The manufacturer of a vegan collagen, Geltor, has raised a new round of financing — $90 million, according to people familiar with the company.

It’s another sign of the newfound viability of sustainability and cell-based, vegetarian replacements for animal products.

Sustainable bio-products, whether plant-based, genetically modified or cell-cultured, are having a big year. In the month of July alone, companies developing sustainable alternatives to animal agriculture and the industry’s byproducts have announced or closed on investments totaling $335 million in just three companies. Those companies include Geltor, The Not Company and Perfect Day.

Geltor’s chief executive Alexander Lorestani declined to comment on the new round, and sources did not disclose who the lead investor was.

The company had previously raised capital from SOS Ventures, IndieBio, Fifty Years, Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, Starlight Ventures, New Crop Capital, Baruch Future Ventures and FTW Ventures, according to information in Crunchbase.

In November, TechCrunch reported that the company was in looking for at least $50 million in new financing, but could raise as much as $100 million in the new round.

“Geltor’s production method is vastly more sustainable and eliminates the need for animal cruelty, but the reason companies in the cosmetics and food industries are clamoring for their products is because Geltor allows them to achieve function they simply can’t get from animal-derived gelatin and collagen,” said one person familiar with the company and its technology. 

Worldwide, the collagen market is expected to reach $7.5 billion by 2027 according to data from the market research firm, Grand View Research. Another report from Grand View put the size of the gelatin market at another $6.7 billion over the same period.

Geltor’s aim is to make these additives — and other animal-derived proteins — cheaply, efficiently and animal-free.

Much of the cosmetics, skin care and food business is shaped by animal byproducts. Lanolin is made from wool grease, squaline is made from shark liver oil and gelatin is made from the bones, tendons and ligaments of cows and pigs. Geltor replaces all of that with a cell-derived protein brewed in a fermenter like beer.

The company’s founders, Alex Lorestani and chief technology officer Nick Ouzounov, first met as graduate students at Princeton and began working on their company in 2015.

As Lorestani told Forbes in a 2019 article, Ouzounov would always approach him about new ideas for companies. After graduation the two men relocated to Silicon Valley and were accepted into the IndieBio accelerator.

Geltor began as a manufacturer of gelatin, a food additive used in everything from marshmallows to Jell-O, but quickly expanded into collagen for beauty products and dietary supplements. The company is already working with Gelita, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of collagen.

The funding for companies like Geltor and Perfect Day show that industrial biology is having a moment. There are billions of dollars of value to be unlocked in the re-engineering of cell functions, and proteins are just one application.

For investors looking at new bio-products, the future is very much alive.

 

SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek has bootstrapped SurveyGizmo to $13 million from Boulder, Colorado. He has experimented with both freemium and free trial, and has managed to monetize nicely. Read...

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Scores of online learning startups have emerged in India in recent years to serve school-age students. More than 250 million students are enrolled across schools in urban and rural parts of the country.

Whether one is in kindergarten, or preparing to join a college to pursue an undergraduate course, there are several startups offering a plethora of courses at affordable price points to help these students get there.

Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu among other local startups today help tens of millions of students each year gain access to high-profile and established teachers and a repository of study material that many might not have been able to find in an offline setting.

These startups — and legacy educational institutions — are helping students chase some of the most aspirational jobs: careers in engineering and medicine.

Most of these students, however, will either end up not getting their dream job — or based on their skills and India’s growing unemployment figures, a job altogether.

There are about 400 million people in India, or roughly a third of the country’s population, who are confronting a fundamental challenge: Not able to speak English, and lacking other skills that could prove crucial when applying for a job.

Entri, a startup based in the Southern city of Kochi, is attempting to address this market. The three-year-old startup offers upskilling courses to help people excel at exams that would land them a job with state and federal governments. And it teaches them these courses in the language with which they are most comfortable.

Students who dropped out before high school to those who have already attained graduate-level degrees account for the vast majority of users of Entri .

