Circ, the Berlin-based e-scooter rentals — or so-called micromobility — company founded by Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame, has made a number of layoffs, TechCrunch has learned.

This has seen a reduction in headcount in its HQ and other regional operations. The exact number isn’t clear, although one source placed it at around 50 people, or less than 10% of employees.

Confirming the restructuring, Circ issued the following statement, citing the move to swappable batteries and a shift of focus to “efficiency and ops excellence”:

After fast growth in the initial stage now we focus on efficiency and ops excellence, including switching our operations mode to swappable battery scooters, [we] just introduced the Circ “KAISER” vehicle in a few German cities. Apart from being more cost efficient that is also more sustainable (cargo bikes instead of vans).

I managed to get Gadowski on a call and he added some further context to the layoffs, citing three reasons behind the decision to reduce headcount: seasonality, operational learnings and indeed the move to e-scooters with swappable batteries.

“It’s a seasonal business, we have less riders in the winter than summer,” explained the Circ founder. “In winter you can expect less than 50% of your summer rides with the current micromobility devices. That may change in the future.”

With regards to operational learnings, Gadowski says the company needed to learn how to operate a micromobility service across many markets simultaneously. “Basically figure out how to be more efficient, how to run a micromobility operation; it’s not optimised yet and we learned over the summer.”

He also conceded that, within the micromobility space more generally, there had been something of a land grab strategy that is now perhaps inevitably shifting toward greater emphasis on capital efficiency. “When we started this there was a focus on time to market but now it is not about time to market but efficiency,” he tells me.

Finally, Gadowski says the move to swappable battery technology means that Circ can run more efficiently and therefore also requires fewer people.

“What happens at the moment is we have warehouses where we store the scooters, maintain them and charge the batteries. Vans bring them into the city hotspots, the user rides them, then vans pick them up again where they are maintained or batteries charged. And now this changes to swappable batteries operations in which the vehicles are equipped with batteries that are swappable so you charge only the battery in the warehouse… and mechanics do light maintenance in-field. This requires less people because it is more operations efficient.”

Meanwhile, Circ shared some updated metrics with TechCrunch. The company says it has enabled approximately 10 million rides to date and has 3 million registered customers. It operates in more than 40 cities across 14 European countries, in addition to United Arab Emirates.

I’m also told that this year Circ has seen “positive unit economics” in cities in about one-third of its countries (five out of 14). “In 2020 we expect to be unit economic profitable across the group,” a spokesperson tells TechCrunch.

Circ — then called Flash — raised €55 million in Series A funding in January, with Target Global leading the round via its mobility fund.

Kleiner Perkins has joined a $25.5 million Series A funding round for Bison Trails, a provider of blockchain protocols, which was led by Blockchain Capital to develop the firm’s infrastructure services.

Other participants included Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys, A Capital, Collaborative Fund and Sound Ventures as new investors. Galaxy Digital and Initialized, as early backers, joined this latest round after participating in a $5.25 million seed round in March.

Bison Trails became one of the 21 founding members for Facebook’s Libra Association in October, boosting its somewhat flagging reputation as a global infrastructure service provider after high profile players like PayPal pulled out.

That makes Bison Trails the only blockchain infrastructure firm in the Libra project.

The New York-based startup helps customers deploy the participation nodes on any blockchain, without having to develop their own supporting technologies such as security, and serves more than 20 protocol projects.

In a statement, Kleiner Perkins investing partner Monica Desai said: “Bison Trails realized early that node infrastructure would become a bottleneck to blockchain adoption, which is why they created a decentralized, user-friendly solution.”

“When we started building Bison Trails, we wanted to bring transparency and ease to entrepreneurs bold enough to build in a decentralized ecosystem, investors wise enough to back a nascent market, and enterprises courageous enough to commit to a technological inevitability like blockchain technology and cryptocurrency,” said Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails. “We have become the easiest way to run infrastructure on multiple blockchains. And have helped the world’s leading protocols, companies and builders launch and manage secure, highly-available and geographically distributed nodes on blockchain networks.”

Article updated with correct total funding amount.

Cheq, a startup focused on preventing ad fraud and ensuring that ads run in brand-safe environments, has raised $16 million in Series B funding.

When the company raised its $5 million Series A last year, CEO Guy Tytunovich contrasted Cheq’s approach with what he called “first generation solutions for ad verification” — rather than identifying fraud and other issues after an ad has already run, he said Cheq is more proactive and can block ads from being served in real time.

I caught up with Tytunovich yesterday, and he told me that this approach remains one of Cheq’s strengths.

At the same time, he also acknowledged that “refunds, rebates and make goods” are allowing advertisers to achieve a kind of retroactive prevention. So he’s increasingly focused on Cheq’s accuracy.

Tytunovich suggested that rather than simply relying on keywords (an approach that might suggest that a relatively innocuous article like “LeBron James killed it last night” isn’t an appropriate place to serve an ad), Cheq is examining 1,200 different factors, “looking for anomalies or looking where the fraudster did some sloppy work.”

He added, “We investigate every single impression in JavaScript. We are extremely deterministic to not cause this damage of false positives and false negatives.”

And Tytunovich said that despite the number of companies tackling the issue, fraud is still growing — he pointed to a recent report from Cheq estimating that fraud will cost advertisers $23 billion this year.

