Small-satellite startup Kepler has done something never before accomplished with satellite-based broadband connectivity: providing a high-bandwidth to the Arctic. Kepler’s nanosatellites have successfully demonstrated achieving over 100Mbps of network speed to a German icebreaker sea vessel that acts as a mobile lab for the MOSAiC research expedition.

This is the first time there’s been a high-bandwidth satellite network for any central Arctic ground-based use, Kepler says, and this connection isn’t just a technical demo: it’s being used for the researchers in the MOSAiC team, which is made up of hundreds of individuals, to transfer data back and forth between the ship and shore-based research stations, which improves all aspects of working with the considerable quantities of data being gathered by the team.

Bulk data transfer has been a challenge for a long time for science expeditions at either of the Earth’s poles. It’s impractical to do terrestrial high-bandwidth networks in these locations, and traditional satellite-based networking has not been able to achieve these kinds of speeds in these locales, either. Kepler is uniquely servicing the poles with two low Earth orbit satellites that are on a polar orbital trajectory, which means they can provide service to these scientists, which include a multidisciplinary team intent on studying the impact of climate change up close at the location where its effects are perhaps most dramatic, or at least felt earliest.

On the icebreaker floating research ship, Kepler has demonstrated 38Mbps down, and 120Mbps up, which is coincidentally above the max recommended specs that Google has posted for its highest quality Stadia game streaming. But this is for science, not gaming. For science.

Wrench, the Seattle-based on-demand vehicle maintenance and repair service for consumers and fleets, has raised $20 million in its latest round of financing.

The company’s round was led by Vulcan Capital, with additional participation from Madrona Venture Group, Tenaya Capital and Marubeni Corp.

Wrench is one of a growing number of companies using technology to adapt what had previously been infrastructure-heavy services closer to a more consumer-friendly, convenient business model. Other companies operating in a similar vein (and in automotive) include refueling and car wash on-demand startups, like Filld, Yoshi and Booster Fuels for gassing up and Spiffy, Wype Washos and Washé for washing.

Equipped with diagnostic software that can assess problems with vehicles based on their owners descriptions, and service trucks that can handle most maintenance and repair work, Wrench meets fleet operators and consumers at their vehicles to provide servicing and repairs.

It’s a model that has attracted some competitors with big backing. RepairSmith, which operates a similar service out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, is backed by Daimler to provide much the same on-demand repair services.

Given the competition coming into the market, it’s no wonder that Wrench is raising additional capital to expand its footprint into new markets. The company also said it intends to use the financing to make some key hires.

“Busy consumers need a simple scheduling and vehicle diagnosis system to deliver repair and maintenance services without the hassle of the waiting room,” said Ed Petersen, the company’s chief executive, in a statement.

Wrench has already serviced around 100,000 vehicles, according to Petersen, and all of the company’s repair and servicing visits come with a 12,000-mile warranty and a vehicle inspection with the results delivered to a customer.

“Consumers are embracing on-demand services that make their lives better. Wrench’s technology-enabled mobile mechanic service saves customers time and money — resulting in high customer satisfaction and lifetime value,” said Stuart Nagae, director of venture capital at Vulcan Capital. “With more than 270 million vehicles in the United States, the opportunity is enormous.”

Wrench has already begun its process of geographic expansion with the acquisition earlier this year of the Canadian mobile automotive mechanic startup Fiix, which provided mobile mechanic services to around 80,000 customers across North America.

Wrench raised $4 million in its first round of financing, which TechCrunch covered back in 2017.

SourceScrub at its core is a business intelligence database surrounded by a platform that allows the user to find companies or investment opportunities that meet a given criteria. Its main value...

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Enterprises have made tremendous investment in cyber security. Amos discusses how to extract value out of existing investments. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as...

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Opportunity’s still knocking, but it’s on a very short leash. We’re T-minus 48 hours remaining on early-bird prices to Disrupt Berlin 2019. And if you want to talk opportunity, you won’t find a better one than attending this two-day international conference focused on early-stage startups.

Right now, savvy startuppers can reap significant savings — up to €500 depending on which pass level you purchase. But the countdown is on. Don’t let procrastination — or any other obstacle — sideline your chance to get the best price. Buy your early-bird passes to Disrupt Berlin before the clock runs out tomorrow, 8 November, at 11:59 p.m. (CEST).