The startup began its courses in Malayalam, a language spoken by about 50 million people in India and especially popular in South India, explained Mohammed Hisamuddin, co-founder and chief executive of Entri. It has since added its courses in several other languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil.

Over the years, Entri has also expanded its course catalog to help people pursuing other kinds of jobs, including those in the blue-collar category, replicating a model similar to that of San Francisco-headquartered Udemy .

“We soon realized that only about 1.5 to 2% of the people who appear in these exams are able to make the shortlist,” he said. “These exams are very competitive, so many start to explore jobs in the private sector, sometimes even when they already have some low-profile job.”

The startup now offers more than 150 courses, including several languages, accounting and those that teach popular computer applications such as Microsoft Office. These pre-recorded video courses and quizzes run for 30 to 60 days.

“Starting with the 100 million people who apply for government jobs each year, Entri is expanding the universe of employable candidates by skilling people in their own language — as it should be,” said Arjun Malhotra, a partner at venture firm Good Capital . “It’s ridiculous that economic opportunities are bottlenecked because of the medium of learning. Skills bringing employability shouldn’t require people to be proficient in English.”

Hisamuddin said Entri has amassed more than 3 million users on its platform, up from 1.5 million early this year. About 90,000 of these users are paying subscribers. “We are adding close to 10,000 paying subscribers each month now,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch early this week.

Entri offers a portion of its courses in certain languages at no charge, but complete access requires a subscription. Paid subscriptions start as low as 300 Indian rupees a year ($4) and go as high as 10,000 Indian rupees ($133), said Hisamuddin. The most popular subscription tier costs 1,500 Indian rupees ($20).

The startup said this week that it had closed a $3.1 million Pre-Series A financing round, led by Good Capital. Hari TN, head of human resources at online grocery startup BigBasket, and HyperTrack founder Kashyap Deorah also participated in the round.

It plans to deploy the fresh capital into introducing 50 additional courses to its platform and reach more users. Hisamuddin said Entri’s revenues have surged 150% in the last three months and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has reached $2 million. He aims to scale Entri’s ARR to $5 million by this year.

On the heels of Hippo’s funding round and our exploration of how the private markets appear to be more conservative than public investors at the moment, we’re asking a new question: are a bunch of insurtech startups undervalued?

Hippo — an insurtech startup focused on home insurance — put together a $150 million round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation after growing its gross written premium to $270 million “in the past 12 months.” At that valuation, and at pre-adjustment premium scale, Hippo is super-cheap compared to Lemonade, another venture-backed insurtech startup that just went public.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or receive it for free in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which drops Saturdays starting July 25.

There’s no need to relitigate Hippo’s valuation and how the private markets have valued the firm. But our work yesterday does give us the chance to do some fun math on other players in the neo-insurance space, namely, Root and MetroMile. Using data accrued from financial filings and valuation data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, we can grok how much the two firms are worth using Hippo’s and Lemonade’s current premium multiples.

If you aren’t familiar, the cohort of startups we’re looking at have raised well over $1 billion as a group; VCs really believe in them. How they are priced then, and how they exit, will help determine the results of many a venture fund.

So, are other players in the startup insurance market cheap at their last private price when compared to Lemonade and Hippo? Did their venture backers overpay? Let’s find out.

Cheap? Expensive?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Up top the crew this week was the regular contingent: Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and myself. As a tiny programming note, we’re going back to posting some videos on YouTube in a few weeks, so make sure to peep the TechCrunch channel if that’s your jam.

And we did a special episode on the SPAC boom, if you are into financial arcana. For more on SPACs –> here.

The Equity crew tried something new this week, namely centering our main conversation around a theme that we’re keeping tabs on: The resilience of tech during the current pandemic-led recession.

Starting with the recent economic news, it’s surprising that tech’s layoffs have slowed to a crawl. And, as we’ve recently seen, there’s still plenty of money flowing into startups, even if there are some dips present on a year-over-year basis. Why are things still pretty good for startups, and pretty good for major tech companies? We have a few ideas, like the acceleration of the digital transformation (more here, and here), and software eating the world. The latter concept, of course, is related to the former.

