its portfolio startups. The announcement today follows Accel’s similar recent push in Europe and Israel, where it closed a $575 million fund.

“We also selectively do growth investments for companies that are scaling well, such as Swiggy, UrbanClap, Blackbuck and Bounce. We have continued to back them through Series B and Series C rounds,” he said.

Like in many other markets, Accel’s track record in India is quite impressive. It participated in the seed financing round of e-commerce firm Flipkart, which was then valued at $4 million post-money. Walmart bought a majority stake in Flipkart last year for $16 billion. (This helped Accel net more than $1 billion in return from Flipkart.)

Accel, which has nine partners and more than 50 members in total in India, also invested in the seed round of SaaS giant Freshworks, which is now valued at more than $3 billion, food delivery startup Swiggy, also valued at north of $3 billion, and recently turned unicorn Blackbuck. Accel has been the first institutional investor for 85% of startups in its portfolio.

The VC firm says 44 of the 100-odd startups in its India portfolio today are valued at over $100 million each. In total, including Flipkart’s $21 billion market value, Accel’s portfolio firms have created $44 billion in market value.

“When we started our first fund in India in 2005, the world was a very different place. Just 1 in 50 Indians had access to the internet and mobile phone ownership was nascent. ​Yet we firmly believed that India was on the cusp of a big change,” the firm said in a statement.

“Today, the opportunity ahead is significantly bigger than when we started in 2005: India can now digitally identify 1.3 billion people, has 600 million internet users and 150 million online transacting customers with a national payments platform that processes $20 billion a month.”

Daniel said moving forward Accel will continue to focus on consumer, business-to-business, fintech, healthcare and global SaaS categories. “We have nine partners with their own areas of interest. They invest from their own conviction and finance seed rounds. If we see a particular sector evolving, then we do a deeper thesis work,” he said.

“We then develop deeper confidence for the space. For example, back in the day we invested in mobility startup TaxiForSure, long before Uber had arrived in India. That helped us understand mobility well. We have used those learnings to invest in several more mobility startups.”

Accel’s growing interest in India comes at a time when several other giants, including SoftBank and Prosus Ventures, have also become more active in the nation — though they tend to finance later-stage rounds.

For Indian startups that are already having their best year, this can only be good news.

The holiday season is officially on, and Disrupt Berlin 2019 opens its doors in just nine days. We’re ready to celebrate both occasions in festive style with a one-day Cyber Monday special. Buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin* today, 2 December, and you can pick any gift — up to $200 in value — from the TechCrunch Gift Guide.

Not familiar with our gift guide? You’re in for a treat. TechCrunch folk verge on the maniacal when it comes to choosing the gadgets, gear and services we use. Because we love to share, we curate the guide and pack it with absolutely awesome stuff.

Once you purchase your pass* to Disrupt Berlin today, we’ll contact you the week after the conference ends to get your preferred selection from the gift guide — priced up to $200 (US). Cross a name off your holiday shopping list and choose a gift for a loved one, a friend or your kids. And if you decide to pick a cool gadget for yourself — hey, who are we to judge?

If you want to talk about gifts that keep on giving, Disrupt Berlin tops the list. This international conference boasts thousands of attendees from more than 50 countries, 200 media outlets and hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting the very latest innovations across the tech spectrum. It’s opportunity on steroids.

We packed the Disrupt Berlin agenda with world-class speakers, presentations, in-depth Q&A Sessions, panel discussions and workshops. The cream of the international early-stage startup crop will compete in the Startup Battlefield pitch competition for a $50,000 equity-free prize and bask in the spotlight of investor and media attention.

You’ll find infinite networking opportunities in Startup Alley. Our expo floor will be home to hundreds of pre-Series A startups eager to connect and impress. While you’re in the Alley, be sure to meet our Disrupt Berlin 2019 TC Top Picks — a cadre of innovative startups handpicked by TechCrunch editors.

This year, the TC Hackathon finalists will pitch live on the Extra Crunch stage the products they built in less than 24 hours. If you’re looking for creative devs in your startup — or if you just appreciate code poetry — this is a great opportunity to see the solutions these highly skilled competitors created to address real-world problems.

