Earlier this year, GetYourGuide raised a gigantic $484 million funding round with SoftBank’s Vision Fund leading the round. Now that the German startup has reached a valuation well over the $1 billion mark, it’s time to look back at the company’s impressive trajectory. That’s why I’m excited to announce that GetYourGuide co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

At first, people started booking flights and train tickets on online platforms. Then, they started booking hotel rooms and Airbnb apartments. But going somewhere is just step one. You also need to figure out what you’re going to do when you arrive in a city you don’t know.

GetYourGuide lets you book experiences, from sightseeing tours to tickets for attractions and other events. Behind the scene, the company operates a marketplace that matches third-parties with travelers.

But the startup now wants to go one step further and build a catalog of “Originals” tour experiences, such as a “GetYourGuide Instagram Tour of Bali,” which is probably a lot more appealing to young travelers compared to traditional travel agencies.

GetYourGuide’s metrics are mindboggling. Back in May, the company offered 50,000 experiences and had sold 25 million tickets in total. And I’m sure those numbers are even higher today.

The startup has a shot at becoming a cultural phenomenon and influencing the way we travel — just like Airbnb did with its peer-to-peer rental platform. And I can’t wait to hear Johannes Reck tell us how to grow such a big marketplace with everyone’s best interests in mind.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Johannes Reck is the Chief Executive Officer at GetYourGuide. He leads the company’s long-term vision and strategy.

Johannes co-founded GetYourGuide in 2009 while attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and has grown the company into the leading booking platform for incredible travel experiences.

Under Johannes’ leadership, over 30 million tickets have been booked to date via the GetYourGuide website, mobile app, and partnership network. GetYourGuide has raised over $650M from investors such as the SoftBank Vision Fund, Battery Ventures and KKR. Johannes leads GetYourGuide’s 550-person global team from its headquarters in Berlin, Germany.

Johannes originally hails from Cologne, Germany and holds an M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Peanut, an app that began its life as a match-maker for finding new mom friends but has since evolved into a social network of more than a million women, announced today it has closed on $5 million in new funding and is expanding its focus to reach women who are trying to conceive. The round was led by San Francisco and London-based VC firm Index Ventures, also backers of Dropbox, Facebook and Glossier, among others.

Other Peanut investors include Sweet Capital, Greycroft, Aston Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Female Founders Fund, Felix Capital and Partech. To date, Peanut has raised $9.8 million.

The idea for Peanut arose from co-founder Michelle Kennedy’s personal understanding of how difficult it was to forge female friendships after motherhood. As the former deputy CEO at dating app Badoo and an inaugural board member at Bumble, she initially saw the potential for Peanut as a friendship-focused matching app with swipe mechanisms similar to popular dating apps.

Over the past couple of years, however, Kennedy realized that what women needed was more of a community space. The team then built out the app’s features accordingly, with the launch of its Q&A forums, Peanut Pages, last year, and more recently, with Peanut Groups. The latter has now become Peanut’s main use case, with 60% of users taking advantage of the app’s community features and just 40% using the friend-finding functions.

“Community is definitely becoming a very important part of what we do. It’s where we see the users that we deem to be power users — women who are using Peanut for hours every day — they’re very much within the community section,” explains Kennedy. “We see that growth there and it actually guides the product. So we’re taking the behaviors that we see and letting that inform our roadmap,” Kennedy says.

Since around November 2018, Peanut has been growing by 20% month-over-month, as more women discover Peanut’s private and ad-free alternative to Facebook Groups. On Peanut, users are verified (by selfies!), and people have the sorts of discussions that don’t really take place in other social apps.

Even Kennedy admits she was surprised at first by what women were talking about in the app.

“The conversations were much, much more personal and intimate and more related to their lives. So whether that had to do with their sex life or relationships, it was on a deeper level,” she says. “These are conversations that women simply can’t have anywhere else. Of course, they’re not happening in Facebook Groups…these are very intimate and self-reflective moments. And [women] want to do that in a private setting in a private social network,” Kennedy adds.

The new funding, in part, will be used to grow Peanut’s 16-person team to 22 this year, which will then double next year.