After that it was time to go through some neat funding rounds from the week, including:

Dumpling raising $6.5 million to help individual shoppers build their own Instacart.Kibbo’s shot at making the #vanlife happen for more folks, something that we think is a good fit for the pandemic and the mobile professional.Sora’s $5.3 million raise for no-code HR connective tissue, something that I was rather bullish on but drew some chat about no-code itself, and if the trend is more hype than substance.

All that and I have a newsletter launching this weekend that if you read, you will automatically be 100% cooler. It’s called the TechCrunch Exchange, and you can snag it for free here.

Earlier this week, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) reported its fiscal fourth quarter results that surpassed all market expectations. Growth in Teams, Cloud, and Gaming segments helped drive growth for the...

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on stage. How do you define pre-seed and how do you define seed? Where are you comfortable? Do you need a proof of concept? What do you need? Do you need paying...

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The Not Company, Latin America’s leading contender in the plant-based meat and dairy substitute market, is about to close on an $85 million round of funding that would value it at $250 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

The latest round of funding comes on the heels of a series of successes for the Santiago-based business. In the two years since NotCo launched on the global stage, the company has expanded beyond its mayonnaise product into milk, ice cream and hamburgers. Other products, including a chicken meat substitute, are also on the product roadmap, according to people familiar with the company.

NotCo is already selling several products in Chile, Argentina and Latin America’s largest market — Brazil — and has signed a blockbuster deal with Burger King to be the chain’s supplier of plant-based burgers. It’s in this Burger King deal that NotCo’s approach to protein formulation is paying dividends, sources said. The company is responsible for selling 48 sandwiches per store per day in the locations where it’s supplying its products, according to one person familiar with the data. That figure outperforms Impossible Foods per-store sales, the person said.

NotCo is also now selling its burgers in grocery stores in Argentina and Chile. And while the company is not break-even yet, sources said that by December 2021 it could be — or potentially even cash flow positive.

With the growth both in sales and its diversification into new products, it’s little wonder that investors have taken note.

Sources said that the consumer brand-focused private equity firm L Catterton Partners and the Biz Stone-backed Future Positive were likely investors in the new financing round for the company. Previous investors in NotCo include Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; the London-based CPG investment firm, The Craftory; IndieBio; and SOS Ventures.

Alternatives to animal products are a huge (and still growing) category for venture investors. Earlier this month Perfect Day closed on a second tranche of $160 million for that company’s latest round of financing, bringing that company’s total capital raised to $361.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Perfect Day then turned around and launched a consumer food business called the Urgent Company.

These recent rounds confirm our reporting in Extra Crunch about where investors are focusing their time as they try to create a more sustainable future for the food industry. Read more about the path they’re charting.

Meanwhile, large food chains continue to experiment with plant-based menu items and push even further afield into cell-based meat using cultures from animals. KFC recently announced that it would be expanding its experiment with Beyond Meat’s chicken substitute in the U.S. — and would also be experimenting with cultured meat in Moscow.

Behind all of this activity is an acknowledgement that consumer tastes are changing, interest in plant-based diets are growing, and animal agriculture is having profound effects on the world’s climate.

As the website ClimateNexus notes, animal agriculture is the second-largest contributor to human-made greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuels. It’s also a leading cause of deforestation, water and air pollution and biodiversity loss.

There are 70 billion animals raised annually for human consumption, which occupy one-third of the planet’s arable and habitable land surface, and consume 16% of the world’s freshwater supply. Reducing meat consumption in the world’s diet could have huge implications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If Americans were to replace beef with plant-based substitutes, some studies suggest it would reduce emissions by 1,911 pounds of carbon dioxide.

One little-known home and retail automation startup might seem like an unlikely candidate to help combat the ongoing pandemic. But its founder says its technology can do just that, even if it wasn’t the company’s original plan.

