Influencer marketing and the related area of sponcon have become a cornerstone of how the internet’s wheels spin: personalities attract traffic and buzz, and help shift not just sentiment but often products for brands, giving boosts both to online engagement and commerce. Now, a London startup called Verve, which plays on the influencer theme in the area of selling tickets to experiences and events, has raised a significant round of growth funding and made an acquisition to expand its business.

The company today is announcing that it has raised $60 million as it rebrands to a new name, Pollen, to reflect a redoubled consumer focus alongside the platform that is also sold as a service to companies on a B2B basis to build their own marketing campaigns. The company has sold 1 million experiences since being founded in 2014, with 330,000 sold this year, making tens of millions in revenue across a footprint of about 20 countries and among a demographic that is mostly in the 16-28 range, a market that Pollen says spends some $800 million annually on goods and services.

The acquisition, of a company called Lifestylez, which specialises in ski and snowboard trips aimed at college students, will be used to help expand its business. Pollen has been known best for providing access to music concerts, club nights and one-off experiences, it’s going to be using the funding to expand more deeply in those but also sports and travel, for example beach holidays, city breaks, ski trips and festivals.  

Led by Northzone, the round also included Sienna Capital, existing investors, including Draper Esprit, Backed and Kindred, and others.

Pollen has now raised $100 million, and while it is not disclosing its valuation, Callum Negus-Fancey, the CEO who co-founded the company with his brother Liam, told me that it’s about 3.7 times higher than in its previous round. Meanwhile, PitchBook notes that when it raised part of the round this summer, it had a pre-money valuation of about £70 million. If that’s accurate, this would put the valuation now at around $150 million.

The era of influencers is well and truly upon us in social media: the “billboards of new media,” as Negus-Fancey describes them, have become a major way for brands to reach certain kinds of audiences — often younger demographics that are spending a lot of time already on social platforms whose tastes are formed in part by posts from those whom they follow.

Pollen is also targeting the same demographic, and it’s also playing on the idea of influencers, but it’s taking a fairly different approach to how it interacts with these. The company is based around a members-only business model, with membership being free, but only open to those who have built networks of people who look to them to make recommendations for interesting things to do. There are about 35,000 members on the platform today, which Pollen refers to as “Ambassadors.”

Pollen then works with event planners — be they music festival or concert organizers, nightclub events or destination experiences such as skydiving or chartering yachts, some 500 in all, including Live Nation, MGM Resorts, TAO, Hakkasan, AEG & C3; and secured partnerships with Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Priceline, StubHub and SeeTickets — and negotiates a certain amount of tickets to these that will be marketed through its network of people, the members of Pollen.

These people, in turn, decide which events they want to promote to their audiences. For those who manage to shift tickets (which are not sold by Pollen but by partners like Ticketmaster or Eventbrite), they get rewards in the form of tickets to other events or other perks (but no cash). Pollen makes money by taking a cut on each sale — usually something like 10-20%, Negus-Fancey said.

Sometimes these can be very popular events, like the Reading Festival. “It’s a common misconception that most events sell out,” he told me. “In fact, there is a spectrum and you have to spend a lot of money on marketing when you are an event organizer. We are a cost-effective way to market those tickets.”

Interestingly, the basic idea is that these tickets and the influencers themselves do not share their offers widely: part of the company’s terms and conditions are that its members cannot promote their offers widely on social media.

“I see us micro-influencers, more like an evolution of direct selling rather than related to what happens on Instagram,” Negus-Fancey said. “It’s not about loads of followers online. It’s much more omnichannel. Our members might connect with people in bars or pubs or schools or on WhatsApp, or even the dark web. These are about two-way conversations between close groups of friends, not one-way communication.”

At a time when we are also seeing an interesting rise in messaging-based commerce — where the focus is less scale and better connections with smaller audiences to guarantee better conversions — Pollen’s idea has had some resonance with users, as well as investors.

“We’ve known Callum and the team since early 2016 and the company has delivered on every milestone since then,” said Gareth Jefferies, investment manager at Northzone, an early investor in Spotify, in a statement. “The most exciting prospect for me is the potential the company has to play a pivotal role in how brands engage with an entire demographic. In a few years’ time, if the company continues to execute, Pollen can become one of the most culturally significant companies for Gen Z, and be the best way of buying not just festival tickets and holidays, but to access all sorts of products and services.”

Sramana Mitra: You’ve created all these heuristics and you categorized on the basis of that. How many such heuristics do you have? Ashutosh Garg: That’s the beauty of AI. You can’t do it manually....

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Tines, a Dublin-based startup that lets companies automate aspects of their cybersecurity, has raised $4.1 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Blossom Capital, the venture capital firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown.

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, who was subsequently joined by former eBay and DocuSign colleague Thomas Kinsella, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so that they can focus on other high priority work. The pair have bootstrapped the company until now.

“It was while I was at DocuSign that I felt there was a need for a platform like Tines,” explains Hinchy. “We had a team of really talented engineers in charge of incident response and forensics but they weren’t developers. I found they were doing the same tasks over and over again so I began looking for a platform to automate these repetitive tasks and didn’t find anything. Certainly nothing that did what we needed it to, so I came up with the idea to plug this gap in the market”.

To that end, Tines lets companies automate parts of their manual security processes with the help of six software “agents,” with each acting as a multipurpose building block. Therefore, regardless of the process being automated, it only requires combinations of these six agent types configured in different ways to replicate a particular workflow.

“I wanted there to be as few agent types as possible, to simplify the system, and I haven’t discovered a workflow in which tasks sit outside of these agents yet,” says Hinchy. “Once a customer signs up they can start automating their own workflows immediately and most of our customers see value from day one. If they need a hand, my team works with them to establish how they currently manually carry out tasks, such as identifying and dealing with a phishing attack. Each step of dealing with the attack – from cross-checking the email address with trusted contacts or a blacklist, to scanning attachments for viruses or examining URLs – will be performed by one of the six agent types. This means we can assign these tasks to an agent to create the workflow, or as we call it the “story.”

So, for example, once a phishing email triggers the first agent, the following steps in the “story” are automatically carried out. In this way, Tines might be described as akin to IFTTT, “but an exceptionally powerful, enterprise version of the IFTTT concept, designed to manage much more complex workflows”.

Competitors are cited as Phantom, which last year was acquired by Splunk, and Demisto, which was bought by Palo Alto Networks. However, Hinchy argues that a key differentiator is that Tines doesn’t rely on pre-built integrations to interact with external systems. Instead, he says the software is able to plug in to any system that has an API.

