There are many painful ways for a startup to fail — including founders who ultimately throw in the towel and turn off the lights.

But assuming a founder intends to keeps moving forward, there are a few pitfalls that Garry Tan has seen during his career as a founder, Y Combinator partner and, lately, co-founder of venture firm Initialized Capital.

During a fun chat during last week’s TechCrunch Early Stage, he ran us through these avoidable mistakes; for those who couldn’t virtually attend, we’re sharing them with you here.

 1. Chasing the wrong problem

This sounds insane, right? How can you be blamed for wanting to solve a problem?

Tan says people choose the wrong problem for a wide variety of reasons: Founders sometimes choose a problem that isn’t problematic for enough people, he said, citing the example of a hypothetical 25-year-old San Francisco-based engineer who may be out of touch with the rest of the country. When founders target the wrong problem, it typically means that the market will be too small for a venture-like return.

After feedback from the investor and founder communities, Y Combinator is making a change to how it does Demo Days in a remote world. The accelerator announced today that it will keep its two-day Demo Day virtual, but instead of offering pre-recorded pitches on-demand, the entire program will be streamed live.

In an e-mail, Y Combinator said the feedback was that “founders enjoyed the bonding experience involved in prepping for a live demo day and investors like seeing the founder pitch their businesses personally.”

“We’ve decided that a live Demo Day is an important part of founders’ YC experience,” Michael Seibel, Y Combinator’s CEO, wrote in a blog post.

The thirty-first Demo Day will be live over Zoom, splitting the batch between two days. Each company will have one minute to present, with a single-slide summary, description and team bio available on the website for attendees to peruse. If you can’t attend, recordings will be published at the end of the week.

The accelerator told TechCrunch that presentations will kick off at 9 a.m. PST and end at noon, with breaks scheduled throughout the day. Similar to past Demo Days, investors will be able to indicate interest in investing and share contact information with founders through YC Demo Day software.

Startups that deferred Demo Day in years past will present at the upcoming Demo Day. Deferring to present on Demo Day is fairly common and happens when founders are not yet ready to present their startup to the VC and tech press community. In a remote world, some startups may opt for this route until things turn back to normal (if that ever happens, of course).

For founders participating in remote accelerators, a question remains: Is the new format worth the equity? Y Combinator says that the most recent cohort is the first batch to participate in an entirely remote program, run entirely through the COVID-19 lockdown.

Founders recently shared with me the ups and downs of this accelerator season. One founder, Michael Vega-Sanz, recommends that first-time founders attend a physical accelerator instead of a virtual one for the energy it brings.

“If you’re a competitive person, like we were, you’ll see other companies kicking butt, getting praised in front of everybody,” he said. “I know this sounds a bit narcissistic, but we were like, ‘Damn, we really need to pick our game up.’ ” Peer competition might sound insignificant, but founders, much like investors, thrive on FOMO and rivalries.

Y Combinator going live feels like an attempt at bringing excitement and earnestness to the pitch experience. Techstars did a live, virtual demo day earlier in the pandemic, even bringing on Ice-T to congratulate the founders participating through a Cameo.

YC Demo Day will be August 24 and 25.

Today, Priti Youssef Choksi is a partner with venture firm Norwest Venture Partners . But she previously spent five-and-a-half years at Google, where she worked on strategic partnerships, and nearly nine years at Facebook, where she began in corporate development and later focused on M&A.

Because Choksi knows firsthand how some of the biggest companies on the planet think about potential acquisition targets and how deals ultimately come together, we asked if she would share some of those insights with us during our recent founder-centric Early Stage event. The idea was to help attendees better how understand how — and why — certain acquisitions come together; her advice was so helpful that we wanted to share it more widely here.

So where to start? Choksi suggested people first understand the “build, partner, or buy” mentality of big acquirers. Indeed, while deals can look very much alike to outsiders (a deal is a deal is a deal), they are not. First, big companies will build internally if they are bolstering a strategic asset or what they need involves sensitive information or technology. A good example of something that Google would never buy, for example, is search tech, because search is the company’s crown jewel, she noted. Companies will meanwhile partner in order to fill a product or service gap or when they’re looking to stand up a new platform, she said, pointing to the early days of Google’s Android ecosystem.

As for when they finally go shopping, companies are driven by three things, said Choksi: talent, technology and traction. With talent, as you might imagine, companies may conduct an acqui-hire with the goal of filling a talent or leadership gap internally or to acquire niche skills that their current employees don’t already have, she said.

Companies meanwhile shop for technology when they need outside tech to boost their organic efforts. Choksi pointed to Luma.io by way of example. Back in 2013, the young company, which created a video-capture, stabilization and sharing app, was acquired by Instagram (which was itself already owned by Facebook); a week after it closed the Luma deal, Facebook launched video on Instagram largely based on Luma’s platform.

Indonesia-based online travel portal, Traveloka, has picked up $250M in fresh funding to beef up its coronavirus-battered balance sheet.

The travel aggregator dubs the capital injection a “strong vote of confidence” in its strategy to adjust to what it couches as a ‘new normal’ for travel by retooling its focus on domestic and short hop excursions and activities. The funding round is led by an unnamed global financial institution. Traveloka also says “some” existing investors also participated (EV Growth being one it has named).

