Gorgias, a startup offering artificial intelligence tools for customer service and support, is announcing that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding.

Co-founder and CEO Romain Lapeyre told me that the startup is taking advantage of a broader shift as brands are looking to sell directly to consumers, rather than going through intermediaries like Amazon — for example, he pointed to Nike’s recent decision to pull its products from Amazon.

As brands make this change, Lapeyre (pictured above with his co-founder and CTO Alex Plugaru) said they need a “bundle of tools” to build their online business, and “each little part of the bundle is separate.” So they might create a store with Shopify, accept payments via Stripe — and naturally, Lapeyre believes they should be handling their customer support through Gorgias .

The product integrates with Shopify, using AI and customer data to automate responses to basic questions like, “What’s my tracking number?” By doing this, the business can free customer service representatives from spending most of their time responding to these routine requests, and the customers get faster answers.

“The automation should just be the very basic questions,” Lapeyre added.

But even when it comes to more complex queries, Gorgias also provides tools that help the customer service representatives to respond more quickly and to upsell customers on additional products and services — Lapeyre said they’re acting as “sales associates rather than customer service agents.”

It seems like this approach is becoming a reality at some of Gorgias’ 2,000 customers — the Groovelife customer service team gets paid a commission based on upselling. At Steve Madden, meanwhile, the customer service team is using automation to respond to 20% of tickets.

Gorgias previously raised $3.5 million in seed funding. The new round was led by Flex Capital, with participation of SaaStr, Alven, CRV, Amplify Partners and Eric Yuan.

Lapeyre said Gorgias will use the money to build out the product with new  features while also bringing on more merchants.

Why are we all trapped in enterprise chat apps if we talk 6X faster than we type, and our brain processes visual info 60,000X faster than text? Thanks to Instagram, we’re not as camera-shy anymore. And everyone’s trying to remain in flow instead of being distracted by multi-tasking.

That’s why now is the time for Loom. It’s an enterprise collaboration video messaging service that lets you send quick clips of yourself so you can get your point across and get back to work. Talk through a problem, explain your solution, or narrate a screenshare. Some engineering hocus pocus sees videos start uploading before you finish recording so you can share instantly viewable links as soon as you’re done.

“What we felt was that more visual communication could be translated into the workplace and deliver disproportionate value” co-founder and CEO Joe Thomas tells me. He actually conducted our whole interview over Loom, responding to emailed questions with video clips.

Launched in 2016, Loom is finally hitting its growth spurt. It’s up from 1.1 million users and 18,000 companies in February to 1.8 million people at 50,000 businesses sharing 15 million minutes of Loom videos per month. Remote workers are especially keen on Loom since it gives them face-to-face time with colleagues without the annoyance of scheduling synchronous video calls. “80% of our professional power users had primarily said that they were communicating with people that they didn’t share office space with” Thomas notes.

A smart product, swift traction, and a shot at riding the consumerization of enterprise trend has secured Loom a $30 million Series B. The round that’s being announced later today was led by prestigious SAAS investor Sequoia and joined by Kleiner Perkins, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Front CEO Mathilde Collin, and Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

“At Instagram, one of the biggest things we did was focus on extreme performance and extreme ease of use and that meant optimizing every screen, doing really creative things about when we started uploading, optimizing everything from video codec to networking” Krieger says. “Since then I feel like some products have managed to try to capture some of that but few as much as Loom did. When I first used Loom I turned to Kevin who was my Instagram co-founder and said, ‘oh my god, how did they do that? This feels impossibly fast.'”

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Systrom concurs about the similarities, saying “I’m most excited because I see how they’re tackling the problem of visual communication in the same way that we tried to tackle that at Instagram.” Loom is looking to double-down there, potentially adding the ability to Like and follow videos from your favorite productivity gurus or sharpest co-workers.

Loom is also prepping some of its most requested features. The startup is launching an iOS app next month with Android coming the first half of 2020, improving its video editor with blurring for hiding your bad hair day and stitching to connect multiple takes. New branding options will help external sales pitches and presentations look right. What I’m most excited for is transcription, which is also slated for the first half of next year through a partnership with another provider, so you can skim or search a Loom. Sometimes even watching at 2X speed is too slow.