Meanwhile, Tines says it will use the new funding to hire engineers in Dublin who can help improve the platform through R&D, as well as grow its customer base with companies in the U.S. and in Europe. Notably, the startup plans to expand beyond cybersecurity automation, too.

“Our background is in security so with Tines, we’ve initially focused on helping security teams automate their repetitive, manual processes,” says Hinchy. “What makes us different is that nowhere does it say we can’t expand beyond this, to help other teams and sectors automate tasks. The advantage of our direct-integration model is that Tines doesn’t care if you’re talking to a security tool, HR system or CRM, it treats them the same. In the next 18 months, we plan to expand Tines outside security, hire more talent and increase the product team from 8 to 20”.

Amazon has acquired Health Navigator, a startup that develops APIs for online health services. According to CNBC, which first reported the deal, Health Navigator will become part of Amazon Care, its pilot healthcare service program for employees.

This is the second health startup acquired by Amazon. The first was online pharmacy PillPack, purchased by the company in 2018 for slightly less than $1 billion. PillPack’s services have also been integrated into Amazon Care, which offers deliveries of prescriptions with remotely communicated treatment plans.

Health Navigator’s platform was created to be integrated into online health services, including telemedicine and medical call centers, to standardize the process of working with patients. Its platform includes natural language processing-based tools for documenting health complaints and care recommendations, and is integrated into apps with APIs.

The startup, founded in 2014 by physician David Thompson, has not made a public statement about the acquisition yet, but CNBC reports that the company telling customers that their contracts will not be renewed.

London-based fintech startup Revolut has two pieces of news to announce this week. First, Revolut is expanding to Singapore after a long beta period. The company already has 30,000 customers there and anyone can open an account now.

Singapore residents will be able to take advantage of all of Revolut’s core features. You can open an account from your phone, get a card and start spending anywhere in the world.

Revolut supports Singapore dollar as well as 13 other currencies. You can top up your account, and send and receive money from the app.

With a free account you can convert money in the app without any markup fee on weekdays up to S$9000 per month. You can also withdraw money anywhere in the world without any fee, up to S$9000 per month.

Premium accounts cost S$9.99 per month and Metal accounts cost S$19.99 per month in Singapore. You get higher limits and a few additional features with Metal.

Revolut is currently available in the U.K., Europe and Australia. There are 7 million Revolut customers in total. The company is still working on its launch in the U.S. and Canada for later this year.

The other piece of news is that Revolut has signed a global partnership with Mastercard. Revolut has already been working with Mastercard to issue cards, so this is an expansion of the current deal.

Revolut can now issue cards that work on the Mastercard network in any market where Mastercard is accepted, which represents around 210 countries. It doesn’t mean that Revolut will launch in 210 countries. But the startup says that the first Revolut cards in the U.S. will work on Mastercard.

It also doesn’t mean that Revolut will work exclusively with Mastercard. The company also works with Visa and recently announced a partnership deal. But at least 50% of all existing and future Revolut cards in Europe will be Mastercard branded.

It shouldn’t matter much to end customers, as I have yet to see a place that accepts Mastercard but not Visa, or Visa but not Mastercard. But Revolut is clearly using market competition to its advantage.

Founders start a company because they have an idea they want to bring to market. As their company gains traction and matures, the way in which they manage their business needs to evolve to enable strategic decisions for growth.

Developing and properly managing a capitalization table (cap table) is one such necessary business evolution. In this context, capitalization is the sum and itemization of all those who hold equity in the company or the right to receive equity in the future. Tracking these items through a central means helps illustrate the ownership stakes in the business and what securities the company has outstanding.

For a first-time founder, it can be overwhelming to develop a cap table and make all related decisions. However, with the right resources and adoption of best practices, founders can better manage, maintain and leverage their cap table to provide actionable business intelligence and management.

For better business intelligence, look to your cap table

In many ways, the cap table is akin to the balance sheet in the sense that it represents the company’s position as of a certain point in time. The balance sheet shows the company’s assets and liabilities. The cap table shows the company’s ownership and accompanying economic and voting rights. The cap table includes factors such as shareholder information, ownership position, rights to purchase additional equity in the future, vesting schedules, voting percentages and purchase price. It takes all of the material information related to capitalization and summarizes it into a digestible format to help founders make executive-level decisions for soliciting stockholder approvals, issuing grants to new hires, raising additional rounds of financing, calculating liquidation waterfalls for a liquidity event, etc.

When it comes to how much founders need to own the cap table, think about it this way: Not every CFO needs to build out the financial statements. However, every CFO needs to have a high degree of confidence that their financial statements are accurate — with systems in place to ensure accuracy so they can spend their time using the financial statements to make strategic decisions. The same is true for founders’ involvement with their cap tables. Most companies rely on competent legal counsel to maintain their cap table and provide their executive team with actionable information in a digestible format.

Here are six best practices that help founders improve and maintain an effective cap table management process.

1. Familiarize yourself with its basic elements and formats

There are many different elements and formats of a cap table. Viewed as a spreadsheet, table or chart, the cap table can look different for every company at every stage of its growth. While the cap table tends to be simple in the beginning stages of the company, it will naturally evolve and become much more complicated as the company matures.

At a basic level, the cap table should list the equity stakes in a company, including common stock, preferred stock and stock options, and outline all of the ownership details for these securities. Other elements include transaction history and legal restrictions, such as sales, transfers, exercises of options, transfer restrictions and the conversion of debt to equity, among others.

The cap table should show the company’s overall capital structure at a glance, as well as detailed ownership information for each class and series of stock outstanding (see an example at the end of this article). Most importantly, it should always be accurate and up to date.

2. Recognize the importance of executive alignment

At its core, the cap table should be designed to help solve business issues for you. If you’re not using it to make decisions as an executive team, then it’s not serving a core purpose. The cap table is also critical to your legal team, so certain aspects may be primarily for their use, but if the company’s management doesn’t find the cap table helpful, that is a problem.

A good example of this is its role in the hiring process. Equity is a key consideration in talent recruitment and retention packages. Without an accurate cap table, you’ll find yourself in situations where you have to routinely ask yourself how many shares you can offer to a new hire, which can unnecessarily slow down the hiring process.

However, if you can use the cap table as a way to gain alignment on such matters, you can begin to use it to solve actual business problems. Rather than argue about which equity package to grant a new employee, your HR team can provide routine feedback on standardized equity packages to help improve or maintain competitive compensation.