Prior to this latest raise, Traveloka had pulled in around $950M across five funding rounds since being founded back in 2012, according to Crunchbase. Back in 2017 it passed unicorn valuation after bagging $350 million from Expedia in exchange for a minority stake in the business. But, shortly afterwards, it lost one of its co-founders — who departed citing a clash of goals as the business switched to more of a commercial mindset, as he saw it.

Fast forward a few years and the pandemic is playing havoc with the travel industry as a whole. Since the pandemic landed to decimate ‘business as usual’ in the sector, Traveloka has responded by launching a number of initiatives in a bid to reassure and woo back customers — including flights that bundle COVID-19 tests; flexible open-date vouchers for hotels (aka, ‘Buy Now Stay Later’); online experiences; flash sale livestreams; and a big push around cleanliness with standardized hygiene protocols for vacation accommodation that can be booked via its platform.

Traveloka says the latest capital injection will be used not only to beef up its balance sheet but to boost efforts and deepen offerings in “select priority areas” — including building out what it describes as “a more robust and integrated Travel & Lifestyle portfolio” in key markets.

It also intends to expand financial services solutions it offers to ecosystem partners.

Commenting in a statement, Ferry Unardi, Traveloka co-founder and CEO, said: “Without a doubt, Traveloka has been profoundly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have experienced the lowest business rate that we have ever seen since our inception. However, we always believed that the company will prevail by rapidly adjusting our strategy, working with our industry and ecosystem partners, as well as continuing to innovate for our users, our ultimate focus.”

Per Ferry, Traveloka’s business in Vietnam is “approaching” steady pre-COVID-19 levels, while he says its Thailand business is “on its way” to surpassing 50%.

“Indonesia and Malaysia are still in the early stage, but they continue to demonstrate promising momentum with strong week-to-week improvement, especially in accommodation with the emergence of shorter distance staycation behavior,” he added. “We acknowledge that the sector may go through further turbulence as it navigates new waves, but we feel we are prepared to take on the challenge and emerge on the right side of it.”

“The travel industry is facing unprecedented times, including Traveloka,” added Willson Cuaca, managing partner of EV Growth, in another supporting statement. “The leadership team has taken difficult yet commendable measures including restructuring and optimization to minimize financial health risks. We are confident that the company will emerge even stronger after this crisis.”

Greg Robertson: Now we are talking about the early 1990s when laptop computers started to play. They needed a person that knew computers because they had these projectors, which now seems commonplace...

___

Low-code is a hot category these days. It helps companies build workflows or simple applications without coding skills, freeing up valuable engineering resources for more important projects. Paragon, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced a $2.5 million seed round today for its low-code application integration platform.

Investors include Y Combinator, Village Global, Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital and FundersClub.

“Paragon makes it easier for non-technical people to be able to build out integrations using our visual workflow editor. We essentially provide building blocks for things like API requests, interactions with third party APIs and conditional logic. And so users can drag and drop these building blocks to create workflows that describe business logic in their application,” says company co-founder Brandon Foo.

Foo acknowledges there are a lot of low-code workflow tools out there, but many like UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere concentrate on robotic process automation (RPA) to automate certain tasks. He says he and co-founder Ishmael Samuel wanted to focus on developers.

“We’re really focused on how can we improve developer efficiency, and how can we bring the benefits of low code to product and engineering teams and make it easier to build products without writing manual code for every single integration, and really be able to streamline the product development process,” Foo told TechCrunch.

The way it works is you can drag and drop one of 1,200 predefined connectors for tools like Stripe, Slack and Google Drive into a workflow template, and build connectors very quickly to trigger some sort of action. The company is built on AWS serverless architecture, so you define the trigger action and subsequent actions, and Paragon handles all of the back-end infrastructure requirements for you.

It’s early days for the company. After launching in private beta in January, the company has 80 customers. It currently has six employees, including Foo, who previously co-founded Polymail, and Samuel, who was previously lead engineer at Uber. They plan to hire four more employees this year.

With both founders people of color, they definitely are looking to build a diverse team around them. “I think it’s already sort of built into our DNA. As a diverse founding team we have perhaps a broader viewpoint and perspective in terms of hiring the kind of people that we seek to work with. Of course, I think there’s always room for improvement, and so we’re always looking for new ways that we can be more inclusive in our hiring recruiting process [as we grow],” he said.

As far as raising during a pandemic, he says it’s been a crazy time, but he believes they are solving a real problem and that they can succeed in spite of the macro economic conditions of the moment.

Startup stories are often too reductive — an entrepreneur dreams up an idea, snags some co-founders, raises a bit of money and presto: success and riches.

It’s nearly never true. Even breakout successes like Slack that may feel straightforward have complicated stories. Amongst the most valuable startups there are hidden crises and disappointing quarters. Some famous startups even had to execute a hard pivot after their original idea flopped. Slack was originally a gaming company, Twitter was a podcasting platform and YouTube wanted to be a dating service.

But not all startups that struggle and eventually make it have to completely toss out their original idea. Some just need to shake up operations before seeing the sort of success they’d hoped for.

Social e-commerce and fulfillment platform Teespring is one such company.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

From a 2017-era round of layoffs and restructuring, the company is on an impressive, profitable growth curve today.