In addition, Peanut is expanding access to women who are trying to conceive, with the launch of the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community. This will offer a separate sign-up experience and access to a dedicated network of women, where members can candidly discuss the topic and ask questions. Within TTC, members can also create their own groups — like one for women on their fifth round of IVF, for example — to have conversations with others who are at the same place in their journey.

The community, today, won’t point women to other fertility-focused apps or related health services, Kennedy says, though she sees the potential for strategic partnerships further down the road. In the near-term, however, Peanut plans to generate revenue by way of the freemium model and micropayments.

“We’re incredibly excited to partner with Michelle to grow Peanut from the essential platform for mothers it is today, to a social network for women globally. Peanut is a true companion for women, bringing them together when they need each other the most,” says Hannah Seal, principal at Index Ventures, about the firm’s investment. “We’ve been impressed with the response Peanut has received since launch and look forward to supporting the team as it enters into new areas such as fertility, and expands globally.”

“We want to shine a light on an often silent struggle. What has always been Peanut’s point of difference is enabling conversations women feel unable to have on any other platform. Providing a safe, inclusive space for women to discuss fertility is a natural progression for our brand as we continue to support women throughout each life stage. No woman should ever feel lonely, isolated or muted on such an important issue,” Kennedy says.

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Meet The Garage, a new incubator in Paris that is all about blockchain projects. Co-founded by Cyril Paglino from Starchain Capital, Fabrice Le Fessant from Dune Network and Oussama Ammar from The Family, the company will support blockchain startups, help big companies launch blockchain projects and educate engineers about blockchain development.

The Garage is a sort of puzzle made out of multiple pieces. First, it wants to create a community of startups and support those startups in different ways.

“We copy and paste The Family’s model, which means that it’s built on trust. We take 5% of equity after six months if the startup and The Garage are happy,” The Garage director Damien Daübe said during a small press conference yesterday.

In exchange for 5%, startups that are part of The Garage community get some help when it comes to product, engineering, press relations, marketing, etc. Eventually, The Garage wants to tap its network of investors to make some introductions and help them get some funding and traction.

There are already five startups participating in the program, such as Ipocamp, Ticket721 and Elite Chain. Eventually, The Garage wants to help 25 startups per year. The Family receives a lot of applications. You could imagine that The Family might recommend The Garage to some of them.

But taking some equity isn’t going to generate revenue from day one. The Garage is also going to work with Dune Network, the new blockchain from OCamlPro. According to The Block, OCamlPro was working with the Tezos Foundation but decided to part ways, create a fork and start a new blockchain.

The Garage is going to work with big corporate clients on some blockchain projects. This could generate some revenue much more quickly.

Finally, The Garage is also going to teach software engineers about blockchain development. The company will host with free lessons in the evening. There will be some online resources as well.

All of this is going to happen in a recently renovated building that looks like a hybrid between an Apple Store and a movie set. If you’re into concrete, metal and industrial design, it’s a beautiful place. It was mostly used for fashion week events until The Garage started renting it.

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Plum, the U.K.-based “AI assistant” to help you manage your money and save more, has raised $3 million in additional funding — money it plans to use for further growth, including European expansion.

The London company has also quietly launched its app for Android phones, adding to an existing iOS app and Facebook Messenger chatbot.

Backing this round — which is essentially a second tranche to Plum’s earlier $4.5 million raise in the summer — is EBRB, and VentureFriends, both existing investors. Christian Faes, founder and CEO of LendInvest has also participated

It brings the fintech startup’s total funding to $9.3 million since being founded by early TransferWise employee Victor Trokoudes, and Alex Michael in 2016.

The new investment is said to come at the end of a year of “rapid expansion for Plum” in both London and Athens, including growing the team to 31 employees. Senior hires include Max Mawby, Plum’s Head of Behavioural Science, who previously worked for the U.K. government and ran the fintech sector-focused Behavioural Insights Team.

In a call, Trokoudes told me that take up for Plum’s iOS app has been high and Android is also following a similar trajectory, proof that the startup’s AI assistant has perhaps outgrown its chatbook and Facebook Messenger beginnings (competitor Cleo has also released dedicated iOS and Android apps as an alternative to Facebook Messenger).

