StepLadder, another London-based startup aiming to help so-called “generation rent” get onto the housing ladder, has raised £1.5 million in seed funding.

Backing the round is Spanish banking giant BBVA and fintech VC Anthemis via the London-based venture studio on which the pair have partnered. Early investor Seedcamp also followed on, in addition to unnamed angel investors.

StepLadder says it will use the new capital and support provided by BBVA/Anthemis to further develop its “collaborative finance platform.” The startup is also eyeing international expansion.

Founded in 2015 by Matthew Addison and joined by Lucy Mullins and Mihir Bhushan, StepLadder’s collaborative deposit saving platform is designed to motivate renters to save for a deposit so they can purchase their first home.

Using a financial model known as a “Rotating Credit and Savings Association” (ROSCA), StepLadder puts its members into “Circles,” whereby each individual member contributes an identical amount on a monthly basis — ranging from £25 to £1,000. A random draw then takes place each month and the winner is provided with that month’s full pot to use toward their deposit.

“For most first-time buyers, it’s really difficult to get on the property ladder,” says Addison. “Home ownership rates amongst 25 to 34-years-olds have collapsed… [with around] 250,000 fewer first-time buyers every year, for over a decade, in the U.K. alone. Raising the deposit is the biggest hurdle. At StepLadder we’re using something called a ROSCA, a form of collaborative finance where people work together in groups to help our members raise their property deposits, on average, 45% faster.”

As an example, StepLadder might match you to a £500 a month Circle for 20 months to raise £10,000. This would see it find 19 other members to be in the same Circle. “Each month the £10,000 is randomly allocated and you could be drawn at any point in that 20 months,” explains StepLadder’s Lucy Mullins. “You have to keep making your £500 a month payment for the full 20 months, so at the end everybody has paid in £10,000 and everybody has received £10,000.”

To help protect the platform from being abused, Mullins says that while a member is still part of a Circle, the startup will only release the pot to their solicitor for use as a property deposit. “So, if somebody stops paying after they have been drawn then we wouldn’t release their payout until they had made catch-up payments.”

StepLadder also supports members along the house-buying journey. The app lets members engage with a community of like-minded people and access group-buying discounts on services such as mortgages, solicitor fess and surveyors. The latter forms part of the company’s revenue stream.

“We introduce our members (at their request) to high-quality service providers, such as mortgage brokers, lending banks, surveyors and insurance providers,” says Addison. “In return, these partners pay us fees or commissions. We offer discounts on these transaction services via the combined buying power of our members in their Circles.”

In addition, there is a small monthly fee (between 2-5%) to be part of a Circle, which Mullins says covers the cost of delivering the service.

This includes holding money securely in a client money account, a payment waiver if a member were to become sick or unemployed after buying a property with their StepLadder deposit, credit bureau costs and the cost of a Circle host to support members on the journey.

“We do not aim to profit from the monthly administration fees we charge members and would usually be able to save our members much more in discounts than they pay in fees,” says Mullins.

Meanwhile, StepLadder has plans to expand the use cases for Circles and evolve the platform to also cover general savings goals and targeted “big ticket items.”

Explains Addison: “In Brazil, ROSCAs are used by nine million consumers for everything from dishwashers to cars to homes. We have already begun to demonstrate this potential with both our First Step offering (smaller circles from £25 a month) and proposed partnered launches.”

Lotame, a company offering data management tools for publishers and marketers, today unveiled a new product called Cartographer — described by CMO Adam Solomon as “our new people-based ID solution.”

In other words, it’s Lotame’s offering to help businesses connect their visitor and customer data across platforms and devices.

We’ve written about plenty of other cross-device targeting technologies — and in fact, Lotame acquired one of them, AdMobius, in 2014. But Solomon said the landscape has become more challenging given privacy regulations and especially updated browsers that place new limits on the types of cookies that can be used to track users.

“There’s been an explosion of first-party cookies,” Solomon said, referring to cookies that are stored on the domain you’re actually visiting (as opposed to third-party cookies, which are increasingly blocked).

He argued that these “short-lived” cookies then create problems for publishers: “If you’re in Safari visiting the same site every day, a new ID could be generated” each day. So Cartographer deals with this by using data science and machine learning to attempt to “cluster” different IDs together that likely belong to the same user.

“Every day when we see an ID, we’ll capture it,” Solomon said. “We’re graphing those cookies together, these dozens or hundreds of cookies that we believe, based on our technology, that these cookies belong to the same individual.”

He also said that connecting IDs in this way is crucial to the whole “Russian nesting doll” of how a publisher or advertiser understands identity on the internet: “Cookies ladder up to devices, devices ladder up to people, people ladder up to households.” So by connecting cookies to people, Lotame can also offer better household-level data.

And far from being an attempt to circumvent privacy restrictions, Solomon argued that Cartographer actually makes it easier for publishers to stay compliant with Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA rules, because they can do a better job of storing a customer’s privacy preferences.

Grant Whitmore, chief digital officer at Lotame customer Tribune Publications, made a similar point: “One of the things that I think all publishers are wrestling with right now is really the disconnect that is occurring in the adtech landscape and the legislative landscape and really managing the persistence of that consent.”

Whitmore continued, “One of the unintended consequences of that legislation and some of what is happening in the browser space is that we could be forced into a position where we are having to ask you every single time you visit a site whether it’s okay to sell your data, whether it’s okay to track.”