“You need to be smarter every day,” he said. “We’re definitely seeing in ad fraud, not just different types of sophisticated fraud — as the time goes by we see more and more of that organized crime type of ad fraud. Which is fascinating on the one hand, but also it’s kind of frightening if you really think about it.”

The new funding was led by Battery Ventures (which also led the Series A) and MizMaa Ventures. The latter is an Israeli firm that Tytunovich said already “helped tremendously” with things like introductions, even before making an investment.

Cheq is also moving into new areas like connected TV and console gaming.

Ultimately, Tytunovich said he wants the company to become the “immune system of the internet” — which doesn’t just mean detecting ad fraud, but also becoming “a solution to everything that sucks about digital advertising specifically, things like fake news and how advertising relates to that.”

A little over a year after the dissolution of the once high-flying blood testing startup Theranos, another startup has raised more than $27 million to breathe new life into the vision of bringing low-cost blood tests to point-of-care medical facilities.

Unlike Theranos, Truvian Sciences is not claiming that most of its blood tests do not need clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and is, in fact, raising the money to proceed with a year-long process to refine its technology and submit it to the FDA for approval.

“More and more consumers are refusing to accept the status quo of healthcare and are saying no to expensive tests, inconvenient appointments and little to no access to their own test results,” said Jeff Hawkins, the president and chief executive of Truvian, in a statement. “In parallel, retail pharmacies are rising to fill demand, becoming affordable health access points. By bringing accurate, on-site blood testing to convenient sites, we will give consumers a more seamless experience and enable them to act on the vast medical insights that come with regular blood tests.”

Hawkins, the former vice president and general manager of reproductive and genetic health business at Illumina, is joined by a seasoned executive team of life sciences professionals, including Dr. Dena Marrinucci, the former co-founder of Epic Sciences, who serves as the company’s senior vice president of corporate development and is a co-founder of the company.

As part of today’s announcement, the company said it was adding Katherine Atkinson, a former executive at Epic Sciences and Illumina, as its new chief commercial officer, and has brought on the former chairman of the Thermo Fisher Scientific board of directors, Paul Meister, as a new director.

Funding for the company came from GreatPoint Ventures and included DNS Capital,Tao Capital Partners and previous investor Domain Associates.

The ultimate goal, according to Hawkins, is to develop a system that can be installed in labs and can in 20 minutes and for as low as $50 provide from a small sample of blood accurate results for a battery of health tests. Typically, these tests can cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars — depending on the testing facility, says Hawkins.

Using new automation and sensing technologies, Truvian is aiming to combine chemistries, immunoassays and hematology assays into a single device that can perform standard assessment blood tests like lipid panels, metabolic panels, blood cell counts and tests of thyroid, kidney and liver functions.

The company’s system includes remote monitoring and serviceability, according to a statement from Truvian. Its dry reagent technology allows materials to be stored at room temperature, removing the need for cold chain or refrigerated storage. According to a statement, the company is working to receive a CE Mark in the European Economic Area and submitted to the FDA for 510(k) clearance along with a “clinical laboratory improvement amendments” waiver application to let the devices be used in a retail setting or doctor’s office.

“We don’t believe that single drop of blood from a finger stick can do everything,” says Hawkins (in opposition to Theranos). “Fundamentally as a company we have built the company with seasoned healthcare leaders.”

As the company brings its testing technology to market, it’s also looking to complement the diagnostics toolkit with a consumer-facing app that would provide a direct line of communication between the company and the patients receiving the results of its tests.

Truvian’s data will integrate with both Apple and Google’s health apps as well as reside on the company’s own consumer-facing app, according to Hawkins.

“At the end of the day, precision medicine is going to come from integrating these data sources,” says Hawkins. “I think if we pull off what we want we should be able to make your routine blood testing far more accessible.”

Front, the company that lets you manage your inboxes as a team, acquired Meetingbird last year. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Front is about to roll out its own calendar. This way, you can manage meetings within Front and find time that works for everyone.

Integrating emails with your calendar makes a lot of sense. There’s a reason why Outlook lets you manage both your inbox and your calendar. And there’s also a reason why Google includes both Gmail and Google Calendar in G Suite accounts.

Front Calendar works with both Google and Office 365 accounts as the backend infrastructure for your calendars. You can open a day view by clicking on the calendar button in the top-right corner.

As you can see in the following screenshot as well, you get a preview of your existing events when somebody sends you a calendar invitation:

A day view doesn’t cut it when you’re trying to plan further ahead; that’s why you can expand the calendar and get a full-fledged calendar in glorious full screen:

Finally, Front Calendar is bringing back Meetingbird’s core feature. You can insert a widget in your email with your available meetings times. Recipients can click to accept a time slot.

It looks like a good Google Calendar or Outlook alternative. But Front says that it wants to add a multiplayer component — beyond just inviting people to events. You could imagine opening an event and @-mentioning your teammates to reschedule an event. You could also imagine setting up sophisticated rules to automatically tag and organize events based on multiple criteria.

The first version of Front Calendar will be available in December.

Sramana Mitra: Once you hit this limit and you realized that you had to do something else, what did you do? Charles Miglietti: We looked at our customer base. We identified the pattern in terms of...

