According to a recent report, the global digital health market size is expected to grow from $103.1 billion at 25% CAGR to reach $385.8 billion by 2025. Digital health industry is the integration of...

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Sramana Mitra: Do you get paid commissions on the full price? Ning Liang: Yes, we do.  Sramana Mitra: What is the situation with the semi-legal immigrants in the country – people who do...

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The wider field of cyber security — not just defending networks, but identifying fraudulent activity — has seen a big boost in activity in the last few months, and that’s no surprise. The global health pandemic has led to more interactions and transactions moving online, and the contractions we’re feeling across the economy and society have led some to take more desperate and illegal actions, using digital challenges to do it.

Today, a UK company called Quantexa — which has built a machine learning platform branded “Contextual Decision Intelligence” (CDI) that analyses disparate data points to get better insight into nefarious activity, as well as to (more productively) build better profiles of a company’s entire customer base — is raising a growth round of funding to address that opportunity.

The London-based startup has picked up $64.7 million, a Series C the it will be using to continue building out both its tools and the use cases for applying them, as well as expanding geographically, specifically in North America, Asia-Pacific and more European territories.

The mission, said Vishal Marria, Quantexa’s founder and CEO, is to “connect the dots to make better business decisions.”

The startup built its business on the back of doing work for major banks and others in the financial services sector, and Marria added that the plan will be to continue enhancing tools for that vertical while also expanding into two growing opportunities: working with insurance and government/public sector organizations.

The backers in this round speak to how Quantexa positions itself in the market, and the traction it’s seen to date for its business. It’s being led by Evolution Equity Partners — a VC that specialises in innovative cybersecurity startups — with participation also from previous backers Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, HSBC and Accenture, as well as new backers ABN AMRO Ventures. HSBC, Accenture and ABN AMRO are all strategic investors working directly with the startup in their businesses.

Altogether, Quantexa has “thousands of users” across 70+ countries, it said, with additional large enterprises including Standard Chartered, OFX and Dunn & Bradstreet.

The company has now raised some $90 million to date, and reliable sources close to the company tell us that the valuation is “well north” of $250 million — which to me sounds like it’s between $250 million and $300 million.

Marria said in an interview that he initially got the idea for Quantexa — which I believe may be a creative portmanteau of “quantum” and “context” — when he was working as an executive director at Ernst & Young and saw “many challenges with investigations” in the financial services industry.

“Is this a money launderer?” is the basic question that investigators aim to answer, but they were going about it, “using just a sliver of information,” he said. “I thought to myself, this is bonkers. There must be a better way.”

That better way, as built by Quantexa, is to solve it in the classic approach of tapping big data and building AI algorithms that help, in Marria’s words, connect the dots.

As an example, typically, an investigation needs to do significantly more than just track the activity of one individual or one shell company, and you need to seek out the most unlikely connections between a number of actions in order to build up an accurate picture. When you think about it, trying to identify, track, shut down and catch a large money launderer (a typical use case for Quantexa’s software) is a classic big data problem.

While there is a lot of attention these days on data protection and security breaches that leak sensitive customer information, Quantexa’s approach, Marria said, is to sell software, not ingest proprietary data into its engine to provide insights. He said that these days deployments typically either are done on premises or within private clouds, rather than using public cloud infrastructure, and that when Quantexa provides data to complement its customers’ data, it comes from publicly available sources (for example Companies House filings in the UK).

There are a number of companies offering services in the same general area as Quantexa. They include those that present themselves more as business intelligence platforms that help detect fraud (such as Looker) through to those that are secretive and present themselves as AI businesses working behind the scenes for enterprises and governments to solve tough challenges, such as Palantir, through to others focusing specifically on some of the use cases for the technology, such as ComplyAdvantage and its focus on financial fraud detection.

Marria says that it has a few key differentiators from these. First is how its software works at scale: “It comes back to entity resolution that [calculations] can be done in real time and at batch,” he said. “And this is a platform, software that is easily deployed and configured at a much lower total cost of ownership. It is tech and that’s quite important in the current climate.”