I was part of the reporting team that covered the company’s earlier struggles, which came after it raised more than $50 million in venture capital. So when Teespring wanted to discuss the numbers behind its recent growth, I was more than curious.

This morning, let’s look at how one startup found its groove a few years after we’d figured it was a done deal.

A comeback

Rewinding the clock, Teespring’s 2017 was a difficult period. The company had sharply cut staff as sales declined, cost reductions that helped push the startup from regular deficits into profitability.

At the time, reporting indicated that Teespring’s revenue fell off after it lost some power sellers and investments in goods other than T-shirts failed to materially improve its financial results. After the layoffs, Teespring raised $5 million at a diminished valuation to get back on its feet.

A lot of tech is built on the premise of services that can target the widest or most lucrative pools of users (and they’re a blockbuster when they can do both). But that leaves out a number of consumers, who fall into the margins for all kinds of reasons, be they physical, age, financial or other circumstances. Today, a startup building financial services specifically aimed at three typically marginalised markets — elderly, disabled people and those who are recovering from addiction — is announcing some funding on the back of strong growth of its business, and plans to do more.

True Link Financial, which provides financial services — specifically, today in the form of prepaid Visa cards and investment management — aimed at the three demographics, is announcing that it has closed a Series B of $35 million, led by Khosla Ventures with strong participation from Centana Growth Partners, an investor that specialises in financial services. We understand the valuation is now around $115 million.

Kai Stinchcombe, the CEO who co-founded the company with Claire McDonnell (the COO), says the plan will be to invest the money in adding more products to the mix, with insurance (life insurance) likely to come next, along with more credit-based services.

Interestingly, the company had raised a smaller Series B of $21 million from Khosla about 14 months ago — and started to pitch the news to TechCrunch back then.

“We’d mostly written the press release but then just didn’t get around to it,” Stinchcombe said with a little laugh. In the meantime, the company doubled in size in terms of revenues, and then Centana came along. Because of its financial services focus it was an investor True Link really wanted to get on board, so it reopened the round, closed the deal and finally announced the news.

Indeed, Centana spotted the opportunity specifically around providing services for elderly people.

“True Link is fundamentally changing people’s financial lives at a time when they are the most vulnerable,” said Tom Davis, principal at Centana Growth Partners, in a statement. “The number of Americans ages 65 and older will likely double to over 80 million in the next 20 years, and this demographic is fortunately living longer and more independently than ever before. No one should be taken advantage of at a time when they need the most support, and customers and families consistently speak to the ways in which True Link has enabled them to retain financial freedom. We are thrilled to partner with True Link and invest in their mission to bring unique financial products to this market.” Davis is joining the board with this round, along with David Weiden from Khosla.

It’s ironic that the boost in personalisation that’s been afforded by the expansion and growing sophistication of technology hasn’t trickled down into more services built for the long-tail of would-be customers, so it’s always refreshing when you come across a startup that is tackling that very opportunity. In the case of True Link, the startup (founded in 2012) has taken the same products but tweaked them specifically with the particular user group in mind.

The True Link Card for Vulnerable Elders is based around the idea of giving an older person some autonomy with their money but with visibility for another person either to limit where and how that money is spent, or simply to be able to monitor where it is going. It also makes it easier for elderly users to pass on their cards to caregivers to make a purchase on their behalf without needing to track whether that’s been used exactly as requested (as there is a limit). It was, in fact, Stinchcombe’s own experience with a grandparent losing money in a case of fraud and financial abuse that led him to start this company.

The True Link Card for People in Recovery is based around the idea that people who are in that situation are usually engaged in a long-term struggle not to fall off the wagon. This can be tailored both to limit purchases at specific types of businesses (e.g. casinos or bars), and also make it harder to take money out. “The thought here is that if you have a relapse along that journey, there is a transaction that could have been prevented,” he said. “Our goal is to raise the barrier, provide one more roadblock to relapsing.”

Services for those with disabilities are aimed at providing a link between a third-party administrator and the customer, so that the former has better tools for record keeping that can be necessary for benefits and also for local authorities to make sure that a person is being looked after well. Similarly those with cognitive or other behavioral issues can still maintain some financial independence and to learn more of it, but with better controls in place should something go awry. Stinchcombe said that for many this represents the first time that they have been given that kind of autonomy. The company is based and active for now only in the U.S., and True Link says it works with nearly half of participants in state-administered ABLE Act programs.

While some might say that “marginal” means “small,” there is still a big opportunity, both in the U.S. and further afield (where True Link would likely work with a partner to roll out, said Stinchcombe).

“True Link has a great combination of a passionate team, a large and underserved market, and a proven product offering that is ready to scale,” said Weiden, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with them and improve financial flexibility and dignity for millions of people.”

In a world with growing amounts of data, finding the right set for a particular machine learning model can be a challenge. Explorium has created a platform to make that an easier task, and today the startup announced a $31 million Series B.

The round was led by Zeev Ventures, with help from Dynamic Loop, Emerge, 01 Advisors and F2 Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $50 million, according to the company.

CEO and co-founder Maor Shlomo says the company’s platform is designed to help people find the right data for their model. “The next frontier in analytics will not be about how you fine tune or improve a certain algorithm, it will be how do you find the right data to fit into those algorithms to make them as useful and impactful as possible,” he said.