And CrunchMatch, our free business match-matching service available to all attendees — makes networking easier, more productive and less stressful. Who doesn’t love that?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. ‘Tis the season — take advantage of our one-day Cyber Monday celebration. Buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019 today*, and you get to choose a gift — worth up to $200 — from the TechCrunch Holiday Gift Guide. Come and join us in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

*Purchase must occur before 11:59pm CET on 2 December and must be a full-priced pass without any additional discounts applied. You will be contacted via the email address you submit in your registration after the event has been completed to provide your preferred gift selection valued up to $200 USD.

Uncapped, a London-headquartered and Warsaw-based startup that wants to provide “revenue-based” finance to growing European businesses, is officially launching today and disclosing that it has raised £10 million in funding.

The capital is a mixture of equity funding and debt (money it can use for lending), and sees the fintech company backed by Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, White Star Capital and Seedcamp.

I understand a number of angel investors also participated. They include Robert Dighero (partner at Passion Capital), Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (COO of GoCardless) and David Nolan and Kevin Glynn (founders of Butternut Box).

Founded by “serial entrepreneur” Asher Ismail (who was most recently CEO of Midrive) and former VC Piotr Pisarz, Uncapped has set out to use various marketing, sales and accounting data to be able to offer finance for young businesses based on their current (and projected) revenue.

Specifically, Uncapped says it will enable founders to access working capital between £10,000 and £1 million for a flat fee of 6%. It’s being pitched as a smart alternative for growing companies that don’t want to give away equity in return for capital to help grow.

“The first decision that entrepreneurs need to make when raising finance is whether to give away a portion of equity in their company or take on debt,” explains Ismail. “Equity is a slow and very expensive way to fund growth, while loans add more risk. We’re creating an alternative that sits between debt and equity financing, while offering the benefits of both. We started Uncapped so that entrepreneurs wouldn’t have to give up a piece of their company or put up their house.”

Ismail says that Uncapped provides entrepreneurs with access to capital without the need for “personal guarantees, credit checks, warrants or equity,” and promises to move a lot quicker than investors, or for that matter, more traditional forms of debt finance, can.

“We don’t require customers to share any business plans, cap tables or pitch decks,” he adds. “All we need is to verify their business performance. We connect to the business’ existing sales and marketing platforms, like Stripe, Shopify and Facebook. Revenue-based finance also gives founders the flexibility to repay less when their sales slow or the market hits a downturn.”

The only stipulation is that businesses must be based on online payments and have at least nine months trading history. This makes Uncapped particularly suitable for companies operating e-commerce, SaaS, direct-to-consumer, gaming and app development businesses.

“For example, our first customer was online menswear brand, L’Estrange,” Pisarz tells me. “For e-commerce businesses, December is typically the most challenging time to invest in growth, as inventory and marketing costs are at a peak but Christmas sales have not yet come through. We were able to provide the business with an advance within three days.”

Meanwhile, Ismail claims that Uncapped is the first company of its kind to launch in Europe (which is somewhat of a stretch) and that venture capital — although very different — is probably the closest alternative form of financing.

“Despite the $35 billion invested in Europe by VCs this year, many companies do not fit the venture model,” he says. “They might be a family business that doesn’t intend to sell, an entrepreneur focused on more of a niche market or minority who may be overlooked by traditional funders. Whilst VCs will often meet 1,500 companies and back just five of them a year, we have the ability to provide hundreds of businesses with growth capital for a flat fee much faster and without sacrificing equity at an early stage.”

November 2019 could mark when Nigeria (arguably) became Africa’s unofficial capital for fintech investment and digital finance startups.

The month saw $360 million invested in Nigerian-focused payment ventures. That is equivalent to roughly one-third of all the startup VC raised for the entire continent in 2018, according to Partech stats.

A notable trend-within-the-trend is that more than half — or $170 million — of the funding to Nigerian fintech ventures in November came from Chinese investors. This marks a pivot (to tech) in China’s engagement with Africa. We’ll get to that.

Before the big Chinese-backed rounds, one of Nigeria’s earliest fintech companies, Interswitch, confirmed its $1 billion valuation after Visa took a minority stake in the company. Interswitch would not disclose the amount to TechCrunch, but Sky News reporting pegged it at $200 million for 20%.

