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

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Renaissance Periodization CEO Nick Shaw has done just that. He has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on, you’ll learn a lot....

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 463rd 1Mby1M Roundtable October 31, 2019: Anand Rajaraman, rocketship.vc

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Anand Rajaraman, Founding Partner at rocketship.vc. Anand was an early investor in Facebook. Among other things, we discussed how the quality of...

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Despite the various antitrust, privacy, and FTC issues that Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) is dealing with, it recently announced a stellar third quarter performance. The better than expected revenue and...

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

This week Kate and Alex broke the discussion into two main themes. The first dealt with early-stage companies, and the second, as you can imagine, later-stage affairs. Don’t worry, we don’t get to SoftBank for quite some time.

Up top, we dug into Kate’s story about Quill, a formerly stealthy company that could be taking on Slack. That or something similar to Slack . Next, we turned to ManiMe, a startup in the beauty space that raised a smaller $2.6 million round to take on a market that is valued in the billions.

After that it was time to leave the auspices of the early-stage market and move to, of all things, a public company. Grubhub reported earnings this week. It went poorly. Alex wanted to riff over the company’s earnings report and what it could mean for startups that are competing with Grubhub, a leader in the food delivery space that DoorDash and Postmates would prefer to lead themselves.

What impact Grubhub may have on the highly valued on-demand companies isn’t clear yet, but will be pretty damn interesting to see when it does land.

Sticking to the later-stage markets, Alex dug into the problems at Wag, which is struggling and looking for a sale despite raising a castle of cash from the Vision Fund. Kate followed that up with notes on problems at Katerra. The Information is reporting this week that the business is going through a number of layoffs, and we’re wondering if it will suffer the same fate of some of SoftBank’s other investments.

And, finally, the changing face of things at SoftBank itself. The great money spigot is slowly cutting flow. How many unicorns that will strand isn’t yet clear. But surely it can’t be zero.

Chinese autonomous air mobility company EHang has filed with the SEC the paperwork required to go public in the U.S. on the Nasdaq exchange, with a $100 million initial public offering. The company, which has been flying demonstration flights with passengers on board for a while now, is gearing up to launch its first commercial service in Guangzhou after getting approval from local and national regulators to deploy its drones in the area.

At launch, EHang will be using its two-seater vertical take-off and landing craft (VTOL), which has room for two passengers on board. EHang doesn’t just build the aircraft, though — its goal is to build full, multi-aircraft (as many as “thousands,” according to Forbes) autonomous transportation networks that it hopes will serve to alleviate and avoid congested ground traffic. Guangzhou, with an estimated population of more than 13 million, suffers from considerable traffic.

EHang is also building out logistics and cargo transportation capabilities as well as passenger services. The company believes it can offer short, designated cross-city transportation that can cut down on time by as much as 40 to 60%, and once it achieves scale, it also says that costs have the potential to be reduced by as much as 50%.

Founded in 2014, EHang last announced funding in 2015, when it raised $42 million in a Series B round led by GP Capital, with GGV Capital, ZhenFund, Lebox Capital, OFC and PreAngel also participating.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you burning during this period? Richard Hoehn: We were running $45,000 a month for a while. You definitely need some runway.  Sramana Mitra: Where does this money...

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Calling all tech-minded students, nonprofit and government employees — this is your moment. Come and join us at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December at a price you can afford — because great ideas and innovation come from every sector.

Apply for our discounted Innovator passes for students and nonprofit or government employees and enjoy all the early-stage startup goodness of Disrupt Berlin.

Here’s what comes with your Innovator pass: Access to the full conference agenda and all stages — including the Startup Battlefield competition, interactive workshops, more than 400 startups and sponsors in Startup Alley, networking events, access to the full attendee list (via TechCrunch Events Mobile App) and CrunchMatch, the attendee networking platform. You’ll also have access to exclusive video content after the conference ends.

Here’s how the discounts work and what you need to know to qualify.

Discounts for students: You must be enrolled in a grade school, high school, college or university program or have graduated within the last six months. Coding schools don’t qualify for a discount; sorry.

Bring a valid student ID, proof of current enrollment or transcripts at registration, otherwise you’ll pay the full on-site price. Note: If you’re younger than 21 years old, you may not have access to some venues. Your reduced Innovator pass costs €135 plus VAT. Tickets are non-refundable.