Butlr, a spin-out of the MIT Media Lab, uses a mix of wireless, battery-powered hardware and artificial intelligence to track people’s movements indoors without violating their privacy. The startup uses ceiling-mounted sensors to detect individuals’ body heat to track where a person walks and where they might go next. The use cases are near-endless. The sensors can turn on mood-lighting or air conditioning when it detects movement, help businesses understand how shoppers navigate their stores, determine the wait-time in the queues at the checkout and even sound the alarm if it detects a person after-hours.

By using passive infrared sensors to detect only body heat, the sensors don’t know who you are — only where you are and where you’re heading. The tracking stops as soon as you leave the sensor’s range, like when you leave a store.

The technology is in high demand. Butlr says it’s delivering its technology to some 200,000 retail stores, not least because it’s far cheaper than the more privacy-invading — and expensive — alternatives, like surveillance cameras and facial recognition.

But when the pandemic hit, most of those stores closed — as effectively did entire cities and nations — to counter the ongoing threat from of COVID-19. But those stores would have to open again, and so Butlr got back to work.

Butlr’s co-founder Honghao Deng told TechCrunch that it began retooling its technology to help support stores opening again.

The company quickly rolled out new software features — like maximum occupancy and queue management — to help stores with sensors already installed cope with the new but ever-changing laws and guidance that businesses had to comply with.

Deng said that the sensors can make sure no more than the allowed number of people can be in a store at once, and make sure that staff are protected from customers by helping to enforce social distancing rules. Customers can also see live queue data to help them pick a less-crowded time to shop, said Deng.

All these things before a pandemic might have sounded, frankly, a little dull. Fast-forward to the middle of a pandemic and you’re probably thankful for all the help — and the technology — you can get.

Butlr tested its new features in China at the height of the pandemic’s rise in February, and later rolled out to its global customers, including in the United States. Deng said Butlr’s technology is already helping customers at supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market and the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi to help them reopen while minimizing the risk to others.

It’s a pivot that’s paid off. Last month Butlr raised $1.2 million in seed funding, just as the pandemic was reaching its peak in the United States.

Nobody knew a pandemic was coming, not least Deng. And as the pandemic spread, businesses have suffered. If it wasn’t for quick thinking, Butlr might’ve been another startup that succumbed to the pandemic.

Instead, the startup is probably going to help save lives — and without compromising anyone’s privacy.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sonali Vijayavargiya, Founder and Managing Partner, Augment Ventures. She discussed her firm’s investment approach, including early exits. Siply As...

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Quantum computing is at an interesting point. It’s at the cusp of being mature enough to solve real problems. But like in the early days of personal computers, there are lots of different companies trying different approaches to solving the fundamental physics problems that underly the technology, all while another set of startups is looking ahead and thinking about how to integrate these machines with classical computers — and how to write software for them.

At Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18, we will have a panel with D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz, Quantum Machines co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan and IonQ president and CEO Peter Chapman. The leaders of these three companies are all approaching quantum computing from different angles, yet all with the same goal of making this novel technology mainstream.

D-Wave may just be the best-known quantum computing company thanks to an early start and smart marketing in its early days. Alan Baratz took over as CEO earlier this year after a few years as chief product officer and executive VP of R&D at the company. Under Baratz, D-Wave has continued to build out its technology — and especially its D-Wave quantum cloud service. Leap 2, the latest version of its efforts, launched earlier this year. D-Wave’s technology is also very different from that of many other efforts thanks to its focus on quantum annealing. That drew a lot of skepticism in its early days, but it’s now a proven technology and the company is now advancing both its hardware and software platform.

Like Baratz, IonQ’s Peter Chapman isn’t a founder either. Instead, he was the engineering director for Amazon Prime before joining IonQ in 2019. Under his leadership, the company raised a $55 million funding round in late 2019, which the company extended by another $7 million last month. He is also continuing IonQ’s bet on its trapped ion technology, which makes it relatively easy to create qubits and which, the company argues, allows it to focus its efforts on controlling them. This approach also has the advantage that IonQ’s machines are able to run at room temperature, while many of its competitors have to cool their machines to as close to zero Kelvin as possible, which is an engineering challenge in itself, especially as these companies aim to miniaturize their quantum processors.