Founded in 2002 by Mitchell Elegbe, Interswitch pioneered the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s then predominantly paper-ledger and cash-based economy.

The company now provides much of the tech-wiring for Nigeria’s online banking system that serves Africa’s largest economy and population. Interswitch offers a number of personal and business finance products, including its Verve payment cards and Quickteller payment app.

The financial services firm has expanded its physical presence to Uganda, Gambia and Kenya . The Nigerian company also sells its products in 23 African countries and launched a partnership in August for Verve cardholders to make payments on Discover’s global network.

Visa and Interswitch touted the equity investment as a strategic collaboration between the two companies, without a lot of detail on what that will mean.

One point TechCrunch did lock down is Interswitch’s (long-awaited) and imminent IPO. A source close to the matter said the company will list on a major exchange by mid-2020.

For the near to medium-term, Interswitch could stand as Africa’s sole tech-unicorn, as e-commerce venture Jumia’s volatile share-price and declining market-cap — since an April IPO — have dropped the company’s valuation below $1 billion.

Circling back to China, November was the month that signaled Chinese actors are all in on African tech.

In two separate rounds, Chinese investors put $220 million into OPay and PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale in Nigeria and the broader continent.

PalmPay, a consumer-oriented payments product, went live last month with a $40 million seed round (one of the largest in Africa in 2019) led by Africa’s biggest mobile-phone seller — China’s Transsion.

The startup was upfront about its ambitions, stating in a company release its goals to become “Africa’s largest financial services platform.”

To that end, PalmPay conveniently entered a strategic partnership with its lead investor. The startup’s payment app will come pre-installed on Transsion’s mobile device brands, such as Tecno, in Africa — for an estimated reach of 20 million phones.

PalmPay also launched in Ghana in November and its U.K. and Africa-based CEO, Greg Reeve, confirmed plans to expand to additional African countries in 2020.

OPay’s $120 million Series B was announced several days after the PalmPay news and came only months after the mobile-based fintech venture raised $50 million.

Founded by Chinese-owned consumer internet company Opera — and backed by nine Chinese investors — OPay is the payment utility for a suite of Opera -developed internet-based commercial products in Nigeria. These include ride-hail apps ORide and OCar and food delivery service OFood.

With its latest Series A, OPay announced it would expand in Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.

Though it wasn’t fintech, Chinese investors also backed a (reported) $30 million Series B for East African trucking logistics company Lori Systems in November.

With OPay, PalmPay and Lori Systems, startups in Africa have raised a combined $240 million from 15 Chinese investors in a span of months.

There are a number of things to note and watch out for here, as TechCrunch reporting has illuminated (and will continue to do in follow-on coverage).

These moves mark a next chapter in China’s engagement in Africa and could raise some new issues. Hereto, the country’s interaction with Africa’s tech ecosystem has been relatively light compared to China’s deal-making on infrastructure and commodities.

There continues to be plenty of debate (and critique) of China’s role in Africa. This new digital phase will certainly add a fresh component to all that. One thing to track will be data-privacy and national-security concerns that may emerge around Chinese actors investing heavily in African mobile consumer platforms.

We’ve seen lines (allegedly) blur on these matters between Chinese state and private-sector actors with companies such as Huawei.

As OPay and PalmPay expand, they may need to do some reassuring of African regulators as countries (such as Kenya) establish more formal consumer protection protocols for digital platforms.

One more thing to follow on OPay’s funding and planned expansion is the extent to which it puts Opera (and its entire suite of consumer internet products) in competition with multiple actors in Africa’s startup ecosystem. Opera’s Africa ventures could go head to head with Uber, Jumia and M-Pesa — the mobile money-product that put Kenya out front on digital finance in Africa before Nigeria.

Shifting back to American engagement in African tech, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey was on the continent in November. No sooner than he’d finished his first trip, Dorsey announced plans to move to Africa in 2020, for three to six months, saying on Twitter, “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!).”

We still don’t know much about what this last trip — or his future foray — mean in terms of concrete partnerships, investment or market moves in Africa from Dorsey and his companies.

He visited Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia and met with leaders at Nigeria’s CcHub (Bosun Tijani), Ethiopia’s Ice Addis (Markos Lemma) and did some meetings with fintech founders in Lagos (Paga’s Tayo Oviosu).