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“Move fast and break things” is a term we usually associate with Facebook (at least, until 2014) and the general startup ethos of being disruptive. Now in true entrepreneurial fashion, the phrase is finding itself as the center of — what else — a startup idea, which today is announcing a sizeable Series B as it gains traction.

Vouch, which offers business insurance specifically targeting startups, is today announcing a Series B of $45 million, led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. The company was part of YC cohort that presented this past August, and between then and now it appears to have also raised a Series A of $24 million, with this Series B actually also closing back in September (I’m guessing the delay in timing was to coincide the news with the expansion of its service to California). PitchBook data indicates that Vouch’s valuation has also ramped up rapidly: it’s currently at $210 million. (Previous investors in the company include Ribbit Capital, SVB Financial Group, Y Combinator, Index Ventures, and 500 Startups, with the total raised to date now at $70 million.)

The company — not to be confused with the tutoring network Vouch, nor the ‘social network for loans’ Vouch — will be using the money that it will use to continue expanding its product and to bring the service to more geographies.

In addition to now launching in its newest region of California, today, it’s also live in Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. Today’s move is a key one, considering Silicon Valley is at the heart of the tech world, and therefore startups, and therefore fertile ground for acquiring new customers.

(It seems that although Vouch itself is based in San Francisco, it delayed a California launch in part to test out the product in smaller markets before hitting the big time: California, it notes, accounts for 50% of the whole business insurance market in the US, and California startups alone spend $44 billion annually on it.)

When Vouch launched at YC, founder Sam Hodges (who had been one of the original co-founders of Funding Circle, the business lending platform that went public in London) described the platform’s mission as a way of mitigating risks because sometimes “bad things happen to good startups.”

The company’s insurance covers all the tricky things that can befall young businesses in what is a very volatile market. (Common wisdom says that most fail, some have put the figure as high as 90%.)

That includes general liability (which includes damage to rented premises, personal or advertising injury, and related areas), business liability, management liability, fiduciary liability, cyber and crime coverage, rented and non-owned auto insurance and more. (Health or workers’ compensation are not included.) The products start at $200/year, which Vouch says undercuts most of what is already on the market. Munich Re backs the policies.

“Vouch helps founders manage the risks associated with starting up a new company, so they can focus on creating and growing businesses that change the world. We believe that’s a purpose worth pursuing,” said Hodges in a statement. “As an entrepreneur, I’ve spent most of my career building companies at the intersection of technology and financial services. I know first-hand that along the journey of building and growing a business, teams will face numerous high-stakes challenges. Vouch is here to support entrepreneurs and mitigate those challenges from the beginning, leaving more room for growth.”

Y Combinator has always had a soft spot for startups that built services for startups, and this is no exception. It makes perfect sense as a follow-on investment for Continuity, which has also backed Brex, Gusto, Instacart, LendUp, and Stripe. In this sense, it becomes a strategic investor, not unlike Silicon Valley Bank (which tells startups that do business with it that Vouch is its preferred insurance provider).

“Y Combinator and Vouch share a common goal – giving founders the support they need to build successful, innovative companies,” said Anu Hariharan, Partner at Y Combinator Continuity, in a statement. “Vouch is built specifically for startups, so founders have the peace of mind that their business is covered. This platform is fundamental to the startup community, as it enables founders to focus on growing their companies — which is why we were bullish on leading the Series B.”

After trials in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, Tokyo’s Haneda airport and Abu Dhabi airport earlier this year, WHILL, the developer of autonomous wheelchairs, is bringing its robotic mobility tech to North America.

At airports in Dallas and Winnipeg, travelers with mobility limitations can book a WHILL through Scootaround and test out the company’s products.

Using sensing technologies and automatic brakes, WHILL’s wheelchairs detect and avoid obstacles in busy airports, allowing customers to get to their gate faster.

Based in Yokohama, Japan, WHILL has raised roughly $80 million for its technology to bring autonomy to personal mobility.

“When traveling, checking in, getting through security and to the gate on time is critical to avoid the hassle and frustration of missing a flight,” said Satoshi Sugie, the founder and chief executive of WHILL, in a statement. “Travelers with reduced mobility usually have to wait longer times for an employee to bring them a wheelchair and be pushed to their gate, reducing their flexibility while traveling. We are now providing an opportunity for travelers with reduced mobility to have a sense of independence as they move about the airport and get from point A to point B as smoothly as possible.”

The company is one of a growing number of startups and established technology companies tackling the massive market of assistive technologies.

The entire population of people with disabilities globally stands at 1 billion, and there are 70 million potential customers for assistive technology products across Europe. If demand in human terms isn’t enough to sway would-be entrepreneurs, then perhaps a recent market report indicating that spending on assistive technologies for the elderly and people with disabilities is projected to reach over $26 billion by 2024 will do the trick.

“Accessibility is a priority for Winnipeg Richardson International Airport and travel is now easier for passengers with limited mobility thanks to our partnership with WHILL. We are excited to be one of the first airports in North America to trial WHILL’s autonomous personal mobility devices with our travelers.”

Inhabitr, a Chicago-based furniture rental platform, has today announced the close of $4 million in Series A funding, led by Great North Labs.