But the point of raising a massive $30 million Series B just a year after Loom’s $11 million Kleiner-led Series A is to nail the enterprise product and sales process. To date, Loom has focused on a bottom-up distribution strategy similar to Dropbox. It tries to get so many individual employees to use Loom that it becomes a team’s default collaboration software. Now it needs to grow up so it can offer the security and permissions features IT managers demand. Loom for teams is rolling out in beta access this year before officially launching in early 2020.

Loom’s bid to become essential to the enterprise, though, is its team video library. This will let employees organize their Looms into folders of a knowledge base so they can explain something once on camera, and everyone else can watch whenever they need to learn that skill. No more redundant one-off messages begging for a team’s best employees to stop and re-teach something. The Loom dashboard offers analytics on who’s actually watching your videos. And integration directly into popular enterprise software suites will let recipients watch without stopping what they’re doing.

To build out these features Loom has already grown to a headcount of 45, though co-founder Shahed Khan is stepping back from company. For new leadership, it’s hired away former head of web growth at Dropbox Nicole Obst, head of design for Slack Joshua Goldenberg, and VP of commercial product strategy for Intercom Matt Hodges.

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Still, the elephants in the room remain Slack and Microsoft Teams. Right now, they’re mainly focused on text messaging with some additional screensharing and video chat integrations. They’re not building Loom-style asynchronous video messaging…yet. “We want to be clear about the fact that we don’t think we’re in competition with Slack or Microsoft Teams at all. We are a complementary tool to chat” Thomas insists. But given the similar productivity and communication ethos, those incumbents could certainly opt to compete. Slack already has 12 million daily users it could provide with video tools.

Hodges, Loom’s head of marketing, tells me “I agree Slack and Microsoft could choose to get into this territory, but what’s the opportunity cost for them in doing so? It’s the classic build vs. buy vs. integrate argument.” Slack bought screensharing tool Screenhero, but partners with Zoom and Google for video chat. Loom will focus on being easily integratable so it can plug into would-be competitors. And Hodges notes that “Delivering asynchronous video recording and sharing at scale is non-trivial. Loom holds a patent on its streaming, transcoding, and storage technology, which has proven to provide a competitive advantage to this day.”

The tea leaves point to video invading more and more of our communication, so I expect rival startups and features to Loom will crop up. Vidyard and Wistia’s Soapbox are already pushing into the space. As long as it has the head start, Loom needs to move as fast as it can. “It’s really hard to maintain focus to deliver on the core product experience that we set out to deliver versus spreading ourselves too thin. And this is absolutely critical” Thomas tells me.

One thing that could set Loom apart? A commitment to financial fundamentals. “When you grow really fast, you can sometimes lose sight of what is the core reason for a business entity to exist, which is to become profitable. . . Even in a really bold market where cash can be cheap, we’re trying to keep profitability at the top of our minds.”

Sramana Mitra: Outside of Salesforce, what else is popular in your ecosystem? David Wenger: We see a lot in the medical device space, durable medical equipment, home health & hospice, and post...

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Coralogix, a startup that wants to bring automation and intelligence to logging, announced a $10 million Series A investment today.

The round was led by Aleph with participation from StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners and 2B Angels. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $16.2 million, according to the company.

CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf says his company focuses on two main areas: logging and analysis. The startup has been doing traditional applications performance monitoring up until now, but today, it also announced it was getting into security logging, where it tracks logs for anomalies and shares this information with security information and event management (SEIM) tools.

“We do standard log analytics in terms of ingesting, parsing, visualizing, alerting and searching for log data at scale using scaled, secure infrastructure,” Assaraf said. In addition, the company has developed a set of algorithms to analyze the data, and begin to understand patterns of expected behavior, and how to make use of that data to recognize and solve problems in an automated fashion.

“So the idea is to generally monitor a system automatically for customers plus giving them the tools to quickly drill down into data, understand how it behaves and get context to the issues that they see,” he said.

For instance, the tool could recognize that a certain sequence of events like a user logging in, authenticating that user and redirecting him or her to the application or website. All of those events happen every time, so if there is something different, the system will recognize that and share the information with DevOps team that something is amiss.

The company, which has offices in Tel Aviv, San Francisco and Kiev, was founded in 2015. It already has 1500 customers including Postman, Fiverr, KFC and Caesars Palace. They’ve been able to build the company with just 30 people to this point, but want to expand the sales and marketing team to help build it out the customer base further. The new money should help in that regard.

Intuit last week reported a strong first quarter that beat analyst estimates driven by 41% growth of QuickBooks Online (QBO) in its Small Business and Self-Employed Group segment. Intuit’s Financials...