He says that companies need this more than ever during the pandemic because this can help customers find more relevant data at a time when their historical data might not be useful to help build predictive models. For instance, if you’re a retailer, your historical shopping data won’t be relevant if you are in an area where you can no longer open your store, he says.

“There are so many environmental factors that are now influencing every business problem that organizations are trying to solve that Explorium is becoming this […] layer where you search for data to solve your business problems to fuel your predictive models,” he said.

When the pandemic hit in March, he worried about how it would affect his company, and he put a hold on hiring, but as he saw business increasing in April and May, he decided to accelerate again. The company currently has 87 employees between offices in Israel and the United States and he plans to be at 100 in the next couple of months.

When it comes to hiring, he says he doesn’t try to have hard and fast hiring rules like you have a certain degree or have gone to a certain school. “The only thing that’s important is getting good people hungry to succeed. The more diverse the culture is, the more diverse the group is, we find the more fun it is for people to discover each other and to discover different cultures,” Shlomo explained.

In terms of fundraising, while the company needs money to fuel its growth, at the same time it still had plenty of money in the bank from last year’s round. “We got into the pandemic and we didn’t know how long it’s going to last, and [early on] we didn’t yet know how it would impact the business. Existing investors were always bullish about the company. We decided to just go with that,” he said.

The company was founded in 2017 and previously raised a $19.1 million Series A round last year.

According to a recent report by Fortune Business Insights, the global cloud computing market size is expected to grow at 19% CAGR to reach $760.98 billion by 2027. The recent COVID-19 crisis has...

___

Swiss computer vision startup Advertima has raised a €15 million Series A (~$17.5 million) to build out a machine learning platform for physical retail stores to ‘upgrade’ the shopping experience via real-time shopper behavior analytics. The round is led by existing shareholder, Fortimo Group, a Swiss real estate company.

Fed by visual sensors, Advertima’s platform provides physical retail spaces with a real-time view of what’s going on in store — comprised of AI-powered behavioral and demographic analysis, as shoppers move through the space — with the aim of helping retailers better understand and respond dynamically to customers in store.

The startup calls this its “Human Data Layer” — noting that the tech can support features like smart inventory management and autonomous checkout.

Throw in digital signage (which it also offers) and its platform can be used to serve contextually relevant messaging intended for one or just a few pairs of nearby eyeballs — such as product offers for a particular gender or age bracket, or discounts for families — depending on who’s in proximity of the given digital eye.

Albeit ‘relevancy’ depends upon the calibre of the AI and the quality of the underlying training data. So certainly isn’t a given. Ads that seem to personally address you when you make eye contact, meanwhile, have been a sci-fi staple for years, of course. But the reality of ‘smart’ ads informed by AI analytics could very quickly stray into creepy territory.

An example message shown in a demo video on Advertima’s website isn’t great in this regard — as the system is shown IDing a stick woman and popping up a targeted message that reads: “Hello young woman. All alone?” (uhhh ). So retailers plugging such stuff into their stores need to be hyper sensitive to tone and context (and indeed take a robust approach to assessing how accurate the AI is, or isn’t).

Or, well, they could find shoppers fleeing in horror. (tl;dr no one likes to feel watched while they’re shopping. And if the AI misgenders a potential customer that could be a disaster.)

One flashy pledge from Advertima is that its approach to applying AI to guestimate who’s in the shop and what they’re doing is ‘privacy safe’ — with the startup noting there’s no facial recognition nor biometric detection involved in its system, for one thing.

It also specifies that the visual sensors required for the analytics to function do not store any image or video recordings. Instead it claims to “only process minimal anonymized data” — and only evaluate that in “aggregated form”.

“This means that the unintentional identification of a person is technically impossible,” is the top-line claim.

With long-standing data protection laws covering Europe, and EU lawmakers actively considering new rules to wrap around certain applications of artificial intelligence, there’s a legal incentive not to push such tech’s intrusiveness too far (at least for local use-cases). While Switzerland, which is not a Member of the EU (though it is part of the bloc’s single market), also has a reputation for strict domestic privacy laws — so this homegrown startup’s pitch at least reflects that context.

That said, its system appears to generate a “Person ID” (see below screengrab) — so we’ve asked how long it retains these individual-linked IDs for; and whether or not it links (or enables the linking of) the Person ID with any other data that might be gathered from the shopper, such as an email or a device ID. If the Person IDs are persistent it could enable a retailer to re-identify an individual via the Advertima visually tracked behavioral data — and then be in a position to plug these offline shopping behavior ‘insights’ into an identity-linked customer database or link it to an ad profile that’s maintained by a tracking giant or data broker for ad targeting purposes. All of which would be the opposite of ‘privacy safe’ — so we do have questions. We’ll update this report with any response from Advertima to this.

Update: The company says the reference to a ‘Person ID’ is from an old version of the software which it only used to demo the platform’s capabilities, such as at trade fairs.

It said it now refers to this label as a “tracking ID”. “Our system generates a tracking ID every time someone is entering the field of view of a sensor. This ID is a randomly generated hash and is not connected to other tracking IDs, nor can it be connected to other tracking IDs retrospectively,” it told us. “If the same person leaves the field of view and returns later, a new tracking ID is generated that is not linked to the previous ID. Tracking IDs are fully anonymous and are kept for analytics purposes only.”

