Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers! This feature from TechCrunch looks at the publishing trends in the third quarter of 2019 when the top 1% of publishers globally accounted for a whopping 80% of...

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There were lot of highlights in the space industry this past week (even though a rocket launch that was supposed to happened is now pushed to Monday). The biggest news for commercial space might just be that NASA signed on five new companies to its list of approved vendors for lunar payload delivery services, bringing the total group to 14.

SpaceX is among them, and Musk’s company had its own fair share of news this week, too – some good, some bad. One things’ for sure: Even going in to the last week in November, there’s still plenty of news to come in this industry before the year’s out.

The five include Blue Origin, SpaceX, Ceres Robotics, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean all or any of these companies will actually fly anything to the Moon on behalf of NASA, but it does mean they can officially bid for the chance. Alongside 9 other companies selected previously by NASA, their bids will be considered by the NASA based on cost, viability and other factors.

This is the bad news I referred to earlier: SpaceX’s Starship Mk1 prototype in Texas blew up just a little bit during cryo testing. This test is designed to simulate extreme cold conditions that the spacecraft could endure during flight, and it clearly didn’t. But Elon Musk was optimistic, saying just after the incident that they’ll move on to a more advanced design right away.

One of the companies that is now included in NASA’s lunar payload service provider list is Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC). They’re currently developing and building their Dream Chaser spacecraft, which is reusable and lands like the Space Shuttle. At an event at Cape Canaveral in Florida, they unveiled what they call the ‘Shooting Star’ – an ejectable single use cargo container for the Dream Chaser that can really add to its versatility.

This demonstration mission is just a start, but the tech that Nanoracks is launching aboard a future SpaceX launch will be able to cut metal in space, marking the first time a robotic piece of equipment has done that. The ultimate goal is to use this tech to take spent spacecraft upper stages and give them new life – as research platforms, satellites or even habitats in orbit.

That’s one of Saturn’s moons, and it’s made up of icy oceans. Normally, that’s not an optimal place for a rover to get around, but the agency’s laboratory has been testing a design in the Earth’s coldest oceans to see how viable it will be, and now they’re going to use the Antarctic, which is where it’ll test it for months at a time.

Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s crazy, beautiful, ugly, strange Cybertruck pickup last week, and he noted that the stainless steel alloy that makes up its skin is the same material that SpaceX is developing and using on its new Starship spacecraft. Sometimes, being CEO of both a car company and a space company at the same time really pays off.

A lot of large companies outsource at least part of their innovation management and design, and with the space boom on, there’s a new opportunity for companies to emerge that specialize in helping those same large companies find out where they fit in this new frontier. Luna is one such co, putting the puzzle pieces together for health tech companies.

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to cover this CEO transition, which is always a tricky thing to do. For founders to let go and bring on a new CEO is a tricky transition. How did you do it? What wisdom do you...

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My last thank you note goes to my readers, especially those who are participating in the Colors series. This year, I started publishing a new series on LinkedIn, Facebook, and my blog called Colors...

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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...

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Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major inflection point? Kevin Groome: The introduction of Campaign Drive. We kept on building the software and getting more of our legacy customers over to the SaaS...

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My second thank you note is for regaining something unexpected, something that I value tremendously: dance. I studied Indian classical dance since I was four years old. I stopped studying when I came...

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We’re in the home stretch to the TC Hackathon going down at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. If you have what it takes to compete against some of the best hackers, developers, engineers and code poets, apply to the TechCrunch Hackathon now. We have fewer than 50 seats left, and they’ll be gone before you can say deep hack mode.

The Hackathon is free — no fee to apply or to compete. It’s a thrilling, fun and exhausting ride. Designing, creating and pitching a working product in roughly 24 hours will test your physical, mental and technical limits. It’s an adrenaline rush like no other.

What do you get for messing with your circadian rhythm? For starters, we’ll keep you fed, watered and caffeinated. And every participant receives a free Innovator pass to enjoy Disrupt Berlin. Then there’s the prize money associated with each sponsored contest and, on top of that, TechCrunch editors will award an additional $5,000 prize to the team they choose for creating the best overall hack.