And that is what has resonated with investors.

“Quantexa’s proprietary platform heralds a new generation of decision intelligence technology that uses a single contextual view of customers to profoundly improve operational decision making and overcome big data challenges,” said Richard Seewald, founding and managing partner of Evolution, in a statement. “Its impressive rapid growth, renowned client base and potential to build further value across so many sectors make Quantexa a fantastic partner whose team I look forward to working with.” Seewald is joining the board with this round.

Cowboy has raised a $26 million (€23 million) Series B funding round from Exor Seeds, HCVC, Isomer Capital, Future Positive Capital and Index Ventures. The startup has been manufacturing premium electric bikes and selling them directly to consumers around Europe.

The company recently released the third generation of its flagship bike, which is all about refinements and iterating on its existing offering. If you haven’t seen one in a European city, it features an iconic triangle-shaped aluminum frame with integrated pill-shaped lights.

With a focus on simplicity, there are no gears or buttons to control motor assistance. The motor kicks in automatically when you start pedaling. Some of the key features of the Cowboy bike are the carbon belt, custom-made tires with a puncture protection layer and the detachable battery.

Cowboy bikes are also connected bikes thanks to some electronic components. For instance, you can lock your bike when you’re not using it. The company is currently testing auto-unlock, a feature that takes advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy to detect your phone.

By combining data from the accelerometer, the speed of the bike and your pedal power, Cowboy will also soon automatically detect crash and notify an emergency contact.

In addition to designing a bike, Cowboy is also a service company. It has built a network of repair partners and offers test rides to potential clients. It is now available in dozens of European cities.

The company also offers an insurance product thanks a partnership with Qover. For €8 per month, you can receive real-time notification whenever someone is trying to steal your bike and you’re insured against theft. For €10 per month, you’re also insured against damage.

With today’s funding round, the startup plans to hire over 30 people in the next six months, expand its network of test rides and scale production operations with Flex.

Partipost, a Singapore-based marketing startup that lets anyone with a social media profile sign up for influencer campaigns, has raised $3.5 million in new funding. The round was led by SPH Ventures, the investment arm of publisher Singapore Press Holdings, with participation from Quest Ventures and other investors.

The funding will be used to grow Partipost’s current operations in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan, and expand into Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, other Southeast Asian markets with heavy social media usage. Since launching its mobile app in 2018, Partipost says it has added about 200,000 influencers to its platform, and that over the past 12 months, it has helped conduct 2,500 social media marketing campaigns for more than 850 brands, including Adidas, Arnott’s, Red Bull, Chope and Gojek.

According to benchmark report released in March by Influencer Marketing Hub, the influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth about $9.7 billion in 2020, with companies spending increasing amounts on social media campaigns and working with more “micro-influencers.” To serve them, the report said that more than 380 new influencer marketing agencies and platforms were launched last year, joining a roster of companies that already include AspireIQ, Upfluence, BuzzSumo, SparkToro and Inzpsire.me, to name just a few examples.

While most of these companies focus on helping brands identify the influencers with the widest social media reach, Partipost lets anyone sign up to take part in a campaign.

“Partipost’s main difference is that we believe that everyone can be an influencer,” founder and chief executive officer Jonathan Eg told TechCrunch. “Even if you have 200 followers, you can be one. We want to create a new market that we believe will be the future. Everyone can post on social media, write a review or give some feedback and be paid for it.”

“We want to empower everyone to monetize off their own data and influence and not just allow the big tech companies to do so,” he added.

Aspiring influencers browse brand campaigns on Partipost’s app and apply to take part by submitting a post draft. If the brand approves it, the user can then go ahead and post it on their social media profiles.

The amount of cash they earn is based on how much engagement each post receives. According to the company’s website, most campaigns require a minimum of 200 followers or more, and successful users can earn an average of $5 to $150 per campaign, depending on the brand’s payout structure.

One of Partipost’s selling points for brands is that it enables them to sign up thousands of influencers for a campaign in a single day, help them react quickly to online trends. Part of the funding will also be used to build data tools to help brands match campaigns with Partipost users more efficiently. The company says it expects to increase its base of aspiring influencers to one million within the next 18 months.