3. Evaluate and implement tools to help you manage it

When it comes to understanding how detailed your cap table needs to be, compare it once again to the financial statements. In the early days of the business, financial statements don’t necessarily feel as valuable as they do in later stages of growth. They aren’t as critical to the business — yet — because it’s not hard to recreate it whenever you need information to make a decision.

However, as the business matures and grows, it becomes more difficult to recreate the financial statement on an ad hoc basis, and virtually impossible to hold the information accurately in your mind. The same holds true with the cap table: In the beginning, you might be able to rattle it off the top of your head or have it documented simply in Excel, but as you grow, the information becomes more complex and you need better, automated systems in place. As with financial statements, creating good habits early on will serve you well as the business grows.

Using cap management software provides better capabilities and version control than spreadsheets to manage this process. Free software, such as captable.io and Carta are great starting places for early-stage founders. Carta also provides additional features to manage your more complex cap table. Because the cap table’s ultimate purpose is to enable the executive and legal teams to make informed decisions, safeguards on administrative access and version control are critical features to consider when choosing which tool or application to use.

4. Determine and delegate ownership of the cap table

As you model new rounds of financing and analyze the impact on stakeholders, cap table management becomes a significantly valuable activity. This is where your legal team or outside counsel becomes even more advantageous to you as a founder. Delegating cap table management to your lawyer can further help you stay on top of critical changes and minimize errors, while enabling you to focus more on building and scaling the business. Creating and maintaining an accurate cap table requires an ability to read, understand and translate legal documents into numbers and formulas. It is best to rely on the expertise of your legal team for this to ensure the most accurate business decisions are made.

We frequently see founding teams make seemingly small mistakes, such as adding an individual’s name to the cap table before an equity grant has legally been made. This may lead one to believe that more stock is outstanding than is technically the case and can create errors when calculating the number of shares to be granted to subsequent stockholders — or miss making the grant altogether, which can have unfortunate tax consequences for the stockholder and potential liability for the company. Order of operations is critical to legal workflows and it’s best to leave the day to day cap table maintenance to your legal team.

5. Decide how much information to share with investors

When it comes to how much cap table information you should disclose to your investors, there isn’t a right or wrong answer. Commonly, providing investors with a summary cap table is a fairly standard practice. That allows investors to calculate their ownership position for their internal tracking and audit purposes. More often than not, investors don’t receive an itemized list of every shareholder or investor in the company. While preferences differ on this point, many of our clients prefer that any company-related discussions are directed to the executive team so they can address and control messaging. Of course, in many instances investors will know which of their peers have also invested, but sharing detailed equity positions, contact information and individual employees’ equity stakes is less common.

In Carta, investors generally have portfolio views with visibility into all of their companies. They might send you a request for access to your cap table so they can add you to their portfolio. In this scenario, the summary cap table is the most common approach people default to for the investors. If an investor feels strongly about receiving detailed cap table viewing privileges, they can make their case to the company, which may consider the request on an individual basis.

Major investors will typically have specific, private contractual rights to get regular financial statements and cap table updates. They might even have a representative who is a board observer or board member, in which case, they will have access to the information they want, as agreed to in the equity financing paperwork.

6. Choose how much to share with employees

Understanding the appropriate levels of information about your cap table to share with employees is another top consideration for founders. The key to this is determining the balance that you, as a founder, feel comfortable with in terms of employer transparency.

Some founders choose to be transparent about their cap tables and others opt not to disclose much and provide equity information on a need-to-know basis. The important part here is determining how you can best use the cap table to help your employees understand what they need to know.

For example, employees with equity want to understand what their payout is if the company sells. Regular communication or resources that provide employees with access to their holdings and options is a great approach to help motivate employees and improve talent retention, but can have unintended consequences.

For example, most companies will have their common stock valued after each round of financing. Some founders will want to share this number with the team so that people can understand that their stock is appreciating. That is very exciting and motivating — so long as everything is going well. However, if the stock’s appreciation is not meeting the team’s expectation (whether reasonable or not), then providing that information can significantly decrease morale. For this reason, the vast majority of companies choose not to disclose this information to the broader team.

Get proactive with your cap table

Your cap table should be well-managed, well-understood and up-to-date. Fortunately, the management process doesn’t need to become just another headache: With the proper considerations, communication, resources and ownership, you can put the correct processes and legal team in place efficiently, and effectively manage your cap table so it continues to help you scale your business — rather than slow it down.

Sample cap table

This table represents a simple cap table showing a hypothetical breakdown of seed preferred stock, Series A preferred stock, common stock and the available option pool.

All content presented herein is for informational purposes only. Nothing should be construed as legal advice. Transmission and receipt of this information is not intended to create, and does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship with Atrium LLP. There is no expectation of attorney-client privilege or confidentiality of anything you may communicate to us in this forum. Do not act upon any information presented without seeking professional counsel.

Koan, a three-year-old online platform that aims to help teams achieve their objectives and stay engaged, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Uncork Capital and Crosslink.

Koan, co-founded and led by CEO Matt Tucker — who previously co-founded Jive Software, an outfit that made social software for businesses and went public in 2011, then sold in 2017 — is trying to set itself apart from the many other performance management tools in the world by catering less to HR departments and targeting instead the chief operating officer or chief of staff.

Though these individuals today rely heavily on emails and spreadsheets — static products that can slow down execution — Koan tries to make them more efficient by providing them with a dashboard that makes it easier to track goals, provide feedback and execute other people-management tasks.

The company is also targeting leaders of small to mid-size companies. The broader idea is to help them with goal management, and to make it easier for them to make progress against their own metrics and goals.

Koan, which integrates with a wide number of third parties, from Salesforce to Slack, employs just 10 people at this point and is based in Portland, Ore., though Tucker works from Palo Alto, where, interestingly, he and his wife also operate a company called Blind Tiger Ice.

Inspired by their international travels to upgrade in some way their local dining (and drinks) experience, the couple’s nearly two-year-old company is becoming known in some tech circles for its “high-quality cocktail ice,” as Tucker describes it. Among its customers: Netflix, Facebook, Google and the world-famous Yountville, Calif.-based restaurant French Laundry.

Every once in a while, too, says Tucker, his worlds collide. Recently, for example, the venture firm CRV called Blind Tiger to order ice for a party it was throwing. The portfolio company it was celebrating: Iterable, a growth marketing startup and also a Koan customer.