“We do not link tracking IDs to any other data like device IDs or other attributes from external sources,” it added. “Our system is not designed to and not capable of communicating with other devices like mobile phones. We operate with computer vision only with data privacy in mind to ensure that we deliver a positive experience. From the very beginning, we designed our solution in collaboration with data privacy officials to ensure that we are fully compliant with EU and Swiss data privacy laws, some of the most restrictive data privacy laws in the world.”

For its cashierless check-out product, Advertima’s system tracks customers around the store and may communicate the ID to a retailers’ POS in order to generate the bill. But in that scenario the customer has to have opted in. “In [the case of cashierless checkouts], the anonymous tracking ID and basket are communicated to the retailer’s checkout system. In the retailer’s system, it is linked to their customer ID to process the checkout. Of course, this requires a double opt-in by their customer, which the retailer implements,” it said.

Advertima was founded back in 2016 and has so far forged partnerships with Switzerland’s largest retailer, Migros and the international grocer SPAR, to deploy its tech. It says the system is being used by 14 companies across eight countries at this stage.

It says the new funding will go on further developing its platform, and on scaling so the business can better address the global market for smart retail solutions. Although it’s competing in a space that includes Amazon’s cashierless tech so that’s one Goliath-sized big tech competitor to Advertima’s David.

In a press release announcing the Series A it notes it will be ploughing in €10M of its own revenue too — so touts a total spend of €25M over the next two years on building out its platform.

“We see a world where the physical and digital layers are merged to enhance our daily professional and private lives,” said Advertima Co-Founder and CEO, Iman Nahvi, commenting in a statement.

In a blog post announcing the Series A, he also talked up the autonomous store product — suggesting it will “change how people experience grocery shopping, cinemas, DIY stores, and a whole range of retailers”.

“Delivering smart inventory management, autonomous checkout, in-store analytics, and contextual content on smart digital screens will allow grocers and other retailers to maximize the efficiency of their stores, increase their revenues, and generate greater returns per square meter,” he wrote.

“Retailers can actualize an omnichannel strategy to orchestrate better experiences and relationships with their audience. Soon the standard for retailers will be holistically customer-centric: Cashierless checkouts, no lines, individualized experiences, and real-time product recognition for fast, easy, and fun shopping.”

Given that Amazon began licensing its ‘Just Walk Out’ cashierless tech to other retailers earlier this year, and various tech startups have sprung up to chase the potential of similar systems — such as AiFi, Grabango, Standard Cognition and Zippin — Advertima’s global growth ambitions are tempered by plenty of competition.

Physical retail has also taken a battering from the coronavirus pandemic. Although COVID-19 may, paradoxically, drive demand for cashierless tech — as a way to reduce the risk of viral exposure for staff and shoppers.

AI technology being applied to eliminate retail jobs does raise wider socioeconomic questions too, though.

Also commenting in a supporting statement, Fortimo Group founder Remo Bienz added: “It is clear that the rapid digitalisation of our society is going to have an impact on consumer habits, especially in the retail sector. Advertima is at the cutting-edge of technology in the retail space. As a long-standing shareholder, we know how visionary their technology is, but also how it has been successfully adopted by major, global organisations and already generated significant revenues. We’re excited to be part of Advertima’s journey.”

ClimaCell, the weather forecasting and intelligence service that is using a number of interesting new techniques to gather weather data, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series C round co-led by new investor Pitango Growth and existing investor Square Peg Capital. With this new round, the Boston and TelAviv-based company’s total funding now exceeds $100 million.

As ClimaCell co-founder and CEO Shimon Elkabetz told me, the round came together well after the worldwide COVID-19 lockdowns had started and the team never met with its new investors in person. Because the pandemic affected many of ClimaCell’s customers in the travel industry, in recent months, the company did take some steps to reduce cost and expand its overall runway, but Elkabetz stressed that the company didn’t need to raise this new round and that the investors approached the company.

“We took some aggressive but respectful actions around reducing our expenses and created a significant runway,” Elkabetz explained. “We didn’t really need to raise money now, but this opportunity came to us and we decided to take it, because it gives us a significant opportunity to invest in strategic things.”

Given the changing business climate, the company did double down on its efforts to brand its service as an intelligence platform that helps businesses make smart decisions about the operations, even if they are not meteorologists. In practice, this means a stronger focus on its Insights service, which helps operators in various industries make smart decisions based on the company’s forecasts. With this, ClimaCell can help a construction company ensure that a worksite is safe when a storm is coming and when it should shut down its crane operations because of wind, for example, or when a logistics company should expect slowdowns because of heavy rains. Instead of just giving its users a weather forecast, the company’s tools provide actionable suggestions instead.

“65% of the world’s GDP is being impacted by weather events. ClimaCell is the only SaaS company that enables actionable items ahead of weather events rather than reacting to them and their implications and ramifications,” said Aaron Mankovski, managing general partner at Pitango Growth, in today’s announcement. “The opportunities coming to ClimaCell across industries including supply chain and logistics, railroads, trucking, shipping, on-demand, energy, insurance, and more represent a complete upending of the existing competitive landscape and is a testament to being laser-focused on customer value.”

Elkabetz noted that the company plans to use the new funding to expand both its go-to-market efforts and to focus on the fundamental R&D that makes its platform work. He wasn’t quite ready to share what those R&D efforts will look like, but he expects to be able to announce these new capabilities “soon.”