When you and your team arrive on site, you’ll pick one of several sponsored contest hacks to tackle and complete. Arriving solo? No worries. We’ll help you find a team when you get here.

After the 24-hour hackathon clock runs out, sponsor representatives and TechCrunch editors will review all completed projects. They’ll select 10 teams to move on to the finals the following day. Each team gets two minutes to power pitch and present their products live on the Extra Crunch Stage.

After 10 sleep-deprived presentations, the judges announce the winners of the sponsor challenges and TechCrunch reveals the winner of best overall hack and awards them $5,000.

Curious about the types of challenges you’ll find on tap? We’ll announce this year’s sponsors and their specific contests before the month is out, but here’s an example of the type of challenges you can expect.

Last year at Disrupt SF, BYTON sponsored a contest challenging the Hackathon participants to create a product that addressed this question: What will people want to do in a car that has a 49-inch screen and drives autonomously? The $5,000 first prize went to CAR-O-KE, a karaoke app for autonomous vehicles. Check out the other sponsored contests, prizes and winners from DSF ’18.

TC Hackathon takes place during Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Love to code? Love to compete? Love to win money and recognition? Then apply to the Hackathon today before the last remaining seats disappear.

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

E-commerce now accounts for 14% of all retail sales, and its growth has led to a rise in the fortunes of startups that build tools to enable businesses to sell online. In the latest development, a company called VTEX — which originally got its start in Latin America helping companies like Walmart expand their business to new markets with an end-to-end e-commerce service covering things like order and inventory management, front-end customer experience and customer service — has raised $140 million in funding, money it will be using to continue taking its business deeper into more international markets.

The investment is being led by SoftBank, specifically via its Latin American fund, with participation also from Gávea Investimentos and Constellation Asset Management. Previous investors include Riverwood and Naspers; Riverwood continues to be a backer, the company said.

Mariano Gomide, the CEO who co-founded VTEX with Geraldo Thomaz, said the valuation is not being disclosed, but he confirmed that the founders and founding team continue to hold more than 50% of the company. In addition to Walmart, VTEX customers include Levi’s, Sony, L’Oréal and Motorola . Annually, it processes some $2.4 billion in gross merchandise value across some 2,500 stores, growing 43% per year in the last five years.

VTEX is in that category of tech businesses that has been around for some time — it was founded in 1999 — but has largely been able to operate and grow off its own balance sheet. Before now, it had raised less than $13 million, according to PitchBook data.

This is one of the big rounds to come out of the relatively new SoftBank Innovation Fund, an effort dedicated to investing in tech companies focused on Latin America. The fund was announced earlier this year at $2 billion and has since expanded to $5 billion, and while that figure is a far cry from the $100 billion Vision Fund, one hopes that the Innovation Fund will function in inverse variation in terms of controversy.

In any case, relatively speaking, it’s a huge injection of money for startups serving this region and has already led to a string of sizeable investments. Other Latin American companies that SoftBank has backed include online delivery business Rappi, lending platform Creditas and property tech startup QuintoAndar.

The common theme among many SoftBank investments is a focus on e-commerce in its many forms (whether that’s transactions for loans or to get a pizza delivered), and VTEX is positioned as a platform player that enables a lot of that to happen in the wider marketplace, providing not just the tools to build a front end, but to manage the inventory, ordering and customer relations at the back end.

“VTEX has three attributes that we believe will fuel the company’s success: a strong team culture, a best-in-class product and entrepreneurs with profitability mindset,” said Paulo Passoni, managing investment partner at SoftBank’s Latin America fund, in a statement. “Brands and retailers want reliability and the ability to test their own innovations. VTEX offers both, filling a gap in the market. With VTEX, companies get access to a proven, cloud-native platform with the flexibility to test add-ons in the same data layer.”

Although VTEX has been expanding into markets like the U.S. (where it acquired UniteU earlier this year), the company still makes some 80% of its revenues annually in Latin America, Gomide said in an interview.

There, it has been a key partner to retailers and brands interested in expanding into the region, providing integrations to localise storefronts, a platform to help brands manage customer and marketplace relations, and analytics, competing against the likes of SAP, Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce (but not, he said in answer to my question, Commercetools, which builds Shopify -style API tools for mid and large-sized enterprises and itself raised $145 million last month).