Koan has now raised $5 million. Earlier investors include the Webb Investment Network, SV Angel and Spider Capital, all of which participated in the company’s newest round.

Above, left to right: Co-founders Matt Tucker and Scott Campbell, an early salesperson at Jive Software.

Personal finance startup Truebill announced today that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The new funding was led by Eldridge Industries, with participation from Evolution VC and previous investors, including Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.

When the Y Combinator-backed startup raised seed funding back in 2016, it was focused on what Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada now describes as “a single function” — helping users track all their subscriptions and recurring expenses, and then to cancel them when desired.

Mokhtarzada said the Truebill team subsequently saw an opportunity, given “the increasing degree of financial complexity in people’s lives,” to take “a more holistic view of personal finance.”

Truebill still offers subscription tracking, and Mokhtarzada said that’s usually what brings new users in. But it’s also added capabilities like automated budgeting, automated saving and bill negotiation. And this fall, it plans to launch additional features, including bill pay, credit score monitoring and a rewards program.

Consumers have plenty of other personal finance tools to choose from, but Mokhtarzada said most of them are focused on fulfilling a specific need and will likely become less relevant as your financial situation changes.

“The other half is, if you look at the App Store, it’s filled with single point solutions,” he said. “As your financial life gets more sophisticated and complex, the consumer is ending up with five or more different point solutions. All of that needs to be consolidated into one place.”

Truebill says it currently has 500,000 active users. The basic product is free, then users can pay a price of their choosing for premium features like custom budget categories; Truebill also takes a cut of the savings when it negotiates lower bills.

The company recently opened new headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. Mokhtarzada said Truebill still has an office in San Francisco, but he noted that he and his co-founders/brothers previously built Webs.com in Silver Spring.

“San Francisco obviously has a very competitive market — it’s harder to hire and very difficult to retain talent,” he added. “With the D.C. area, it feels like we’ve found an untapped market, with very talented engineers working for the government, working in an area of technology that’s not very exciting for them.”

U.K.-based lunar rover startup Spacebit, a company developing robotic exploration hardware for use on the Moon, announced two new partners that will help it develop and finalize its technology ahead of its target mission date of 2021. The Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA) and Mexico’s Dereum will be providing the technology that Spacebit will employ on both its deployer and the robot rover it’s preparing for use on the Moon.

This marks the first time that Latin American companies will participate in a mission to the lunar surface, and Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk was joined by Dereum CEO Carlos Mariscal and EXA COO Ronnie Nader to talk about the news at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C.

“We have Ecuador and Mexico as our technical partners,” Tanasyuk said. “So in addition to this being the first lunar mission from the U.K., it also is the first Latin American mission with a consortium of Latin American countries participating along with the U.K.”

Both the EXA and Dereum have strong technical chops when it comes to spacecraft and space-based robotics, with the EXA focusing on developing technology that is “efficient, cheap and reliable,” according to Nader, while Dereum’s Mariscal said that his organization is well-known globally for its work on building robots for use in space, with an extensive track record. Their expertise should help a lot in Spacebit’s efforts to build, test and validate its robotic lunar rover, which employs a novel walking system for getting around, whereas all rovers to date have used wheels for transportation.

“We are planning on doing a swarm technology exploration plan, where we have multiple small spider walking rovers deployed from a wheeled mothership, along with being able to have some redundancy and the ability to do 3D lidar scanning of the interior  lunar caves and lava tubes,” Tanasyuk said.

“It’s essentially a data as a service business model,” he added, explaining how they’ll seek to monetize the business. “Our primary focus for early missions are to do exploration and mapping of lunar lava tubes to be able to characterize the lunar subsurface environment for potential suitability for future human habitation.”

Spacebit, founded in 2014, is funded privately via Tanasyuk himself, along with a couple of other private investors. He said that his company is fully funded through its first mission, a berth aboard the Peregrine Moon lander being launched by Astrobotic in 2021 (which itself has a price tag of $1.7 million he said). The first mission won’t be an entire swarm, but a single rover sent up as a demonstration unit to prove out its technology.

Vendr has developed an enterprise SaaS solution for managing enterprise SaaS.

The new startup, founded by InVision’s former head of enterprise sales Ryan Neu, is another standout from Y Combinator’s latest batch. Contrary to the majority of those businesses, however, Vendr is already profitable.

In classic YC fashion, the company has created software to sell to other startups, and, as such, it was quick to gain the confidence of top venture capital investors. Headquartered in Boston, Vendr has raised a $2 million round led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures, Garage VC and angel investors including Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht and HubSpot COO JD Sherman.

The company offers subscription-based software, priced depending on company headcount, that helps fast-growing businesses buy and manage enterprise SaaS. In short, the product cuts the human out of the sales process, allowing companies to purchase or upgrade software using software. The goal isn’t to eliminate the sales profession, rather to put an end to “persuasion driven” sales, Neu explains, and to make enterprise software purchases as easy as consumer product purchases.

“We see software sales actually going away because most people are tired of being sold to, they are tired of being persuaded, they want to transact,” Neu, who previously led sales at HubSpot, tells TechCruch. “Vendr was created to allow people to transact software without actually having to talk to people.”

Founded 14 months ago, Vendr has reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue, which, for context, has historically been amongst the benchmarks necessary for a SaaS startup to raise its Series A. Neu says the company is growing 15% month-over-month with monthly recurring revenue currently sitting at $96,500. Already profitable, Neu says they want to put themselves in a position in which they don’t have to raise any additional outside capital.

“I can’t imagine looking at the bank account every month and watching it deplete,” Neu said. “We want to be in a position where we can control our own destiny.”

Vendr currently operates with a team of six employees and 19 customers, including Canva, Grammarly, GitLab, Brex, HubSpot and InVision. The company is also backed by Okta’s general counsel Jon Runyan, AppDynamics’ COO Dan Wright and YC partner Aaron Epstein.

America has an addiction problem.

It’s a problem that serial entrepreneur Josh Bruno has seen first hand. And it’s why he has launched a new company called Path, which pitches access to specialized substance addiction treatment professionals as an employee health benefit, to do something about it.

“I have unfortunately lost five friends now to alcohol and opioid overdoses. I went to five funerals in three years,” says Bruno. “Every time I would end up talking to friends and family afterwards… and everyone would ask, ‘What could we have done?’ “

Now Bruno is doing something. 

While Alcoholics Anonymous and rehabilitation facilities provide one solution, Bruno says that neither one has the scope to address the enormity of the problem. 