The company also expects to launch some updates to its consumer mobile app soon. While the consumer app may not be ClimaCell’s main focus, it uses the same technology in the back end, including a version of Insights for leisure activities, for example. For Elkabetz, the consumer app helps spread the ClimaCell brand but he also expects that it can become a real business in its own right.

Sramana Mitra: What’s happening on the technology end? How are these questions generated? How is the progression being determined? Matthew Glotzbach: Most of the interactions are with texts and...

___

Israeli startup Nanox has big ambitions to take on the world of medical imaging and imaging analytics with hardware that reduces the size and cost of scanning equipment, plus software that improves the quality of images and the insights you can gain from them. Today, Nanox is announcing another big step ahead in that plan: it has raised another $59 million in funding, closing out its Series B at $110 million, to continue building its full-body scanning hardware and securing more customers after already securing deals in 13 countries.

The money is coming from a range of strategic investors that include SK Telecom, Industrial Alliance (the Canadian insurance group), Foxconn and Yozma Korea, and it has arrived swiftly on the heels of $51 million delivered in two tranches, the most recent being $20 million in June from strategic investor SK Telecom, which is building a factory to manufacture Nanox hardware in South Korea (there is another factory in Japan).

Nanox is not disclosing its valuation, but in June, it was $600 million, and from what we understand, this is likely to be the company’s last fundraise before it goes public, although a timeline for that has not been set (and never say never in the world of startup funding, of course).

Ran Poliakine, Nanox’s founder and CEO, said in an interview that today the startup makes the majority of its revenues from licensing deals: it provides IP to manufacturers like Foxconn, SK and Fuji (another investor) to build devices based on its concepts, and the plan is to have some 15,000 scanners out in the market over the next several years.

Longer term, Nanox is seeing regulatory approval across all markets where the machines are in place to start to roll out the services side of its business, providing insights into the imaging that is sourced by way of the hardware — a process that is in play but has been delayed due to the spread of the coronavirus (and the subsequent slowdown of many processes, such as getting regulatory approvals and clearance).

This services aspect of Nanox’s business is particularly interesting, as it underscores a major shift in how medical services are delivered and will be delivered in the future.

Namely, the rise of more powerful communications networks and better technology for imaging, and the high overhead of employing people and keeping costly equipment up to date, has led to a wave of deals where hospitals and others are outsourcing some of the analytics work away from on-site labs to remote facilities. And that has led to a surge of businesses looking to tap into the new opportunities arising out of that.

“Telecoms carriers are looking for opportunities around how to sell 5G,” said Ilung Kim, SK Telecom’s president, in an interview in June. “Now you can imagine a scanner of this size being used in an ambulance, using 5G data. It’s a game changer for the industry.”

This means that, even as it is waiting for regulatory clearance, Nanox is already signing on customers for this service — a sign of the times and the demand in the market. Most recently, it inked a deal with USA Radiology, which will be using the tech for a scan-as-a-service business across the U.S. as well as in 15 other countries.

Nanox, of course, benefits on two sides with those deals: not only is it licensing its tech for the services, but it’s getting licensing fees connected to the hardware that’s being built and sold to use them.

As we have described before, the Nanox system is based around proprietary digital X-ray technology, a relatively new area in imaging that relies on digital scans rather than X-ray plates to capture and process images. Nanox’s flagship ARC hardware comes in at 70 kg compared to 2,000 kg for the average CT scanner, and production costs are around $10,000 compared to $1-3 million for the CT scanner.

In addition to being smaller (and thus cheaper) machines with much of the processing of images done in the cloud, the Nanox system, according to Poliakine, can make its images in a fraction of a second, making them significantly safer in terms of radiation exposure compared to existing methods. This makes it easier and cheaper to own the machines, as well as to take regular scans with them, covering not just one small area of the body but the full length of it, which opens the door also to gaining more insights. Nanox today is working on that, but is also partnering with institutions that are building complex algorithms to “read” better and more accurate insights into those images.

Nanox’s proposition is particularly compelling at the moment. As we’ve pointed out before, imaging has been in the news a lot of late because it has so far been one of the most accurate methods for detecting the progress of COVID-19 in patients or would-be patients because of how the illness impacts patients’ lungs and other organs.

But on the other hand, the global health pandemic, and the push to keep people physically away from each other, has also pointed to a big need in the healthcare community for services that make it easier to diagnose patients remotely, putting Nanox and its approach right at the heart of how all of medicine and healthcare seem to be evolving.

That’s provided that Nanox gets the necessary regulatory approvals for services so that it can take its business to the intended next level.

“It is easy to say that we are aiming to change the world,” Poliakine said in a statement. “The main challenge with such statements is always the execution. We have a bold vision of helping to eradicate cancer and other disease by means of early detection. We are actively working for the deployment of a global medical imaging service infrastructure that may turn this dream into reality.”

The growth of digital banking has opened up a wealth of opportunities for making the world of finance more accessible and transparent to a greater number of people. But the darker underbelly is that it has also created more avenues for illicit activity to flourish, with some $2 trillion laundered annually but only 1-3% of that sum “caught.”

To help combat that, a London-based startup called ComplyAdvantage, which has built an AI platform and wider database of some 10 million entities to help identify and track those involved in financial crime, is today announcing a growth round of funding of $50 million to expand its reach and operations.