I know pretty well most of the organizations and people Dorsey talked to and nothing has shaken out yet in terms of partnership or investment news from his recent trip.

On what could come out of Dorsey’s 2020 move to Africa, per his tweet and news highlighted in this roundup, a good bet would be it will have something to do with fintech and Square.

More Africa-related stories @TechCrunch

African tech around the ‘net

This feature from Reuters looks at how online sales surged close to 20% on Black Friday while shopper traffic at retail stores declined. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links....

___

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I...

___

UpKeep Maintenance Management CEO Ryan Chan took a hobby project that he bootstrapped with a paycheck and managed to get into Y Combinator. From there, he raised a $10 million Series A from a...

___

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Airbnb’s issues. Before that, I noted Uber’s new “money” team.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you’re new, you can subscribe to Startups Weekly here.

China’s pivot to Africa

Three African fintech startups; OPay, PalmPay and East African trucking logistics company Lori Systems, closed large fundraises this year. On their own, the deals aren’t particularly notable, but together, they expose a new trend within the African startup ecosystem.

This year, those three companies brought in a total of $240 million in venture capital funding from 15 different Chinese investors, who’ve become increasingly active in Africa’s tech scene. TechCrunch reporter Jake Bright, who covers African tech, writes that 2019 marks “the year Chinese investors went all in on the continent’s startup scene” — particularly its fintech projects. Why?

“The continent’s 1.2 billion people represent the largest share of the world’s unbanked and underbanked population — which makes fintech Africa’s most promising digital sector,” Bright notes. “In previous years, the country’s interactions with African startups were relatively light compared to deal-making on infrastructure and commodities. Chinese actors investing heavily in African mobile consumer platforms lends to looking at new data-privacy and security issues for the continent.”

Active Chinese investors in Africa include Hillhouse Capital, Meituan-Dianping, GaoRong, Source Code Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, BAI, Redpoint, IDG Capital, Sequoia China, Crystal Stream Capital, GSR Ventures, Chinese mobile-phone maker Transsion and NetEase .

Here’s more of TechCrunch’s recent coverage of Africa startup activity:

VC Deals

It was a short week (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way). But here’s a quick look at the top deals of the last few days.

M&A (VR edition)

Last week, Facebook announced it was buying Beat Games, the game studio behind Beat Saber, a rhythm game that’s equal parts Fruit Ninja and Guitar Hero. Heard of the company? Maybe if you’re a gamer, but if you’re readying this newsletter because of your interest in VC, this company may not have come across your radar.

Why? It’s one of virtual reality’s biggest successes today, but it’s just an eight-person team with no funding.

“I’m really proud that we were able to build the company with this mindset of making decisions based on what is good for the game and not what is the most profitable thing,” Beat Games CEO told TechCrunch earlier this year. Read about Facebook’s acquisition here and an in-depth profile of the small team here.

Equity

If you like this newsletter, you will definitely enjoy Equity, which brings the content of this newsletter to life — in podcast form! Join myself and Equity co-host Alex Wilhelm every Friday for a quick breakdown of the week’s biggest news in venture capital and startups.

This week, we discussed Weekend Fund’s new vehicle, Cocoon’s new friend-tracking app and the unfortunate demise of a startup called Omni. You can listen here.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners. Nexus us a fundamentals focused firm that aligns with the 1Mby1M philosophy....

___

Meet Pixpay, a French startup that wants to replace cash when you’re handing out pocket money to your kids. Anybody who is older than 10 years old can create a Pixpay account, get a debit card and manage pocket money.

Challenger banks are nothing new, but they’re still mostly targeted towards adults. If you want to create an N26 or Revolut account, you need to be at least 18 years old. You can create a Lydia account if you’re at least 14 years old with parental consent.

Pixpay, like Kard, wants to fill that gap and offer modern payment methods to teens so that you can ditch cash altogether. Parents and kids both download the Pixpay app to interact with the service.

A few days after creating an account, your child receives a Mastercard. It offers the same features that you’d expect from a challenger bank — you can customize the PIN code, lock it and unlock it, receive a notification with each transaction and restrict some features, such as limits, ATM withdrawals, online payments and payments abroad. Pixpay also lets you generate virtual cards for online payments.