Inhabitr launched in 2016 after the co-founders, who have gone through dozens of moves between the two of them, decided that purchasing, moving and maintaining furniture is one of the biggest pain points of the whole process.

Inhabitr tries to solve that by letting users rent furniture on the platform at a much more affordable cost than buying, never having to worry about the associated costs of moving that furniture should they relocate.

The company works directly with manufacturers to source products, and partners with local furniture stores and their employees to handle delivery and white glove installation.

Customers can choose from pre-packaged rooms, which have been curated by in-house designers, or build their own room by renting à la carte. Living room packages range from $70/month to $130/month, while individual pieces of furniture, like a sofa, are priced anywhere between $30/month to as high as $150/month for some high-end pieces. If at any time a user wants to change things up, Inhabitr charges a $99 swap fee to swap old furniture out with new.

The Chicago-based company already serves 10 cities in the U.S. and has put furniture in more than 2,000 homes.

The hope is that Inhabitr can better serve the end customer by tying together these three existing frameworks — designers, furniture manufacturers and retail stores.

Co-founder Ankur Agrawal believes that one of the biggest challenges for the company is scaling operations in a logistics-heavy industry, and perfecting the training playbook for the retail employees interfacing with the end customer.

“Another big challenge is capital,” said Agrawal. “Furniture as a category is an operations-heavy category and there is little understanding around the industry. Investors think of this as a non-sexy category and are looking for an obsolete business that software can come and disrupt. But the next feat of iteration will come from brick and mortar innovation.”

Spark, the popular email app from Readdle, has been redesigned on iOS and Android. The interface has always been a bit busy in the mobile app. That’s why the updated app now features a cleaner design and a handful of new features.

On the design front, Spark now uses simple headers to separate smart sections, such as newsletters, notifications and personal emails. It looks better than the rounded boxes with a colorful background.

There’s a lot of whitespace now, but the company has also taken advantage of this update to add dark mode. When you tap on a thread, the thread view has been updated as well.

When it comes to new features, the app tries to autopopulate your inbox with profile pictures. Just like Vignette, it pulls images from popular web services. For instance, if somebody who emails you has a Twitter account under the same email address, Spark can add the Twitter profile picture to your inbox.

Everybody has their own way of dealing with their email inbox. That’s why Spark lets you choose the buttons that appear at the bottom of an email thread. For instance, if you use folders a lot, you can put a folder button. But if you want to replace that button with a snooze button, you can.

Spark is now a better citizen on iPadOS 13. You can open multiple instances of Spark. This way, you can work on a document with an email thread using Split View and you can open a second Spark window to check your inbox in a separate workspace. Spark on iPadOS also supports the floating keyboard and new iPadOS gestures.

Tuesday Company, the organizational toolkit for political advocacy groups and candidates, has taken another step to consolidate its position in the growing market for tech-enabled political outreach with the acquisition of the voting mobilization service VoteWithMe.

Launched in the wake of the 2016 election by three former staffers from Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, Tuesday is one of the higher-profile alumni from the progressive-focused technology accelerator, Higher Ground Labs.

Michael Luciani, Jordan Birnholtz and Shola Farber, the co-founders of Tuesday Company, met working on mobilization and outreach for the Clinton campaign in 2016. Although Clinton lost, the work the trio did to encourage staffers and volunteers to send personalized outreach messages to their social network increased outreach in Michigan and other battleground states.

Now, coupled with VoteWithMe’s technology to encourage people to get to the polls on election day, the company believes it has a more complete platform to organize and mobilize for election day.

While Tuesday’s users were political campaigns, advocacy groups and their professional staffers, VoteWithMe was a free-to-use app that went directly to voters to encourage them to get friends to voting booths. The company had more than 250,000 downloads at the time of its acquisition.

“The opportunity to bring the B2B and B2C aspects together was really, really, really important,” says Farber, the Tuesday Company chief operating officer.

“We did a really great job building for organizations and for staff and organizers because our team is so strongly rooted in the organizing practice… and, VoteWithMe, they did a great job of building that consumer experience and our goal is to blend the expertise there,” according to Birnholtz, the company’s chief product officer.

The size of the acquisition was not disclosed, but the all-cash transaction means that Tuesday Company now owns the VoteWithMe tech and the team developing the VoteWithMe product will continue to have a consulting relationship with Tuesday Company.

While national politics dominates the news, advocacy groups of all stripes are seeing the benefits in applying the same tools that well-funded political campaigns brought to bear on the electorate to promote particular issues.

Nonprofits represent at least $13 billion of annual business, according to Farber, and Tuesday Company believes its services can provide value to all of them.

“The… political campaign world is really hard to build an innovative, sustainable business in, because it’s relatively small. Folks that don’t figure out how to become broadly relevant won’t survive,” says Birnholtz.

In the wake of the acquisition, investors can expect to see Tuesday Company out on the fundraising trail. The company is backed by Higher Ground Labs and individual investors like Chris Sacca and Reid Hoffman.

While Hoffman’s forays into the intersection of tech and politics have not always been without scandal, he has emerged as one of the most prolific backers of companies looking to apply technology to the political sphere.