What kind of opportunities await you at Disrupt? Opportunities to network. Startup Alley, the pulsing heart of every Disrupt, will be home base to hundreds of early-stage startups. This is where you’ll find some of the most innovative technology — products and platforms, services and talent. No matter what part of the startup ecosystem they occupy — founders, investors, media, marketers, engineers — everyone heads to the Alley.

While you’re exploring Startup Alley, be sure to check out our TC Top Picks. We hand-picked this cohort of roughly 30-50 exemplary startups representing these tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Disrupt Berlin packs a lot of programming into two short days. Pro tip: Use CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform that helps you find, connect and schedule meetings with people based on mutual business goals and interests. No more wasting time or shoe leather trying to find and schedule meetings with the right people.

Now that you’re set to network with greater efficiency, don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from a terrific lineup of speakers — founders, investors and tech icons ready to address the most challenging issues facing the startup community. Check the Disrupt Berlin agenda and plan your strategy before you even pack your bags.

Startup Battlefield is an opportunity to witness the birth of tomorrow’s tech giants — potential unicorns in the making. Since 2007, Startup Battlefield pitch competitions have launched 857 tech companies — like Vurb, Dropbox, Mint, Yammer and many others — that have collectively raised $8.9 billion and produced 112 exits.

Watch as 15-20 impressive early-stage startups pitch and demo to a tough panel of seasoned VCs and technologists. All the fast-paced action takes place live on the Main Stage. Be there to see which startup claims the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 prize.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. So much untapped opportunity awaits, but your opportunity to pay early-bird prices ends tomorrow, 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin today and keep the opportunities coming.

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

South African internet company Naspers isn’t a particularly well-known name in the startup community. And yet, the company made an early investment in a small Chinese company called… Tencent. Naspers still retains a 31% stake in Tencent that is valued at around $100 billion (with a B). That’s why I’m excited to announce that Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

It’s hard to talk about Naspers without talking about SoftBank, another company that made an early bet on Alibaba, another small Chinese company back then. But Naspers doesn’t want to be compared to SoftBank, as it doesn’t have the same approach.

Naspers recently created a new holding company for its tech investments, called Prosus NV. A couple of months ago, Prosus went public in Amsterdam — the holding company is currently valued at $114 billion.

This has been a huge deal for Naspers — and also a highly unusual listing. And it should open up a lot of possibilities for more late-stage investments in the future. Prosus isn’t a traditional fund with limited partners that expect returns. It means that it can hold investments for multiple decades.

Naspers has invested in online classifieds business OLX, in fintech startups with PayU and Remitly, in food delivery startups Delivery Hero, iFood and Swiggy, and in dozens of other startups across the globe.

While many venture capital firms are focused on the U.S., Naspers has investments in 90 countries. If you want to learn more about the mega-trends of the tech industry, you have to hear what Bob van Dijk has to say.

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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Immo Investment Technologies, a London-based fintech startup that purchase homes on behalf of buy-to-let investors, has closed €11 million in Series A funding.

Backing the round is Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, with participation from Tom Stafford and Rahul Mehta of DST Global, and Mato Peric, among others. In addition, the company is disclosing that it has raised more than €60 million in real estate “buyer capital.”

It will use the buyer capital to fund the acquisition of properties — targeting private individuals who want to sell their property quickly. It then refurbishes these properties and puts them on the rental market as part of a fully managed package, therefore returning a predictable yield to investors.

Immo says it has already evaluated more than 10,000 for-sale apartments in the launch city of Hamburg. It claims its technology can accurately predict property sales prices, as well as current and future rental income prices.

“Immo buys residential properties directly from consumers on behalf of professional investors, thereby helping consumers sell their home in a fast, reliable, transparent and convenient way and providing investors with desired residential asset exposure at scale,” explains Hans-Christian Zappel, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

“Immo tenants enjoy a well invested, fully furnished long-term rental product and a highly standardised and professionally managed lettings experience.”

As well as serving investors and tenants, Immo is also targeting property owners that want to sell their home quickly, with less hassle, and without the expense of using an estate agent. “With Immo, consumers go through one viewing, receive an offer within 24 hours and then sell to us without any agency fees and free of worries about financing risks or changing minds,” says Zappel.