He also says Plum now has 650,000 registered users, of which around 70% are active monthly. In recent user feedback sessions conducted by the startup, the biggest draw to the app is that it’s aim of changing financial behaviour to help people save more appears to be working.

When users stick around using Plum for long enough, Trokoudes says they are surprised (and delighted) that it actually works.

Like similar apps, Plum’s “artificial intelligence” deems what you can afford to save by analysing your bank transactions. It then puts money away each month in the form of round-ups and/or regular savings.

You can open an ISA investment account and invest based on themes, such as only in “ethical companies” or technology. Another related feature is “Splitter,” which, as the name suggests, lets you split your automatic savings between Plum savings and investments, selecting the percentage amounts to go into each pot from 0-100%.

Trokoudes says that Plum recently launched two new “intelligent” saving rules: the 52 Week Challenge, which aims to help you save £1367 over a year; and the Rainy Day Rule, which puts aside money whenever it rains (yes, really!).

“Saving rules use automation to help people save more effectively without overloading them with information,” adds the Plum founder in a statement. “We have good evidence that this approach works: our automated round-ups feature, that we launched earlier this year has become a firm favourite among Plum users, boosting their savings by 50% on average”.

Meanwhile, another one of Plum’s competitors, Chip recently raised £3.8 million in equity crowdfunding on Crowdcube. It was part of a round targeting $7.3 million in total, although it isn’t clear if all of that has closed yet (last time I checked the company had so far secured $5 million). Noteworthy, the equity crowdfund gave Chip a pre-money valuation of £36.78 million based on “over 153,000” accounts opened.

We’re just about one month away from opening the doors to infinite early-stage startup opportunity. We’re talking about Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. But today we’d like to highlight a specific opportunity you might not be familiar with — the Wild Card.

Why is this opportunity a big deal? The startup that earns the Wild Card designation gets to compete in Startup Battlefield, our epic pitch competition with a $50,000 prize. Ka-ching!

How do you qualify? Every early-stage startup that exhibits in Startup Alley, our expo floor and the heart of every Disrupt — has a shot at the Wild Card. And we mean every startup — Startup Alley Exhibitor Package holders, our recently announced TC Top Picks, members of a Country Pavilion — no matter how you come to exhibit in Startup Alley, you’re eligible.

Here’s how it all works. The day before Disrupt Berlin 2019 opens, TechCrunch editors will review the exhibiting startups and select one standout to join the cadre of Startup Battlefield competitors. The Wild Card team receives roughly 24 hours’ notice before they step out onto the Main Stage to pitch their product and company in front of a live audience — and a panel of expert VCs and technologists waiting to be impressed.

Talk about pressure. But startuppers don’t back away from a potentially life-changing opportunity — they rise to the occasion, amirite? Case in point: the little startup that could. Legacy earned the Wild Card at Disrupt Berlin 2018 and went on to win Startup Battlefield, beau coup love and attention from investors and media — not to mention that $50,000 equity-free cash infusion.

Here’s the good news: There’s still time for you to be an exhibitor at Disrupt Berlin 2019 — and have a shot at competing in Startup Battlefield. Simply buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and you’re good to go.

Here’s even better news. Exhibiting in Startup Alley holds tremendous potential to move your business forward — whether you get the Wild Card or not.

This is how David Hall, co-founder of Park & Diamond, describes his experience in Startup Alley.

“Exhibiting in Startup Alley was a game-changer for us. We received insight on our product development process, and we got to engage with media and potential investors. The chance to have those discussions and to potentially form relationships was invaluable.”

The opportunity that is Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Make the most of that opportunity — exhibit in Startup Alley and take your shot at the Wild Card and Startup Battlefield. We’ll see you in Berlin!

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

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Depending on which study you believe, the wearable and digital health market could be worth anywhere from $30 billion to nearly $90 billion in the next six years.

If the numbers around the size of the market are a moving target, just think about how to gauge the validity and efficacy of the products that are behind all of those billions of dollars in spending.

Andy Coravos, the co-founder of Elektra Labs, certainly has.