Discounts for nonprofit and government employees: You must be full-time employees of nonprofit organizations, federal, state or local government agencies, international government agencies or active military employees.

Nonprofit employees — you must provide your email address from your organization during the online registration process. Government and military employees — you must provide your valid .gov email address during the registration process.

At the Disrupt Berlin on-site registration check-in, you must show proof of current employment at your nonprofit (copy of 501c3 documentation) or government organization. Government contractors, including contractors working on government “Cost Reimbursable Contracts,” are not eligible for the government discount.

We accept the following forms of valid government ID:

If you don’t present valid nonprofit documentation or government ID at registration, you’ll have to pay the full on-site price. The discounted Innovator pass costs €295 + VAT, and tickets are non-refundable.

Students, nonprofits and government employees — Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Take advantage of these deep discounts and join us to learn, share and experience early-stage startup culture at its best. Apply for a discounted Innovator pass today.

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

Accusonus, the Greece and U.S.-based AI company helping content creators improve the audio in their videos, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Athens-based Venture Friends, with participation from Big Pi, IQBility and PJ Tech, along with a syndicate of U.S.-based investors led by Michael Tzannes, who is actually the co-founder of Accusonus (and the former CEO of Aware Inc.).

Launched in 2014, Accusonus has been using AI for various audio and music applications longer than most. The company’s first product was Drumatom, which allows recording engineers to control microphone leakage (also known as bleed or spill) in drum recordings. In 2017, Accusonus followed up with the release of Regroover, an AI software instrument that un-mixes audio loops into stems so that new beat making workflows are possible.

Its products are said to have been used by engineers working with musicians such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Goo Goo Dolls, Super Furry Animals, Wilco, Jennifer Lopez and many others.

However, more recently the company has developed a suite of simple-to-use tools aimed at video content and podcast producers that need to repair or “clean up” audio in their creations. With the amount of content being created growing exponentially — often recorded on smartphones and other consumer equipment or turned around quicker than ever — the market beyond music production is huge.

The company’s thinking, explained co-founder and CEO Alex Tsilfidis, is that Accusonus wants to democratise access to high-quality audio via AI-driven tools that remove the learning curve required by traditional audio software.

He says that inventing new algorithms and “painstakingly” fine-tuning the UX of Accusonus’ products has enabled it to offer audio tools that provide ease-of-use to entry-level users while simultaneously speeding up the workflows of audio and video professionals.

Specifically, the Accusonus Enhancement and Repair of Audio (ERA) tools are able to clean up audio recordings via turning a single “virtual” knob within the software. The ERA tools work as plugins and are compatible with major video and audio platforms. These include entry-level editors, such as Audacity and Garageband, and more high-end offerings, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut, Avid Pro Tools, Apple Logic Pro and Da Vinci Resolve.

Meanwhile, Tsilfidis says there is some advantage to serving both customer groups, too. The company’s professional users often provide feedback that then helps improve its non-professional targeted products (even if there is likely some overlap between the two groups).

Forecast, a Denmark-based startup that has developed “AI-powered” project management software, has raised $5.5 million in new funding.

The round is led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers SEED Capital and Heartcore. Forecast has raised $10 million in total funding to date.

Founded in late 2016, Forecast describes itself as an AI-powered project management solution that automates manual project management tasks, and brings extra visibility and predictive capabilities to project management. The idea is to help increase collaboration across teams with a better workflow and to improve planning.

Forecast claims that by using its project management software, customers reduce their administrative tasks by 20-40% and gain much better insights into “project risk, resource management and more.”

“Work is going more project-based… leading to an increased need for project management skills and expertise,” Forecast co-founder and CEO Dennis Kayser tells TechCrunch. “Plus, projects are getting more complex. Project management depends on many manual, ongoing updates to stay on time, on budget and on track. That’s why 66% of all projects fail due to human error.”

In addition, as projects become more complex and the data associated with a project increases exponentially, Kayser says the problem is getting worse, which, of course, is where machine intelligence can help. “We don’t learn from our mistakes because no one can keep track of every influencing factor to make crucial adjustments,” he adds.

To tackle this, Forecast uses AI to help keep projects on track and make project management more efficient. The software integrates with existing tools — such as Trello, Slack, Gdrive, Githum and Salesforce — and uses these various external data-points as key indicators for how well a project is running.