The ability to transact “fast and confidently” is based on the company’s data and tech-driven approach to understanding markets and assets, says the Immo co-founder. “We replace instinct and gut-based valuations with data; we call this the ‘Immo Intelligence,’ ” he adds.

In this regard, it echoes similar claims made by Nested, another London-based fintech company aiming to remove the uncertainties surrounding selling a property.

“Using our inspection technology we collect a proprietary set of 281 data points about every property,” continues Zappel. “Everything from ceiling height, decibel noise levels, wall dampness, lumen levels to water pressure gets measured. The resulting asset information is then combined with a hyperlocal market assessment which is based on two automated valuation models that use historical transaction and lettings data as well as environmental data such as traffic flow, crime statistics, average school/restaurant/cafe ratings, average Airbnb ratings in the area, social media activity, distance to supermarkets/places of worship, etc. to come up with the price we are able to offer to the seller.”

Based on its machine learning model, Immo claims to be able to do the financial underwriting of a property “in a matter of minutes,” a process that when done manually can take days.

Meanwhile, traditional real estate brokers are arguably Immo’s most direct competitors, but they tend to charge high fees and don’t provide a standardised experience for sellers. “They sell the hope for a quick and convenient sale to a customer that is helpless. Immo actually delivers on that promise,” says Zappel.

He also argues that Immo isn’t currently competing directly with other “iBuyer” models, such as those operated by OpenDoor, Nested and Casavo. “We are not in the same country market [yet],” he says, “but fundamentally these players are trying to address a similar problem for the consumer.”

“Immo’s C2B model — buying from consumers, selling to investors — is in our view superior to the C2C model [of] buying from consumers, [and] selling to consumers,” adds Zappel. One reason is that Immo is able to operate a “balance sheet light” model, in which properties don’t sit on its balance sheet and therefore is arguably less exposed than some other “iBuyer” models.

Immo generates revenue from investors that pay the startup a fee for sourcing, assessing and acquiring property assets. In addition, the company receives a subscription fee for ongoing portfolio management. “We don’t take any fees from the seller, nor from tenants,” says Zappel.

Hot on the heels of adding support for Samsung Pay, Curve, the London-based “over-the-top” banking platform that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single card, has added support for Google Pay.

The new integration — which we reported earlier this week was imminent — means that Android users can pay with Curve via their Android-powered phone or smartwatch anywhere Google Pay is accepted. This includes via devices from Google itself, along with those made by the likes of Acer, Huawei, HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and others.

It also widens the availability of Google Pay to users whose bank doesn’t currently support Google’s digital wallet, such as Barclays and Virgin, which have chosen instead to shun Google Pay while adding support for NFC-enabled payments to their own banking apps.

The new feature is enabled by Curve’s ability to consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card. This means that once you register your Curve card with Google Pay, the Google Pay app will now work with any Mastercard or Visa-issued debit or credit card you have added to Curve.

With Google Pay, Curve customers also can spend beyond the £30 limit on transactions imposed by regular “contactless” card payments. They’ll also benefit from a single sign-in and payment system when transacting online and within apps where Google Pay is supported.

“We are delighted to announce Curve’s integration with Google Pay,” said Diego Rivas, Curve’s head of Product, OS, in a statement. “Curve is still an excellent way of consolidating all your cards in one and its integration with Google Pay enables even more ways to pay if you don’t have your physical card handy. By combining the Google Pay experience with Curve’s unique all your cards in one and money management features, Curve customers get to experience one of the most rewarding and feature packed personal finance products on the market.”

Meanwhile, Apple Pay is still unsupported by Curve. Could it be next? Perhaps. The first rule of Apple Pay is to never talk about Apple Pay (until it launches).

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Alok Nandan was recorded in September 2019. Alok...

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Nigerian internet service provider Tizeti has launched its first 4G LTE network.

The Y Combinator-backed startup — which uses solar-powered towers to deliver net connectivity — has built its premier 4G-capable tower in the city of Port Harcourt, where Tizeti will offer its first 4G and ISP services.