And he said that’s one of the big reasons Tribune is deploying Cartographer across all its properties, including its nine core newspaper sites. Though he acknowledged that it’s more broadly useful too.

“From the standpoint of our core business, getting a more complete picture of who a user is across these device types … That is of ongoing importance to us,” Whitmore said. “As we fight in this very competitive landscape, our ability to bring our understanding of who a user is, what their interests are … and providing good solutions — whether on the advertising front or whether that’s handling digital subscription offers — is just table stakes at this point.”

Solomon, meanwhile, said that Cartographer’s benefits go beyond “just figuring which IDs cluster together to represent an individual,” because it’s also ensuring that there’s proper ID synchronization with other data and ad-buying platforms.

“We make sure there’s maximum connectivity, maximum dial tone, with all the ecosystem participants,” he said.

Apple Arcade introduced the idea of all-you-can-eat subscription-based mobile gaming to the mainstream. Google Play Pass soon followed as a way to subscribe to a sizable collection of both apps and games on Android devices. Today, a startup called GameClub is launching in the U.S. to offer an alternative. For $4.99 per month, mobile consumers will be able to access a library that includes some of the best games to have ever hit the App Store.

To be clear, GameClub is not a cloud gaming platform, like Google Stadia. It’s a way to subscribe to actual App Store games, similar to Arcade. In GameClub’s case, however, the focus is not on new releases but on quality games that already have proven track records and high ratings.

In fact, many GameClub games have made Apple’s own editorially selected “Game of the Year” lists in years past. And like the games offered on Apple Arcade, they don’t have ads or any in-app purchases.

At launch, GameClub’s library includes more than 100 titles, with around half that available for play today. More titles will roll out on a weekly basis in the months ahead. Combined, the games have over 100 million collective downloads, the company says.

On GameClub, you’ll find games like: Super Crate Box, Hook Champ, Mage Gauntlet, Space Miner, Forget-Me-Not, MiniSquadron, Plunderland, Pocket RPG, Sword of Fargoal, Incoboto, Tales of the Adventure Company, Hook Worlds, Orc: Vengeance, Mr. Particle-Man, Legendary Wars, Deathbat, The Path to Luma, Grimm, Zombie Match, Faif, iBlast Moki 2, Kano, Baby Lava Bounce, Run Roo Run, Gears and many others.

It’s a selection that extends across gaming categories, like Action, Arcade, Puzzle, Adventure, Platformer, Retro, Role Playing, Simulation, Strategy and more.

To use the service, you first download the main GameClub app, which becomes the hub for your GameClub activities. You then sign up for the $4.99 per month subscription, which includes a 30-day free trial. Within the main app, you can browse the available titles as well as read editorial content like in-depth overviews and histories, get tips and learn about gaming strategies.

The startup was founded last year by game industry vets Dan Sherman and Oliver Pedersen.

Sherman, GameClub CEO, has worked in the gaming industry for around 17 years, including time spent at EA and his own startup, Tilting Point. His experience has involved, predominantly, signing content partnerships with game creators. Pedersen, meanwhile, built backend systems and platforms for games, including at Yahoo Games.

Though GameClub is seemingly arriving after Apple Arcade’s debut, it actually began before that. The startup was founded in 2018, ahead of any Apple Arcade rumors. It went live on iOS outside the U.S. before Arcade launched.

The founders say they were inspired to address the issues caused by the free-to-play model that has infiltrated the gaming industry. In addition, they had witnessed a decline in consumers’ willingness to purchase content upfront, which was impacting the industry.

“I was seeing all these amazing game developers leave mobile because the types of games they make are not the types of games that monetize through in-app purchases and ads,” Sherman tells TechCrunch. “The free-to-play model actually only works for a handful of genres,” he explains. “A lot of companies make a lot of money through a very small number of genres and game experiences — to the exclusion of a lot of other types of genres that GameClub is bringing back — action, adventures, arcade, tower defense — anything that can be completed.”

With free-to-play, games are built around perpetual retention loops. “And the freemium model comes out of the casino industry, not the premium game industry,” Sherman points out.

But because this is how games could make money, it led to homogeneity in the marketplace, he says.

GameClub aims to offer a subscription to the premium games that got left behind.

They are meant to be wholesome and fun, not overly addictive. They’re not designed to manipulate you into spending money. You simply pay your subscription fee every month to access the catalog, then play unencumbered.

Thanks to Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass, consumers are now comfortable with the idea of the subscription model for mobile games. And other services — like Spotify Netflix, and Xbox Game Pass, for example — have pushed the idea of subscription access to content across platforms and genres.

GameClub is different from Arcade, however, because it’s not funding the development of content upfront — at least, not yet. Instead, it’s forging agreements with largely indie developers to release their existing IP as a GameClub exclusive.

This may include bringing an older game into the 64-bit era — something GameClub handles on their behalf.

“Many of [the GameClub titles] have been gone for many years,” says Sherman. “It’s with our team, our technology and our developers that they’ve been brought back. And they’ve been brought back in a way that is 100% using the original code and the exact same design…but making them look and feel new, with higher resolution, Retina Display assets and by optimizing for the latest screen sizes and configurations,” he adds.

The company doesn’t discuss the business model for GameClub, but it’s not the same as Apple Arcade’s pay-upfront model.

What Sherman could say is that the more important the game is to the GameClub service, the more money the creator makes. Additionally, GameClub says it’s transparent with developers about its subscription revenue, so there’s no question about which games are earning or why.