Coravos, whose parents were a dentist and a nurse practitioner, has been thinking about healthcare for a long time. After a stint in private equity and consulting, she took a coding bootcamp and returned to the world she was raised in by taking an internship with the digital therapeutics company Akili Interactive.

Coravos always thought she wanted to be in healthcare, but there was one thing holding her back, she says. “I’m really bad with blood.”

That’s why digital therapeutics made sense. The stint at Akili led to a position at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as an entrepreneur in residence, which led to the creation of Elektra Labs roughly two years ago.

Now the company is launching Atlas, which aims to catalog the biometric monitoring technologies that are flooding the consumer health market.

These monitoring technologies, and the applications layered on top of them, have profound implications for consumer health, but there’s been no single place to gauge how effective they are, or whether the suggestions they’re making about how their tools can be used are even valid. Atlas and Elektra are out to change that. 

The FDA has been accelerating its clearances for software-driven products like the atrial fibrillation detection algorithm on the Apple Watch and the ActiGraph activity monitors. And big pharma companies like Roche, Pfizer and Novartis have been investing in these technologies to collect digital biomarker data and improve clinical trials.

Connected technologies could provide better care, but the technologies aren’t without risks. Specifically, the accuracy of data and the potential for bias inherent in algorithms that were created using flawed data sets mean there’s a lot of oversight that still needs to be done, and consumers and pharmaceutical companies need to have a source of easily accessible data about the industry.

”The increase in FDA clearances for digital health products coupled with heavy investment in technology has led to accelerated adoption of connected tools in both clinical trials and routine care. However, this adoption has not come without controversy,” said Coravos in a statement. “During my time as an Entrepreneur in Residence in the FDA’s Digital Health Unit, it became clear to me that like pharmacies which review, prepare, and dispense drug components, our healthcare system needs infrastructure to review, prepare, and dispense connected technologies components.”

The analogy to a pharmacy isn’t an exact fit, because Elektra Labs currently doesn’t prepare or dispense any of the treatments that it reviews. But Atlas is clearly the first pillar that the digital therapeutics industry needs as it looks to supplant pharmaceuticals as treatments for some of the largest and most expensive chronic conditions (like diabetes).

Coravos and here team interviewed more than 300 professionals as they built the Atlas toolkit for pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare stakeholders seeking a one-stop shop for all their digital healthcare data needs. Like a drug label, or nutrition label, Atlas publishes labels that highlight issues around the usability, validation, utility, security and data governance of a product.

In an article in Quartz earlier this year, Coravos made her pitch for Elektra Labs and the types of things it would monitor for the nascent digital therapeutics industry. It includes the ability to handle adverse events involving digital therapies by providing a single source where problems could be reported; a basic description for consumers of how the products work; an assessment of who should actually receive digital therapies, based on the assessment of how well certain digital products perform with certain users; a description of a digital therapy’s provenance and how it was developed; a database of the potential risks associated with the product; and a record of the product’s security and privacy features.

As the projections on market size show, the problem isn’t going to get any smaller. As Google’s recent acquisition bid for Fitbit and the company’s reported partnership with Ascension on “Project Nightingale” to collect and digitize more patient data shows, the intersection of technology and healthcare is a huge opportunity for technology companies.

“Google is investing more. Apple is investing more… More and more of these devices are getting FDA cleared and they’re becoming not just wellness tools but healthcare tools,” says Coravos of the explosion of digital devices pitching potential health and wellness benefits.

Elektra Labs is already working with undisclosed pharmaceutical companies to map out the digital therapeutic environment and identify companies that might be appropriate partners for clinical trials or acquisition targets in the digital market.

“The FDA is thinking about these digital technologies, but there were a lot of gaps,” says Coravos. And those gaps are what Elektra Labs is designed to fill. 

At its core, the company is developing a catalog of the digital biomarkers that modern sensing technologies can track and how effective different products are at providing those measurements. The company is also on the lookout for peer-reviewed published research or any clinical trial data about how effective various digital products are.

Backing Coravos and her vision for the digital pharmacy of the future are venture capital investors, including Maverick Ventures, Arkitekt Ventures, Boost VC, Founder Collective, Lux Capital, SV Angel and Village Global.