The company operates primarily in Lagos, Nigeria’s unofficial business capital, and expanded this year to Ghana. Port Harcourt is the fifth largest city in Nigeria located in River State, another commercial hotspot for the country.

Tizeti plans to take its model to additional West African countries in 2020, according to CEO and co-founder Kendall Ananyi.

“We leverage inexpensive wireless capacity and plummeting cost of solar panels to create a low capex and opex network of owned and operated towers,” Ananyi told TechCrunch.

“We’re able to offer customers unlimited internet at 30 to 50% the cost of traditional mobile data plans,” he said.

The price for a Tizeti unlimited plan is 9,500 Nigerian Naira per month, or around $26. The startup has 1.1 million unique users and packages internet services drawing on partnerships with West African broadband provider MainOne and Facebook’s Express Wi-Fi. 

On the addressable market for Tizeti after its latest move, “Not everyone’s gonna sign up but we know we have 20 million in Lagos and 1.8 million in Port Harcourt; so even if we get 10%, that it’s a huge number for us,” Ananyi said.

A lot of businesses and tech startups bank on Nigeria’s numbers because it has both Africa’s largest economy and population, at 200 million.

Tizeti raised a $3 million Series A round in 2018 and has built a suite of internet-driven products to capture market share. In addition to ISP services, it launched a Skype-like personal and business enterprise communications service — WiFCall.ng — in April 2019.

Tizeti could shift the connectivity equation in Africa’s key tech hubs, such as Nigeria, where high levels of startup formation and VC investment are still hindered by weak internet stats.

Though Africa (primarily Sub-Saharan Africa) still stands last in most global rankings for internet penetration (35%), the continent continues to register among the fastest connectivity growth in the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa countries with the highest number of internet users include Nigeria (123 million), Kenya (46 million) and South Africa (32 million).

European startup studio eFounders recently reached a portfolio valuation of $1 billion across 23 companies. And the company doesn’t want to stop there, as it is currently launching three new companies and products.

While software-as-a-service companies are trendy, eFounders has been exploring this space for a few years now. The company regularly comes up with ideas for new companies that improve the way we work.

In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keeps a significant stake in its startups. Ideally, startups raise a seed round and take off on their own after a year or two.

And here’s what eFounders has been working on.

Cycle

Cycle is a product management platform. And if you think about product management, it encompasses many things under one title, such as writing specs, planning a roadmap, assigning tasks and defining cycles or sprints.

Many startups use multiple tools for all those tasks. And sometimes, the tools they were using don’t scale well. Cycle will integrate with GitHub, Figma and Zendesk so that you can handle bugs, improvements and features more efficiently.

Finally, Cycle lets you generate product updates for your customers, create public roadmaps and collaborate with other people in your organization.

It has an Airtable vibe as you can create your own views and workflows depending on your needs. You can display data as a timeline, a to-do list, a kanban view, a normal list, etc.

Folk

Talking about Airtable, Folk is easy to describe. What if Salesforce and Airtable had a baby? It would look more or less like Folk.

Folk lets you manage your contacts more efficiently and collaborate with teammates. You can import your address book from iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Excel and CSV files. You can then sort your contacts into groups, and add notes, reminders and tasks.

You also can create many views to go through your contacts. There’s a spreadsheet-like view, a kanban view, a calendar view and even a space view so you can create table layouts for an event.

It’s worth noting that eFounders CEO Thibaud Elziere is also going to be the CEO of Folk.

Once

Once is a new take on visual presentations. It lets you create stories using a drag-and-drop interface and generate a link to send your stories to your customers. Once supports everything you’d expect from an Instagram story, such as images, text, polls and sliders.

You also can embed tweets, YouTube videos or Google Maps addresses in your stories. The best part is that users don’t need to download an app or follow a brand on Instagram. It works in your mobile browser.

Following the death of five people at a Halloween party hosted at a California Airbnb rental, and a scathing Vice report outlining Airbnb’s failure to prevent nation-wide scams, the company says it will begin verifying all seven million of its listings.

Airbnb properties will soon be verified for accuracy of photos, addresses, listing details, cleanliness, safety and basic home amenities, according to a company-wide email sent by Airbnb co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky on Wednesday. All rentals that meet the company’s new standards will be “clearly labeled” by December 15, 2020, he notes. Beginning next month, Airbnb will rebook or refund guests who check into rentals that do not meet the new accuracy standards.