The same can’t be said for Apple Arcade, which is a total black box to the point that consumers don’t know which Arcade games are most popular, developers can’t see how they’re doing compared with others and third-party measurement firms have no data.

Of course, there could be concerns that GameClub exists in a gray area, with regard to App Store policy. Those with longer memories may recall that Apple banned app-stores-within-a-store starting back in 2012. The company had kicked out apps that recommended other apps like AppHero, FreeAppADay, Daily App Dream, AppShopper and more. It also banned the more popular app recommendation service AppGratis the following year.

But Apple’s concern was that these apps were leveraging their power to manipulate App Store charts and rankings, often charging for that service. GameClub, on the other hand, plays fairly. Its service also benefits Apple, by offering subscription access to quality games that couldn’t thrive as free-to-play titles.

Longer-term, GameClub wants to produce its own original content and offer its service across platforms, starting with Google Play, but eventually tackling PC and console gaming.

The startup is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Copenhagen. In addition to the founders, it includes Eli Hodapp, the former editor-in-chief of the popular game news and review site TouchArcade, and COO Britt Myers, the former chief product officer of subscription-based edtech apps platform Homer.

With the close of a seed round last week, GameClub is backed by $4.6 million in funding.

Investors from a round that closed last year include GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund, CRCM Ventures, Watertower Ventures, Ride Ventures, BreakawayGrowth Fund and others. New investors include GFR Fund, Gramercy Fund, CentreGold Capital, and AET Fund.

GameClub is available on the App Store.

Enterprise software tool startups are so often birthed to either un-bundle or re-bundle what came before them. In an age where “consumerization of the enterprise” is a trendy phrase for investors, it was natural a startup would come along to bundle its take on some of the trendiest startup tools.

Taskade appears to be the love child of Notion, Slack and Asana. It’s a tool for startup teams to collaborate around projects that can be re-organized based on how the individual user best works through tasks. The startup graduated from YC in the most recent batch and has now locked down $5 million in seed funding from Grishin Robotics and Y Combinator, Taskade CEO John Xie tells TechCrunch.

It’s a platform that tries to meet an awful lot of needs at once. You can take notes, designate tasks, chat with co-workers, set goals and visualize everything you’ve already completed.

The startup certainly seems to take a page or two from Notion, where you can re-visualize databases in tables or Kanban boards with ease. Taskade has built this framework into a more collaborative tool, while trying to place limits on itself so that users aren’t left with an endless amount of customizations, something that can be both a blessing (to the technically minded) and a curse (to those who don’t find exploring a piece of software deeply enjoyable).

Taskade’s platform is organized around tasks arranged inside projects. Rather than being organized around pages, which can contain multiple data sets and perspectives, Taskade’s projects are limited strictly to one database each. It’s certainly a limitation, but one that probably cuts down on confusion and the temptation to stuff pages with as much as you can think of.

“Notion is a beautiful product, I think at some point it just gets extremely hard to manage all the hierarchy with the cross-linking and whatnot,” Xie told TechCrunch. “For us, we just wanted to make it much simpler and more workspace-driven so you are able to collaborate with multiple teams.”

The collaboration is another distinguishing factor of the platform. The team has built a commenting stream that lives inside each project so that a project can have its own ongoing dialog without forcing users into another Slack channel. You also can fire up video chats inside the project pages and chat through the data without opening another app or sending another invite.

The startups that Taskade is taking on feel ubiquitous. Slack went public this summer and is sitting on a $11.4 billion market cap. Asana has raised north of $210 million from investors. Notion, the youngin’ of the group, recently nabbed new funding at an $800 million valuation.

The team at Taskade is still quite small; there are just six employees at the company right now, organized remotely, but the focus is on using this funding to build out the product over time rather than pumping cash into sales and marketing, Xie tells me. The company has largely been building up early customers through word-of-mouth and has taken a particular foothold among creative agency customers.

The product has free and paid tiers, priced at $10 per month per user. Taskade is still flirting with how they want the relationship between their free and paid tiers to look. Xie tells me they’re hoping to transition to a usage-based free model rather than one that leaves certain features pay-walled.

The platform is available on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and the web.

At this week’s International Astronautical Congress, where the space industry, international space agencies and researchers from around the world convene to discuss the state of space technology and business, I asked NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine about what role he sees for startups in contributing to his agency’s ambitious Artemis program. Artemis (named after Apollo’s twin sister, one of the gods of Greek mythology) is NASA’s mission to return human beings to the surface of the Moon — this time to stay — and to use that as a staging ground for further exploration to Mars and beyond.

Bridenstine, fielding the question during a press Q+A about Artemis, said the program is incredibly welcoming of contributions from startups large and small, and that it sees a number of different areas where contributions from younger space companies can have a big impact.

“When we talk about entrepreneurs, there are big entrepreneurs and there are small entrepreneurs, but know this: What we’re building in the [Lunar] Gateway is open architecture, and we want to go with commercial partners,” Bridenstine said. “So there are in fact, a number of companies here [at IAC], big companies that have said they want to go to the Moon, they want to go sustainably, they want to be part of Artemis, and the Gateway is available to them.”

The Lunar Gateway is a station NASA intends to put in orbit around the Moon to act as a staging ground for its vehicles, a key step to ensure the process of landing things on the Moon once they reach lunar orbit is more easily accomplished. Bridenstine pointed out that in the Broad Agency Agreement (BAA) that NASA originally put out for the Artemis program, it went further still and said that it welcomed proposals from private space companies that involve going directly to the Moon, bypassing the Gateway entirely.