It’s been pointed out before that e-commerce is a business of economies of scale, and VTEX is a precise case in point. While the company processes some $2.5 billion in transactions annually, it makes a relatively small return on that — $69 million, to be exact. This, plus the benefit of analytics on a wider set of big data (another economy of scale play), are two of the big reasons VTEX is now doubling down on growth in newer markets like Europe and North America: scale will give it better returns, and better data.

“At the end of the day, e-commerce software is a combination of knowledge. If you don’t have access to thousands of global cases you can’t imbue the software with knowledge,” Gomide said. “Companies that have been focused on one specific region are now realising that trade is a global thing. China has proven that, so a lot of companies are now coming to us because their existing providers of e-commerce tools can’t ‘do international.’ ” There are very few companies that can serve that global approach and that is why we are betting on being a global commerce platform, not just one focused on Latin America.” The company now has 122 integrations with localised payment methods, and that is set to grow, he added.

What a wonderful story of an ecommerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. All of the 60 employees working under TrendHim CEO Sebastian Peterson work out...

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This has been a year full of curve balls. On the afternoon of April 2, I was getting ready to head out of the house to a meeting at Facebook. My husband, Dominique, had already left for a meeting at...

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Heiliger Strohsack — holy smokes! In just a few weeks, thousands of attendees will arrive in Germany for Disrupt Berlin 2019, the premiere international tech conference focused on early-stage startups. Talk about an opportunity to expose your fledgling startup to savvy investors, hungry media and a host of successful tech entrepreneurs and potential customers — from more than 50 countries.

Here’s the best part: you still have time to plant your flag in Startup Alley and place your innovative products and ideas in front of the movers and shakers who can help you advance your business goals. How? Buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package.

Startup Alley exhibitors receive one full day on the expo floor, plus three Founder passes, access to programming on all stages (including the Startup Battlefield competition, speakers, interactive workshops and Q&A Sessions), the complete attendee list via TechCrunch Events Mobile App, CrunchMatch — TechCrunch’s free networking platform — the complete press list and exclusive video content access once the conference ends.

Consider the benefits of exhibiting. Disrupt Berlin attendees flock to Startup Alley to meet and greet the hundreds of outstanding startups on display — including our recently announced TC Top Picks. It’s networking on steroids where you have the opportunity to meet investors determined to find the perfect addition to their portfolios, journalists eager to write about new companies and emerging trends or startuppers looking for collaborators, service providers or a new gig.

What’s more, every startup that exhibits gets a shot at the Wild Card — which means a spot to compete in Startup Battlefield. Imagine — you could win it all and take home the $50,000 prize. Does that seem far-fetched? Granted, it’s a longshot, but Legacy earned the Wild Card at Disrupt Berlin 2018 and went on to win the Startup Battlefield ccompetition. And RecordGram did the same at Disrupt NY 2017.

Whether or not you win the Wild Card, exhibiting in Startup Alley provides real benefits. Here’s what Caleb John, co-founder of Cedar Robotics, told us about his experience.

“We demonstrated our technology in front of hundreds of people. It was a chance to meet startups we might work with, investors for potential funding and, because we plan to expand down the road, we’ll need to hire people for R&D. Building relationships with those firms was very helpful.”

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place in just a few weeks — on 11-12 December. Don’t miss your opportunity for the kind of exposure that can alter the trajectory of your startup in the best way possible. Buy your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and show the world what you’ve got!

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

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

We have something a bit different for you this week. Equity co-host Kate Clark recently sat down with Manish Chandra, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Poshmark, and one of his earliest investors, NFX managing partner James Currier.

If you haven’t heard of Poshmark, it’s an online platform for buying and selling clothes. Basically, it’s the thrift shop of the 21st century. We asked Chandra how he and co-founders Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala and Chetan Pungaliya cooked up the idea for Poshmark, what bumps they faced along the way, how they raised venture capital and, of course, what details of their upcoming initial public offering he could share with us. Meanwhile, Currier dished about the company’s early days, when the Poshmark team worked hard on the floor of Currier’s office.