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Vivun, a startup that wants to help companies keep better track of pre-sales data announced a $3 million seed round today led by Unusual Ventures, the venture firm run by Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal.

Vivun founder and CEO Matt Darrow says that pre-sales team works more closely with the customer than anyone else, delivering demos and proof of concepts, and generally helping sales get over the finish line. While sales has CRM to store knowledge about the customer, pre-sales has been lacking a tool to track info about their interactions with customers, and that’s what his company built.

“The main problem that we solve is we give technology to those pre-sales leaders to run and operate their teams, but then take those insights from the group that knows more about the technology and the customer than anybody else, and we deliver that across the organization to the product team, sales team and executive staff,” Darrow explained.

Darrow is a Zuora alumni, and his story is similar to that company’s founder Tien Tzuo, who built the first billing system for Salesforce, then founded Zuroa to build a subscription billing system for everyone else. Similarly, Darrow built a pre-sales tool for Zuroa after finding there wasn’t anything else out there that was devoted specifically to tracking that kind of information.

“At Zuora, I had to build everything from scratch. After the IPO, I realized that this is something that every tech company can take advantage of because every technology company will really need this role to be of high value and impact,” he said.

The company not only tracks information via a mobile app and browser tool, it also has a reporting dashboard to help companies understand and share the information the pre-sales team is hearing from the customer. For example, they might know that x number of customers have been asking for a certain feature, and this information can be organized and passed onto other parts of the company.

Bansal, who was previously CEO and co-founder at AppDynamics, a company he sold to Cisco for $3.7 billion just before its IPO in 2017, saw a company filling a big hole in the enterprise software ecosystem. He is not just an investor, he’s also a customer.

“To be successful, a technology company needs to understand three things: where it will be in five years, what its customers need right now, and what the market wants that it’s not currently providing. Pre-sales has answers to all three questions and is a strategically important department that needs management, analytics, and tools for accelerating deals. Yet, no one was making software for this critical department until Vivun,” he said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2018 and has been bootstrapped until now. It spent the first year building out the product. Today, the company has 20 customers including SignalFx (acquired by Splunk in August for $1.05 billion) and Harness.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model for you? Are you on a marketplace commission business model? Talha Satter: We have a few different revenue streams. One is, we charge service fees or...

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Leavy.co, the Paris-born startup that offers a travel app for millennials to help them travel more without getting into further debt, has quietly raised $14 million in funding.

The investment — which is pegged as a seed round and actually closed in January! — is led by Dutch investor Prime Ventures, with participation from angel investor Dominique Vidal (who is also a partner at Index Ventures). Pieter Welten, a partner at Prime Ventures, has taken a seat on Leavy’s board.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Aziza Chaouachi, who at the time was studying law and traveling a lot, and later joined by co-founders Yassine Ben Romdhane (COO) and Mario Moinet (Chief Strategy Officer), the Leavy.co app is described as a “travel community and marketplace” that wants to help millennials travel (more) for less.

At the heart of its offering is a way for travellers (dubbed “Happy Leavers”) to rent out their room or apartment when they are away to help fund their trip. Other members (dubbed “Hosts on Demand”) then get paid to act as a local host and manage the Leavy booking. The idea, explained Chaouachi on a call yesterday evening, is to scale the community model that she first developed informally amongst friends and via her use of Airbnb when she was a student.

The killer feature — and undoubtedly where things get more interesting — is that Leavy gives members cash up front when they make their space available prior to traveling, regardless of whether or not a booking takes place. The exact price offered is dynamic and factors in various data, including how much notice is given.

Chaouachi declined to talk about the range of margin Leavy expects to generate, but, unlike most marketplaces, the startup is taking on most of the risk. If it fails to rent out a space while a member is away, it loses money. On the other hand, if its algorithm works well, it should be quite lucrative.

However, Chaouachi stressed that its algorithm and everything the startup does is being optimised for member satisfaction. If the pricing doesn’t work for all sides of the marketplace — renters, guests and hosts — Leavy’s network will stop growing and that’s the bottom line for a community-driven business that is incredibly reliant on network effects.

“We are the first pure-scale marketplace that takes a risk for its users,” she told me in an email prior to our call. “As network orchestrators, we generate profit with dynamic pricing. Our tech is obsessed with finding the optimal point of satisfaction for every user”.