Actually getting to the Moon has been taken on by some of the deeper-pocketed and more well-established entrepreneurs among the so-called “New Space” companies, including SpaceX . But Artemis participation goes well beyond the high-priced task of building vehicles capable of getting from Earth to lunar orbit, according to Bridenstine.

“We’re going to need cargo on the surface of the Moon,” he said, noting that the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion crew capsule Artemis will use to take humans to the Moon in 2024 will lean on advance payloads to better ensure mission success. “[W]hen we talk about aggregating a lander at the gateway — when we talk about, maybe even putting hardware on the surface the Moon, including science hardware, like the Viper neutron spectrometer, an IR spectrometer helping us understand the regolith and the water ice, what’s there on the surface of the Moon, where it is and in what quantities […] we’re going to need those science instruments delivered to the surface of the Moon.”

Indeed, there are companies poised to deliver cargo via lunar landers in advance of, or in time with, NASA’s 2024 target for a human landing, including Astrobotic’s Peregrine Moon lander, which is looking to launch in 2021, and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander. Both these landers, and the payloads they carry, could include startup-designed equipment and systems to pave the way for sustainable human occupation of our large natural satellite. In fact, Bridenstine suggested some potential payloads that could be even more wild than advance data-gathering hardware.

“Maybe even — again it depends on budgets, and I’m not promising anything between now and 2024 — but maybe even an inflatable habitat on the surface of the Moon so that when our astronauts get there they have a place to go, and they can stay for longer periods of time,” he said. “Is that in the realm of possibility? Absolutely.”

Bridenstine continued that the agency is already working with many smaller, entrepreneurial businesses, and intends to continue exploring partnerships with more. There’s a clear and growing need for lunar cargo from NASA, in increasing volumes, the Administrator pointed out.

“On top of SLS and Orion we need additional capability, there are opportunities there for all kinds of commercial companies entrepreneurs,” he said. “We also have small business investment and research that NASA is involved in, and we’re on-ramping small businesses all the time. In fact, right now we have the Commercial Lunar Payload Services [CLPS] program underway. We have nine companies that have signed up […] two of them now have task orders to deliver to the Moon in 2021 […] We’re on-ramping, not only those nine companies, but we want to on-ramp additional companies, and maybe even bigger companies for larger landing opportunities because, like I said, we’re going to have a lot more needs in the future for cargo on the surface of the Moon.”

As the market continues to turn against the wave of highly valued venture-backed startups operating with little end in sight to their huge losses — Uber and WeWork being two prime examples — another startup is taking a proactive step to get ahead of the story, by cutting costs and restructuring before public opinion forces the issue on them.

Fair.com, a startup building a flexible car ownership business that is valued at $1.2 billion — backed by some $500 million in equity from SoftBank and others, plus billions more dollars in debt funding — said today that it will be laying off 40% of its staff. On top of this, it is removing its CFO, Tyler Painter, the brother of the CEO and co-founder (and car business veteran) Scott Painter. He’s being replaced in the interim by Kirk Shryoc.

It’s not clear how many people 40% translates to in terms of headcount, nor which areas of the business will be affected. Fair’s CEO Painter is not disclosing the full number of employees the company has across the U.S., or which parts of the business are going to be restructured. (As a marker though, there are some 539 employees listed on LinkedIn, which would work out at about 215 people.)

He did note that the business is not planning on shuttering any specific operations: leasing services for those driving for on-demand services, and its consumer-focused service, will both remain operational, even as certain geographies and certain segments of the markets that Fair is serving are proving to be unprofitable.

This is one area where the CFO change will play.

“As Fair has grown, the skill sets needed to drive the business forward change. Kirk has a decade of experience running treasury and capital markets for large fleet companies, and is well known on the capital markets side,” the company said in a separate statement. “We’ve been working with him over the course of this year, and given our renewed focus on our acquisition and financing approach, now was the right time to ask him to step in to manage our upstream banking relationships and the fleet management.”

The full internal memo that Painter sent out to staff is included below.

Painter (the CEO) said in an interview earlier today that the reason for the move was to proactively come out to make changes to help the company become more profitable at a time when the “capital markets” are focused on profitability — perhaps more than the over-focus on growth that has fueled a lot of the biggest investments in recent years.

“It’s hard building a sustainable company and these are the choices you have to make,” he said of the news.

Fair has been growing at a fast clip in the last couple of years, at a rate of 5x, Painter said. In 2018, ahead of its funding from SoftBank, the company picked up the unprofitable leasing business of Uber; and earlier this year it picked up Canvas, a car leasing business previously owned by Ford. In both cases, the terms of the deals were undisclosed.

At the time of the Canvas deal, Fair said it had about 45,000 subscribers currently in the U.S., with 3.2 million downloads across 30 markets, adding some 3,800 subscribers coming on from Canvas.

It’s notable that Fair is backed by the same investor that helped propel both WeWork and Uber to giant valuations ahead of the companies seeing their fortunes change: Uber’s in the public markets where it’s been pounded for its losses and WeWork before it ever got to its IPO (the company had to withdraw its filing and just this week saw SoftBank scoop up 80% of its business at a cut price in order to keep the whole thing from going under).

Cautionary tales for Fair, which is only profitable in certain parts of its business and is now turning its attention to fixing that.

