Sramana Mitra: Talk about specific use cases. You can pick whatever illustrates best your value proposition in the healthcare IT workflow. John Harrison: If you don’t mind, one minor digression...

___

Think you have what it takes to be a TechCrunch hackathon champion? It’s time to put your creative code and confidence where your mouth is, my friends. Come to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December and pit your skills, tenacity and endurance against some of the best creators from around the world.

We’re limiting participation to 500 people, and seats are filling fast. Get yours before they’re gone. Apply to compete in the TC Hackathon today!

Why submit an application? For starters, it doesn’t cost a thing to apply or to compete. In fact, if you make the grade, you’ll receive a free Innovator pass to Disrupt Berlin and have access to everything Disrupt has to offer. But wait, as they say, there’s more.

The Hackathon is not only a great opportunity to build a working prototype that addresses real-world problems, it’s the chance to showcase your talent and creativity in front of people who have the potential move your ideas, career or startup forward. Each sponsored challenge comes with its own set of prizes, which typically includes cash and/or related products. On top of any sponsor prizes you might win, TechCrunch will award a $5,000 prize to the best over-all hack.

We’ll announce the sponsors in the coming weeks. But for now, the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from the Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2018 will give you an idea of what you can expect.

Teams will choose a project to hack, and they’ll have less than 24 hours to design, build and present their product. If you arrive solo, you can find a team onsite. It’s a pressure-cooker situation that requires focus, coding and problem-solving skills and perseverance. Here’s the good news. We’ll have plenty of food, water and lots of caffeine to help you go the distance.

The first round of judging takes place science-fair style. The judges will review all completed projects and then select only 10 teams to move on to the finals. The finals take place on day two, and teams have just two minutes to step onto the Extra Crunch Stage to present and pitch their work.

Sponsors will award prizes to the team(s) for their specific project, and then TechCrunch will choose one finalist as the best over-all hack. That team earns the championship title and $5,000 cash. Sweet!

TC Hackathon takes place during Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. There are so many great reasons to apply, but seats are going fast. Grab this opportunity for all it’s worth and apply to the Hackathon today.

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

TrueLayer, the London startup that’s built a developer API platform for fintechs and other adjacent companies to utilise open banking, has agreed a strategic and commercial relationship with Visa. The partnership sees Visa also take a minority stake in TrueLayer as part of the company’s $35 million Series C funding announced in June.

The round was led by Tencent and Temasek, with participation from previous investors Northzone and Anthemis, while we now know that Visa was on-board too. TrueLayer has raised $47 million to date.

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and co-founder of TrueLayer tells me the Visa partnership will enable the fintech to work with a “huge network” of businesses and banks to help them to develop open banking services and applications that will “provide tangible benefits” to customers.

“We want to scale open banking to a level where it manifestly impacts every aspect of financial services for consumers,” he says. “[This] requires large, established players to come on board and work with startups like us. Visa has been one of the most successful ‘fintech’ companies ever created, [and] we ultimately have a lot to learn from them”.

Furthermore, Simoneschi says the partnership is a key part of TrueLayer’s twin goals of becoming a global platform and growing the open banking economy. The fintech is already open for business in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and recently expanded to Australia. It works with companies such as Revolut, Zopa, ClearScore, Plum, Emma, CreditLadder, Canopy, and ANNA Money.

“Our view is that any initiative that enables more businesses to embrace open banking is good for everybody involved — from fintechs to consumers,” says the TrueLayer CEO.

Visa’s SVP of Open Banking, Mark Nelsen, says that working with TrueLayer will enable Visa with to explore new opportunities for its clients and for the Visa network. “Our partnership with TrueLayer is another example of how we’re investing in companies that offer next generation services, enabling innovation and convenience for clients and consumers alike,” he says.

“I wouldn’t want to speak for Visa, but I believe that TrueLayer has a combination of factors that are appealing,” says Simoneschi. “We were one of the first movers in the U.K. for open banking which enabled us to develop our solution in line with the needs of our clients and subsequently quickly grow our customer base. We now are responsible for about 65% of all open banking traffic in the U.K. This gave us the launchpad to scale across Europe — and most recently to become the first European open banking specialist to launch in Australia. Throughout this process, we’ve developed a reputation for working in partnership with businesses of every size, from banks down to early-stage startups. It really is these partnerships, aligned with our experience, that I think makes us different”.

With that said, Simoneschi stresses that he doesn’t see the industry as a “zero sum game” and that there is a huge opportunity for scores of businesses to do well. “If we can collaborate to get more people to embrace open banking, everyone wins,” he adds. “It is perhaps this mentality that was an important factor for Visa.”

Milieu Insight, a Singapore-based market research and data platform, announced today that it has raised $2.4 million in pre-A funding. The round, led by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, will be used on product development and to launch in four new Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The startup’s platform, called Milieu Surveys, is already available in Singapore and Thailand and has signed more than 45 clients.

This brings Milieu Insight’s total funding so far to $3.15 million, including a seed round announced in November 2018. Founded in December 2016 by CEO Gerald Ang, who previously worked at global research firms including GfK and YouGov, Milieu Insight seeks to make market research and data analysis accessible to smaller businesses and organizations. Milieu Portraits, its consumer segmentation tool, returns insights about specific demographics, including what products, media and brands they prefer, while Milieu Studies allows companies to create their own studies.