Alongside several angel investors, including the founders and chief executives from companies including: PillPack, Flatiron Health, National Vision, Shippo, Revel and Verge Genomics, the venture investors pitched in for a total of $2.9 million in seed funding for Coravos’ latest venture.

On the heels of Google buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, another player in wearables and health technology has picked up a big round of growth funding to continue expanding its business. Whoop, which makes a sensor-equipped (and screen-free) strap that continuously tracks your activities 24/7 and then provides a multitude of performance metrics and other data based on that activity, has closed a round of $55 million, a Series D that it will use to continue expanding its business into a wider range of wearables and analytics that can be gathered around them.

Today the devices measure things like how much strain a workout is causing you, how you are recovering afterwards, your sleep, whether training is having the desired effect, whether you are working at a level that will be less likely to cause injury and how you are likely to perform. Looking ahead, the plan is to bring the sensors into more places than just the strap it currently makes. “You’ll see Whoop over time worn throughout your body,” CEO Will Ahmed said. “The tech can live in other areas of the body, people will not even know you are wearing a sensor. We like the idea of tech being invisible while still being there.”

The funding brings the total to more than $100 million for the Boston-based company, and while Ahmed, who originally incubated the startup at Harvard with co-founders John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae, said the valuation was not being disclosed, he did describe it as “healthy” — which I guess is appropriate for a health-tech company.

For some context, PitchBook notes that its last round of $25 million, in 2018, was at $125 million, post-money. That would mean a minimum of $180 million here, although the “healthy” implies it is actually higher. (We’ll continue to dig around and will update the number if we learn more.)

Whoop doesn’t disclose how many users it has currently, or anything about its financials, but its investor list is a good measure of the traction that Whoop has had to date, as a company pitching its product not just to the mass market, but to an elite group of sports people — who in turn are not just major athletes, but, in this day and age, major influencers when it comes to purchasing power.

This latest round was led by Foundry Group — coincidentally also an investor in Fitbit — with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Accomplice, Thursday Ventures, Promus Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Individual investors included David Stern, the former NBA Commissioner; Ed Baker, former VP of product and growth at Uber, and former head of International Growth at Facebook; Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix; and Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab.

Previous backers of the company include the Durant Company, the National Football League Players Association, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, Los Angeles Chargers offensive tackle Russell Okung and Mike Novogratz, the chief executive of Galaxy Digital.

One notable shift Whoop has seen in the last year is that it has dropped the price of its wearable from an eye-watering $500 down to free. Instead, it bundles the strap into a wider membership program that you do pay for, starting at $30/month and decreasing, depending on what you would like to measure and use the data for (specifically, pricing is six months of data for $30/month; 12 months for $24/month; or 18 months for $18/month).

Offering its devices for free is just one of the ways that Whoop diverges from the usual wearables story.

At a time when wearables have become part of the gadget pantheon, equipped with screens and acting as little computers in their own right, Whoop has taken a very different turn, opting to build a device that looks nothing like a piece of electronics, even if behind the scenes it’s using just as much AI and other powerful technology to crunch the data that its five sensors are continuously collecting.

“The dirty secret with wearables is that the more features you try to pack in to them, the less effective they are,” Ahmed said. “We have been deliberate about what we want our tech to do. We think about the context of what will make the experience better, and if it doesn’t we’re not doing it.”

He gave me a flat “no comment” on the subject of whether Whoop had ever been approached for acquisition, but it’s notable to watch what has been happening around big tech. Apple has been seeing sales growth of its Watch outpace its other iconic products. Amazon is building a massive health services business that will likely also have a hardware component. And Google’s acquisition of Fitbit (if it clears all regulatory and other hurdles) is a big sign of how the company also sees this area as one where it will want to have a seat at the table.

“Google buying Fitbit is a sign that health data will be a big piece of the future for tech companies,” Ahmed said, pointing out that the company’s lack of growth in device sales is a strong sign that Google bought it largely for its data capabilities. “It puts a big value on data and what it’s done there and suggests Google will use the data to create health products.”