Quantum Machines plays in a slightly different part of the ecosystem from D-Wave and IonQ. The company, which recently raised $17.5 million in a Series A round, is building a quantum orchestration platform that combines novel custom hardware for controlling quantum processors — because once quantum machines reach a bit more maturity, a standard PC won’t be fast enough to control them — with a matching software platform and its own QUA language for programming quantum algorithms. Quantum Machines is Itamar Sivan’s first startup, which he launched with his co-founders after getting his Ph.D. in condensed matter and material physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Come to Disrupt 2020 and hear from these companies and others on September 14-18. Get a front-row seat with your Digital Pro Pass for just $245 or with a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package for $445. Prices are increasing next week, so grab yours today to save up to $300.

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The outages at RBS, TSB and Visa left millions of people unable to deposit their paychecks, pay their bills, acquire new loans and more. As a result, the House of Commons’ Treasury Select Committee (TSC) began an investigation of the U.K. finance industry and found the “current level of financial services IT failures is unacceptable.” Following this, the Bank of England (BoE), Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) decided to take action and set a standard for operational resiliency.

While policies can often feel burdensome and detached from reality, these guidelines are reasonable steps that any company across any industry can exercise to improve the resilience of their software systems.

The BoE standard breaks down to these five steps:

Identify critical business services based on those that end users rely on most.Set a tolerance level for the amount of outage time during an incident that is acceptable for that service, based on what utility the service provides.Test if the firm is able to stay within that acceptable period of time during real-life scenarios.Involve management in the reporting and sign-off of these thresholds and tests.Take action to improve resiliency against the different scenarios where feasible.

Following this process aligns with best practices in architecting resilient systems. Let’s break each of these steps down and discuss how chaos engineering can help.

Identify critical business services

The operational resilience framework recommends focusing on the services that serve external customers. While internal applications are important for productivity, this customer-first mentality is sound advice for determining a starting place for reliability efforts. While it’s ultimately up to the business to weigh the criticality of the different services they offer, the ones necessary to make payments, retrieve payments, investing or insuring against risks are all recommended priorities.

When it comes to choosing a tech stack, the decisions you make today could have a cascading impact for years. On one hand you want to be cool and modern, but on the other, you want to build with technology you know — and sometimes getting to market is more important than riding the latest technology wave.

The problem is that your decisions can have consequences that result in technical debt, the concept that as you make one decision, you have to pay a debt of sorts to fix underlying structural problems in the code as the result of those decisions you made early on.

Before you start freaking out, it’s something that happens to every company and is really impossible to avoid — so you make your choices and get your product out the door.

At this week’s TechCrunch Early Stage conference, HappyFunCorp CEO and co-founder Ben Schippers and CTO Jon Evans spoke about choosing the optimal tech stack. The pair have built custom software for companies like Amazon, Samsung, WeWork and AMC, so they know a thing or two about the subject.

What to consider before choosing

Evans says startups must weigh several key factors when choosing a tech stack, but development speed tops the list. “The single most key thing about your tech stack is speed,” he said. “The right stack will give you the most speed, compared to the alternatives.”

But early choices have other implications. “In the medium- to long-run, you have to be conscious about running up what we call technical debt, which is really the side effects of a spaghetti nest of bad code that is tightly coupled and leads to negative side effects all over the place,” he said.

The last few years haven’t proven too friendly to hardware companies in the augmented reality world. Enterprise-centric efforts like ODG, Daqri and Meta flared out, Magic Leap raised massive amounts of cash only to scale back its dreams this year in the face of looming disaster and just about every other hardware player has suffered some form of an identity crisis. As someone who covers the space closely, this has led me to keep an eye on companies I’ve covered that seem to have been a bit quiet.

Over the past three years, every few months or so, I’d check in on the AR startup Mira just to see if they had any updates. I met with them in 2017 after they announced they’d raised funding from Sequoia, notable as one of that firms few public AR/VR investments. Back then, Mira pitched its device as a Google Cardboard for AR, something that could give people a lightweight introduction to the world of augmented reality. They teased both workplace and at-home use cases, but there was an early skew toward approaching developers building consumer apps.