[gallery ids="1904986,1904985,1904984"]

COO Stephen Tracy told TechCrunch in an email that the startups’ four new markets were picked because “they are in high demand among existing research buyers who want to study consumer trends, particularly because the market dynamics in these countries are evolving fast.” Milieu focuses exclusively on mobile data since smartphone penetration is still growing quickly in many Southeast Asian markets.

He added “one other dynamic that makes us particularly excited about expanding across Southeast Asia is that, through our investment in tech and automation, we’re able to sell market research solutions at considerably more affordable price points (i.e. research studies as low as US$350). Meaning our platform can also activate new spending among businesses/organizations who couldn’t previously afford it, such as charities/non-profits, academic institutions and startups.”

Milieu Insight’s competitors include traditional research firms like Kantar and YouGov for Milieu Studies and Global Web Index for Milieu Portraits. Tracy says the startup’s competitive edge is its end-to-end solution. “That is, there’s no other company that offers a single platform that connects an audience (i.e. our managed consumer panel) with a SaaS service that allows you to access consumer profiling data on-demand as well as launch bespoke consumer studies and get results in just a few hours, all within a self-serve environment.”

In a press statement, MassMutual Ventures managing director Anvesh Ramineni said “Milieu’s impressive team has built a world-class product, making market research services affordable, accessible and more relevant in today’s mobile first landscape. We are pleased to lead Milieu’s current round and look forward to supporting the company as it scales across the region.”

Airbnb is best known as the place you go to find somewhere to stay that’s not a hotel when travelling. Now, it’s made an investment in a startup that points to its bigger ambition to be a go-to destination for experiences. Tiqets, a startup out of Amsterdam that has built a platform for booking tickets for museums and other attractions, has raised $60 million in a Series C round led by the travel giant to expand its platform and wider business. Tiqets has sold millions of tickets in over 60 countries to date, it says.

The investment also includes backing from previous backers HPE Growth and Investion, and it brings the total raised by Tiqets to $100 million. Luuc Elzinga, the CEO and co-founder of Tiqets, said the startup is not disclosing its valuation but said it was “really happy” with the number.

This is, for now, a financial investment for Airbnb rather than a strategic one. In other words, the two companies have yet to work together, said Elzinga, although that is the hope longer term. “Airbnb will be involved in the business,” he said, “and that’s interesting because we can also learn from how they scaled.”

Scaled is almost an understatement. Starting as a modest marketplace for people to offer spare rooms and sofas to travellers, Airbnb is now part of the guard of outsized startups, raising $4.4 billion in venture funding, valued at $31 billion, and on the road to an IPO in 2020.

“Travelers are seeking out a diverse range of experiences when they visit a new city, ” said Airbnb Art and Culture Director Philippe Magid, in a statement. “The Tiqets team has effectively used new technology to connect travelers to communities and we are excited to support their work.”

In the wider tourism and travel industry, museums and attractions revenues are estimated to be worth some $160 billion, with ticketing accounting for $60 billion of that.

The gap in the market that Tiqets is targeting is the shift we’ve seen in how and why people — both tourists but also those visiting museums and attractions in their own home towns — purchase tickets to go to these places.

While some are still waiting to line up outside a venue for hours, others are opting to go online to buy in advance and use mobile tickets to speed up the process. Museums and most other attractions are not often the places that come to mind when you think “technology”, and Tiqets comes in and provides a service to them so that they can meet the demands of more digitally-savvy visitors.

Museums and other attractions are now gradually starting to think of how to use this to their advantage.

There was a Very British uproar in the 1980s when London’s Victoria & Albert Museum ran an ad campaign about how it was an “ace caff with a quite nice museum attached.” (It is a beautiful cafeteria.) But nowadays those cafes, and the ever-present gift shops, are some of their biggest revenue spinners, so offering tickets online reduces some of the friction in getting people into venues, and into better moods, to spend more money later. And, if users “check the box,” the venues can also build their marketing databases to boot.

Tiqets, founded in 2014, is still a relatively young business. Elzinga said it works with some 3,000 museum groups and attractions — with its customer list including some of the world’s most-visited institutions, such as the Louvre in Paris.

It also partners with some 2,500 travel agencies and portals — Ctrip is another big customer — that integrate with Tiqets’ APIs to upsell customers with tickets to venues after they have booked their trips. Some 35% of its revenues currently come by way of these third-party deals.

Tiqets’ plans for the investment will be to expand its coverage to more attractions, and to extend deeper into smaller towns beyond the big cities where it’s currently most active, specifically building out better self-service technology (not unlike Airbnb’s for hosts) to make it easier to onboard to its platform. It’s now available in 14 languages, so adding more localisation is also on the cards.

On the part of Airbnb, the investment is part of  a bigger strategy for the company to make investments into smaller startups that are strategically aligned with what it’s aiming to build into its own business.

Other investments have included stakes in Oyo, the India-based hotels chain; corporate accommodation specialist Lyric Hospitality; reservations platform Resy (which eventually got acquired by Amex) and coworking space The Wing.

Sometimes Airbnb also acquires companies outright, although the case of Tiqets, Elzinga said that Airbnb did not approach it to acquire the company.