Specifically, the plan will be to use the funding for hiring, to invest in the tools it uses to detect entities and map the relationships between them and to bring on more clients.

“We’ve been focused on more granular analysis and being able to scale to hundreds of millions of searches across our database,” said Charles Delingpole, founder and CEO, said in an interview. “The next phase is more around the network of contacts and more enhanced diligence.” The company today has some 250 staff, mainly in the U.K. and Romania.

The Series C is being led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), a huge pension plan out of Canada (U.S. $155 billion) that is known as a prolific growth-stage tech investor.  Previous backers Balderton and Index are also in the round. The company has raised $88 million to date, and while it’s not disclosing its valuation, for some context, it was last valued at around $141 million in its last round a year ago, per PitchBook data.

Today, ComplyAdvantage has more than 500 customers, primarily financial institutions using it to meet regulatory compliance requirements as well as to reduce their own exposure and risk, providing some automated services to complement (and potentially replace) some of the manual checks that they make to prove you are who you say you are.

It also has a growing business with other groups that are tracking fraud for their own ends, such as insurance companies trying to stem fraudulent claims and government entities. It also has a number of partners that access its database and use that as part of their own solutions (Quantexa, which announced a big funding round of its own last week, is one of those licensing partners).

“A lot of companies in the wider identity space are powered by our data, even if they don’t disclose it,” Delingpole said.

The company had its start originally focusing on the process of helping banks meet regulatory compliance around fraud detection by ingesting and analysing documents provided by customers ahead of opening accounts, initiating larger transactions with new entities and so on. That has taken on a more targeted purpose in recent years as ComplyAdvantage’s database has grown deeper.

Today the core of the business is based around a central database of known money launderers, human traffickers, terrorists, drug lords and others who exploit financial rails to run illegal operations and make a profit from them.

It’s formed, Delingpole said, by way of “automatically ingesting tens of thousands of data points, from websites, national warning lists, linked real-time databases of companies and various other applications on top of that.” That central database is still growing, and Delingpole believes that it’s not unrealistic for it to run to a much higher number in order to get the most accurate picture possible.

“Although we have 10 million today, we want to cover every company and person one day. We think the right number is 8 billion” — that is, the world’s population. “With that larger database we can solve other kinds of crimes too.”

The startup already has a straight channel through to government agencies, reporting connections and discoveries on behalf of their clients directly to them. And to be clear, although there are now strong data protection measures in place in Europe, when people are linked to illegal activity, that puts them on a list that supersedes that. When someone is suspected and is tipped to authorities, that information is kept private.

While all institutions will continue to have teams of people dedicated to risk analysis and investigations into activity, the idea here is to supercharge that work with more data that helps those investigators tackle the greater scale of data in the world today.

“Detecting financial crime in billions of transactions that take place around the globe has become nearly impossible without the application of data science and machine learning. It is this approach that has made ComplyAdvantage into a leader in the category, and the go-to partner for organizations that seek to automate what are still very often manual or inadequate processes,” said Jan Hammer, a partner at Index Ventures, in a statement.

The longer-term opportunity is to build out ComplyAdvantage’s customer base by leveraging information that the company is already surfacing that might be relevant to other verticals.

Insurance is a key example, Delingpole said. “We already see a mention of a person having defaulted on a loan then making an insurance claim,” he said. “We see credit, fraud and ownership data together.”

This, of course, puts the company into close competition not just with others building credit databases but those building strong AI platforms to leverage data to gain deeper insights into seemingly disparate digital actions and to build better pictures of activity on behalf of their clients. That includes not just partners like Quantexa, but others like Palantir.

The strength here, said Delingpole, is the sheer size of ComplyAdvantage’s database and its very specific focus on financial crime and how that sits for companies that need to police that, both for their own business health and for regulatory reasons. It’s that focus that has attracted investment.

“ComplyAdvantage offers mission-critical technology solutions for combating financial crime and keeping pace with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape,” said Olivia Steedman, senior managing director, TIP, at Ontario Teachers’. “The company is well-positioned to continue its rapid growth as its powerful technology platform transforms the compliance and risk management process for its clients.”

The latest startup to see an uplift in inbound interest flowing from the remote work boom triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is Berlin-based Everphone, which sells a “mobile as a service” device rental package that caters to businesses needing to kit staff out with mobile hardware plus associated support.

Everphone is announcing a €34 million Series B funding round today, led by new investor signals Venture Capital. Other new investors joining the round include German carrier Deutsche Telekom — investing via its strategic investment fund, Telekom Innovation Pool — U.S.-based early-stage VC AlleyCorp and Dutch bank NIBC.

The Series B financing will go on expanding to meet rising demand, with the startup telling TechCrunch it’s expecting to see a 70-100% increase in sales volume versus the pre-crisis period, thanks to a doubling of inbound leads during the pandemic.

“The global pandemic has been a catalyst for growth in the field of digitization,” said CEO and co-founder, Jan Dzulko, in a statement. “We are currently experiencing a significant increase in demand at home and abroad, which is why we are aiming for European expansion with the funding.”