Bruno thinks Path may be the avenue to best address the issue. The idea is to provide near-instant access to specialized providers of substance abuse treatment as a benefit that employers can offer to their staff.

As the founder of HomeTeam, which provided in-home senior care and a software toolkit to manage that care, Bruno already has an understanding of the healthcare marketplace.

“We plug in to an employer and provide a holistic solution for the employees. We bring a doctor, a therapy and a coach,” says Bruno of the new service he’s launching. “We’re not a provider ourselves and we bring a network of providers.”

The business model evolved as Bruno began researching how things are currently done. “I have volunteered at AA and rehab facilities [and] I talked to labor union leaders across the country,” says Bruno. He also reached out to the nation’s 23 largest employers and shadowed treatment specialists to see how substance abuse treatment is currently handled.

“The first thing I saw is that 10% — or one in 10 adults across the U.S. — have a substance abuse disorder,” says Bruno. “That shocked people because it’s more than diabetes.”

What’s more, about 33% of mental health issues are actually addiction-related, which can add additional stress on an employers’ healthcare costs.

The founding team at Path, which includes Bruno and Gabriel Diop, who heads partnerships, and Greg Moore, who leads product development, all think of substance abuse treatment as an access issue. People looking for treatment simply don’t know where to go to get the most effective and affordable help.

“Today the health insurance company would give a list of in-network providers and it’s up to the patient to figure out where to go [and] 50% of time they go out of network,” says Bruno. 

When Path works with a large employer, a phone call is made directly to the company and that call goes to a clinical social worker, who handles the intake of a prospective patient. The company has deals with addiction doctors in the geographies where it operates and can ensure that an assessment can be done within 48 hours.

After the assessment, a treatment plan is drawn up and the company will manage that process for the employer, and the physician as well.

Path is already talking to two Fortune 100 companies about deploying its service. “It’s a targeted, regional service,” says Bruno. “Not a national service.”

The Los Angeles-based company has raised $5.35 million to date in a round of funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Benefits, Radian Street Capital and angel investors including Barbara Wachsman, the former head of benefits at Disney; Amy Shannon, the former head of benefits at Chevron; and Howard Cherny, the former head of benefits at Cisco.

“Put simply, Path plans to work with the best addiction treatment providers across the continuum in the U.S., which is exactly what is needed. Finally, a team is focusing on core issues of quality and cost-effective treatment,” said Kelly Clark, a member of the Path Clinical Advisory Board, and the former president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.   

Not only can Path help to roll out access to treatment at scale, but the company can also reduce healthcare costs for companies, according to Bruno.

“It will lower the expense to the plan,” he says. “Approximately 30% to 50% of employees are going out of network for addiction treatment… that’s $25,000 to $50,000 per month.”

Path’s costs are substantially lower, and the company is only paid if members use the network, he said.

“Employers have made a commitment to the health and well-being of their employees. If mental health is a top priority for your organization, you can’t ignore [substance use disorders],” said Wachsman, in a statement.

In a perfect example of a small, new space startup teaming up with a legacy industry heavyweight with plenty of experience, Firefly is teaming up with Aerojet Rocketdyne. Firefly Aerospace was founded in 2013 and has raised $21.6 million so far to bring its first product, the Alpha small satellite launch vehicle, to market.

Firefly is on track to make its crucial first launch in time for the February to March time frame next year, according to Firefly founder and CEO Dr. Tom Markusic, who spoke at the International Astronautical Congress this year in Washington, D.C., to provide an update on his company’s progress and talk about the newly formed partnership between Firefly and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

Markusic was joined by Aerojet Rocketdyne SVP of Space Business Jim Maser, and the two executives explained how Aerojet will provide engines for Firefly to use on its next-generation launch vehicle, aptly named “Beta,” the full development of which will follow once Alpha has launched and enters into regular commercial service.

Beta will be a medium launch vehicle, with greater cargo capacity compared to Alpha and a maximum load of around 8.5 metric tons. Alpha, the startup’s first rocket, will be able to take 1 metric ton to orbit, which Markusic said his company has identified as the “sweet spot” for current unaddressed demand.

That medium band is also underserved, Markusic said, and because it’ll need a bigger booster to transport that larger cargo capacity to orbit, they looked around for solutions and found that Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 Engine, which can produce 500,000 pounds of thrust, was the perfect solution.

In general, Markusic and Maser both expressed the opinion that startup and younger companies just getting into the industry are prime partners for older companies like Aerojet, which was founded in 1942 and has been serving the rocket and missile industry ever since.

“It’s okay to move fast and it’s okay to make mistakes, but let’s not make other peoples’ mistakes and let’s not make our own mistakes twice,” Markusic said, characterizing the benefits of teaming up with someone with lots more experience. This partnership goes beyond just the engine supply arrangement, Markusic said, and will provide more far-ranging benefits for the startup.

“Aerojet Rocketdyne has a whole corral of amazing in-space propulsion options, for example the XR-5,” Markusic said, “which is a five kilowatt hull thruster that can be utilized on our OTV (orbital transfer vehicle), and advanced OTV, we could do some heavier missions in cis-lunar space, and they also have a large corral of flight proven by proposed chemical thrusters that can be used on these other stages as well.”

Firefly plans to do an orbital transfer vehicle to provide more advanced launch capabilities, and its ambitions extend even beyond launchers and to in-space manufacturing, which Markusic said is attractive to the company since the ultimate way to reduce launch costs is to obviate the need for launch costs altogether. The company’s ultimate goal is to get more commercial satellites into orbit, regardless of method. Still, there’s plenty of opportunity, but Markusic says ultimately, the company’s biggest challenge right now is remaining focused on their most immediate, and most important goal.

“There are at least 100 companies like Firefly talking about going to space,” he said. “We’re in that crowd of talkers right now, and it is my focus with this company to get us out of that crowd of people talking about it as soon as possible, and into the elite crowd of people that are actually flying a spacecraft to space.”

Harnessing new networking technologies that can turn any real estate developer into their own wireless internet service provider, Wander is launching a $25 per month high-speed networking service for the lucky citizens of Santa Monica, Calif.

The brainchild of a former Disney analyst, David Fields, and a former Intuit engineer, Dan Rahmel, Wander uses low-cost wireless hardware and proprietary software to bring last-mile wireless Internet to a customer’s home.

“The idea behind Wander was created around some deep frustration with the net neutrality repeal,” says Fields. “We could look at utilizing some of the existing wireless infrastructure and cover that last mile at a fraction of the cost… we have a strong perspective on the data demands of consumers.”