The vast majority of Airbnb’s growth has come by way of people posting and booking accommodation in private homes, but Airbnb’s interest in Tiqets underscores how the company is itself extending the revenue it can make per user by building out the longer tail of services it offers to its users beyond booking travel accommodation.

Current offerings include Experiences (in-city, one-day activities), Adventures (multi-day guided tours), and restaurant listings.

One area where Tiqets does not plan to expand is into performance or seated event ticketing a la Ticketmaster or Eventbrite.

“Our focus and opportunity will continue to be museums and attractions,” Elzinga said. Part of the reason for this is that so many of them continue to provide paper-based, kiosk-issued tickets, but also because of the rise of the blockbuster, and the new awareness of public safety in crowded, high profile, iconic tourist spots. “It’s getting more complex, with timed entry and issues like crowd management.”

Longer term, it will be interesting to see how and if Airbnb works more closely with Tiqets. Both are targeting what is a massive opportunity. Travel and tourism are some $8.8 trillion and will account for 10.4% of global GDP in 2019, according to one estimate.

Sourcing ingredients in the restaurant industry is a dirty process that still relies heavily on voicemails and fax orders. More tech-forward solutions have been pushed, but getting restaurants and suppliers to uniformly sign on to a platform has been a relatively daunting challenge.

Choco is a young startup with plenty of momentum that’s aiming to attract restaurants and suppliers to their mobile ordering platform, which gives restaurants their very own food delivery app for getting ingredients from suppliers, moving them away from daily voicemail orders.

“[Leaving voicemails] a very tedious process and one that’s very prone to error but [restaurants] are going to repeat it every day,” Choco CEO Daniel Khachab tells TechCrunch. “This ‘system’ is highly inefficient and wasteful, but it’s our main competitor.”

Choco’s mobile app has an interface reminiscent of popular consumer apps, with a Messenger-like chat interface for communication between suppliers and restaurants and a Postmates-like ordering list that makes ordering as easy as tapping away on one’s commonly purchased ingredients.

There’s a big opportunity here, and Khachab has been growing the Choco team at breakneck speeds to ensure that it is the solution to beat. The 18-month-old team has 100 employees already and is announcing that they’ve closed a $33.5 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners . By the end of next year the company hopes to grow its business by 15x.

Choco is in 15 cities across Europe and the U.S. and says their early customers include everyone from Michelin-starred restaurants to burger chains. The company has now raised $41 million to date. Other investors include Atlantic Labs, Target Global, Visionaries Club and Greyhound.

As the company seeks to build up a user base among suppliers and restaurants keen to build out their networks, Choco currently isn’t monetizing its users. Khachab tells me the team is developing premium subscription features that will likely focus on monetizing suppliers’ abilities to reach restaurants and communicate with them about new offerings.

Khachab sees Choco’s solutions as one that makes restaurant/suppliers relationships better but also takes a step toward solving the broader problem of food waste in the restaurant industry. Better communication and analytics that aren’t on the back of a napkin mean more precise ordering that can prevent both sides from overstocking, increasing efficiency but also preserving resources. Khachab notes that estimates say that 30-40% of food produced each year is wasted and that nearly three-quarters of that waste happens in the supply chain before consumers are involved.

In 2017, when a destructive earthquake struck Puebla, Mexico, sending shock waves to Mexico City and destroying buildings in the nation’s megalopolis and its surrounding suburbs, both public and private emergency services sprung into action.

For multinational corporations operating in the city it was a test of their internal support services, which were established to meet the “duty of care” requirements that multinationals have to their foreign employees. That’s a minimum threshold which companies must meet to ensure the safety of their employees.

After the Mexico City earthquake, at least one Fortune 500 insurance company found its services lacking. It took two weeks for the company to contact all of its employees and account for everyone.

So the company turned to a new Washington-based startup called Base Operations to see if they could do a better job.

Founded by a former security and risk management consultant, Cory Siskind, Base Operations uses a suite of hosted software services and mobile applications to provide security updates to corporate customers and their employees.

The insurance company tested Base Operations’ check-in feature to see how it would perform in a simulated natural disaster and Siskind said that Base Operations had identified the location of 80% of the company’s workforce in less than two days. More than half of the company’s employees checked in within the first 24 hours.

Base Operations offers a dashboard for corporate customers to monitor their employees’ locations and for staff traveling abroad, the company has an app that provides geo-tagged alerts on potential risks based on an individual’s location.

“This is a compliance situation for companies… They have to do it,” says Siskind. “We work with a company’s chief security officers and travel security. If you send people off into an emerging market with a risk PDF… It’s not dynamic information and it just sits in a report and nobody reads it.”

Companies with a sales or marketing team traveling around need to have some sort of tool to meet their compliance regulations and duty of care standards, says Siskind.

“We have a whole set of features that nudge towards safer behaviors so that you don’t end up getting mugged and so that you don’t end up in a situation that would be damaging to you,” she says. 

Siskind recently raised $1 million for Base Operations from investors including Glasswing Ventures, Spiro Ventures, the Latin American early-stage investment firm Magma Partners and Good Growth Capital. Base Operations graduated from Techstars Impact Accelerator in 2018.

The money from the company’s most recent round will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts and continue its research and development.

So far, the company has three customers, including the undisclosed insurance provider, the energy company Enel and another, yet unnamed, corporation.