Painter maintained that this was a proactive move, made not because SoftBank or another investor leaned on it to do so. It’s notable that the last time the company raised equity funding was close to one year ago, so this could help put it in a healthier position were it considering to raise again.

“Softbank is a big shareholder and supporting my focus, and that is the reality right now,” Painter said. “Leaning on us is not the term,” he added in response to my multiple questions of whether SoftBank pressured it to make these changes. “They are supporting us — there is a big difference,” he stressed.

“There’s no question that the world is changing and there is a lot of noise in system, but for us we are doing this proactively, on our terms. We recognise what we are seeing so we are being proactive to avoid this. We wouldn’t have the ability were it not for capital partners like SoftBank. Despite all this noise they remain a steadfast believer in Fair.”

Last week’s big story was about how Airbnb, which has reportedly been planning to go public next year, has seen a widening loss. Today’s news could be a sign that we will see more of these rationalizations to come.

Memo here:

As we discussed at our last Fair Family Lunch, today’s companies must demonstrate a path to sustainable growth and profitability. Fair is no different. As one of the pioneers in automotive fintech, we now need to focus on being a profitable company. Our technology, our simple product design, and our focus on the customer are second to none. While we are proud of our growth, we are here for the long term. This means that we’ve decided to take proactive steps now to ensure we are a profitable public company later.

With the help and guidance of our leadership team, I’ve decided to focus the company’s resources on strengthening Fair’s core technology and reducing costs associated with the capital-intensive supply side of our business. Going forward, Fair will be a smaller team, focused on doing fewer things well. As part of the process of achieving profitability, we’re reducing our headcount across the business.

While these are the decisions that every entrepreneur dreads making, these are important for us to be able to safeguard the future of the business we’ve all worked so hard to build.

I remain grateful for this team’s hard work and optimistic for the future. We have created an entirely new category that consumers love. We’ve served tens of thousands of customers. We’ve powered Uber drivers’ livelihoods. We’ve helped everyone get access to the car they want, when they want, for how long they want — all on their phone and without taking on debt. We all did this together. We should all be proud of these achievements and I am personally grateful to all those who have given their time and expertise to deliver the future we set out to build.

Now, we will set out to transform the supply side of our business over the coming months, focus on building a profitable model, and operating with the rigor of a publicly traded company.

I expect everyone to have questions about what this means for them and the health of Fair, and while I can’t promise to have all the answers, I commit to keeping you informed along the way. These types of changes are painful, as I know from my previous experiences building companies. Our leadership team is responsible for the long-term sustainability of Fair, and no matter how difficult these decisions are, we believe they are the right steps in ensuring we have a bright future as a company. We thank you for being on this journey with us.

-Scott

Yesterday, in addressing nervous WeWork employees at an all-hands, the company’s new chairman, SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, told those gathered that their days of worrying are over, says Recode, which obtained a leaked recording of the meeting.

In comments that may stun industry observers who haven’t done the math — and upset at least some percentage of SoftBank investors — Claure is quoted as telling employees: “We have guaranteed the future of WeWork, but more importantly is we’re putting the future back into our hands. There’s no more days needed to go fundraising. There’s no more days needed to go prove to the investor community that we’re a viable company. The size of the commitment that SoftBank has made to this company in the past and now is $18.5 billion. To put the things in context, that is bigger than the GDP of my country where I came from. That’s a country where there’s 11 million people.”

Claure, a native of Bolivia who was named chairman as part of SoftBank’s rescue of the beleaguered co-working company, has been a SoftBank lieutenant for the last five years, and currently holds a variety of titles on its behalf, including COO of SoftBank Group Corp, CEO of SoftBank Group International and CEO of SoftBank Latin America.

He has said he first met SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son after building up his own business, Brightstar — a  cellphone reseller — then selling 57% of it to SoftBank in 2013 in a deal that valued the company at $2.2 billion. SoftBank later acquired more of the company before deciding to explore a sale of the low-margin business last year for $1 billion.

By then, Claure was running Sprint, a SoftBank-backed property that installed Claure as CEO in 2014, where he presided over a massive share slide that began before he joined the company and ended only last year when T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to merge. (The deal has been green-lit by the FCC and the Department of Justice, but it’s still facing a lawsuit from several state attorneys general who are trying to block the deal, saying it could hamper competition and drive prices higher. Claure stepped away from running the company and into the role of Sprint’s executive chairman in May of last year to become COO of SoftBank. Sprint’s shares have meanwhile held mostly steady for the past year.)

In talking with WeWork employees, Claure painted a rosy picture of his own career. (“Masa told me, ‘You’re a great entrepreneur. You built a company from scratch, very successful.’ He says, ‘You’re a good operator. You fixed Sprint.’ “)

To assuage fears, he also underscored repeatedly the gamble that SoftBank is taking on WeWork, telling employees, “We’ve had many, many endless nights with Masa in terms of what was the next thing to do with WeWork. I would say that 99% of advice that we got is to cut your losses and run away, but Masa absolutely is a believer in WeWork and the mission and disruption.

“You say why, right? The easy thing was just run away. There were no need. We didn’t have to come in and make an investment of this size. We’re basically betting SoftBank. We’re betting our reputation and we’re betting everything we have that this is going to be a success story. We want people to look at this move as not a failure, but we want this move as a genius move. We had many, many nights of debate. Everything that we look at the business, the more we dig, the more we love the business, the more community managers we interact with, the more we love the business.”