The problem, as Fields sees it, is that internet service providers are over-billing for capacity that most consumers don’t even use. As an August report from The Wall Street Journal revealed, high-speed internet just isn’t worth it.

Traditional internet service providers are marketing high-speed internet at 200 to 1K megabits per second, while average homes use less than 5 megabits per second during peak usage times, according to a report from the networking infrastructure technology provider, Cisco.

Even with streaming services, the average customer is going to use less than 15 megabits per second by 2022, according to some projections. Wander’s existing service will provide 50 megabits per second.

“We see an ability to come out in market and deliver to 99% of consumers something that is a package that more than covers their streaming needs, their connected home needs,” says Fields. 

Using existing fiber infrastructure and low-cost wireless transmitters from companies like Ubiquiti, Wander is driving down costs and pitching real estate developers on a new way to make money.

The company already has signed deals with property managers and developers to gain access to 200 buildings across Santa Monica and Van Nuys, Calif. Those locations will be the first commercial testing grounds for Wander’s pitch.

“Think of the way we partner with them as a two-pronged approach. For the value of bringing the rooftop real estate to the Wander network, they get a share of the subscribers that are tapping into that rooftop real estate.  They can have their property management teams acquire customers for us and that revenue share is incremental for them,” Fields says. 

Basically, Wander owns and operates the network and gives real estate owners a share of the revenue coming in.

At launch, Wander will be able to cover about 20,000 homes in the Santa Monica area using the company’s point to multi-point networking services, which have a range of about half-a-mile.

Fields stresses that improving customer service is just as important as lowering prices at Wander. The company gives users access to a Wander dashboard that provides information about network performance and uptimes, and the average megabits per second that a home uses, as well as its peak consumption.

“That dashboard provides you with a look into the network as well,” says Fields.

The service costs $25 per month along with a $3 fee for the company’s proprietary, mesh-capable router (which is important because to ensure uptimes Wander built software that monitors and resolves performance issues on the fly, the company said).

The company raised a small, strategic round of financing from venture investors and strategic angel investors, including: Distributed Global, an infrastructure-focused investment firm, and individuals like Eric Bender, co-founder of Wilcon, fiber and data center business which sold to Crown Castle; and Michael Barker, founder and CEO of Barker Pacific Group, a real estate holding company. Other angels include Louis Beryl, founder and CEO of Earnest, and Jeff Morris Jr., former director of Product at Tinder.

“With 97% profit margins, it’s no secret that traditional ISPs overcharge and underdeliver,” said Bender,  in a statement. “Wander’s unique and affordable model is bringing next-generation internet to an industry that has relied on dated technology, outrageous and unexpected fees and poor customer service. I’m excited to be supporting Wander as a pioneering internet provider that is equally focused on building a happy customer base.”

While Santa Monica, and greater Los Angeles are the company’s first markets, Wander intends to… well… wander to other parts of the country where its services can make the most sense.

“We want to use a  data-driven approach to the next set of sub-markets that we’re going to go into,” says Fields. “Some of these places will be less interesting than the suburban to urban mix where 5G is not going to propagate, where they have one or at most two internet options today.”

To see if a home is among the lucky few that qualifies for Wander’s low-cost services now, check out wander.net/live. Subscribers who sign up within the next 30 days will get their first month free.

Electric-bike maker Cowboy recently let me spend a couple of weeks with one of their e-bikes. It’s a well-designed e-bike that makes biking effortless, even if you’re going uphill.

Cowboy is a Brussels-based startup. The company raised a $3 million seed round a couple of years ago and an $11.1 million (€10 million) Series A round last year.

The company designs e-bikes from scratch. Components feel more integrated than in a normal e-bike. And it also opens up some possibilities when it comes to connectivity and smart features.

Cowboy sells its bikes directly to consumers on its online store. It is currently available in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria for €2,000 ($2,220).

I rode 70 kilometers (43 miles) in the streets of Paris to try it out. For context, riding a bike in Paris is nothing new for me. I primarily use my non-electric bike to go from point A to point B — bikes are commuting devices for me. And given that Cowboy is primarily designed for densely populated cities, I thought I’d give it a try.

From the outside, the Cowboy e-bike is a sleek bike. It features a seamless triangle-shaped aluminum frame, integrated lights and a low-key Cowboy logo near the saddle. The handlebar is perfectly straight like on a mountain bike. The only sign that this is an e-bike is that the frame is much larger below the saddle.

The e-bike is relatively light at 16 kg (35 lbs). Most of the weight is at the back of the Cowboy e-bike because of the battery. But an investor in the startup told me that it wasn’t a problem and that he was even able to attach a baby seat at the back.

There are two things you’re going to notice quite quickly: there are no gears and there’s a rubber and fiberglass belt. Cowboy has opted for an automatic transmission — motor assistance kicks in automatically when you need it the most, such as when you start pedaling, accelerate or go uphill.

If you usually ride on a normal bike, this feels weird at first. I constantly shift from one gear to another. With the Cowboy e-bike, you have to trust the bike and forget about gears.

The electric motor kicks in a second after you start pedaling. It means that you are much faster than people using regular bikes. And you can reach a speed of 30 to 35 kmph in no time (18 to 22 mph). Yes, this bike is fast.

Fortunately, the brakes work surprisingly well. You have to be careful with them. If you’re braking too hard, you’ll skid, especially if it’s raining.

I was able to ride from one end of Paris to another without breaking a sweat. Sure, the Cowboy e-bike is fast, but I only saved a few minutes compared to my non-electric bike. You still spend a lot of time waiting at big intersections.

In fact, riding the Cowboy e-bike felt more like riding a moped-style scooter. You start your engine at a green light, ride as quickly as possible, brake aggressively at a red light and spend more time waiting at intersections. I believe an e-bike makes more sense in larger cities with huge hills. Paris is much, much smaller than London or Berlin, after all.

You may have noticed that the Cowboy e-bike doesn’t have fenders. Cowboy will start selling custom-designed fenders for €89 in a few weeks ($100).

Another thing worth noting is that you have to be relatively tall to use the Cowboy e-bike. I’m 1.75 m tall (5’ 8”) and I lowered the saddle as much as possible. If you’re just a tiny bit smaller than me, chances are it’s going to be too high for you. Similarly, naming your brand “Cowboy” doesn’t make your bike particularly attractive for women.