Base Operations provides its services in 15 cities, including: Mexico City, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, San Juan (Puerto Rico) and San Jose (Costa Rica).

Building effective propulsion systems for satellites has traditionally been a highly bespoke affair, with expensive, one-off systems tailor-made to big, expensive spacecraft hardware. But increasingly, companies, including startups, are looking at ways to provide propulsion tech that can scale with the projected boom in demand for orbital satellites, including CubeSats and small sats, as the commercialization of space and advances in sensor, communication and launch technology broaden the scope of those working in this bold new frontier.

Morpheus Space, which began life as a research project at the University of Western Germany, has accomplished a lot when it comes to propulsion in the short time since its official founding around a year and a half ago. The Dresden-based startup already has sent some of its thrusters to space, where they’re actually providing propulsion, and it’s working with a number of clients and potential clients, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The startup also just wrapped up its participation in Techstars’ inaugural Starburst Space Program in LA.

“Our motivation behind starting Morpheus Space was the lack of maneuverability of, especially small satellites in space,” explained Morpheus CEO and co-founder Daniel Bock, with whom I spoke at last week’s International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. “We have around 2,000 active satellites in space, and in the next few years this will increase by 10x. We have to deal with that. So the first step in how we want to solve that is with our proportion systems, to give mobility to small satellites.”

The startup has seen a ton of inbound interest, and has even had conversations with the CTO of NASA and the CEO of Aerospace Corporation based on the strength of its technology. But what’s so special about what they’re doing, versus what has already been available for satellite propulsion? Put simply, “it’s the world’s smallest and most efficient propulsion system,” according to Morpheus Space co-founder István Lőrincz.

Morpheus’ thruster uses gallium as its fuel source, which allows it to be very efficient, with an operating linespace of up to three or more years — non-stop, Lőrincz told me. When you factor in the low cost of these thrusters versus other solutions, and the ability to make them incredibly small (one thruster, along with electronics, is not that much larger than your average USB charger), you get a product that’s tailor-made for the cost-sensitive emerging new space industry. Ensuring the mass of these thrusters is small pays off big dividends when it comes to thinking about launch costs, and the fact that these are “Lego-like” in their modularity means they can suit a variety of different clients’ needs.

“You can build propulsion systems for satellites that are below one kilogram, up to those the size of trucks, just by creating arrays,” Lőrincz says.

Size is important, but so is scalability, and that’s another strength that the Morpheus thrusters bring to the market. Lőrincz told me that their technology allows you to quickly and easily build a large batch of the thrusters, instead of having to tailor-make your propulsion system to fit the satellite, which provides big benefits in terms of manufacturing and design costs — which Morpheus can then pass on to its customers, opening up to a whole new, much more price-sensitive segment of the market the possibility of including true orbital maneuvering capabilities.

Next up for Morpheus Space, after it gets its hardware business fully up and running, is to develop and deploy software that complements its thrusters and can offer clients things like fully automated route planning and navigation, Bock told me.

“For example, you can imagine you just have to command ‘Okay I want to go from A to B,’ and everything is handled on board,” he said. So when and how you turn, all the routing. And the next step will be an automated way of handling whole constellations.”

It’s a big goal, but there’s a big potential pay-off. More and more companies are getting into the constellation game, including SpaceX and Amazon, and there’s a lot more to come on that front as companies build out new use cases for collecting and making use of data gathered from orbit. Orbital traffic management and collision avoidance is one reason big industry groups like the Space Safety Coalition are being formed, and anyone who can help supply with a solution players at all budget levels of the industry stands to benefit.

Identity Verification-as-a-Service (“IVAAS”?!) is a pretty tortuous phrase. But it’s now established as a key tech area for the tech industry as startups like Onfido, Jumio and others have proved with large funding raises in the last few years. Verifying ID is now also a key part of the gig economy.

Joining them today is a German startup that first emerged in 2014. It has announced a $40 million growth equity investment from Corsair Capital LLC, a private equity firm focused on the financial and business services industries.

IDnow lets consumers verify their identity online, using their smartphone, tablet or webcam via image recognition of their ID document.

Andreas Bodczek, CEO of IDnow, commented: “IDnow is well-positioned to capture greater market share in Europe and beyond, as we continue to lead the way in the growing digital identity verification space.”

Raja Hadji-Touma, partner at Corsair Capital, said: “Our investment is the result of a thematic focus on businesses that address new requirements arising from the digitalization of many financial transactions and processes, such as security. ”

Following the closing of the transaction, Raja Hadji-Touma and Edward Wertheim, principal at Corsair, will join the IDnow board of directors.

IDnow was the first startup to come out of JET A, the holding company set up by the former founder of Amiando, Felix Haas, (who is also co-founder and executive chairman) and his Amiando co-founders, Sebastian Baerhold, Dennis von Ferenczy and Armin Bauer.

Entrepreneurs, founders, investors and all startup fans in between — take heed. The days for saving serious dough on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2019 are seriously numbered. Right now, early-bird pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on the type of pass you purchase, you can save up to €500.

But this bird takes flight for parts unknown on 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Get serious, beat the deadline and save. Buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin.

Now that you have your pass, you can start planning how to take in as much of Disrupt Berlin as possible. Two programming-packed days will keep you engaged and on the move — check out the agenda to find out all the knowledge that will be dropped. They’ve done the work, reaped the rewards and they’ll be on hand to share their hard-won experiences and insight on crucial topics facing startups.