Everphone describes its offer as a one-stop shop, with the service covering not just the rental of (new or refurbished) smartphones and tablets but an administration and management wrapper that covers support needs, including handling repairs/replacements — with the promise of replacements within 24 hours if needed and less client risk from not having to wrangle traditional rental insurance fine print.

Other touted pluses of its “device as a service” approach include flexibility (users get to choose from a range of iOS and Android devices); lower cost (pricing depends on customer size, device choice and rental term but starts at €7,99 a month for a refurbished budget device, rising up to €49,99 a month for high-end kit with a 12-month upgrade); and rental bundles, which can include standard mobile device management software (such as Cortado and AirWatch) so customers can plug the rental hardware into their existing IT policies and processes.

Everphone reckons this service wrapper — which can also extend to include paid apps (such as Babbel for language learning) as an employee on-device perk/benefit in the bundle — differentiates its offer versus incumbent leasing providers, such as CHG-Meridian or De Lage Landen, and from wholesale distributors.

It also touts its global rollout capability as a customer draw, checking the scalability box.

Its investors (including German carrier, DT) are being fired up by the conviction that the COVID-19-induced shift away from the office to home working will create a boom in demand for well-managed and secured work phones to mitigate the risk of personal devices and personal data mingling improperly with work stuff. (On that front, Everphone’s website is replete with references to Europe’s data protection framework, GDPR, repurposed as scare marketing.)

“Everphone envisions that every employee will one day work via their smartphone,” added Marcus Polke, partner at signals Venture Capital, in a supporting statement. “With this employee-centric approach and integrated platform, everphone goes far beyond the mere outsourcing of a smartphone IT infrastructure.”

The 2016-founded startup has more than 400 customers signed up at this point, both SMEs and multinationals such as Ernst & Young. It caters to both ends of the market with an off-the-shelf package and self-service device management portal that’s intended for SMEs of between 100 and 1,500 employees — plus custom integrations for larger entities of up to 30,000 employees.

It says it’s able to offer “highly competitive” prices for renting new devices because it gives returned kit a second life, refurbishing and reselling devices on the consumer market. “Thanks to this profitable secondary lifespan, we are able to offer highly competitive prices and extensive service levels on our rental devices,” Everphone writes on its website.

The second-hand smartphone market has also been seeing regional growth. Swappie, a European e-commerce startup that sells refurbished iPhones, aligning with EU lawmakers’ push for a “‘right to repair” for electronics, raised its own ~$40 million Series B only last month, for example. Its second-hand marketplace is one potential outlet for Everphone’s rented and returned iPhones.

Cross-border financial transactions are a major headache for individuals and large companies alike, who often have to deal with long wait times and high fees in order to send money to recipients in other countries. EMQ, a Hong Kong-based startup that develops network infrastructure to make international payments faster, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by WI Harper Group.

EMQ’s technology is integrated by clients, including online banks, digital wallets, e-commerce settlement providers and licensed financial institutions, into their existing networks, making it easier for them to perform cross-border remittances.

The funding, which also included participation from AppWorks, Abu Dhabi Capital, DG Ventures, Intudo Ventures, VS Partners, January Capital, Hard Yaka, Vectr Fintech Partners, Quest Venture Partners and SparkLabs, will be used for expanding EMQ’s international business, product development and licensing in key markets. Its last funding was a $6.5 million Series A announced back in December 2017.

EMQ is already licensed in Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia, and is registered as a Money Service Business in Canada. It has also been accepted into the regulatory sandbox launched by Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission to encourage innovation by financial tech companies.

The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Max Liu told TechCrunch that EMQ will focus on scaling its operations, especially for business remittances, in China, followed by India and Japan. EMQ’s tech is already used to process business payments in 80 countries.

Until recently, the majority of transactions facilitated by EMQ were between consumers. Then in May, the company launched its enterprise payment solution for companies. Liu said EMQ now expects business-to-business transactions to account for half of its gross transaction volume in 2021.

According to Juniper Research, cross-border B2B transactions are expected to exceed $218 trillion by 2022, up from $150 trillion in 2018, thanks in large part to the adoption of new technology. Other fintech companies that also provide tech, including APIs, for cross-border transactions, include Currencycloud, Payoneer and TransferWise.

Liu said EMQ’s main selling point is that it is focused on building a flexible infrastructure that can handle a large range of use cases in different countries, including e-commerce, merchant settlement, procurement, remittance and payroll.

He added that EMQ can be integrated into a client’s existing tech infrastructure with as little as two API calls. EMQ gives clients a fully functional sandbox environment, which mimics real transactions, and allows them to experiment with its tech and work with EMQ’s customer support team before it is formally deployed. Liu said it usually takes clients between two weeks to two months, depending on a company’s size and requirements, to fully integrate EMQ into their business operations.

In a press statement about the investment, Edward Liu, a partner at WI Harper Group, said, “As digital transformation intensifies globally, enterprises today are increasingly international in scale and they will require a network infrastructure like EMQ with greater speed, more certainty, increased flexibility and transparency, to expand their business in Asia and beyond. We are excited to partner with the EMQ team to expand its market-leading position in cross-border business payments globally.”

There are two major trends that the world will need to take in stride in the Covid era: air travel will become expensive and people will be working remotely. The key driver of ticket pricing in the...

___

Greg has done multiple ventures in Real Estate Technology and discusses his long career as an entrepreneur in the field. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are...

___