In addition to some spending analytics, users can create projects and set money aside to buy an expensive thing after months of savings. Parents can also define an interest rate on a vault account to teach children how to save money. In the future, Pixpay wants to let teens collect money after a babysitting job for instance.

As for parents, they can send money instantly from the Pixpay app. You can top up your Pixpay account with your favorite debit card and send money on a regular basis (€4 per week for instance) or for one-off payment (here’s €15 for your movie ticket and fast food).

Parents can see an overview of multiple accounts in case you have multiple children using Pixpay. Eventually, the startup wants to let multiple parents manage the account of their child, which could be useful for separated couples.

Pixpay costs €2.99 per month per card. Payments and ATM withdrawals in the Eurozone are free. Transactions in foreign currencies cost 2% in foreign exchange and ATM withdrawals outside of the Eurozone cost €2.

The startup has raised $3.4 million (€3.1 million) from Global Founders Capital. The company partners with Treezor, a banking-as-a-service platform that lets you generate cards and e-wallet accounts using an API.

Synchronize your watches startup fans, and get ready to score serious savings on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019. For today only, you can get 2 passes for the price of one. Our Black Friday sale starts now and runs through 11:59pm CET on 29 November. Don’t miss out!

Simply purchase a pass to Disrupt Berlin now (Founder passes start at just €645 + VAT), and you’ll get two passes for the price of one. Split the cost with a colleague, gift the pass to a client or bring a member of your team to Disrupt. No matter how you choose to use that extra pass, you’ll reap extra value. Go BOGO — buy your passes — before the 24-hour clock runs out.

Now you and your buddy can get ready to make the most out of two program – and opportunity-packed days in Berlin. Connection is the name of the game at Disrupt events, and there’s no better place to start promising conversations than Startup Alley. You’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups and sponsors exhibiting an array of products, platforms and services that span the tech spectrum.

Looking for customers, collaborators, incubators, investors? Need manufacturing advice or simply want to talk shop with other founders? Startup Alley has that and more. Be sure to check out the TC Top Picks — our hand-picked cohort of exceptional startups that represent the best in these specific tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, BioTech/HealthTech, Blockchain, FinTech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/eCommerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

There’s plenty to experience outside the Alley, and the Disrupt Berlin agenda can help you make the most of your time. Be in the room when TechCrunch editors interview CEOs from companies such as Away, UIPath and Naspers, as well as leading investors from Atomico, SoftBank and GV.

If you’re a founder (aspiring or otherwise), don’t miss what goes down on the Extra Crunch stage. You’ll hear panelists discuss important startup trends and offer actionable tips and advice on topics like scaling a business, product management, raising money and building a brand.

There’s so much more to experience at Disrupt Berlin: The Hackathon, the always-epic Startup Battlefield pitch competition, workshops and Q&A Sessions. It all happens on 11-12 December, and now you have 24 hours to double up on value. Buy your pass before the clock runs out at 11:59pm CET on 29 November, and you’ll get a second one free. Go BOGO!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT’s famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work.

Greg’s essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls “a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.” In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.

Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.

Below, Greg speaks to two founders of innovative startups whose work provoked much discussion at the EmTech Next conference. Moxi, the robot assistant created by Andrea Thomasz of Diligent Robotics and her team, was a constant presence in the Media Lab reception hall immediately outside the auditorium in which all the main talks took place. And Prayag Narula of LeadGenius was featured, alongside leading tech anthropologist Mary Gray, in a panel on “Ghost Work” that sparked intense discussion throughout the conference and beyond.

Could you give a sketch of your background?

Andrea Thomaz: I was always doing math and science, and did electrical engineering as an Undergrad at UT Austin. Then I came to MIT to do my PhD. It really wasn’t until grad school that I started doing robotics. I went to grad school interested in doing AI and was starting to get interested in this new machine learning that people were starting to talk about. In grad school, at the MIT Media Lab, Cynthia Breazeal was my advisor, and that’s where I fell in love with social robots and making robots that people want to be around and are also useful.

Say more about your journey at the Media Lab?

My statement of purpose for the Media Lab, in 1999, was that I thought that computers that were smarter would be easier to use. I thought AI was the solution to HCI [Human-computer Interaction]. So I came to the Media Lab because I thought that was the mecca of AI plus HCI.