Brava had a lot of things working in its favor, as startups go. It was founded in 2015 by serial executive John Pleasants, whose past stints have included being co-president of Disney Interactive Media Group, COO of Electronic Arts and CEO of Ticketmaster.

His plans to create a suite of snazzy direct-to-consumer smart hardware and software products, beginning with the Brava oven, also attracted tens of millions of dollars from an impressive lineup of backers, including True Ventures, TPG Growth and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. Indeed, though some sophisticated kitchen devices have come and gone (Juicero), some liked what Pleasants and his growing team in Redwood City, Calif., were trying to cook up. One of these admirers, apparently, was the Middleby Corporation, a publicly traded commercial and residential cooking and industrial process equipment company in Illinois that just acquired Brava — though neither Brava nor Middleby is disclosing terms of the deal.

We were in touch via email yesterday with both Pleasants and the CEO of Middleby, Tim FitzGerald, to learn what they can share about the tie-up, as well as to ask what happens to Brava and its tens of employees now.

TC: This was a young company. Why turn around and sell it?

JP: The company itself is four years old and we’ve had product available in market for one year. We’ve been venture funded to date and had the option to continue raising growth capital or merge with Middleby Corporation. Brava’s mission has always been to enable everyone to cook delicious, healthy home-cooked food with minimal time and effort, and we believe the fastest way to achieve this bold goal is through a strategic partnership with someone who can help make that happen.

TC: How did Brava and Middleby come together? Who brokered the first conversation? Was Brava talking with anyone else?

JP: We’ve been in talks with many people about financing, and a select group of strategics about a deeper partnership to achieve our objective. We had the assistance of City Capital in the process, and they made the introduction to Middleby in Chicago.

TC: How much is Middleby paying for the company? Also, is this an all-cash deal?

JP: While not disclosing the total amount, the consideration includes a mix of cash and stock.

TC: So what’s next? Will Middleby retain the Brava name or will this be phased out over time?

JP: Brava as it’s known today will not only continue but see accelerated growth and expansion. We will continue to sell the product and support our customers under the Brava brand while further innovating new products and services for our customers.

TF: The Brava name will remain. The product and technology will enhance our existing residential and commercial kitchen appliance portfolio. In Middleby Residential, we manufacture and sell Viking Range and other well-known consumer brands.

TC:  How many people does Brava currently employ and how many if any are going to Middleby?

JP: Brava employs 38 people and all will be going to Middleby. I will remain as the CEO of Brava and will also work with other Middleby divisional leaders to leverage Brava’s light-cooking platform and services for their existing brands. We’re excited by this because we currently have many ideas and plans for leveraging the Brava technology across new form factors, business segments (residential and commercial) and geographies. This all becomes more feasible with Middleby.

TC: We last talked before the Brava oven was out in the world. How many units did you wind up selling? 

JP: We’re closing in on 5,000 customers and expect to have a big holiday.

TC: What were some of the lessons learned with this experience?

JP: People love it. You can see this every day throughout our online communities. It’s not just about the quality of food and the ease in creating it . . . we hear comments all the time about how spouses who hardly ever cooked now do, how kids who never liked vegetables now ask for more . . .

In terms of what people want that doesn’t currently exist, [I’d say] more recipes and programs (we have thousands, but there are so many more we can do) and more flexibility; we can uniquely cook multiple ingredients simultaneously to perfection with our light-cooking technology and this enables lots of fun combinations [but] our customers would like even more flexibility in mixing and matching ingredients.

TC: Any business lessons?

JP: In terms of business lessons, it’s challenging to explain Brava’s full value proposition in a quick ad on social media. We have revolutionary technology that enables a new way of cooking that’s better, easier, faster — and that sounds almost too good to be true.

TC: Do you think the market for smart cooking appliances is big enough at this point? What do you think are the remaining hurdles and how do consumers get past them?

JP: The “smart cooking appliance” market is in its infancy. There are still very few pioneers in the space and household penetration is negligible. But this is all about to change. Once people know someone who can personally attest to the benefits, I fundamentally believe the adoption curve will bend exponentially. People spend a lot of money on household appliances…once they can be “smart” and “chef powered” and deliver well against that promise, why would most people not want a “smart” one versus a “non-smart” one?

TF: We see this market growing significantly with the next generation [of home cooks] who currently rely on and demand a digital experience.

Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB), the leading cloud software company focused on the non-profit sector, recently announced its third quarter results that surpassed all market expectations. The company remains...

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As we move into an increasingly multi-cloud world, there is a portability problem moving applications between clouds. Gravitational wants to fix that, and today it announced a $25 million Series A.

The round was led by Kleiner Perkins with help from S28 Capital and Y Combinator. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $31 million, according to the company.

Ev Kontsevoy, Gravitational co-founder and CEO, says his company is solving a couple of big problems around cloud portability. “There are just differences between all these different cloud providers because applications have dependencies. The application might depend on the cloud provider’s capabilities, and they use all this different middleware software that the cloud providers are bundling today with the infrastructure,” Kontsevoy explained. Those dependencies make it difficult to move an application to another cloud without additional coding.

He says that the other problem is related to on-going management of an application after you deploy it in the cloud, and that requires a large operations team. The problem with that is that there is a shortage of talent to fill these positions.