Speaking of crucial topics, Brexit is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. We’re thrilled to have three experts take the Main Stage to share their up-close-and-personal experiences. Don’t miss hearing from Bindi Karia, an investor with deep ties to Europe; Glenn Shoosmith, a founder who’s expanding his startup internationally; and Volker Hirsch, a VC born in Germany but currently living in the U.K. All three will examine the Brexit landscape and discuss how to make the right decisions in the face of chaotic obstacles.

Be sure to experience the glory that is Startup Battlefield. Cheer on 15-20 outstanding startups as they pitch and demo their creation to a discerning panel of veteran VCs and technologists. Who will claim the Disrupt cup and win the $50,000 prize? Be in the room where future unicorns are born.

One of the best ways to save time at Disrupt — and connect with the people who share your interests and goals — is to network using CrunchMatch. Our free business match-making service takes the hassle out of finding and meeting with the right people.

And one of the best places to connect is Startup Alley, our exhibition floor. That’s where you’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups displaying their tech and talent. Whether you’re a founder, investor, engineer or startupper of a different stripe, you’ll find potential customers, funders, collaborators — you name it. Startup Alley is a networker’s paradise.

There’s plenty more we could mention in detail: The Hackathon, Q&A Sessions, workshops. Bottom line? You’ll find nothing but opportunity at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. But it’s time to get serious. Buy your early-bird pass before 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST), and all that opportunity will cost you a whole lot less.

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

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-c98bc66ab504d3407da982a3cb4a6527') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-c98bc66ab504d3407da982a3cb4a6527' }, "https:\/\/tcprotectedembed.com" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'tcprotectedembed.com' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

Kandji, a new Apple MDM solution that promises to go far beyond Apple’s base MDM protocol and other solutions on the market, emerged from stealth today with a $3.375 million seed investment. The product is also publicly available for the first time starting today.

The round, which closed in March, was led by First Round Capital with help from Webb Investment Network, Lee Fixel, John Glynn and other unnamed investors.

Company co-founder and CEO Adam Pettit says the company’s founders have a deep knowledge in Apple. They all worked at Apple before leaving to run an Apple IT consultancy for more than 10 years.

He said that while they were at the consultancy, they developed a proprietary stack of tools to help with highly sophisticated Apple device deployments at large organizations, and it occurred to them that there was an unserved market opportunity to turn that knowledge into a new product.

Two years ago they sold the consultancy, took that knowledge and built Kandji from the ground up. Pettit says the new product gives customers access to a set of management tools that they would have charged six figures to implement at that their old firm.

One of the key differentiators between Kandji and other MDM solutions, or even Apple’s base MDM functionality, is a set of one-click compliance tools. “We’re the only product that has almost 200 of these one-click policy frameworks we call parameters. So an organization can go in and browse by compliance framework, or we have pre-built templates for companies that don’t necessarily have a specific compliance mandate in mind,” he said.

The parameters have all of the tools built-in to automatically deploy a set of policies related to a given compliance framework without having to go through and manually set all of those different switches yourself. On the flip side, if you want to get granular and create your own parameters, you can do that too.

He says one of the reasons he and his partners were willing to give up the big-dollar consultancy was because they saw a huge opportunity for firms that couldn’t afford those kind of services, but still had relatively large Apple device deployments. “I mean there’s a big need outside of just the specific kind of sophisticated compliance work we would do [at our previous firm]. We saw this big need in general for an Apple MDM solution like ours,” he said.

After selling their previous firm, the founders bootstrapped for a year while they developed the initial version of Kandji before seeking funding. Today, the company has 16 employees and a set of initial customers that have been testing the product.

Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round.

Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants, including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft, president and COO of the Kraft Group and the New England Patriots; MIT Prof. Edward Roberts; Eric Dobkin, founder and chairman emeritus of Goldman Sachs Global Equity Capital Markets; and Susquehanna International Group.

The prestigious group of investors saw that Searchable.ai is trying to solve a big problem around findability. Company co-founder Brian Shin says that knowledge workers have been struggling for years trying to find a way to better utilize all of the information that exists within an organization.

“The problem we’re really solving is that there are a trillion documents created every year in Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc., and it’s really difficult if you’re a knowledge worker to find what you need in terms of either a document, an asset like a slide or worksheet within a document or the actual answer to a question that you have,” Shin said.

The questioning part could be particularly valuable because it lets you ask a natural language question and find a specific piece of information within a document, rather than just the document itself. “Let’s say you have a giant spreadsheet, you could actually ask a question of all your spreadsheets and find the atomic unit of knowledge that you’re actually looking for,” he said.

The product itself is not quite ready for the big reveal, but if it works as described, it will be a huge boost to knowledge workers who have continually struggled to find a nugget of information they know is out there across the myriad documents in an organization.

Shin is an experienced entrepreneur who has helped launch and sell three companies. He reports he has raised $100 million in venture capital and most recently has worked as a venture capitalist himself, but he saw this opportunity and decided to jump back into the development side of things.

He admits he’s giving up a lot to go back to the startup lifestyle, but he and his co-founders decided this was worth it. “You know the draw, the compulsion to do another startup is is really what this is about. So my three other colleagues and I have have all started companies before and we’re all giving up big jobs to do this, and I’m so excited about the team and the massive opportunity.”