When it comes to connectivity, the Cowboy e-bike isn’t just an electric bike — it’s also a smart bike. It has built-in GPS tracking and an integrated SIM card.

After pairing the bike with your phone using Bluetooth, you can control it from a mobile app. In particular, you can lock and unlock the bike, turn on and off the lights and check the battery. It would have been nice to put a light sensor on the bike itself as you may forget to turn on the lights at night. You also can get a rough idea of the current battery level without the mobile app — there are five LEDs on the frame of the device.

Thanks to GPS capabilities and the integrated SIM card, you can locate your bike using a feature called “Find my Bike.” The company also sells insurance packages for €8 to €10 per month with theft insurance and optionally damage insurance.

I recharged the battery once during my testing. According to the company, you can get up to 70 km on a single charge (43 miles). I got less than that, but I also tried the off-road mode, which consumes more battery. Unless you’re going on a long bike trip, range isn’t an issue for city rides.

When it’s time to recharge the battery, you can detach the battery with a key and bring it back home. This is a great feature for people living in apartments, as you can leave your bike at its normal parking spot and plug in the battery at home. The battery was full after three to four hours.

Overall, the Cowboy e-bike is the perfect commuting bike for people living in large cities. It’s a smooth and well-designed experience. If you’re looking for an e-bike, you should definitely consider the Cowboy e-bike as one of your options. I recommend you book a test ride before buying one though.

If you’re happy with a normal bike like me, the Cowboy e-bike is 100% an e-bike. Don’t expect to get the same experience on a Cowboy e-bike. It’s a completely different thing. But I’m glad e-bikes exist, because they are going to convince more people to ditch their cars and moped-style scooters.

Sramana Mitra: B2B need less money, I think. Doug Atkin: It all depends. If you’re building a business like an analytics package which you’re selling to the big banks, you need a decent amount of...

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There’s no shortage of lidar solutions available for autonomous vehicles, drones and robots — theoretically, anyway. But getting a lidar unit from theory to mass production might be harder than coming up with the theory in the first place. Sense Photonics appears to have made it past that part of the journey, and is now offering its advanced flash lidar for pre-order.

Lidar comes in a variety of form factors, but the spinning type we’ve seen so much of is on its way out, and more compact, reliable planar types are on the way in; Luminar is making moves to get ahead, but Sense Photonics isn’t sitting still — and anyway, the two companies have different strengths.

While Luminar and some other companies aim to create a forward-facing lidar that can detect shapes hundreds of feet ahead in a relatively narrow field of view, Sense is going after the short-range, wide-angle side of things. And because they sync up with regular cameras, it’s easy as pie to map depth onto the RGB image:

These are lidars that you’d want mounted on the rear or sides of the vehicles, able to cover a wide slice of the surroundings and get accurate detection of things like animals, kids and bikes quickly and accurately. But I went through all this when they came out of stealth.

The news today is that these units have gone from prototype to production design. The devices have been ruggedized so they can be attached outside of enclosures even in dusty or rainy environments. And performance has been improved, bumping the maximum range in some cases out to more than 40 meters, well over what was promised before.

The base price of $2,900 covers a unit with an 80×30 degree field of view, but others cover wider areas, up to 95×75 degrees — a large amount by lidar standards, and in higher fidelity than other flash lidars out there. You do give up some other properties in return for the wide view, though. The proprietary tech created by the company lets the lidar’s detector be located elsewhere than the laser emitter, too, which makes designing around the things easier (if not exactly easy).

Obviously if people are meant to order these online from the company these are not going to be appearing in next year’s autonomous vehicles. No, it’s more for bulk purchases by companies doing serious testing in industry settings.

Whether the Sense Photonics kit or some other lucky lidar company’s ends up on the robo-fleets of tomorrow is up in the air, but it does help for your product to actually exist. You can find out more about the company’s lidar platform here.

Demodesk, an early-stage startup that wants to change how sales meetings are conducted online, announced a $2.3 million seed investment today.

Investors included GFC, FundersClub, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins and an unnamed group of angel investors. The company was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort.

CEO and co-founder Veronika Riederle says that the fact it’s so closely focused on sales separates it from other more general meeting tools like Zoom, WebEx or GoToMeeting. “We are building the first intelligent online meeting tool for customer-facing conversations. So that is for inside sales and customer service professionals,” Riederle explained.

One of the key pieces of technology is what Riederle calls “a unique approach to screen sharing.” Whereas most meeting software involves downloading software to use the tool, Demodesk doesn’t do this. You simply click a link and you’re in. The two parties online are seeing a live screen and each can interact with it. It’s not just a show and tell.

What’s more, in a sales scenario with a slide presentation, the customer sees the same live screen as the salesperson, but while the salesperson can see their presentation notes, the customer cannot.

She said while this could work for any number of scenarios, from customer service to IT Help desks, at this stage in the company’s development she wants to concentrate on the sales scenario, then expand the vision over time. The service works on a subscription model with tiered per user pricing starting at $19 per user, per month.

When they got to Y Combinator, the company already had a working product and paying customers, but Riederle says the experience has helped them grow the business to moew than 100 customers. “YC was extremely important for us because we immediately got access to an extremely valuable network of founders and potential customers, and also just a base for us to really [develop] the business.

Riederle founded the company with CTO Alex Popp in 2017 in Munich. Prior to this seed round, the founders mostly bootstrapped the company. With the $2.3 million, it should be able to hire more people and begin building out the product further, while investing in sales and marketing to expand its customer base.

The Plug and Play network of accelerator programs is partnering with the nonprofit organization Alliance to End Plastic Waste to create an accelerator focused on developing technologies to reduce, remove or replace plastics in the industrial ecosystem.

Like Techstars, Plug and Play operates a number of industry-focused accelerator programs around the world, and for this program, targeting solutions that will lower the impact of plastic waste on the environment, the accelerator will operate two programs annually in three different regions — Silicon Valley, Paris and Singapore.

For its part, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste will work with the companies that support the organization, which include some of the largest chemical companies and manufacturers of plastic waste, to select focus areas and source specific startups working on solutions.

Representative members of the organization include:  BASF, Berry Global, Braskem, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Dow, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics Corporation USA, Gemini Corporation, Geocycle, Grupo Phoenix, Henkel, LyondellBasell, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Mitsui Chemicals, PepsiCo, PolyOne, Pregis, Procter & Gamble, Sealed Air Corporation, Shell, Sinopec, SKC co., ltd., Storopack, SUEZ, Sumitomo Chemical, TOMRA and Total.