As for how WeWork saves the business, that’s not clear yet, said Claure.

“My goal in the next 30 days is to work with this management team, to work with Artie, Sebastian, and all the incredibly talented members of the team to basically set up a plan,” he said. “This plan is going to be very clear. We’re all going to know what each one of us is supposed to do. I’m going to make sure that it’s not an empty plan. I’m going to make sure there’s numbers. I’m going to make sure that we can measure. I’m going to make sure that we can hold people accountable.”

One possible hitch that Claure understandably didn’t raise yesterday — one in addition to the countless obvious challenges WeWork faces in trying to generate forward momentum, including convincing corporate customers not to look elsewhere for office space — is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS.

As Bloomberg reported last night, SoftBank will seek national security approval from CFIUS for its takeover, and the committee has stymied the Japanese conglomerate before.

It put conditions on SoftBank’s majority ownership of Sprint; it restricted its control of the investment firm Fortress Investment Group, for which it paid $3.3 billion in late 2017; it also held up SoftBank when it wanted to fill two board seats after it sunk billions into Uber. Indeed, SoftBank was never able to fill those spots, noted Bloomberg. Once the rideshare company went public, it voided some of its obligations to SoftBank.

Anyone who has tried to ride an electric scooter knows the likelihood of finding one with a charged battery is quite low. Swiftmile, which just landed a contract with the city of Austin, supplies cities and private operators with docks equipped to park and charge both scooters and e-bikes.

What Swiftmile offers serves as a win for operators, riders and cities alike. Operators can provide a better (charged) product to their customers, the likelihood of finding a charged scooter increases and cities can better control sidewalk clutter and issues pertaining to improper parking. Unfortunately, the downside falls on those relying on charging scooters to make extra income.

When Swiftmile deploys in Austin, the plan is to start with 10 stations, which comes out to about 80 parking slips. The company hopes to do this by the end of the year. Austin has become a major micromobility hub, with seven providers operating a total of 17,600 vehicles in the city. In fact, it’s become known as a place that many other cities look to for regulation.

“What we do with cities is we get permission from them, we get an encroachment permit and then it’s up to us to monetize off the scooter providers,” Swiftmile co-founder and CEO Colin Roche told TechCrunch. “What we do is put our system down and, you can think of it like a gas station in the middle of where all the scooters are. You don’t want a lot of people having to drive in to pick all these scooters up. I think that’s going to diminish more. If the asset is in the field right there, then you incentivize a rider to ride to the station with credit.”

From there, Swiftmile charges the operators by the minute, but not to exceed a certain amount, depending on the market. Initially, the docking system will be open to all operators in order to show them how it works and how beneficial it can be. After a certain period of time, Swiftmile will only charge its customers’ scooters.

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“Here’s the key piece,” Roche said. “Our system is really intelligent, so we have the ability to detect whose scooter it is. When it gets plugged in, we pulse the system and it tells us what kind of scooter it is.”

That makes it so a rider could still park any scooter there, but only Swiftmile customers will get their scooters charged.

In addition to Austin, Swiftmile has also launched a mobility hub in Berlin, and plans to deploy more. On the operator side, Swiftmile has partnered with Spin to create branded charging hubs exclusively for Spin scooters. In the U.S., Swiftmile has deployed more than 50 stations. In Austin, however, the charging hubs are vehicle agnostic and will mark Swiftmile’s first public system.

The same will go for Pittsburgh, where Swiftmile will deploy about 50 stations in early 2020. That’s all part of the Pittsburgh Micromobility Collective, which includes Spin, Zipcar, Ford Mobility, Waze and Swiftmile.

Swiftmile got its start as a bike-share operator for private companies, including Tesla and Google. To date, the company has raised a little more than $5 million from Sinai Ventures, Verizon Ventures and others. Additionally, Swiftmile just received a term sheet for a $12 million Series A round.

*Verizon owns TechCrunch, but has no influence on our coverage.

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Shipwell, the software platform for managing trucking logistics, has raised $35 million and is expanding its suite of services to become a full-service hub for logistics management. 

The new round led by Georgian Partners comes as the company has just expanded its suite of tracking and management tools to integrate with FedEx’s parcel shipping services. The company also is planning an expansion into ocean shipping in the coming months, according to chief executive Gregory Price.

The Austin-based company works with multiple service providers — including the logistics services unicorn Flexport — but operates as a marketplace for shippers to connect with freight companies and online tools to manage those shipments. In effect, the company is pitching to any retailer or outlet a version of the proprietary logistics management toolkit that has made Amazon so successful.

Since its last round of funding a year ago, Shipwell has grown to service more than 4,000 customers per month with supply chains spanning multiple geographies. The company now operates in Canada, Mexico and even across Europe.

With the new funding the company intends to open new offices in Chicago and expand to a second location in its home base of Austin.

The company has also launched a new application program interface that allows it to help manage logistics through other modes than just trucking. Price says the company has about 20 companies beta-testing the tool, which is set to launch publicly in November.

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With $11 million in funding and a mission to open up the doors of regenerative therapies to dogs across the nation, the Los Angeles-based startup Gallant is now opening its doors for the first time.

The company was founded by DogVacay founder and chief executive Aaron Hirschhorn after seeing his own pet’s struggle with debilitating illness and knowing firsthand that regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies could help.