Additionally, the Leavy.co app rewards members with travel credit — called Leavy Coins – when they invite friends to join and share travel tips and recommendations, or when posting photos to the app. They can then spend Leavy Coins on various travel-related products.

More broadly, the problem that Chaouachi is passionate about solving is that millennials are typically saddled with debt, often through buying an education or high accommodation costs, and that the desire and need to travel can often push them into further debt.

“As millennials, we go broke the second we decide to get an education or a credit card,” she says. “Buying a house like our parents is not an option, so we crave that weekend trip to Lisbon to lift our spirits before we go back to work on Monday. Once our outrageous rents have been paid out, it is the only air we can afford and — most of all — post about. The travel industry is the second-fastest-growing sector… and it is so at our expense, since we are its largest spenders”.

To that end, Leavy.co says its community network has grown to more than 65,000 millennials, of whom 60% are women. The young company already has 100 employees across 6 markets, with offices in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Rome, and Lisbon. The plan is to open up in the U.S. by the end of this year.

“We are a brand new actor within the travel space, the next generation of OTA (online travel agency),” adds Chaouachi. “But unlike other OTAs such as traditional search engines like Booking.com, or short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, we don’t offer yet another item the Instagram-generation will never be able to buy: we actually boost their buying power instead”.

$35 million-funded Omni is packing up and shutting down after struggling to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. It’s another victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price.

The startup fought for a second wind after selling off its physical storage operations to competitor Clutter in May. Then sources tell me it tried to build a whitelabel software platform for letting brick-and-mortar merchants rent stuff like drills or tents as well as sell them so Omni could get out of hands-on logistics. But now the whole company is folding, with Coinbase hiring roughly 10 of Omni’s engineers.

“They realized that the core business was just challenging as architected” a source close to Omni tells TechCrunch. “The service was really great for the consumer but when they looked at what it would take to scale, that would be difficult and expensive.” Another source says Omni’s peak headcount was around 70.

The news follows TechCrunch’s report in October that Omni had laid off operations teams members and was in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase. Omni had internally discussed informing its retail rental partners ahead of time that it would be shutting down. Meanwhile, it frantically worked to stop team members from contacting the press about the startup’s internal troubles.

“We’ll be winding down operations at Omni and closing the platform by the end of this year. We are proud of what we built and incredibl y thankful for everyone who supported our vision over the past five and a half years” an Omni spokesperson says. Omni CEO Tom McLeod did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Oddly, Omni was still allowing renters to pay for items as of this morning, though it’s already shut down its blog and hasn’t made a public announcement about its shut down.

“Coinbase has reached an agreement with Omni to hire members of its engineering team. We’re always looking for top-tier engineering talent and look forward to welcoming these new team members to Coinbase” a Coinbase spokesperson tells us. The team was looking for more highly skilled engineers they could efficiently hire as a group, though it’s too early to say what they’ll be working on.

Omni originaly launched in 2015, offering to send a van to your house to pick up and index any of your possession, drive them to a nearby warehouse, store them, and bring them back to you whenever you needed for just a few dollars per month. It seemed too good to be true and ended up being just that.

Eventually Omni pivoted towards letting you rent out what you were storing so you and it could earn some extra cash in 2017. Sensing a better business model there, it sold its storage business to Softbank-funded Clutter and moved to helping retail stores run rental programs. But that simply required too big of a shift in behavior for merchants and users, while also relying on slim margins.

One major question is whether investors will get any cash back. Omni raised $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple in early 2018. Major investors include Flybridge, Highland, Allen & Company, and Founders Fund, plus a slew of angels.

The implosion of Omni comes as investors are re-examining business fundamentals of startups in the wake of Uber’s valuation getting cut in half in the public markets and the chaos at WeWork ahead of its planned IPO. VCs and their LPs want growth, but not at the cost of burning endless sums of money to subsidize prices just to lure customers to a platform.

It’s one thing if the value of the service is so high that people will stick with a startup as prices rise to sustainable levels, as many have with ride hailing. But for Omni, ballooning storage prices pissed off users as on-demand became less afforable than a traditional storage unit. Rentals were a hassle, especially considering users had to pick-up and return items themselves when they could just buy the items and get instant delivery from Amazon.

Startups that need a ton of cash for operations and marketing but don’t have a clear path to ultra-high lifetime value they can earn from customers may find their streams of capital running dry.

Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover has raised another $10 million to invest in nascent upstarts via Weekend Fund. The news represents the firm’s second fundraise after a $3 million debut angel fund that closed in 2017.