Unfortunately, neither Chandra or Currier were willing to share deets about Poshmark’s IPO, reportedly expected soon. But they both shared interesting insights into building a successful venture-backed company, battling competition and putting your best foot forward.

Glad you guys came back for another episode, we’ll see you soon.

Virtual reality wunderkind Palmer Luckey has had a checkered past. He was responsible for setting up Oculus and selling it to Facebook. But soon after, he was involved in the controversy involving...

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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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Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is to completely step down from his role as head of the Pitch@Palace initiative he set up at Buckingham Palace to showcase entrepreneurs, and the operation will be relaunched as “Pitch,” without any royal involvement, according to a well-placed source.

Despite indications on Thursday that the Duke had decided to stay on in the private sector after stepping aside from all public duties, TechCrunch understands there is to be “no further royal involvement.”

This week, Pitch@Palace’s major sponsors — including Barclays Bank — were reportedly furious that the Duke had declined to resign. Sponsors listed as Pitch@Palace supporters are British chip designer Arm and airline AirAsia. Other backers, including KPMG, Standard Chartered and Bosch, pulled out earlier this week. Mark Eavis, a director of Pitch@Palace who runs an advertising agency, quit his role on Tuesday.

The Duke, who founded Pitch@Palace, which matches investors and corporate partners with startup companies, was previously due to host a Pitch@Palace event at St James’s Palace next month. But a planned trip to Bahrain to promote the event was canceled on Thursday night amid the furor surrounding his disastrous BBC Newsnight interview, in which he defended his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and sex offender, and showed little sympathy for Epstein’s victims.

Yesterday royal sources said Pitch@Palace would be moved to his “private portfolio.” But it’s understood that previous sponsors have won the battle to force the Prince to resign from the initiative completely.

Pitch@Palace will now be rebranded as “Pitch” by the directors, who are headed up by Amanda Thirsk (pictured), formerly the Prince’s private secretary, a role now abolished after the Duke stepped down from public duties.

The Duke was the “significant” controller of Pitch@Palace Global Ltd., the private company set up to run the events. The scheme had provided startup firms with advice and contacts, but no funding. A controversial clause in the terms and conditions, recently revealed on Twitter, showed that it was entitled to a 2% equity share for three years for any company that went through the Pitch@Palace program, has, say sources, been removed from the conditions to apply.

One VC I spoke to about the terms said he was “aghast” that such a clause had been inserted in the application document.

A source told TechCrunch that the terms had “never been actioned” and would no longer continue with the new “Pitch” entity.

Pitch@Palace was a glitzy event, using all the prestige of its royal connections — including soldiers from the Household regiment as part of the theatrical staging — to showcase often over-looked startups and entrepreneurs. Although venture capitalists attended early versions of the event when it launched in 2014, in recent years its switch into more impact-led companies and charities had meant institutional investors tended to steer clear.

Speaking to the BBC, Will King, founder of King of Shaves, said it was “really sad” the Pitch@Palace initiative had “been affected by the personal issues around the Duke of York.” King, a founding member of Pitch@Palace, had previously suggested Prince Andrew could be “rotated out of his captaincy of the ship” for the business initiative.

Speaking to TechCrunch, a well-placed source said: “The directors of Pitch are keen to find another way for it to survive after several years as an extremely successful initiative, which helped many under-served entrepreneurs.”

“In a week or so there will be a full statement about its future,” they added.

“The directors are looking for a new home for ‘Pitch’ out of the Palace, as an independent, going concern.”

They also said “new sponsors are coming on board and several old sponsors are sticking with it. It would be a massive shame if it collapsed.”

According to the Pitch@Palace web site, it claimed to have generated £1.345 million in economic activity, 6,323 jobs, 39% of its winners were female, created 1,042 alumni and saw 2,842 pitches.

Picture: Getty Images

Meet Bellman, a new French startup that wants to improve residential building management using technology and a fair amount of human interactions. The startup has been co-founded by Antonio Pinto, who previously co-founded TV Time.

“I know this space quite well because I’m the son of a caretaker, so I grew up in the caretaker’s apartment until I was 17,” Pinto told me.

In France, the vast majority of property management of residential buildings is handled by private companies. As co-owners of the hallways, elevator and common space of your building, you get together every few years to decide if you want to work with a third-party company to handle all the pesky tasks that come with property management.