He promised more details about the company and the solution would be coming early next year.

It was a surprising quarter for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). For the first time in more than two years, the company saw its earnings fall. The market was clearly not impressed, and the stock fell 7% in the...

___

Veronica Chou’s family has made its fortune at the forefront of the fast fashion business through investments in companies like Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger . But now, the heiress to an estimated $2.1 billion fortune is launching her own company, Everybody & Everyone, to prove that the fashion industry can be both environmentally sustainable and profitable.

There’s no argument about the negative impacts of the fashion industry on the environment.

The textiles industry primarily uses non-renewable resources — on the order of 98 million tons per year. That includes the oil to make synthetic fibers, fertilizers to grow cotton and toxic chemicals to dye, treat and produce the textiles used to make clothes. The greenhouse gas footprint from textiles production was roughly 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2015 — more than all international flights and maritime shipments combined (and a lot of those maritime shipments and international flights were hauling clothes).

The litany of catastrophes that can be attributed to the clothing industry extends to pollution, as well. About 20% of industrial water pollution globally can be traced to the dyeing and treatment of textiles — and microplastics from polyester, acrylic and nylon are polluting the world’s oceans.

Meanwhile, the rise of fast fashion has encouraged consumers to accelerate waste. Roughly one garbage truck full of clothes is landfilled around the world every second, according to a 2017 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That means consumers are throwing away around $400 billion worth of valuable goods every year as low prices and more “seasons” create an illusion of disposability.

As the fashion business has expanded, so has the wealth of the Chou family. South Ocean Knitters, the knitwear manufacturer started by Chou’s grandfather, was responsible for one of the first foreign investments into mainland China in 1974. It is now one of the largest suppliers of knitwear in the world, and, together with the Hong Kong manufacturer Li & Fung, is behind the Cobalt Fashion Holding conglomerate.

And her father, Silas Chou, made millions as an investor in Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger. As an executive at Iconix Brand Group China, Veronica Chou played a role in the acceleration of the industry — bringing American brands to Chinese consumers. Chou also served as the co-founder of the Beijing-based private equity fund China Consumer Capital and as a director of Karl Lagerfeld Greater China.

For Chou, an understanding of the environmental toll that the family business was taking on the planet began six years ago — a few years before Iconix Brand Group acquired the China subsidiary she had co-founded with her father in a transaction reportedly worth $56 million.

It was around the time that Chou had her children, she says, that she realized the importance of making a brand that was both environmentally sustainable and inclusive.

“It was six years ago I started learning about sustainability and five years ago that I said that I needed to have a sustainable brand,” says Chou. 

Since that revelation, Chou dove into the world of sustainable manufacturing head-first. Through her family’s investment vehicles she has worked with companies like Modern Meadow, which uses bio-engineering to make leather goods in a lab. Chou has also led investments in Thousand Fell, a soon-to-launch manufacturer of fully recyclable shoes; Dirty Labs, which is developing more sustainable laundry cleaning products; and Carbon Engineering, which is developing a direct air capture technology for carbon dioxide.

Everybody & Everyone applies the lessons that Chou has learned about sustainability to a new fashion brand that she hopes can serve as a model for how to weave sustainability into every facet of the industry.

The new brand, which sells women’s clothes for every size from 00 to 24 and at prices ranging from $18 to $288 (most fall in the $50 to $150 range, given a quick scroll through the company’s new website) partners with companies like Naadam and Ecoalf for sustainable cashmere and recycled fabrics made from plastic.

“For our brand, recycled is a big story for us,” says Chou. “Our t-shirts, our socks, our packaging, our mailers, our labels, our stickers are all made from recycled materials that can be recycled again.”

The company’s attention to its environmental impact also extends to its supply chain. “Most of our fabrics are knit close to where our garments are manufactured. That is definitely reducing our carbon footprint,” says Chou. “I put an emphasis on having factories in America… our denim is manufactured in America and in the future we’re looking at t-shirts and athletics to be manufactured in America.”

Some clothes are also made with fabrics that have recycled silver in them — so that the clothes can be worn multiple times without smelling or the need for a wash. 

Digital printing is used in place of screens to prevent tons of water waste, the company said, and several of the company’s fabrics are not dyed at all. instead, the company relies on an upcycling process by separating recycled fibers mechanically by color.

Everybody & Everyone has also partnered with the organization One Tree Planted to plant a tree for each purchase that’s made with the company. In addition, the company has calculated its carbon footprint from all of its pre-launch activities and has bought and retired offsets to balance its emissions, Chou says.

“I started building Everybody & Everyone from the ground-up, first by getting the best team in place then by finding the right vendors, manufacturers and partners who were already making strides in the sustainability space,” Chou said in a statement. “I wanted this brand to be for every woman, so body positivity, inclusivity and sustainability were going to be the backbone of everything we did. We then constructed the brands sustainable & technical pillars, which consist of activation, recycled, dyeing & printing, naturals done better, bio-based fibers and end use to ensure our products would minimize negative impacts. We are sustainable down to the labels sewn into each garment.”

Having trouble pitching your startup to investors? This year at Disrupt Berlin, we’re going to help you solve that problem. We’ve invited a panel of experts to tear down real pitch decks live onstage, to help any founder in the room learn about the right way to tell a startup’s story.