Uploadcare, a startup that aims to make using CDN platforms cheaper and easier for businesses, today announced that it has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Runa Capital and Vendep Capital, with existing investors Vaizra Capital and LVL1 Group participating, as well. Uploadcare promises to offer an end-to-end solution for businesses that automatically optimizes the files, images and videos of its clients and then delivers it over its CDN network or that of its partners.

Uploadcare founder and CEO Igor Debatur told me the idea for the service started quite a few years ago, while he was running a web development agency. Gathering files in different formats and sizes and then making those available in a way that was secure and easily scalable often turned out to be a challenge — and one that others in the industry faced as well. In the early days, Uploadcare was basically a file uploader for developers. Over time, Uploadcare added back-end features, including the smart CDN that can modify content on the fly based on the client where it’s displayed.

For a while, the team developed Uploadcare as a side project, but by 2016, the project started getting traction and they decided to shut down the development agency and focus solely on building out a proper product. “We started to build out a team and right now, we have more than 1,000 paying customers from very different sizes, starting from SMB to large enterprises using the product,” said Debatur.

Having worked for clients, the team obviously knew how to build products, but it had to figure out sales and marketing on the fly. Unsurprisingly, a lot of today’s new funding will go to exactly that: building out a sales and marketing team. Debatur also argues that unlike some of its competitors, Uploadcare invests a lot in its own technology, though the company does partner with other CDN vendors as well, based on its users’ needs.

“The amount of data that’s created per day is rising at a breakneck rate,” said Dmitry Chikhachev, general partner at Runa Capital . “With its robust infrastructure of delivery networks that span the globe, Uploadcare has quietly become a go-to solution for developers and engineers at some of the world’s largest companies. With differentiated technology and a strong leadership team, we believe that Uploadcare is well positioned to accelerate its growth and further solidify its leadership in the content delivery market.”

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Loop Returns, the startup that helps brands handle returns from online purchases, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital. Lerer Hippeau and Ridge Ventures also participated in the round.

Loop started when Jonathan Poma, a co-founder and COO and president, was working at an agency and consulting with a big Shopify brand on how to improve their system for returns and exchanges. After partnering with longtime friend Corbett Morgan, Loop Returns was born.

Loop sits on top of Shopify to handle all of a brand’s returns. It first asks the customer if they’d like a different size in the item they bought, quickly managing an exchange. It then asks if the customer would prefer to exchange for a new item altogether, depositing the credit in that person’s account in real time so they can shop for something new immediately.

If an exchange isn’t in the cards, Loop will ask the customer if they’d prefer credit with this brand over a straight-up refund.

The goal, according to Poma and Morgan, is to turn the point of return into a moment where brands can create a life-loyal customer when handled quickly and properly.

The more we shop online, the more brands extend themselves financially, and returns are a big part of that. Returns account for 20 to 30% of e-commerce sales, which can become a terrible financial burden on a growing direct-to-consumer brand. And what’s more, the cost of acquiring those users in the first place also goes down the drain.

Loop Returns hopes to keep that customer in the fold by giving them post-purchase options that are more sticky and more lucrative for the brand than a refund.

The company thinks of it as Connection Infrastructure. Most brands already have a customer acquisition architecture, and Shopify and Amazon are ahead when it comes to the infrastructure around customer convenience. But the ties that bind customers to brands haven’t been optimized for the many D2C brands out there looking to make an impact.

“The big problem we’re trying to solve long term is connection infrastructure,” said Morgan. “Why does this brand matter? Why does it mean something to me? Why does the product matter? We want to enforce more mindfulness and meaning into buying.”

Of course, a more mindful shopper doesn’t yield as many returns. Poma and Morgan admit that the goal of their software is to minimize returns, the very reason for the software’s existence. After all, return volume is one of a handful of variables that help Loop Returns determine what it will charge its brand clients.

But the team is thinking about other layers of the connection infrastructure, with plans to launch a product in 2020 that also focuses on the connection point after purchase. Poma and Morgan believe, with an almost religious reverence, that the brands themselves will help lead shoppers and infrastructure providers to a better, more connected shopping experience.