And Bellman wants to replace those companies, as they often have outdated processes, which leads to poor customer satisfaction. Foncia, Citya, Nexity and Immo de France dominate the market. But due to high churn rates, they regularly buy smaller residential property management companies.

“I started having problems myself with my property management company. I sent an email just to say that the elevator wasn’t working and they replied asking me ‘hello, what’s your address?’ ” Pinto said. According to him, a CRM with the name of the co-owners, their email addresses and their building address seemed like a basic feature.

Bellman focuses on two values — responsiveness and transparency. And it starts with a tech platform. The startup has developed a service to help property managers do their job properly. In addition to centralizing information, Bellman hopes to automate some of the most repetitive tasks.

Residential building co-owners regularly receive updates via emails as this is the most direct way to reach them. If you want to download invoices and other paperwork, you can connect to Bellman’s website to see all your documents.

As a full-stack property management company for residential buildings, Bellman has hired in-house property managers. “We have property managers who have five to 10 years of experience,” Pinto said.

Each property manager can manage around 50 buildings. Bellman doesn’t want to compete on price, so it costs as much as a legacy property management contract. You can expect to pay around €20 per apartment per month for a building with 20 apartments for instance. Bellman then acts as the help desk for the building.

But Bellman wants to help its clients save money by renegotiating contracts with partners — elevator maintenance, heating maintenance, cleaning company, water, electricity, insurance, taking care of the garden, etc. There are roughly 40 contracts per building, and legacy property management companies don’t have time for that.

Bellman wants to detect if you’re paying too much for heating for instance. It could be because there’s a broken part in the heating system, and the startup could detect unusual activity.

Finally, the startup also takes care of administrative tasks, such as general meetings or collecting money from co-owners ahead of some construction work.

Bellman is just starting for now. It is currently available in Paris and nearby cities as property managers need to be able to go the building. The startup manages a dozen buildings right now.

But Bellman has already raised $2.2 million (€2 million) from Connect Ventures and around 30 business angels (Xavier Niel/Kima Ventures, Michael Benabou, The Family, Jean-David Blanc, Nicolas Brusson, Nadra Moussalem, Antoine Martin…).

According to the company, there are other European countries with a similar system, such as Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Italy. It could open up some opportunities when it comes to international expansion.

Sramana Mitra: How many clients did you have in 2007? Kevin Groome: Brands under management were 40. Billing relationships were probably 15. Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level were you at?...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO at Aible. Previously, Arijit founded another AI startup, BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce.com. This was...

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OutVoice, a startup that allows editors to pay freelancers with the click of a button, has officially left beta testing and is open to any publication.

The company is also announcing that it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from content monetization startup Coil.

OutVoice was founded by Matt Saincome and Issa Diao (pictured above). When the product was still in beta last year, Saincome told me it was created to solve “a horrible problem for everyone” involved in publishing freelance work: When he was a freelance writer, he’d have to constantly bug editors so that he could get paid, but then as the founder of the satirical sites The Hard Times and Hard Drive, he realized that managing payments was a huge headache.

OutVoice simplifies the whole process by integrating directly into WordPress and other content management systems. When editors load a story into the CMS, they can also identify the contributor and the payment amount. Then once they hit publish, the payment is sent and should arrive in the freelancer’s back account within a few days.

This means freelancers don’t have to worry about payment delays, while publications don’t have to worry about tracking invoices and writing checks (or losing their best writers and photographers if they don’t stay on top of this).

OutVoice also handles the initial on-boarding paperwork that the freelancers need to fill out, and it creates monthly reports for accounting and taxes. Publications can pay for the service on either a per-transaction basis (5% of payments plus $1 per transaction) or through a monthly subscription, which starts at $29 per month.

And by working with Coil, OutVoice says it can take advantage of new payment technologies like Interledger.

“Our goal at Coil is to make it easy and effortless for content creators to get paid,” said Coil CEO Stefan Thomas in a statement. “During their beta, OutVoice has already erased hundreds of years of lag time between freelance content creators and their paycheck. We’re excited to partner with OutVoice to promote more efficient payment solutions and processes, giving creators more time and money to create.”