If you’re attending, you can apply to have your pitch deck chosen for the stage — just fill out this form.

We had a packed house for the first teardown we did, at Disrupt SF this year. We’re excited to bring it to you. Investors onstage will include Sitar Teli, a London-based co-founder and managing partner at Connect Ventures, who has helped make more than 40 investments across Europe, including Fiit, Kheiron, Citymapper, Typeform, OurPath and Soldo, and Karen Stafford, a Berlin-based director at Intel Capital who focuses on European startups and has invested in companies including iZettle, dataArtisans, Elmodis and Volocopter.

Also joining us will be Russ Heddleston, the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based DocSend, a document management company that helps thousands of founders in Silicon Valley and around the world track things like how investors are responding to their decks. By collaborating with his users, Heddleston and his company have gained new insights into major trends in what works (and what doesn’t) in venture funding pitches — like what time of year is actually best for pitching. Check out his articles on TechCrunch for more.

To have your deck considered, just fill out this form. If the panel picks yours to tear down, we’ll provide you with a free ticket to any TechCrunch event in 2020.

Disrupt Berlin runs December 11 and December 12. Tickets are available right here!

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-c98bc66ab504d3407da982a3cb4a6527') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-c98bc66ab504d3407da982a3cb4a6527' }, "https:\/\/tcprotectedembed.com" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'tcprotectedembed.com' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

The document transfer and management process in the healthcare industry is archaic and full of holes. John discusses innovation and opportunities. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning and have...

___

Huge travel platforms that run airline booking systems like Sabre and Amadeus were invented eons ago and are so large and cumbersome that innovating with them is no easy feat. In the same way that challenger banks have come along to re-invent the banking software Starck, U.K. startup Duffel has done the same in the travel market, linking up airlines directly with travel agents with a 21st century platform.

Today it has announced a $30 million Series B funding round from investors Index Ventures; existing investors Benchmark Capital and Blossom Capital also participated. Its airline partners already include American Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa Group, Aegean Airlines, Vueling and Iberia.

Duffel will use the new funds to hire more engineers and increase its broader team. It is focusing on expanding in North America and Europe, with its first customers drawn from the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany and Spain.

Duffel enables travel agencies to plug in directly to airlines’ reservation systems via an API so they can pull real-time flight offers, make bookings, access live seat availability and buy extra services. This means new digital and mobile app-based travel agencies — Duffel’s target market — can bypass the long lead times and high costs associated with the legacy flight booking systems. They are then able to see live seat availability from some of the world’s biggest airlines, as well as additional offers on in-flight meals or luggage allocations.

Steve Domin, co-founder and CEO of Duffel, said: “A new breed of online agencies want to access reservation systems quickly and seamlessly. By reinventing the underwiring between online agents and airlines we can transform the world of travel booking and reduce barriers to entry for innovative new companies that are offering travelers a whole new way of creating a holiday or trip.”

In the same way that banking systems have been opened up by deregulation, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) created a new industry standard, known as New Distribution Capability (NDC), which transformed the way air products are retailed through the use of modern XML technology. The problem was, the legacy platforms didn’t take much interest. Duffel has obviously come along to take advantage of that.

Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures, said: “We are incredibly impressed by the Duffel team, who we have supported since the days of their seed funding. There is an opportunity here to transform the booking experience for travelers and ease many of the pain points in the industry. From the launch of budget airlines to sharing economy businesses like Airbnb, travel has changed and Duffel will provide the tools, built from the ground up, that make the next wave of innovation possible.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Domin said: “Historically it’s been very hard to sell travel products to agencies. Integrations are hard. There is too much complexity. We are bundling it all into a very simple API and two hours later you can have it running on a site or a mobile app.”

“We are connecting directly to airlines’ reservation systems. If you go on a site that uses Duffel, we will forward — to the airline — the right search request, and the airline generates the offer in real time.”

“Airlines were trying to modernize their booking systems with Amadeus and Sabre, but they have not moved quickly on adapting to what the airlines wanted. When the IATA came up with its new XML platform, no-one wanted to use it. So we did.”

Is Duffel a threat to the legacy platforms? “Potentially,” he says, “but I don’t think they see it that way. They don’t see the benefit of engineering and developer experience. In a way, I hope we will be a threat, but I don’t think we are right now.”

He said Duffel has future plans to expand to other products, like trains and hotels.

Kenya’s Twiga Foods has raised a total of $30 million from lenders and investors led by Goldman Sachs.

The B2B food distribution company financed $6.25 million of the funding in convertible debt and $23.75 million in equity, classified as a Series B round. IFC, TLcom Capital and Creadev joined Goldman on the VC side.

Twiga will use the funds to set up a distribution center in Nairobi and deepen its conversion to offering supply chain services for both agricultural and FMCG products.

The Nairobi-based company will invest in expanding into more cities in Kenya, including Mombasa. Twiga is also targeting Pan-African expansion by third quarter 2020.

“We’re working on French West Africa…we see significant opportunity in those markets,” Twiga CEO Peter Njonjo told TechCrunch. The company will name the new country (or countries) in the following year, he added.