The long-awaited updates to Airbnb’s security measures come months before the company plans to complete an initial public offering or direct listing and just days after Chesky announced the business would ban “party houses,” and work harder to combat unauthorized parties and abusive host and guest conduct.

“We believe that trust on the internet begins with verifying the accuracy of the information on internet platforms, and we believe that this is an important step for our industry,” Chesky said in the staff email.

Airbnb also will launch a 24/7 Neighbor Hotline, which will allow guests to reach a real Airbnb employee from any location at any time. The company will fully roll-out the service next year. Finally, Airbnb will expand its screening of potentially high-risk reservations globally next year.

The new efforts are led by Margaret Richardson, Airbnb’s vice president of trust, who Chesky tasked with rapidly formulating a response to the Halloween party massacre. The company has also tapped Charles Ramsey, former chief of the Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. police departments, and Ronald Davis, the former chief of the East Palo Alto police department, to advise the projects.

“More than eleven years after Joe, Nate, and I started Airbnb, I have been asked what has surprised me most about the world,” Chesky writes. “My answer is two things: that people are, in fact, fundamentally good, and that we are 99% the same. We still believe this, and with these changes, we hope to continue to demonstrate this to the world.”

Stealth fintech startup Digits, from the same team that built Crashlytics to scale then sold to Twitter for more than $100 million, has raised a $10.5 million round of Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Benchmark and has the backing of 72 angels, including founders and CEOs from companies like Box, GitHub, Tinder, Twitch, StitchFix, SoFi and several others.

With the round, Digits also gains a new board member, Peter Fenton, who has served on the boards at AirTable, Twitter, NewRelic, Yelp and elsewhere.

The funding is a big bet on serial entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, who launched and sold their crash reporting service to Twitter, which itself later sold it to Google. At Twitter, the team remained to build out the product and launch new services, like Answers. After the sale to Google four years later, it was then folded into Google’s own developer platform to become the crash reporting tool for Android. Today, it’s still on nearly 5 billion monthly active devices and used inside millions of apps.

Now, the Crashlytics co-founders have returned with most of their original team to develop a new fintech startup, Digits, which describes itself vaguely as “a counting company.”

The company’s focus aims to solve a problem the founders had faced themselves when building Crashlytics.

“As builders, there is nothing more exciting than cracking the next engineering puzzle; than perfecting the next design; than delivering the next capability to customers. And there is nothing more mind-numbing than the paperwork, and spreadsheets, and financial reports, and inscrutable transaction records that are all required to actually operate the business,” a Digits blog post earlier this year explained.

“Globally, most entrepreneurs today have no formal training in business finance. We certainly didn’t. Today, you start a company to solve a real problem for real people, or to offer a service you’re skilled at, or to provide a living for you and your family. You don’t start a company because you want to operate a business—but you have to anyway,” the founders said.

While Digits isn’t talking about the specifics of its new product yet, its software is described as pairing design and machine learning in order to “democratize financial savvy.”

More specifically, it leverages APIs, classification algorithms and machine learning techniques to provide a real-time view into a business’ finances, proactively alert you to what’s important and allow you to deep dive into your data to better understand what’s driving your business.

The company believes its approach to visualizing a company’s finances is unique, and apparently a sizable number of investors agree.

Among the 70+ angels backing Digits are Box CEO Aaron Levie; Adam Bain and Dick Costolo (ex COO and CEO of Twitter); Ali Rowghani (partner at Y Combinator, ex-COO Pixar); SoFi CEO Anthony Noto; Drift CEO David Cancel; AngelList board member Jeff Fagnan; Justin Kan (CEO Atrium, co-founder Twitch, YC partner); StitchFix CEO Katrina Lake; GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; First Republic Bank COO Mike Selfridge; Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop; Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen; DraftKings CEO Jason Robins; LegalZoom co-founder Brian Lee; Gusto CEO Josh Reeves; and Notazie CEO Pat Kinsel. 

Though Digits hasn’t publicly launched — the product is in invite-only status for now — it already has live customers and is seeing more than $1.5 billion in transactions processing on its platform, the company says.