“Brands are the torch bearers,” said Poma. “They will lead us to a more enlightened era of how we think about buying. Empowerment of the brand will lead us to a better consumerism.”

The co-founders stayed mum on any specific plans for the 2020 product, but did say they will use the funding to expand operations and further build out its current and future products.

Of course, Loop is playing in a crowded space. Not only are there other players thinking about post-purchase connection, but Shopify has itself built out tools to help with exchanges and returns, and even acquired Return Magic, a similar service, in the summer of 2018.

That said, Loop Returns believes there is a long way to go as it builds the “connection infrastructure,” and that one clear path forward is actual personalization. With data from returns and exchanges, Loop Returns is relatively well-positioned to take on personalization in a meaningful way.

For now, Loop Returns has more than 200 customers and has handled more than 2 million returns, working with brands like Brooklinen, Allbirds, PuraVida and more.

Counting billable time in six-minute increments is the most annoying part of being a lawyer. It’s a distracting waste. It leads law firms to conservatively under-bill. And it leaves lawyers stuck manually filling out timesheets after a long day when they want to go home to their families.

Life is already short, as Ping CEO and co-founder Ryan Alshak knows too well. The former lawyer spent years caring for his mother as she battled a brain tumor before her passing. “One minute laughing with her was worth a million doing anything else,” he tells me. “I became obsessed with the idea that we spend too much of our lives on things we have no need to do — especially at work.”

That’s motivated him as he’s built his startup Ping, which uses artificial intelligence to automatically track lawyers’ work and fill out timesheets for them. There’s a massive opportunity to eliminate a core cause of burnout, lift law firm revenue by around 10% and give them fresh insights into labor allocation.

That’s why today Ping is announcing a $13.2 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures, along with BoxGroup, First Round, Initialized and Ulu Ventures. Adding to Ping’s quiet $3.7 million seed led by First Round last year, the startup will spend the cash to scale up enterprise distribution and become the new timekeeping standard.

“I was a corporate litigator at Manatt Phelps down in LA and joke that I was voted the world’s worst timekeeper,” Alshak tells me. “I could either get better at doing something I dreaded or I could try and build technology that did it for me.”

The promise of eliminating the hassle could make any lawyer who hears about Ping an advocate for the firm buying the startup’s software, like how Dropbox grew as workers demanded easier file sharing. “I’ve experienced first-hand the grind of filling out timesheets,” writes Initialized partner and former attorney Alda Leu Dennis. “Ping takes away the drudgery of manual timekeeping and gives lawyers back all those precious hours.”

Traditionally, lawyers have to keep track of their time by themselves down to the tenth of an hour — reviewing documents for the Johnson case, preparing a motion to dismiss for the Lee case, a client phone call for the Sriram case. There are timesheets built into legal software suites like MyCase, legal billing software like TimeSolv and one-off tools like Time Miner and iTimeKeep. They typically offer timers that lawyers can manually start and stop on different devices, with some providing tracking of scheduled appointments, call and text logging, and integration with billing systems.

Ping goes a big step further. It uses AI and machine learning to figure out whether an activity is billable, for which client, a description of the activity and its codification beyond just how long it lasted. Instead of merely filling in the minutes, it completes all the logs automatically, with entries like “Writing up a deposition – Jenkins Case – 18 minutes.” Then it presents the timesheet to the user for review before they send it to billing.

The big challenge now for Alshak and the team he’s assembled is to grow up. They need to go from cat-in-sunglasses logo Ping to mature wordmark Ping.  “We have to graduate from being a startup to being an enterprise software company,” the CEO tells me. That means learning to sell to C-suites and IT teams, rather than just build a solid product. In the relationship-driven world of law, that’s a very different skill set. Ping will have to convince clients it’s worth switching to not just for the time savings and revenue boost, but for deep data on how they could run a more efficient firm.

Along the way, Ping has to avoid any embarrassing data breaches or concerns about how its scanning technology could violate attorney-client privilege. If it can win this lucrative first business in legal, it could barge into the consulting and accounting verticals next to grow truly huge.