“[It pulls in] data from disparate systems and synthesizes it into something human-readable with powerful AI,” explains Kayser. “Everyone on your team can continue to use the tool they prefer without sacrificing dead-simple scheduling, reporting and collaboration for project managers and senior executives. With better insights and tools, project managers can be more efficient and gain insights from increasingly complex projects.”

The use of AI is proactive, too. This includes matching the best person and role to the task, automation of time registration, forecasting the size and duration of tasks and being alerted before a project is in trouble.

With regards to target customers, Kayser says that Forecast is focused on helping IT & services, marketing and computer software development companies that “rely on capacity being predictable and project delivery being successful.”

Forecast currently has “hundreds of customers” in more than 40 countries. The software has helped customers manage more than 40,000 projects with more than 1,000,000 tasks created.

Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million in new financing. This includes a $83 million Series C extension from investors including PayPal Ventures and debt financing of $60 million. The funding will be used to advance Paidy’s goals of signing large-scale merchants, offering new financial services and growing its user base to 11 million accounts by the end of 2020.

In addition to PayPal Ventures, investors in the Series C extension also include Soros Capital Management, JS Capital Management and Tybourne Capital Management, along with another undisclosed investor. The debt financing is from Goldman Sachs Japan, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank. Earlier this month, Paidy and Goldman Sachs Japan established a warehouse facility valued at $52 million. Paidy also established credit facility worth $8 million with the three banks.

This is the largest investment to date in the Japanese financial tech industry, according to data cited by Paidy and brings the total investment the company has raised so far to $163 million. A representative for the startup says it decided to extend its Series C (announced last year) instead of moving onto a D round to preserve the equity ratio for existing investors and issue the same preferred shares as its previous funding rounds.

Launched in 2014, Paidy was created because many Japanese consumers don’t use credit cards for e-commerce purchases, even though the credit card penetration rate there is relatively high. Instead, many prefer to pay cash on delivery or at convenience stores and other pickup locations. While this makes online shopping easier for consumers, it presents several challenges for sellers, because they need to cover the cost of merchandise that hasn’t been paid for yet or deal with uncompleted deliveries.

Paidy’s solution is to make it possible for people to pay for merchandise online without needing to create an account first or use their credit cards. If a seller offers Paidy as a payment method, customers can check out by entering their mobile phone numbers and email addresses, which are then authenticated with code sent through SMS or voice. Paidy covers the cost of the items and bills customers monthly. Paidy uses proprietary machine learning models to score the creditworthiness of users, and says its service can help reduce incomplete transactions (or items that buyers ultimately don’t pick up and pay for), increase conversion rates, average order values and repeat purchases.

Kepler Communications, the Toronto-based startup that’s focused on developing and deploying shoebox-sized satellites to provide telecommunications services, is opening up registration for those interested in getting their first developer kits. These developer kits, designed to help potential commercial customers take advantage of its Internet of Things (IoT) narrowband connectivity deploying next year, will then be made available to purchase for elect partners next year.

This kind of early access is designed to give a head start on testing and integration to companies interested in using the kind of connectivity Kepler intends on providing. Kepler‘s service is designed to provide global coverage using a single network for IoT operators, at low costs relative to the market, for applications including tracking shipping containers, railway networks, livestock and crops and much more. Kepler says that its IoT network, which will be made up of nanosatellites designed specifically for this purpose it plans to launch throughout next year and beyond, is aimed at industries where you don’t need high bandwidth, as you would for say HD consumer video streaming, but where coverage across large, often remote areas on a consistent basis is key.

IoT connectivity provided by constellations of orbital satellites is an increasing area of focus and investment, as large industries look to modernize their monitoring and tracking operations. Startup Swarm recently got permission from the FCC to launch its 150-small satellite constellation, for instance, to establish a service to address similar needs.

Kepler, founded in 2015, has raised more than $20 million in funding, and has launched two small satellites thus far, including one in January and one in November of 2018. The company announced a contract with ISK and GK Launch Services to deploy two more sometime in the middle of next year aboard a Soyuz rocket.

Sramana Mitra: How is your system architected to be able to take unstructured data to structured data? Can you talk a little bit about how you do that from a technical point of view? John Harrison:...

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Today’s 463rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, October 31, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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The rise of the internet has given every company the chance to be a global company. But as a founder, growing from your garage to the worldwide markets can be tricky business.

That’s why we’ve assembled a panel of top-tier experts to talk through the peaks and pitfalls of scaling strategies at Disrupt Berlin in December.