It wasn’t until my second year as a student there that Cynthia finished her PhD with Rod Brooks and started at the Media Lab. And then I was like, “Oh wait a second. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Who is at the Media Lab now that’s doing interesting work for you?

For me, it’s kind of the same people. Patty Maes has kind of reinvented her group since those days and is doing fluid interfaces; I always really appreciate the kind of things they’re working on. And Cynthia, her work is still very seminal in the field.

So now, you’re a CEO and Founder?

CEO and Co-Founder of Diligent Robotics. I had twelve years in academia in between those. I finished my PhD, went and I was a professor at Georgia Tech in computing, teaching AI and robotics and I had a robotics lab there.

Then I got recruited away to UT Austin in electrical and computer engineering. Again, teaching AI and having a robotics lab. Then at the end of 2017, I had a PhD student who was graduating and also interested in commercialization, my Co-Founder and CTO Vivian Chu.

Let’s talk about the purpose of the human/robot interaction. In the case of your company, the robot’s purpose is to work alongside humans in a medical setting, who are doing work that is not necessarily going to be replaced by a robot like Moxi. How does that work exactly?

One of the reasons our first target market [is] hospitals is, that’s an industry where they’re looking for ways to elevate their staff. They want their staff to be performing, “at the top of their license.” You hear hospital administrators talking about this because there’s record numbers of physician burnout, nurse burnout, and turnover.

They really are looking for ways to say, “Okay, how can we help our staff do more of what they were trained to do, and not spend 30% of their day running around fetching things, or doing things that don’t require their license?” That for us is the perfect market [for] collaborative robots.” You’re looking for ways to automate things that the people in the environment don’t need to be doing, so they can do more important stuff. They can do all the clinical care.

In a lot of the hospitals we’re working with, we’re looking at their clinical workflows and identifying places where there’s a lot of human touch, like nurses making an assessment of the patient. But then the nurse finishes making an assessment [and] has to run and fetch things. Wouldn’t it be better if as soon as that nurse’s assessment hit the electronic medical record, that triggered a task for the robot to come and bring things? Then the nurse just gets to stay with the patient.

Those are the kind of things we’re looking for: places you could augment the clinical workflow with some automation and increase the amount of time that nurses or physicians are spending with patients.

So your robots, as you said before, do need human supervision. Will they always?

We are working on autonomy. We do want the robots to be doing things autonomously in the environment. But we like to talk about care as a team effort; we’re adding the robot to the team and there’s parts of it that the robot’s doing and parts of it that the human’s doing. There may be places where the robot needs some input or assistance and because it’s part of the clinical team. That’s how we like to think about it: if the robot is designed to be a teammate, it wouldn’t be very unusual for the robot to need some help or supervision from a teammate.

That seems different than what you could call Ghost Work.

Right. In most service robots being deployed today, there is this remote supervisor that is either logged in and checking in on the robots, or at least the robots have the ability to phone home if there’s some sort of problem.

That’s where some of this Ghost Work comes in. People are monitoring and keeping track of robots in the middle of the night. Certainly that may be part of how we deploy our robots as well. But we also think that it’s perfectly fine for some of that supervision or assistance to come out into the forefront and be part of the face-to-face interaction that the robot has with some of its coworkers.

Since you could potentially envision a scenario in which your robots are monitored from off-site, in a kind of Ghost Work setting, what concerns do you have about the ways in which that work can be kind of anonymized and undercompensated?

Currently we are really interested in our own engineering staff having high-touch customer interaction that we’re really not looking to anonymize. If we had a robot in the field and it was phoning home about some problem that was happening, at our early stage of the company, that is such a valuable interaction that in our company that wouldn’t be anonymous. Maybe the CTO would be the one phoning in and saying, “What happened? I’m so interested.”

I think we’re still at a stage where all of the customer interactions and all of the information we can get from robots in the field are such valuable pieces of information.

But how are you envisioning best-case scenarios for the future? What if your robots really are so helpful that they’re very successful and people want them everywhere? Your CTO is not going to take all those calls. How could you do this in a way that could make your company very successful, but also handle these responsibilities ethically?