“I struggled with debilitating chronic back pain for more than a decade, leaving me incapable of doing activities I loved, until regenerative medicine successfully cured my condition,” said Hirschhorn, in a statement. “At the same time, I watched my dog Rocky suffer from arthritis so painful that she couldn’t walk. I knew there had to be a better way to treat and heal our pets, which sparked the beginning of Gallant. We are on a mission to keep our pets happier and healthier through the power of regenerative medicine.”

Joining Hirschhorn at the company is Linda Black, an experienced serial entrepreneur at life sciences companies like Medicus Biosciences and SciStem, which both focused on developing regenerative therapies. Richard Jennings, the chief executive of cord blood banking company California Cryobank, and Darryl Rawlings, the founder and chief executive of Trupanion, both sit on the company’s board of directors.

Hirschorn knows the pet business. He helped grow DogVacay to over $100 million in sales over his tenure at the company before its merger with Rover.

It’s that experience in business that likely helped investors — including Maveron, Bold Capital Partners, Bling Capital and Science Inc. — come to the table and fetch $11 million in cash for the business.

Through the investment, Gallant was able to acquire the veterinary division of Cook-Regentec, including the animal medicine division’s intellectual property, existing stem cell banking operations and their pipeline of cell therapy products derived from reproductive tissue.

What’s the benefit of banking your dog’s stem cells for life for roughly $1,000?

According to Gallant, the veterinarians from its newly acquired business have treated hundreds of cats and dogs already with their own banked stem cells. Those treatments have helped dogs with illnesses including osteoarthritis, atopic dermatitis, torn ligaments and chronic dry eye. Each treatment has been demonstrated to be effective in early clinical trials, and stem cell therapy is on the cutting edge of new scientific research.

With Gallant, pet owners opt in to having their animal’s stem cells collected during a routine spaying or neutering procedure. Hirschhorn says that roughly 1 million cats and dogs undergo those procedures every day, so there’s no shortage of potential customers.

During the procedure, vets deposit tissue from the operation in a special container that Gallant will collect and use to harvest an animal’s stem cells.

By collecting stem cells harvested during the operations, Gallant says it can get access to younger, healthier stem cells.

Banking and paying for therapies using Gallant’s technology isn’t cheap. The company charges $395 to collect the cells and another $595 to store them for a pet’s lifetime. If an owner wants to pay annually, there’s a $95 fee per year to store the genetic material. (Gallant says it’s waiving the initial collection fee for a limited time to coincide with its launch.)

Treatments based on a pet’s genetic material cost $300.

“In my experience with clinical trials and evaluating dogs with debilitating arthritis, I’ve seen first hand how cell therapy can change lives,” said Dr. Black, chief scientific officer at Gallant, in a statement. “I’m committed to developing therapies that dramatically improve the quality of life for dogs.”

Mobile banking app Current, which began as a teen debit card controlled by parents, expanded to offer personal checking accounts earlier this year. Now the company says it has grown to host more than 500,000 accounts on its service and has closed on $20 million in Series B funding to further its growth.

The round included new investors Wellington Management Company, Galaxy Digital EOS VC Fund and CMFG Ventures — the venture capital arm of the CUNA Mutual Group, a mutual insurance company serving credit unions and their 120 million members. Returning investors included QED Investors, Expa and Elizabeth Street Ventures.

The first version of Current, which debuted in 2017, was focused on giving parents a more modern way to dole out allowances and reward their kids for chores. But over time, the product became more like a real bank account for teens, culminating with the addition of routing and account numbers late last year. This allowed working teens to direct their paycheck to Current, as they could with a traditional bank.

This year, Current launched personal checking using the same core technology powering its teen banking product. The product includes features like faster direct deposits, gas hold crediting and merchant blocking without charging overdraft fees, hidden fees or requiring minimum balances.

While the teen checking account users have an average age of 15, the average age for the new personal checking account users is 27.

Although personal checking was only launched in late January, it already accounts for about half of Current’s accounts. It also benefits from conversions from Current’s teen users who turn 18 and want to graduate to their own banking app. (Around 98% of teens on Current move to the personal checking app when they come of age, the company noted.)

This puts Current in a more competitive market, where a number of banking apps are now targeting a younger, more mobile generation that has begun to favor modern, feature-rich apps over brick-and-mortar banks. Among its rivals are apps like Step, Cleo, N26, Chime, Simple, Stash and others.

Like many in this space, Current isn’t actually a bank — its banking services are provided by Choice Financial Group and Metropolitan Commercial Bank, which allows it to offer FDIC insurance up to $250,000. Instead, many of the banking apps focus instead on the feature set and user experience they can offer.

Both of Current’s products include a Visa co-branded debit card tied to the Current account. Along with the funding, Current and Visa are also announcing an expanded joint marketing partnership, which will help Current reach new customers.

“We believe everyone should have access to affordable financial services that improve the chances for a better life,” said Stuart Sopp, Current founder and CEO. “We have made this a reality through rebuilding financial infrastructure with the Current Core. It allows us to build more products that offer new ways to interact with money. Our rapid growth to half a million accounts serves as a testament to the ways our products and cost savings are bringing better financial outcomes and we anticipate bringing those benefits to over 1,000,000 customers by mid-2020.”

The company is planning to launch more features starting next year, including a cash-back system with brands and merchants in Q1, and further down the road, it’s considering things like a credit product and maybe Bitcoin investing. But this will require further education and careful attention to do well.