Hoover, an investor in Girlboss, audio social media platform TTYL and mobile application performance software company Headspin, founded Product Hunt in 2013 before selling the product discovery platform, where he still serves as chief executive officer, to AngelList for $20 million in 2016.

Limited partners in Hoover’s latest fund include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Jana Messerschmidt, Ben Rubin, Chris and Crystal Sacca, Hunter Walk, Kevin Rose and Garry Tan, as well as Q&A co-founder Suzy Ryoo, former Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky, &Then co-founder Corley Hughes, Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky, Nurx CEO Varsha Rao, Long Term Stock Exchange CEO Eric Ries and Atom Factory CEO Troy Carter.

Weekend Fund, which also operates an experiment to encourage employees to build side projects into companies called Weekend Build, invests across geographies and industries with a particular interest in audio and voice products, tools for distributed teams and remote workers, and low-code/no-code projects.

Weekend Fund joins a long line-up of early-stage micro-funds (or nano-funds, if you prefer) setting aside capital to compete with the likes of GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital and other monster funds that deploy capital at the seed stage, too. Weekend Fund, for its part, doesn’t lead investments, rather, it writes small checks as a participant in early financings.

According to Crunchbase, U.S. investors raised more sub-$100 million VC funds last year (148 in total)—more than any other year in history.

Huawei and Devialet have unveiled a new speaker specifically designed for the Chinese market, the Huawei Sound X. French startup Devialet has been looking at ways to license its technology and patents to consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Sky, Iliad, Altice USA and Renault.

While Devialet only sells very premium speakers under its own brand, such as the $1,000 Phantom Reactor, the Huawei Sound X is much more affordable. You’ll be able to buy a pair of speakers for RMB 1,999, the equivalent of $285. Unfortunately, those speakers will only be available in China for now.

The pill-shaped design is reminiscent of the Apple HomePod or the most recent Amazon Echo. It features a 60W double subwoofer and 360-degree sound. You can either use the pair of speakers in different rooms or pair them to create a stereo sound system.

The Huawei Sound X has six microphones so that you can control it with your voice. You can also control the speaker with capacitive touch buttons at the top of the speaker.

If you have a Huawei phone, you can tap it on the top of the speaker to hand off music to the speaker. It also integrates with Huawei HiLink, the company’s framework to control your connected objects around your home.

Devialet has been slowly expanding to China with a distribution partnership, two Devialet stores in Beijing and Shanghai and retail stores partnerships. According to the company, China is now the second market for Devialet.

My co-founder and I go to couples therapy.

Our partnership is not romantic — we’re both married to other people — yet as co-equal parents of a venture-backed startup, we live our professional lives under similar strain. Our “kids” don’t always get along. We don’t always set the right boundaries or model the right behavior. Problems in our company that I consider small agitate my co-founder, who doesn’t shy away from conflict if he thinks it will lead to a better outcome. I think he creates more unnecessary conflict, he thinks I avoid conflict and let problems escalate. We both have a point.

As with many romantic couples, the co-founder relationship is a forum in which old patterns reemerge disguised as basic questions.

Our patterns run through questions about our company. How should our product evolve? When should we raise our next fundraising round? Should we let our team work remotely? Each question is a litmus test revealing both our wisdom and our insecurities. Without high degrees of self-awareness on both our parts, the resulting conversation can devolve into a cold war. So, we go to co-founder therapy to stay aligned.

Here are three pitfalls that co-founder therapy has taught me to avoid:

Being the good cop. My co-founder is an instinctive, emotional leader with a keen sense of strategic direction. When his instincts draw his attention to a growing problem in our company, he doesn’t wait for our executive team to wind its way toward resolution. He becomes animated and aggressive, confronting other leaders and provoking action. His bad cop approach can be beneficial — problems are not left to fester — but it also creates tensions that can linger and grow into other problems. I’m a natural good cop, the interpreter-in-chief, a go-between who helps the other execs understand my co-founder’s psychology. Therein lies the problem. I prefer to work with them, to help them see past his reactive exterior, to understand his underlying intentions and motivations. I have a harder time working with him. I dislike conflict and when my co-founder is upset I can let my conflict aversion prevent me from giving him hard feedback on the downside of his approach. Our therapist helped me realize that by not giving this feedback, I was failing to uphold my end of the co-founder bargain. Co-founders need to balance each other. When stress causes one founder to behave unwisely, it is the other’s responsibility to intervene.