I’m very pleased to announce that Holger Seim, founder and CEO of audio startup Blinkist, Karoli Hindriks, founder and CEO of Jobbatical, and prominent Silicon Valley immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn will be joining us at the show, which runs December 11 and December 12.

Holger Seim founded Blinkist in 2012. The learning service condenses the information and knowledge found in nonfiction books and repackages that info into small text or audio packets. The company charges $12.99/month for a subscription, with a steep discount for those who pay annually. Today, Blinkist has customers in more than 150 countries. Seim brings experience from his time at Deutsche Telekom, where he focused on digital growth and partnership initiatives.

Karoli Hindriks, CEO and founder of Jobbatical, brings a wealth of experience on the topic of scaling, not only from growing her own startup’s footprint, but by the very nature of the company itself. Jobbatical offers reliable relocation for folks joining high-growth tech companies, handling the nitty gritty of immigration on behalf of employers, including visa documentation and residence permits. Hindriks, a native of Estonia, also led the launch of seven television channels in Northern Europe, including National Geographic channels and MTV. In short, Hindriks knows how to cross borders, from tech talent to products.

Last, but certainly not least, we’ll have Sophie Alcorn, founding partner of Alcorn Immigration Law, to round out the panel. The firm was one of the fastest-growing immigration law firms in Silicon Valley. Alcorn can help founders understand the complexities of immigration and how they can leverage different immigration options to secure key talent. Alcorn can also inform investors of the things to look out for when ensuring founders can legally build companies in the U.S.

Join us in Berlin at TechCrunch Disrupt to hear more from our experts on how to scale your company globally. Tickets are available right here.

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Today’s 463rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, October 31, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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The founders of Seattle-based Modus cold-emailed Pete Flint, the founder of Trulia and a current managing partner at the venture capital firm NFX, for months, to no avail. In a last-ditch effort, Alex Day, Jai Sim and Abbas Guvenilir sent one more message to the investor whose real estate listings tool sold to Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion. They were at a coffee shop below his San Francisco office, was he interested in meeting?

Fortunately for them, he was.

Modus, a real estate startup focused on title and escrow services, is today announcing a $12.5 million Series A financing co-led by NFX’s Flint and Niki Pezeshki of Felicis Ventures. Liquid 2 Ventures and existing backers, including Mucker Capital, Hustle Fund, 500 Startups, Rambleside and Cascadia Ventures, also participated in the round.

“The first revolution in online real estate was transforming the research experience, the next revolution in the industry is transforming the transaction,” Flint said in a statement.

Modus launched in 2018 with a focus on Washington (state) real estate opportunities. The startup, led by former employees of a nearly defunct lunch delivery company, Peach, has developed software to help both agents and home buyers navigate the home closing process, which, unlike many other real estate experiences, has yet to receive a boost of innovation from startups building in the sector. That’s why Modus started with an emphasis on escrow services, though the team’s long-term vision, they explain, is to power all real estate transactions.

“When you think about communication, you think of Gmail; when you think of traveling, you think of Uber. We want to be synonymous with home closing,” Sim, the company’s executive chairman, tells TechCrunch.

Day, Modus’ chief executive officer and former head of expansion at Peach, says Modus has ambitions of becoming a sort of operating system for real estate, or “like what Stripe is for payment processing, we want to become for real estate transactions.”

Since closing its Series A financing in May — the team waited until now to make its financing information public — Modus has increased its headcount to 50 employees across product, engineering and operations. Their goal now is to provide their software to home buyers in 15 to 20 states over the next two years. To support expansion efforts, Modus plans to raise a Series B in the second or third quarter of next year.

Modus previously raised $1.8 million in seed funding.

According to a Mordor Intelligence research report, the global cyber security market is estimated to grow 14.5% annually over the next few years to $267.7 billion by the year 2023. The growth in the...

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The internet and search engines like Google have made the world our oyster when it comes to sourcing information, but in the world of business, there remains a persistent need for more targeted market intelligence, a way to get reliable data quickly to get on with your work. Today, one of the startups hoping to build a lucrative operation of its own around that premise is announcing a round of funding to get there.

Crunchbase — a directory and database of company-related information that originally got its start as a part of TechCrunch before being spun off into a separate business several years ago — has raised $30 million, a Series C that it plans to use to continue expanding its base of paid subscribers and expanding its product to include more predictive, personalised information for its users by way of more machine learning and other AI-based technology.