To solve these problems, Gravitational looked to Kubernetes . The company believes customers should build software using Kubernetes, open-source software and standards, and instead of building in the cloud dependencies up front, make their programs completely vanilla.

“Start with your application and don’t worry about clouds at all, don’t even have a cloud account in the beginning. Make sure your application runs on top of Kubernetes, package all of your software dependencies into Kubernetes, use open-source software and open standards as much as you possibly can,” he explained.

He says that Kubernetes gives you the ability to build software with very little administration, and then you can use Gravitational’s Gravity tool to package that solution into a single file, which you can then deploy on any cloud, private data center or even make available as download like you could with software back in the 1990s.

He sees organizations moving to container-driven software using Kubernetes, and as they do this, he believes they can break this dependency on the individual cloud providers using his company’s tools.

It’s certainly compelling if it works as described. Gravitational has 20 employees and around 100 paying customers. The company offers a couple of tools, Gravity and Gravitational Teleport as open source. It was a member of the Y Combinator 2015 cohort.

AI training data provider Samasource has raised a $14.8 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures.

The San Francisco-headquartered company delivers Fortune 100 companies with the inputs they need for machine learning development in fields including autonomous transportation, e-commerce and communications and media. It does so with a global work force of data specialists, a large number of whom are located in East Africa.

In addition to San Francisco, New York and the Hague, Samasource has offices and teams in Kenya and Uganda. The company has a global staff of 2,900 and is the largest AI and data annotation employer in East Africa, according to CEO and founder Leila Janah.

As part of its Series A, Samasource plans to upgrade the features of its platform. It also opened an AI Development Center in Montreal, Canada and expanded its digital delivery center in Kampala, Uganda to serve its corporate client base.

“Typically we’re working with very large companies for whom AI is a key part of their business strategy. So therefore they have to be really careful about…bias in the algorithms or bad data,” Janah explained on a call with TechCrunch.

Samasource works through a discovery phase with customers — to determine the problems they’re trying to solve and their sources of input data — and customizes an approach to providing what they need.

“In some cases we might refine elements of our software…then we go into deployment and…annotation work,” said Janah, referring to the company’s SamaHub training data platform.

Samasource clients include Google, Continental, Walmart and Ford. The company generates revenue primarily through its machine learning data annotation and validation services.

Samasource was originally founded by Janah as a nonprofit in 2008. “I saw huge opportunity for tapping into the incredible depth of…talent in East Africa in the tech world,” she said of the firm’s origins.

Samasource converted to for-profit status in 2019, making the previous nonprofit organization a shareholder.

“As a CEO I need to make it clear to investors that this is an investible entity,” Jana said of the reason for Samasource becoming a private company.

Ridge Ventures principal Ben Metcalfe confirmed the fund’s lead on the $14.8 million Series A round and that he will take a board seat with Samasource. Other investors included Social Impact Ventures, Bestseller Foundation and Bluecrest Limited Capital.

Samasource’s founder thinks that providing for-profit AI training data to global companies can be done while improving lives in East Africa.

“I strongly believe you can combine the highest quality of service with the core mission of altruism,” she said.

“A big part of our values is offering living wages and creating dignified technology work for people. We hire people from low-income backgrounds and offer them training in AI and machine learning. And our teams achieve above the industry standard.”

It’s not unusual for Samasource to hear comparisons to Andela, the well-funded tech talent accelerator that trains and connects African developers to global companies.

“We are very different in that our whole model is about delivering high-quality training data. I would call Samasource an AI company and Andela a software training company,” she said.

Janah does see some parallels, however, in both companies’ recognizing and building tech-talent in Africa, along with a number of blue-chip entrants.

“I think it’s telling that Facebook, IBM and Google have all opened tech hubs in Africa, some of them AI or machine-learning focused,” she said.

Some Samasource professionals are also taking their skills on to other endeavors in Africa’s innovation ecosystem.

“A lot of our alums go on to do entrepreneurial things [and] start businesses and I think you’re going to see a lot more of that as we grow,” said Janah.

For now she will be the one hiring and training new tech workers in East Africa.

As part of its Series A, Samasource increased staff in Kampala to 90 people and plans to grow that by 150% in 2020, its CEO said.

Starburst, the company that’s looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised a $22 million funding round led by Index Ventures, with the firm’s partner Mike Volpi joining the board. The general idea behind Presto is to allow anybody to use the standard SQL query language to run interactive queries against a vast amount of data that can sit in a variety of sources.

Like so many other open-source companies, Starburst plans to monetize Presto, which was originally developed at Facebook and open-sourced in 2013, by adding a number of enterprise-centric features on top, with the obvious focus being security features like role-based access control, as well as connectors to enterprise systems like Teradata, Snowflake and DB2, and a management console where users can configure the cluster to auto-scale, for example.

The Starburst co-founders, Justin Borgman and Matt Fuller, previously sold to Teradata their “SQL-on-Hadoop” company (Hadapt). After their tenure at Teradata, they decided to focus on turning Presto into an enterprise-grade service, and, after a few years, they succeeded in hiring Presto founders Dain Sundstrom, Martin Traverso and David Phillips, as well.

“What makes Presto so interesting is that it allows you to do data warehouse analytics without the data warehouse,” Starburst CEO Borgman told me. “What I mean by that is that you can query data anywhere. You don’t have to load the data, you don’t have to transform the data, and you don’t have to prepare the data.”