As part of the funding, SPH Ventures chief executive officer Chua Boon Ping will join Partipost’s board, while Quest Ventures partner Jeffrey Seah will become an observer.

In a media statement, Chua said, “Social influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing segments within Digital marketing. Hence, we are very excited to lead Partipost’s Series A round to further accelerate its growth. We are impressed by Partipost’s strong traction in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan as a young startup and look forward to partnering it to scale to new markets.”

When you need a loan, the cost and speed of getting it can be as critical to get right as the financing itself, a principle that might be even more relevant today in our shaky pandemic-hit economy than ever before. Today, a company that proposes to cut both the time and price for securing financing, with a platform, initially aimed at SMBs, that lets business owners put up their home property as collateral to get the loan, is announcing a funding round to expand its business.

Selina Finance, which provides loans to small and medium businesses in the form of flexible credit facilities — you pay back only what you borrow, and you do that over time, rather than in one lump sum — that are backed by the value of your personal home, is today announcing that it has raised £42 million ($53 million) — £12 million in equity and £30 million in debt to distribute as loans. The company says it plans to raise significantly more debt in the coming months as its business expands.

The funding is coming from several investors, including Picus Capital and Global Founders Capital — two firms that are tied in part to the Samwer brothers, which built the Rocket Internet e-commerce incubator in Berlin. The company’s valuation is not being disclosed.

London-based Selina plans to use the funding in a couple of areas: first, to continue growing its business in the UK, which was founded by Andrea Olivari, Hubert Fenwick and Leonard Benning and launched in June 2019; and second, to start the process of opening up to other markets in Europe.

Selina today focuses on SMEs whose applications qualify as “prime” (as opposed to sub-prime). They can borrow up to £1 million in funds — the average amount is significantly less, £150,000, says Olivari — with interest rates starting at 4.95% APR. That undercuts the rates on typical unsecured loans. Selina is also in the process of getting a license to expand its offering to consumer borrowers, too.

We’ve moved on from the days when property investing was so stable that “safe as houses” was a common expression to mean absolute reliability. But for most people, their properties continue to represent the single-biggest asset that they own and thus become a key part of how a person might construct their wider financial profile when it comes to borrowing money.

Selina’s tech essentially operates a kind of two-sided marketplace: on one hand, its algorithms process details about your property to determine its market value and how that will appreciate (or depreciate), and on the other, it’s evaluating the health of the SME business, and the purpose of the loan, to determine whether the borrower will be good for it. It’s only a year old and so it’s hard to say whether this is a strong record, but Benning notes that so far, no customers have defaulted on loans.

“We have the security of the home, yes,” he said, “but we only take credit-worthy customers to make sure the default scenario doesn’t happen. It’s something that we avoid at any cost. Technically there is a long process that leads to that outcome, but it almost never happens.” He noted that Selina has people on its team who have worked for sub-prime lenders, which gives them experience in helping to determine prime opportunities.

More generally, the idea of leveraging your property to raise capital — say, through a remortgage or loan against its value — are not new concepts: banks have been offering and distributing this kind of financing for years. The issue that Selina is addressing is that typically these deals come with high interest rates and commissions, and might take six to eight weeks from application to approval and finally loan. Selina’s pitch is that it can bring that down to five days, or possibly less.

“It’s critical that we can make a loan in five days to be be nimble and accurate, because this is one area where banks break down,” said Fenwick. “It can take two weeks to arrange for someone to walk around on behalf of a bank to make a valuation. It’s just a backwards and archaic process. We can use big data and tap different areas and dynamics all that into a model to assess the valuation of a property with a low margin of error.”

Selina is not the only tech company tackling this opportunity — specifically, Figure, the startup founded by Mike Cagney formerly of SoFi, is also providing loans to individuals against the value of their property, among other services. And for those who have followed other commerce startups financed by the Samwers, you could even say that there is a hint of cloning going on here, with even the sites of the two bearing some similarities. But for now at least Selina seems to be the only one of its kind in the UK, and for now that spells opportunity.