Industrial companies don’t have the best history when it comes to reinventing their entire business models with new technologies, but at least there’s some effort being put toward these initiatives.

Each program will run for 12 weeks and accept 10 startups. In true accelerator fashion there will be a demo day where AEPW and Plug and Play would have the opportunity to invest in participating companies.

“I believe when we bring together all the stakeholders—large corporations, entrepreneurs, startups, and universities—you can create real change,” said said Saeed Amidi, founder and chief executive of Plug and Play, in a statement. “By devoting resources and attention to this global issue of plastic waste, we can make a difference in the environment. Through this platform I commit to spend more of my time on sustainability-focused initiatives and will invest in 20 startups in this space per year.”

Applications are now open for the first program, which will run from February through May 2020.

Nooruldeen Agha has been thinking about what’s next for fashion retail for years.

The serial entrepreneur behind the Dubai-based online fashion retailer Elabelz and marketing studio Elephant Nation had always wanted to redesign the shopping experience for how customers actually shopped in stores and online.

“If it was 1994 and we knew what technology is today and we want to reinvent this [shopping] experience… one thought was how we bought our whole life and how we go to the mall,” says Agha. 

Shopping is, for most people, a social activity. Friends go to the mall or department store together to try on clothes and ask each other for advice. Most online and offline shopping experiences are completely divorced from that, Agha said.

So he wanted to take the social aspects of Instagram and the subscription box and retail elements of StitchFix to create the new Los Angeles-based startup, FlipFit. 

But to do it, Agha needed a push. His businesses in Dubai were successful, he says, and there was no need for him to pursue another new venture — especially one in America.

Then he met Jonathan Ellman at the Summit conference in Los Angeles.

“We met at a party. At midnight,” Ellman says. “At 10 o’clock the next morning we were sitting on a balcony talking to each other and came to an understanding that Noor with his dynamics and understanding the industry… that he could not stay in Dubai.”

Ellman has a history as an investor and an operator. He was the founder of the scout program at GreatPoint Ventures and spent years at HoneyBook. And he knew immediately that Agha’s idea had legs.

For the next year, the two laid the foundation for the business. Noor had all of the connections already. Elabelz was pulling in $23 million in revenue off of the sale of 150,000 boxes of clothes — so the logistics and fulfillment and brand partnerships would be a breeze. The company has 200 brands that have already signed on as of today’s launch, including: AG, JBrand, Hudson, Retrobrand, Boyish, MadeWorn, Junkfood, Mavi and Edwin.

FlipFit works by creating a social network based on friends and followers. The company isn’t borrowing from Facebook or Instagram, but instead is trying to build out its network from scratch. Users of the app are encouraged to vote on selfies their friends take in different outfits. Each vote garners in-app cash that can be redeemed whenever someone purchases an item ($10 for each new voting user and $1 per vote).

As users vote on the styles they like, they also can add clothes to a virtual wardrobe. When they’re ready they can select a few styles from that closet to be shipped out to them to try on. If the user doesn’t like the clothes, they just return them.

The mechanics aren’t that different from a number of other online retailers, but the difference is in the company’s decision to create an entirely new social graph.

Initially, Agha and Ellman are tapping influencers to hook in their target customers. Over the next 90 days roughly 500 influencers across social media will be encouraging their audiences to vote on different outfits using the FlipFit app. The influencers are getting $150 in store credit twice-a-month or getting paid sponsorships (depending on the size of their following). The outfits with the most votes are the ones the influencers will keep… training their audiences on the mechanics of how to shop as they market the product.

Agha says the user experience is most akin to TikTok or Snap, rather than Instagram. There’s a publicly available feed for those who want to use it or the feed can be made private and shared among friends. And the app is only available for children 13 and up.

On the business side, the company is keeping 33% of the cash from any item sold. Its cut is higher because FlipFit handles all the back-end logistics of shipping and returns, according to the co-founders. Every box the company ships includes the standard pre-printed return label.

“Returns are our default. While the rest of the industry is fighting this phenomena, we are leaning into it,” said Ellman, co-founder and co-CEO of Flip. “Almost half of all fashion shoppers bracket their online purchases, buying several pieces to try on at home with the intention of returning what doesn’t fit or what doesn’t match what they saw online. We believe returns should be as easy as the purchase and by making the shopping process more efficient and effective, we’re keeping clothes out of landfills and in your closet.”

The company is, to date, backed by a $3.75 million seed round led by TLV Partners with participation from Lool Ventures.

“Flip is the evolution of social media and e-commerce — birthing the baby of Instagram and Amazon and creating the first physical product marketplace where your likes and actions impact the products you receive,” says Rona Segev, a general partner at TLV.

Raydiant, a startup promising to turn TVs into interactive digital signs, is making several announcements today — a new company name, a new CEO, new partners and $7 million in new funding.

Until today, the company was known as Mira, and it was founded by Tuan Ho (who previously founded internet TV company Philo), along with venture studio Atomic. The goal is to offer an alternative to existing digital signage solutions, which it says are often improvised, bespoke or expensive.

With Raydiant, customers just plug the company’s HDMI device into a TV or other screen and connect that device to the internet. Then they can edit and update the content from Raydiant’s online dashboard, and they get access to a number of other digital signage applications.

Customers include Westin, Ramada, Harvard University and Wahlburgers, the restaurant chain owned by the Wahlberg brothers. In fact, Raydiant/Mira was featured in an episode of the Wahlburgers TV show, with Mark Wahlberg testing out the technology as a way to create a virtual presence in Wahlburgers restaurants.

The new applications being announced today show the range of what customers can do with these screens — the partners include BlueJeans (videoconferencing), Soundtrack Your Brand (licensed music), SinglePlatform (digital menus) and PosterMyWall (drag-and-drop content editing).

Ho and Atomic have also brought on Bobby Marhamat, the former COO of Revel Systems, as Raydiant’s new CEO.

“We are thrilled to have so much energy around the company with everything from our new brand, the financial support from our investors and incredible partnerships with the industry’s top enterprise companies,” Marhamat said in a statement. “Raydiant is a thriving and growing company, and we are committed to providing businesses with first-class service to bring any screen to life and create an interactive experience within a brick & mortar location.”

Lastly, the company is announcing that it has raised $7 million in funding led by 8VC, with participation from Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, Lerer Hippeau, SV Angel and Transmedia Capital. It says the money will be used to develop new applications, sign more partners, grow the team and bring on more customers.