And unlike Crashlytics, which was based in Boston, Digits is a 100% remote operation. LinkedIn shows just 10 employees, including co-founders Chang and Seibert.

The team hasn’t said when Digits itself will be publicly unveiled or opened to sign-ups.

Wardrobe, a new peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace, has today announced the close of a $1.5 million seed round and its public launch out of beta.

The funding was led by angel investor Cyan Banister and Ludlow Ventures, with participation from GroundUp Ventures, Shrug Capital, Airbnb cofounder Nate Blecharczyk and HQ Trivia founder Rus Yusupov, among others.

Wardrobe was founded by Adarsh Alphons after he had an epiphany about just how many items of clothes in his own house went mostly unused. In fact, the WSJ suggests that most people only wear around 20 percent of their wardrobe on a regular basis. Alphons says that the average woman has 57 items of clothes in her closet that she doesn’t even wear once a year.

So began Wardrobe.

Wardrobe is a peer-to-peer rental marketplace for vintage, designer, and luxury brand clothing. However, unlike Rent the Runway or other sharing economy fashion platforms, Wardrobe uses dry cleaners as hubs for the inventory. This not only allows the company to scale more quickly from geography to geography, but also to remain lean without taking on the risk of big warehouses and complicated logistics around shipping.

Here’s how it works:

Folks who want to rent their clothes on Wardrobe simply fill out a few answers to questions and receive a shipping label in the mail. Once their clothes are approved, they’re sent to a local dry cleaner where they wait to be rented for either 4, 10, or 20 days.

Wardrobe HQ handles everything from storage to shipping to photographing the pieces for the app.

The owner of the clothes makes between 70 and 75 percent of the rental cost after the cost of dry cleaning.

Interestingly, Alphons learned in beta that users want to not only browse the app for clothes, but follow specific users and closets that they particularly like. So the app is now tailored to let users follow one another and watch each other’s closets, creating an environment that may attract influencers to the platform.

Wardrobe currently has partnerships with more than 40 Manhattan dry cleaners, serving all of the island below 110th Street. Alphons says that each dry cleaner can hold between 100 and 1,000 items of clothing at a time.

As slow-moving LinkedIn leaves room for startups to flourish, Elpha aims to create a tailored online network for women in tech.

The company is not only a graduate of Y Combinator, but was conceived of behind the scenes of the San Francisco accelerator program. Cadran Cowansage, the co-founder and chief executive officer of the startup, was a software engineer at YC from 2016 to early 2019. It was during that stint that she created Leap, a tool meant to help her and her colleagues communicate. Soon enough, she’d granted the entire YC network of female founders access to the tool. Then earlier this year, she decided to spin the company out of YC entirely, rebrand and relaunch as Elpha.

“There’s a velocity that comes with building a startup and the pressure of funding that keeps you moving very fast,” Cowansage, who counts Kuan Luo as a co-founder, said of her decision to make Elpha an independent business.

“I had the idea for a long time,” she told TechCrunch. “I didn’t feel like I really had a big enough network of women who were at my level or a bit further along than I could go to for advice. Things like how do I get this promotion? Or my male peers, they are being paid more than me, what do I do about that? The conversations that are difficult that you really want a woman’s perspective on.”

A hybrid social and professional network, Elpha is meant to offer women in tech a dedicated space to communicate via public forums and direct messages, foster relationships and build their careers. The company, which completed YC this summer, is today announcing a $1.1 million round with participation from Y Combinator, the accelerator’s co-founder, CEO and president (Jessica Livingston, Michael Siebel and Geoff Ralston, respectively), as well as Maveron, Moxxie Ventures, JaneVC, Friale, Kabam co-founder and visiting YC partner Holly Liu, Block Party founder Tracy Chou and Breaker co-founder Leah Culver.

The “LinkedIn for women” charges $12,000 in annual subscription fees to companies who use Elpha to identity potential hires. Cowansage said the company currently has 20 paying customers, many of which are venture-backed startups like Lambda School and Webflow. The Elpha team plans to use the seed investment to hire, host events and continue the development of new products, including a mobile app expected out next year.

Ultimately, Cowansage hopes Elpha will bring together women in media, science, medicine and more.

“There’s a huge opportunity to bring women together across different industries and also create those sub-communities,” she said. “There’s a ton we can do from here.”