We discuss interoperability within the healthcare IT space. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Bridge.  David Wenger: I’m the Founder and CEO of...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 467th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Wednesday, November 27, 2019, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Artiphon, the startup that previously raised more than $1 million on Kickstarter for a device called the Instrument 1, has launched a new campaign for its latest invention, Orba.

Co-founder and CEO Mike Butera said the Instrument 1 and Orba share “the same DNA,” namely his vision to help music-making become more accessible to everyone, regardless of training or experience.

“I want beginners to feel like pros, but also for pros to feel like beginners again,” Butera told me. “For me, this is just the next step in how we do that.”

With Orba, the Artiphon team has created something that’s smaller and more affordable than the Instrument 1 (which the company still plans to support), and that allows its owner to accomplish more without any software. Butera described it as “a radical simplification of what an instrument can be.”

Orba is a circular device that you can hold in one or two hands — Butera said his team was thinking about game controllers, but also “grapefruits and bowls of miso soup.”

The simplicity comes from the fact that the device’s surface is divided into only eight touch pads — but thanks to Orba’s different modes (drum, bass, chord and lead), plus a variety of touch and motion sensors, you can tap, stroke and shake it to make a wide range of different sounds.

You can play Orba on its own by using the on-board synth, or you can connect it to the Orba app, and to other music software like GarageBand.

Artiphon plans to ship the first Orba devices in April of next year. They will eventually cost $99, but they’re currently available through Kickstarter as a $79 early bird special. (Once the early bird runs out, Orba will still be discounted at $89 for Kickstarter backers.) Artiphon is looking to raise $50,000 through this campaign — it’s already halfway there as I write this.

As for why Artiphon still crowdfunding after raising a seed round earlier this year, Butera said the campaign is “not really about finding the right investors, it’s about finding the right customers.”

He added, “I think it’s just responsible for the product designer to go straight to the customer.”

According to a Grand View Research report, the global Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) market is estimated to grow to $51.9 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 38.7%. Big Data player Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK)...

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Seventeen, lieblings. That’s how many days stand between you and Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. Here’s a pro tip for savvy investors. Use this time to jumpstart your networking strategy and make the most of your two days at Disrupt. How? We have a plan for that.

More on that in a minute, but first an important reminder. If you don’t have a ticket yet, get a move on. The deadline to buy your early-bird pass is 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Beat the clock and you can save up to €500.

Alright back to the plan. Hundreds of early-stage startups will exhibit their tech products, services and platforms in Startup Alley. This presents investors with both a huge opportunity and a challenge. The good news? We’ve posted the first batch of Startup Alley exhibitors at Disrupt Berlin. You can explore the list, narrow the possibilities and do your research before you even pack your suitcase.

Don’t forget that Startup Alley is also the place to meet and greet our recently announced TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors sorted through hundreds of applications and chose up to five exceptional startups to come to Disrupt Berlin that represent the best of each of these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Now, combine your pre-Disrupt prep with CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform that helps you find, connect and schedule meetings with people based on mutual business goals and interests. When the platform goes live (we’ll notify you), fill out your profile outlining specific roles, goals and the type of people you want to meet. Investor profiles might include investment categories, preferred funding stage and geographic preferences. Founders would list category, stage, location, funding status, etc.

CrunchMatch will suggest meetings and send out invitations (which recipients can easily accept or decline). You can also use CrunchMatch to reserve meeting spaces where you can network in comfort and relative quiet.

Strategic planning helps you save time and improve efficiency. No more time wasted talking to the wrong people. And you’ll have more time to take in other important aspects of Disrupt — like watching an outstanding cadre of startups compete in the Startup Battlefield. Or maybe you want to listen in as experts discuss Brexit. Check out the Disrupt Berlin agenda to find what else strikes your fancy.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Whether you’re an investor searching for innovative startups, a founder looking for collaborators or you simply want to take in the latest tech ideas, researching the Startup Alley exhibitors listed here will help you make the most of your valuable time. We’ll see you in 17 days, lieblings!

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

Talha talks about trends and opportunities in pharmacy e-commerce. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to NimbleRx. Talha Satter: I’m from Pakistan. I’ve...

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TookiTaki, a startup that develops machine learning-based financial compliance software, announced today it has raised a $11.7 million in additional Series A funding, led by Viola Fintech and SIG Asia Investment, with participation from Normura Holdings. Existing investors Illuminate Financial, Jungle Ventures and SEEDs Capital also returned for the extension, which brings TookiTaki’s total Series A (first announced in March) to $19.2 million.