With this, an analyst can then access data anywhere, using regular SQL queries, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure that makes it all work.

Starburst’s overall mission to unify all of these data sources may sound a bit familiar, and I’ve heard somewhat similar pitches from other companies as well, including the likes of Databricks. Borgman, however, argues, that Starburst’s target audience is quite different from that of other projects, which tend to sit on top of the Spark engine. “We see Spark as very complementary to Presto,” he said. “What I mean by that is, we really think that Spark is best for the data scientist who is training machine learning models and working with Python notebooks, and writing code in Scala. Sort of the AI use cases. We’re focused exclusively on SQL — and SQL is a language that caters to a much broader audience. Maybe it’s not the data scientist PhD, but it’s the business analyst, the guy who went to business school and is trying to create some charts to show what’s going on with sales.”

The company says it will use the new funding to build out its sales force and marketing team, which it doesn’t really have right now, and expand its engineering team. Like similar open-source companies, chances are Starburst will, sooner or later, offer Presto as a managed service, too, though Borgman wasn’t quite ready to talk about that yet.

“Index has a long history of backing open source companies and data infrastructure companies. Some of these have now become household name: MySQL, Elastic, Confluent, Datadog and Kong to name a few,” Index Venture’s Volpi writes in a bog post today. That already made Starburst a good fit for a potential investment, though he also notes that bringing the Presto founders on board helped seal the deal and something he helped engineer.

“Our great fortune was that Justin and Matt are immensely wise and able to put aside ego’s and short term personal gain,” writes Volpi. “We were excited when they came to terms with Dain, Martin, and Dave. The end result was a reborn Starburst — a company constituted of the entrepreneurs that seized the commercial opportunity of Presto and the genius founders who invented it in the first place.”

Sleep is big business. Casper, Leesa and a dozen other mattress companies have driven the point home in recent years. It’s something we all want, but none of us are getting enough of. In 2017, sleep aids generated $69.5 billion, globally. By 2023, that number is expected to blow past $101 billion.

Remrise is the latest startup in search of the Holy Grail of a better night’s sleep. The company’s already raised $8.2 million in seed funding led by Founders Fund to kickstart that effort. Fostered by Atomic, the same incubator that gave the world Hims/Hers, the startup delivers herbal sleep solutions, tailored to the user.

The goal of the service is to move users off medicated sleep aids, using a combination of traditional herbal supplements and improvements to sleep hygiene. “We’re creating an app that is tracking and analyzing data,” CEO and founder Veronica Lee tells TechCrunch. “So we’re going to connect to any existing trackers to understand your bedtime, wake time, REM cycles. We’re collecting that passive data, and we’re also working with the customer around collecting active data around choices. The goal is to help the consumer improve sleep hygiene over time.”

The company has already launched a pilot with 90 users and plans to expand it to a larger study of about 400 people, using both sleep trackers (like Fitbits or Apple Watches) and sleep clinics. In the meantime, however, it’s already launching for the public.

There’s a 14-point questionnaire on Remrise’s site aimed at getting users started. I filled it out and the startup suggested the “Rested Up” mix, featuring Spirit Poria (Fu Shen), Salvia Root (Dan Shen), Polygala (Yuan Zhi), Shi Chang Pu, GABA, Magnesium and Valerian Root. Results will vary.

“Each formation has about a dozen to 15 different ingredients. We’re tailoring it to the individual. When people go through the quiz, we’re basing the patterns off of traditional Chinese medicine patterns. Each profile type goes through four different patterns that rotate on a daily basis.”

The company is offering a “free trial” for a week, which requires the user to pay shipping. Those interested in the full service deal will be charged $55 a month.

The future of the connected home, connected car and connected everything will have a lot of imaging technology at the center of it: sensors to track the movement of people and things will be a critical way for AI brains to figure out what to do next. Now, with a large swing toward more data protection — in part a reaction to the realization of just how much information about us is being picked up — we’re starting to see some interesting solutions emerge that can still provide that imaging piece, but with privacy in mind. Today one of the startups building such solutions is announcing a big round of funding.

Vayyar, an Israeli startup that builds radar-imaging chips and sensors, as well as the software that reads and interprets the resulting images used in automotive and IoT applications (among others) — providing accurate information about what is going on a specific place, even if it’s behind a wall or another object, but without the kind of granular detail that would actually be able to personally identify someone — has picked up a Series D of $109 million, money it will use to expand the range of applications it can cover and to double down on key markets like the U.S. and China.

From what I understand from sources close to the deal, this round is being done at a valuation “north” of $600 million, which is a big step up on the company’s valuation in its C-round in 2017, which was at around $245 million post-money, according to PitchBook data.

Part of the reason for the big multiple is because the company already has a number of big customers on its books, including the giant automotive supplier Valeo and what Raviv Melamed — Vayyar’s co-founder, CEO and chairman — described to me as a “major Silicon Valley company” working on using Vayyar’s technology in its smart home business.