Goldman Sachs confirmed to TechCrunch its lead on Twiga’s Series B funding. The U.S.-based finance firm has backed several African startups, including e-commerce venture Jumia and South African fintech startup Jumo.

Twiga’s financing comes 11 months after a $10 million raise and announcement it would create additional revenue streams by moving into B2B supply chain for FMCG and other consumer products.

Prior to this, Twiga focused primarily on agricultural goods and connecting more efficiently to marketplaces the produce of farmers.

The venture has moved quickly on diversifying its supply-chain product mix. “We’re not just doing fruits and vegetables…I’d say we’re at 50/50 now between FMCG and fresh,” said Njonjo.

“We’ve pivoted a bit as a company…we see our purpose as an organization around what I would call aggregating the informal retail, then using technology, and then using that buying power to essentially provide lower, better-cost goods across cities,” he said.

Co-founded in Nairobi in 2014 by Njonjo and Grant Brooke, Twiga Foods serves around 3,000 outlets a day with produce through a network of 17,000 farmers and 8,000 vendors. Parties can coordinate goods exchanges via mobile app using M-Pesa mobile money for payment.

The company has reduced typical post-harvest losses in Kenya from 30% to 4% for produce brought to market on the Twiga network, according to Njonjo.

Transferring these gains from improved supply-chain to a wider variety of food products has upside for economies and and consumers, he believes.

“[If you] get farmers now producing at large scale and supplying into you, and manufacturers that don’t need to invest in distribution systems, it has huge benefit,” said Njonjo.

“Think about in some of these economies, if you’re spending 55% of disposable income on food, if that number were to go down to 40% — because of…gaining efficiency — what you’ve done is to release 15% for consumers to spend for other things.”

As TechCrunch reported in November, Twiga Foods’ consistent volume and revenue flow from agricultural goods provides a foundation to add other product categories to its B2B network.

“If we can build a business around fresh fruit and vegetables…It’s now much easier to lay things over that would have been very expensive to get to end retailers,” Twiga co-founder Grant Brooke said.

This could put the startup in a position to enter or supply B2C e-commerce with more favorable margins than existing players, i.e. online retailer Jumia — with high fulfillment expenses.

On that prospect, “It’s not something we’re thinking about from a strategic standpoint,” said CEO Njonjo.

But Twiga has factored for its advantages in the B2C e-commerce space. “Let me put it this way, if you’re able to serve Nairobi’s 180,000 retailers, it means that the furthest customer would be less than two kilometers away from any shop. That’s the power of building a B2C business on top of a B2B platform. So definitely, the potential is there,” said Njonjo.

That leaves some room for conjecture that Twiga Foods could pivot toward supplying or entering online retail in Africa.

For now the company will focus on performance metrics around its current model.

“We’re not sharing data around revenue and profitability. But…over the next 12 months as we scale, our unit economics is front and center to ensure we’re growing our margins faster than our costs,” said Njonjo.

Koyo, a fintech startup using open banking to offer loans to people with “thin” credit files and currently poorly served by the market, has closed $4.9 million in funding.

The round — a mixture of debt and equity funding — is led by Forward Partners, with participation from Seedcamp. Other investors include Christian Faes (founder and CEO of LendInvest) and Charles Delingpole (founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage).

Founded in late 2018 by ex-Frontline Ventures VC Thomas Olszewski, and launching later this year, Koyo is attempting to tackle the problem whereby people without much of a credit history, such as migrants or those who have never taken credit or aren’t the main bill payer, aren’t able to secure a loan.

And even if they are, the financial products they’ll typically get access to often charge excessive fees and have an extremely high interest rate.

By using open banking data to better assess risk based on a person’s up-to-date transaction history, the company thinks it can offer something a lot more competitive.

“If someone is new to the country or otherwise has a thin credit file, it can be difficult for that person to access credit,” says Olszewski. “For example, if you’ve been in the country for a year or two and you’d like to get a personal loan, the types of loans that would be offered to you would be payday loans (1,000%+ APRs) or longer-term loans in the 50-99% APR range that may require a guarantor.”

The reason is because these types of customer have little or no information in their credit file, and the vast majority of lenders rely on the three main bureaus (Equifax, Experian, Transunion) to make a credit decision.

“We estimate 15-20% of the population are not captured by bureau data,” explains Olszewski. “Koyo is unique in that we require all customers to connect their current account to our platform using open banking, and we make a lending decision based on the transactions in that customers account, rather than just looking at the credit score. So, if we see the customer has regular income, has a reasonable expenditure relative to the size of their income, that customer may be eligible for a loan from us.”

With regards to competitors, Olszewski says that if you have a thin credit file (or have no file at all) and are unable to get a loan from a bank, there are providers such as Amigo Loans, 118 Money or Sunny. However, he claims that Koyo will usually work out 50-90% cheaper on an APR basis.

“We expect our representative APR to be in the 35% range. While this may be expensive to people who have access to high street bank loans, it is a really exciting proposition for this market segment,” he adds. In addition, Koyo won’t charge late fees, early repayment fees, loan originations fees “or fees of any sort other than interest.”

Meanwhile, I’m told that Koyo is currently a “nimble” team of just six, with four people in the management team. Along with Olszewski, they are CTO Guy Evans (former CTO of LendInvest), Head of Risk Kevin Allen (former CRO of RateSetter) and Head of Marketing Peter Kent.