“It’s expensive to be poor — it really is,” he says. “If you don’t have much money, you’re paying 30% or 35% for your credit, whereas if you’re rich you’re paying 5%. So it’s like the world is inverted for you and it holds you down,” Sopp says. “So if we were to do [credit], we are going to do it right.”

In the near-term, the focus is on offering better budgeting tools and more ways for users to save money. This, Sopp argues, is what Current’s young users need most.

To date, Current has raised $45 million in funding.

Randori, a Boston-based startup from a former Carbon Black executive and a former red team consultant, announced its first product today. Called Randori Recon, this service is designed to act with a hacker’s mindset to surface all of your company’s external weaknesses.

Brian Hazzard, co-founder and CEO, says he had worked with his co-founder David Wolpoff when he was running a red team consulting firm. The idea behind a red team is to act as an attacker and find a company’s weaknesses. The two decided to put Wolpoff’s lucrative consulting firm out of business and develop a tool to put this kind of service in reach of any company.

“The idea is to break out of that defender’s mindset, to stop guessing at what you need to do on the defense side, but rather to inform our strategies and the way we defend our networks from the attacker’s perspective,” Hazzard explained.

Based on just a company email address, Recon begins to build a picture of all the publicly available information about that company, and from that they can find weaknesses and vulnerabilities that a hacker would typically exploit to get inside a company’s defenses.

Wolpoff says that it’s not useful or desirable for a red team to have any knowledge of the target company’s security defenses. He wants to go in there with what he calls “a black box” and discover everything he can find on his own. “We start with basic information, and then we’ll go discover everything that’s discoverable from that and then from each of those individual nuggets that we glean, we chase every thread that we can chase from those,” he said. They then continually monitor this information, so that if anything changes, they can find new vulnerabilities that could pop up over time.

While the company is starting with external vulnerabilities, the plan is to build out the service to provide internal scans, as well. “As we progress the product, we will be able to do internal reconnaissance inside of an organization as well, but for the Recon product we’re really focusing on an outside-in black box discovery of the publicly visible surface area of an organization,” Wolpoff said.

Wolpoff says the service agency he ran was lucrative, but the sales cycles were long, and because of the cost, it was really only within reach of relatively few organizations that were willing to pay for that kind of service. Over dinner in 2017, Hazzard and Wolpoff hatched the idea of developing his knowledge and expertise and packaging it as an online service.

They started developing the product and opened the company last year. They announced a $9.75 million seed round last October.

It’s no secret that the art of customer service in the modern era is something that banks desperately need help with.

One of the reasons challenger banks have been able to find acceptance, new customers and — well — the ability to challenge existing banking companies, is the mistreatment customers receive from their existing money holders.

That’s why tools designed to help marketing and customer engagement are a big business and why the Minneapolis-based Total Expert has been able to raise $52 million in its latest round of financing.

The new round brings the company’s total haul to $86 million thanks to capital investments from Georgian Partners, Emergence and Rally Ventures (all veteran software as a service investors).

“We are incredibly excited about Total Expert’s approach to building trust and maximizing the long-term value of relationships between consumers and lenders,” said Simon Chong, managing partner and co-founder of Georgian Partners, in a statement. “The future of consumer finance is engaging across all product and customer needs during their financial life, and Total Expert is the category leader powering this humanized automation and compliance at scale.”

The company said it will use the money to expand on its 218 person team — especially hiring additional data scientists and designers. The company also said it would accelerate the development of new automation tools to help small banks and credit unions compete.

“The future of financial services belongs to firms that combine human interaction with technology in a way that creates higher quality and more relevant experiences throughout the entire customer journey,” said Joe Welu, Total Expert’s chief executive officer. “Every interaction a consumer has with a financial services brand either erodes trust or builds trust, and legacy technology makes it difficult to deliver on the expectations of the modern consumer. Our mission is to ensure that banks and lenders create customers for life by delivering on these expectations”

HelloOffice, a new real estate brokerage business out of San Francisco, has nabbed $6.5 million in new financing and is absconding down to Los Angeles to open its first regional office.

The company provides software to expedite the often painful (especially in San Francisco) task of finding office space (not the Mike Judge movie, which is available to stream on Google, Amazon, iTunes and other services for $3.99).

So far, HelloOffice has worked with companies like Y Combinator, Knotel, Brex, Palantir and Patreon to help them get the space they need.

Now, chief executive officer Justin Bedecarre says the company is ready to tackle the Los Angeles market.

“We believe LA is at an inflection point, with the biggest technology and entertainment companies in the world choosing to make LA a key hub or headquarters,” says Bedecarre. “At the same time there is a startup renaissance occurring here, building the foundation for decades of growth and opportunity.”

Fueling the company’s growth is the $6.5 million the company has raised from a slew of top-tier venture funds. Investors in the company include Initialized Capital, Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Peak State Ventures, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, SaaStr and The House Fund.

The investment is another example of investors looking to niche verticals within the broad business-to-business software category that can benefit from lightweight, flexible software offerings tailored to the specific needs of industries.

There are a lot of very large businesses that can benefit from the efficiencies software provides.

“We raised money in order to invest in our team and platform as well as to scale to new markets beyond San Francisco,” says Bedecarre. “However, we have been growing so quickly while remaining profitable, we haven’t touched any of the money we raised.”

According to a Markets and Markets report, the global AI market is estimated to grow at 37% CAGR to reach $190.6 billion by 2025. The growth in the industry is expected to be driven by the growing...

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