I was going to write that the funding is notable for the large size, but it feels these days that $100 million is the new $50 million (which is to say, it’s becoming a lot more common to raise so much). What’s perhaps more distinctive is the source of the funding. This Series D is being led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with Regal Four (an investment partner of KDT) and existing investors including Battery Ventures, Bessemer Ventures, ICV, ITI, WRVI Capital and Claltech all also participating. The total raised by the startup now stands at $188 million.

Koch Disruptive Technologies is the venture arm of Koch Industries, the multinational giant that works across a range of oil and gas, manufacturing, ranching and other industries. It was founded by Fred Koch, the father of the Koch brothers, Charles and the late David, the longtime owners who are mostly known in popular culture for their strong support of right-wing politicians, businesses and causes. It’s an image that hasn’t really helped the VC arm, and its partners seem to be trying to downplay it these days.

Putting that to one side, the Vayyar investment has a lot of potential applicability across the many industries where Koch has holdings.

“Advancements in imaging sensors are vital as technology continues to disrupt all aspects of society,” said Chase Koch, president of Koch Disruptive Technologies. “We see incredible potential in combining Vayyar’s innovative technology and principled leadership team with Koch’s global reach and capabilities to create breakthroughs in a wide range of industries.”

Over the last several years, the startup has indeed been working on a number of ways of applying its technology on behalf of clients, who in turn develop ways of productising it. There are a few exceptions where Vayyar itself has built ways of using its tech in direct consumer products: for example, the Walabot, a hand-held sensor that works in conjunction with a normal smartphone to give people the ability to, say, detect if a pipe is leaking behind a wall.

But for the most part, Melamed says that its focus has been on building technology for others to use. These have, for example, included in-car imaging sensors that can detect who is sitting where and what is going on inside the vehicle, useful for example for making sure that no one is dangerously blocking an airbag, or accidentally setting off a seatbelt alarm when not actually in a seat, or (in the case of a sleeping baby) being left behind on accident, creating potentially dire outcomes.

Regulations will make having better safety detection a must over time, Melamed noted, and more immediately, “By 2022-2023 it will be a must for all new cars to be able to detect [the presence of babies getting left behind when you leave the car] if you want to have a five-star safety rating.”

The focus (no pun intended) on privacy is a somewhat secondary side-effect of what Vayyar has built to date, but that same swing of regulation is likely to continue to put it into the fore, and make it as much of a feature as the imaging detection itself.

Vayyar is not the only company using radar to build up better imaging intelligence: Entropix, Photonic Vision, Noitom Technology and Aquifi and ADI are among the many companies also building imaging solutions based on the same kind of technology. Melamed says that this is where the company’s software and algorithms help it to stand out.

“I think when you look at what we have developed for example for cars, these guys are far behind and it will take some time to close the gap,” he added.

Growing up, Selcuk Atli spent a good deal of his free time playing video games with his friends. And when I say with his friends, I mean actually with them. They’re called LAN parties, where everyone brings over their consoles and the group gets to play together virtually and in real life, all at the same time.

Atli, a grown man now, still loves games, but misses the memories made during LAN parties.

That’s how Bunch was born.

Bunch is a lot like Discord, but for mobile games. Users who download the game can connect with friends and join an audio or video chat with them. From there, users can choose a game to load and the whole party is instantly taken not just to the game, but into a multiplayer game session with their friends.

Today, Bunch has announced the close of a strategic investment round of $3.85 million from top game makers, including Supercell, Tencent, Riot Games, Miniclip and Colopl Next. Bunch’s previous investors include London Venture Partners, Founders Fund, Betaworks, Shrug Capital, North Zone, Streamlined Ventures and 500 Startups.

Bunch has a handful of first-party games on its platform to ensure that new users have a starting-off point. However, one of the biggest challenges of scaling is creating relationships with third-party game makers to eventually integrate that deep linking technology into the Bunch app.

With this new money, Bunch finds itself under the arm of a handful of some of the biggest mobile game publishers in the world. This new funding also brings Bunch’s total financing since launch to $8.5 million.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company try to bring the nostalgia of ’90s gaming into the 21st century. Discord has made quite a name for itself in the gaming world with a platform that allows gamers to communicate before, during and after a game.

However, Discord is more targeted at PC gamers, and is meant to give users the chance to meet and communicate with other gamers, rather than just hopping on a call with existing friends.

TeaTime Live, founded by QuizUp founder Thor Fridriksson, is another competitor focused squarely on mobile. However, TeaTime Live is going hard into Snapchat-like filters and avatars for video chat. And, like Discord, TTL wants users to meet other gamers, not connect with their IRL friends.

Bunch is primarily focused on connecting gamers with their actual friends. Once you’ve both loaded into a game, Bunch keeps running in the background to power voice chat. By focusing on real friends, Atli believes the impact of Bunch can be much greater for both users and the games themselves.

In fact, Atli says that user retention on a specific game grows 1.3 times with every new friend added on the platform. Indeed, between Day 7 and Day 30, Bunch Cohorts’ retention rates are 2x the retention of normal players, according to the Bunch CEO.

For now, Bunch is focused entirely on user acquisition and scaling to more games, but could see an opportunity to generate revenue through a subscription or in-app purchase model around premium Bunch features.

Sramana Mitra: Let me start driving you towards the entrepreneur journey story. When you decided to launch this, who developed the software? How did you finance the software development and getting...

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