With eager customers, a massive market, a weak status quo and a driven founder, Ping just needs to avoid getting in over its heads with all its new cash. Spent well, the startup could leap ahead of the less tech-savvy competition.

Alshak seems determined to get it right. “We have an opportunity to build a company that gives people back their most valuable resource — time — to spend more time with their loved ones because they spent less time working,” he tells me. “My mom will live forever because she taught me the value of time. I am deeply motivated to build something that lasts . . . and do so in her name.”

Sramana Mitra: You were providing technicians for various appliances. Why do you need all these software developers? Sardor Umrdinov: Our lead generation is through website and SEO. We do SEO...

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Last week, we extended the early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 until 15 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Consider it distinctly non-divine intervention from Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastinators (and speedy causes). The countdown continues, and you have just four days left to save serious dough — we’re talking up to €500 depending on the type of pass you purchase.

No matter what role you play in the startup world, you’ll find tremendous value at Disrupt Berlin. Add even more value — buy an early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin before the early bird flies away for good on 15 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST).

Disrupt Berlin draws attendees from more than 50 countries across Europe and beyond, making it an international celebration of all things startup. This is the place to see the latest tech from innovative early-stage startups, and you’ll find hundreds of them exhibiting in Startup Alley. Don’t miss the Country Pavilions, where you’ll find delegations from different countries showcasing the best of their up-and-coming startups.

You’ll also find TC Top Picks exhibiting in Startup Alley. Our editors selected up to five startups they feel represent the most interesting use of technology in each of the following categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education. Come meet, greet and network with the founders who earned the coveted Top Pick designation.

With so many exhibiting startups to see, not to mention all the founders, investors and technologists roaming around the Berlin Arena, how can you cut through the noise to find the people who align with your business goals and interests? Use CrunchMatch, our free business-matchmaking tool that slays the old needle-in-a-haystack approach to networking.

We’ll email all registered attendees when we launch CrunchMatch, and we’ll explain how to access the platform. You then create a professional profile outlining your role and the specific types of people and connections you want to make. CrunchMatch will find and suggest matches and — with your approval — suggest meetings, send out meeting requests and schedule appointments. Closing the deal? That’s up to you.

Beyond all the networking opportunities, you’ll have the chance to learn from and engage with tech and investing experts and icons. Hear from world-class speakers, attend smaller Q&A Sessions where you have the chance to get your pressing questions answered, watch the Startup Battlefield and don’t miss the Hackathon finalists pitch on the Extra Crunch Stage. Check out the Disrupt Berlin agenda.

Join us on 11-12 December for all the value and opportunity Disrupt Berlin 2019 offers. And remember, you have just four more days to grab all the value you can. Channel Saint Expeditus and beat the deadline. Buy your early-bird pass before 15 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). We’ll see you in Berlin!

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Meet PacketAI, a French startup that wants to alert you when there’s something wrong with your app or service. The company uses machine learning to parse raw event data and find out if there’s anything wrong.

PacketAI can intercept incidents at many different levels. For instance, the service can tell you if your users can’t write something on your database or if there’s something wrong with your compute layer.

PacketAI doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. The startup is well aware that there are many monitoring tools out there — Datadog, Splunk and Dynatrace for instance.

“Those tools are primarily designed for humans so that they can understand information delivered by machines,” co-founder and CEO Hardik Thakkar told me.

PacketAI integrates directly with the APIs of Datadog, Splunk or Dynatrace to analyze raw event data in real time. Instead of scrolling through thousands of lines, you can get an alert that tells you that bank transfers take a lot more time than usual to go through, for instance.

Eventually, you should be able to repair your problem much more quickly, which could potentially improve your revenue.

For now, the startup creates a machine learning model for each client. But the plan is to create a model for each vertical as soon as you have four or five companies in the same space using PacketAI. You could imagine a model for banking companies, a model for telecom companies, etc.

The startup already raised $2.3 million (€2.1 million) from Aster Capital, BNP Paribas Developpement, Entrepreneur First and SGPA.

PacketAI is already working with some clients on the first implementations of its product. The service will be available to anyone in early 2020. Pricing varies depending on the number of nodes (any physical or virtual network element) you want to monitor using PacketAI.