Over on Extra Crunch, read about why the first wave of AR hardware companies died and what the next generation of startups need to do to succeed.

The company has been keeping a pretty low profile since it publicly launched in 2017, but they’re finally ready to give some updates.

Mira now tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised about $10 million worth of funding over a few top-ups, which the team is collectively deeming as a seed extension round. Sequoia and SF-based Happiness Ventures led these financings, of which the startup did not break out the specific terms. The team has now raised just under $13 million to date. Mira has used this cash to refocus its business and refine its hardware.

By late-2018, the founders had decided to move their focus solely toward industrial rollouts of their headset.

“As we looked across the consumer landscape, as we looked across the industrial landscape, as we looked across government, it became very clear that where that value-driven use case is ripe today is much more in the industrial landscape,” Mira co-founder and COO Matt Stern told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company’s Prism Pro headset sidesteps the technical complexity that has been a major stumbling block for previous entrants in the space that have struggled with their devices holding up in the field. Mira’s device is about as simple as the task requires, integrating a slot-in design for users to pop in an older-generation iPhone and physically connect it to a head-mounted camera that allows workers to scan items and markers. There are a number of advantages to this type of device. It’s cheaper, it’s simpler to operate and it’s easier to integrate into a company’s enterprise device management structure.

Compared to the experience a worker might get with a HoloLens, there’s a much lower ceiling to the capabilities of these devices. The Prism Pro hardware eschews what some consider “true AR” capabilities, dumping spatial tracking and mapping, and opting instead to augment your vision with a heads-up display window. The added camera is for scanning items, not generating depth maps so that holograms can be projected onto a space’s geometry, i.e. there are no floating whales to be had here. This isn’t a dramatic rethinking of the future of work so much as it’s a rethinking of form factors already being used; it’s a tablet for your face that you can control with taps and your gaze.

The AR world is still certainly a rough place to be building a startup, but Mira’s founders feel good about where the company has ended up after refocusing on manufacturing, especially within the competitive landscape.

“I can’t confirm this because I don’t work at Magic Leap, but we have literally onboarded more customers to our platform that are using our device every single day than companies like Magic Leap that have raised literally hundreds of times our funding,” CEO Ben Taft tells TechCrunch. “And it’s just been by trying to grow a business in a conservative manner and actually keeping up with the rate of adoption.”

As an early-stage investor, Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko looks for two breakthroughs in order to invest in a startup: The first happens in the value-seeking stage of a startup’s journey and the second occurs in its growth-seeking phase.

“There are really two stages to building a company,” Miura-Ko said at the TechCrunch Early Stage virtual event earlier this week. “One is what we call value-seeking mode, and this is where you’re really trying to figure out what the company actually looks like, including what’s the product? Who are you selling to? How do you price it? All of these things are still being discovered in the value-seeking mode.”

After founders have answered those questions, they can move into growth-seeking mode, she said. That’s the point when startups are trying to attract as many customers as possible.

Throughout these two distinct stages, Miura-Ko says she looks for the two breakthroughs: the inflection insight and product-market fit.

Inflection insights

The idea of an inflection insight, Miura-Ko said, is a relatively new framework Floodgate is exploring. Often times, she said founders need to ride some massive, exponential curves that allow their businesses to grow sustainably and scale.

These inflections have two parts to it: cause and impact. The causes are generally either technological (cloud, 5G), regulatory (GDPR, AV regulation) or societal (belief or behavior shifts). On the impact side, products and distribution may become cheaper or faster, while also presenting new use cases or customers, she said.

“Or even more interesting, you have something that was impossible that now is possible,” she said. “And that is an exponential impact that you could ride on.”

But simply finding that inflection insight doesn’t mean you should create a business. What founders must do next is determine if the insight is right and nonconsensus.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Vincent Diallo was recorded in June 2020. Vincent...

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Today’s 495th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, July 23 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. PASSWORD:...

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