CEO Jager McConnell, who has long viewed Crunchbase as the “LinkedIn for company profiles,” said that of the 55 million people who visit the site each year, the company currently has “tens of thousands” of subscribers — subscriptions are priced at $29/user/month varying by size of company contract — which works out to less than 1% of its active users. That’s “growing quickly,” he added, speaking to site’s potential.

Indeed, he noted that since its last round in 2017, when it raised $18 million, Crunchbase has tripled its employees to 120 and has 10 times more annual revenue run rate. It’s also more than doubled its traffic since being spun out.

This latest round was led by Omers Ventures, the prolific investment arm of the giant Canadian pension fund of the same name (which is, incidentally, also now opening an office in Silicon Valley to get even more active with startups there).

Existing backers Emergence, Mayfield, Cowboy Ventures and Verizon (which still owns TC) also participated. McConnell said Crunchbase is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but he did note that it was “well within the target range” that the startup had set, that it was an oversubscribed upround and that it was on the more practical than exuberant side.

“I believe we are seeing too many high valuations with low annual revenue rates, and it’s catching up with people, and we were very focused on not hitting that valuation trap in order to be successful in the future,” he said. “This is a good round but not something insane.” Strong logic I suspect could be supported by Crunchbase data. For some context, Crunchbase had a post-money valuation of $70 million in its previous round in 2017 (having raised $26 million), according to PitchBook — ironically, one of Crunchbase’s big competitors (CB Insights, Owler being others.)

With its start as a side project of TechCrunch, the DNA of Crunchbase has always been in tech companies, and that is still very much the heart of the data that is in the system today. The kind of data you can get via the site includes basics on when a company was founded, who the founders are, who the current executive leadership is, how much money it has raised and from whom and what has been written about it in the media. You also can find original content on the site by way of its own team of writers covering funding rounds and other Crunchbase-relevant content.

Then, via a number of third-party integrations with companies like Siftery and SimilarWeb, you can get deeper data around competitors and more (most of which you can only see if you are a paying, not free, user).

The company notes that it currently makes 3.9 billion annual updates to its data set — which people upload themselves in the old wiki style, or are manually or automatically uploaded, by way of some 4,000 data partnerships and syndication deals (these include the likes of Yahoo! Finance, LinkedIn, Business Insider and Amazon Alexa, which in turn make some 1.6 billion annual calls to the Crunchbase API).

The growth of that information trove, and more interesting ways of parsing it to drive subscriptions and potential licensing revenues, will be of paramount importance to the company’s bottom line. Today there is some advertising on the site, but McConnell confirmed to me that Crunchbase is in the process of winding down advertising on the platform.

“The impact on the business was not material enough to sacrifice the user experience to have ads,” he said.

On the subject of the self-styled LinkedIn comparison, you’ve probably already noticed that LinkedIn does have company profile pages, but McConnell’s argument is that the site was built with individuals’ profiles and recruitment in mind. That makes the company pages more of an add-on and not something that can be effectively developed at this point in the way that Crunchbase has done.

“Once you do that, it’s hard to change,” he said of the direction that LinkedIn has grown. “Its company profiles are more brand representations, not a source of truth about the companies themselves.”

What’s interesting to me is to see which direction Crunchbase will evolve in the longer term. As the world has continued to grow into the bigger vision of “every company is a tech company, and every problem has a tech solution,” it seems that Crunchbase’s own ambitions have also grown.

In the company’s blog post and press release announcing the fundraise, it’s notable to me that the word technology, or any variation of it, isn’t mentioned even once in the text (the only exception being the boilerplate description of Omers).

That could point to how — as Crunchbase expands its horizons in terms of the kinds of information on businesses it can provide to users — it might see a role for itself not unlike that of LinkedIn, spanning across multiple verticals and the communities of people (or in CB’s case, businesses) that have built around them.

“We are thrilled to partner with Jager and the talented leadership team at Crunchbase,” commented Michael Yang, managing partner at OMERS Ventures, in a statement. “Crunchbase continues to show significant traction as the leader in research, information, and prospecting for private companies – an incredibly large and valuable market to address and service. By utilizing and collecting aggregated data, adding tools and apps, and continuing to customize each user experience, the lead generation and deal value Crunchbase can provide is unprecedented, and we are proud to support this next phase of growth.”