The company is using the funding to enhance their anti-money laundering (AML) and reconciliation software, and to hire for its offices in the United States, Singapore and India.

In a press statement, Viola Fintech general partner Tomer Michaeli said “With almost twenty years’ experience that Viola has in the AML sector, we found Tookitaki’s approach to be very unique. Its pragmatic way of creating an overlay on top of legacy AML systems helps increase accuracy and significantly lower operating costs for financial institutions. Moreover, its regulator-ready ‘glass box’ solution shows an innovative approach and a deep understanding of the challenges in the modern AML solutions market.”

 

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TookiTaki was co-founded by CEO Abhishek Chatterjee and COO Jeeta Bandopadhyay in 2012. When TechCrunch reported on its seed round in 2015, the company provided data analytics to marketers. But it decided to focus its machine-learning platform for predictive analytics on regulatory compliance in late 2016 after realizing that there is a bigger business opportunity for vertical AI than a horizontal platform play, the founders told TechCrunch in an email.

Chatterjee was an associate at JP Morgan during the 2008 financial crisis and worked with U.S. regulators to make sure the bank’s products complied with new regulations. During that time, he says he realized that current anti-money laundering solutions reduced the effectiveness of compliance programs, and also struggled to keep up with the growth of digital banking and online transactions. Many legacy AML software had high false positive rates, TookiTaki’s founders say, and also missed activity by more sophisticated money launderers.

TookiTaki claims it reduces false positives for transaction monitoring by 50%, a result validated by Deloitte. Its software uses explainable machine learning models, which means their decisions are broken down in a way that can be easily understood by compliance staff, while providing them with the details they need for investigations. TookiTaki’s products can also help minimize costs by using a distributed computing framework, so it can be deployed in the cloud or on premise.

The software has two main modules: one that looks for suspicious transactions across different systems, and names screening, which screens for high-risk individual and corporate customers. Other TookiTaki features include machine learning algorithms that are constantly updating for new money laundering patterns and dividing alerts into low, medium and high-risk, making it easier for companies to figure out how to prioritize investigations.

Detectify, the Sweden-born cybersecurity startup that offers a website vulnerability scanner powered by the crowd, has raised €21 million in further funding.

Leading the round is London-based VC firm Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Paua Ventures, Inventure and Insight Partners.

Detectify says the new funding will be used to continue to hire “world-class” talent to further accelerate the company’s growth and deliver on its mission to reduce internet security vulnerabilities.

Founded in late 2013 by a self-described group of “elite hackers” from Sweden, the company offers a website security tool that uses automation to scan websites for vulnerabilities to help customers (i.e. developers) stay on top of security. The more unique part of the service, however, is that it is in part maintained — or, rather, kept up to date — via the crowd in the form of Detectify’s “ethical hacker network.”

As we explained when the startup raised its €5 million Series A round, this sees top-ranked security researchers submit vulnerabilities that are then built into the Detectify scanner and used in customers’ security tests. The clever part is that researchers get paid every time their submitted module identifies a vulnerability on a customer’s website. In other words, incentives are kept aligned, giving Detectify a potential advantage and greater scale compared to similar website security automation tools.

Detectify co-founder and CEO Rickard Carlsson tells me the company has made a lot of progress in the past 12 months, including building out the crowdsourcing part of its proposition in order to grow the number of known vulnerabilities.

“Modules from crowdsourcing hackers have now generated 110,000 plus vulnerabilities in our customer base,” he says. “And the community is about 2.5 times as large now”.

In the last year, Detectify has also expanded its client base in the U.S, and says it now counts leading software companies such as Trello, Spotify and King as customers.

The young startup seems to be scoring well on the gender diversity front, too. It says that almost half (45%) of its 83 employees are female, including 50% at C-level. In addition, there are close to 30 nationalities across Detectify’s Stockholm and Boston offices.

Adds James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital, in a statement: “Detectify brings together the power of human ingenuity, the immense scalability of software, and a strong culture of transparency and integrity to provide world-class security to everyone. This is a fundamentally new approach to protecting businesses from new cyber security threats, and alongside our other cyber security investments, including Darktrace, Recorded Future & Tessian, we see Detectify as part of a new wave of solutions to make the web safer for everyone.”