Neural Magic, a startup founded by a couple of MIT professors, who figured out a way to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs, announced a $15 million seed investment today.

Comcast Ventures led the round, with participation from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Pillar VC and Amdocs. The company had previously received a $5 million pre-seed, making the total raised so far $20 million.

The company also announced early access to its first product, an inference engine that data scientists can run on computers running CPUs, rather than specialized chips like GPUs or TPUs. That means that it could greatly reduce the cost associated with machine learning projects by allowing data scientists to use commodity hardware.

The idea for this solution came from work by MIT professor Nir Shavit and his research partner and co-founder Alex Mateev. As he tells it, they were working on neurobiology data in their lab and found a way to use the commodity hardware he had in place. “I discovered that with the right algorithms we could run these machine learning algorithms on commodity hardware, and that’s where the company started,” Shavit told TechCrunch.

He says there is this false notion that you need these specialized chips or hardware accelerators to have the necessary resources to run these jobs, but he says it doesn’t have to be that way. He says his company not only allows you to use this commodity hardware, it also works with more modern development approaches, like containers and microservices.

“Our vision is to enable data science teams to take advantage of the ubiquitous computing platforms they already own to run deep learning models at GPU speeds — in a flexible and containerized way that only commodity CPUs can deliver,” Shavit explained.

He says this also eliminates the memory limitations of these other approaches because CPUs have access to much greater amounts of memory, and this is a key advantage of his company’s approach over and above the cost savings.

“Yes, running on a commodity processor you get the cost savings of running on a CPU, but more importantly, it eliminates all of these huge commercialization problems and essentially this big limitation of the whole field of machine learning of having to work on small models and small data sets because the accelerators are kind of limited. This is the big unlock of Neural Magic,” he said.

Gil Beyda, managing director at lead investor Comcast Ventures, sees a huge market opportunity with an approach that lets people use commodity hardware. “Neural Magic is well down the path of using software to replace high-cost, specialized AI hardware. Software wins because it unlocks the true potential of deep learning to build novel applications and address some of the industry’s biggest challenges,” he said in a statement.

A Global Markets Insight report published earlier this year estimates the global e-learning market to grow 7% annually to over $300 billion by 2025. The academic sector is expected to grow at over...

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The multi-asset investment platform eToro, which spans “social” stock trading to cryptocurrency, has acquired Delta, the crypto portfolio tracker app.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although one source tells me the deal was worth $5 million. It is not clear if it is stock only or cash (or a mixture of both) and if it is contingent on any future targets being met.

The Delta app helps investors make better decisions regarding their crypto investments by providing tools such as portfolio tracking and pricing data. It very much fits with the evolution of eToro, which not only wants to “own” the commission-free stocks (and ETF) space, but has also ventured ambitiously into crypto — most recently bringing crypto asset trading to the U.S.

Delta’s crypto portfolio tracker app has support for more than 6,000 crypto assets from more than 180 exchanges. It provides investors with a range of tools to track and analyse their crypto portfolios. To date, Delta says it has seen 1.5 million downloads and has “hundreds of thousands” of active monthly users.

The acquisition sees Delta become part of the eToro Group, while the Delta team led by Nicolas Van Hoorde will become part of eToroX, reporting to Doron Rosenblum. “The team will continue to be based in Belgium, working in close collaboration with eToro and eToroX employees across the globe,” says eToro.

Meanwhile, eToro is talking up the fact that it is a regulated platform where you can hold crypto and traditional assets in the same portfolio. The idea with the Delta acquisition is to extend that so you’ll be able to track all your investments in once place, starting with crypto and eventually multi-asset. In addition, you’ll be able to trade from the app via eToroX, eToro’s own crypto exchange.

“At a time when other fintechs state that they are not even targeting profitability, we are proud to be a well funded, profitable business that is growing both in terms of geographical coverage but also product range,” says Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, in a statement.

“We are a trading and investing platform that not only provides clients with access to the assets they want, from commission free stocks and ETFs through to FX, commodities and cryptoassets, but also lets customers choose how they invest. They can trade directly, copy another trader or invest in a portfolio. We believe in empowering our clients and the acquisition of Delta will allow us to add an important new element to our offering.”