“Selina Finance is bringing much-needed innovation to the UK lending space by allowing customers to access the equity locked up in their residential property, seamlessly and on flexible terms,” said Robin Godenrath, MD at Picus Capital, in a statement. “The team impressed us with their strong focus on building a fully digital customer experience and have already achieved great product-market fit with their business loan use case. We’re excited and confident that Selina’s consumer proposition will also become an attractive alternative in the consumer lending space.”

How’s your 60-second pitch working for ya? Could it stand a refresh? Get ready to learn new and better ways to make your pitch more effective at opening doors to opportunity. Step one: register here — it won’t cost you a dime.

Step two: tune in and join us tomorrow, July 23 at 4:30 p.m. ET / 1:30 p.m. PT, for the next Pitchers & Pitches competition. We randomly chose five Digital Startup Alley exhibitors to bring the heat — in the form of their best 60-second pitch — in front of a panel of expert judges. We’ll name all the names in just a minute.

Note: Anyone can attend Pitchers & Pitches, but only companies exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley during Disrupt 2020 are eligible to pitch.

The invaluable critique, feedback and advice pitchers receive will help them take their elevator pitch to new heights — a great way to prepare for showcasing their tech at Disrupt 2020. Not pitching? No problem — you can apply what you learn to your own business and take your elevator pitch up a few more floors.

Here are five more excellent reasons to tune in:

The founders of the winning startup get a consulting session with cela, a company that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help scale their businesses.

Okay, let’s get to the judges for this session. We’ve tapped the experienced minds of two TechCrunch editors — Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm. Rounding out the panel we have two top featured VCs — Monique Idlett, of Reign Ventures and Jess Morris Jr., general partner and founder of Chapter One VC. They’ll drop a whole lot of knowledge to help you impress potential investors and customers alike.

Here are the five pitchers currently warming up in the bullpen and ready to take the mound in tomorrow’s competition:

Mnemonic AI

Timshel

IVORY & GOLD

Lamienins

ZeBrand Inc. 

The next Pitchers & Pitches takes place tomorrow, July 23 at 4:30 p.m. ET / 1:30 p.m. PT. Register here for free. Don’t miss your chance to improve your pitch, bring the heat and unlock more opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

I have struggled for years about whether or not to write a piece like this.

Speaking out about racism goes against every lesson I have learned since I was the only Black kid in my first-grade class in the Boston suburbs:

Save candid conversations about race for Black people. You’re being a victim. People will think you’re whining or making excuses. They’re not interested. Don’t make white people feel uncomfortable.

In a professional environment, speaking up could be career suicide. But now is not the time to be silent.

The startup I founded, Indenseo, is a data and analytics software insurtech company that provides automated underwriting services, software and analytics services to the insurance industry.

Despite strong customer relationships and support from angel investors, we didn’t complete building solutions and moving the company forward until we stopped taking unproductive pitch meetings with VCs. Some of my [white] colleagues who attended those meetings characterized these encounters as disrespectful and dismissive, but for me, they were par for the course.

Black founders have a better chance playing pro sports than landing VC funding

I was raised by a single mother in West Medford, Massachusetts, and worked my way through Harvard, located about five miles away. Before starting Indenseo, I worked for @Road, a fleet management telematics company that was acquired by Trimble, a company that says it transforms “the way the world works by delivering products and services that connect the physical and digital worlds.” There, I led a team that pioneered the sale of telematics data, which started with using data for traffic predictions and expanded to other markets, including insurance.

At Trimble, I saw the difficulty legacy insurance carriers faced when they tried to incorporate new types of data into their underwriting and business processes; I started Indenseo to solve this problem by combining deep insurance industry experience with the nimbleness of a startup.

I knew fundraising would be a challenge: Commercial auto insurance has been unprofitable for years, and industry executives would be naturally skeptical that my solution would make it better. As my insurance industry friends said, “you sure picked a hard problem to solve.”

Even as a first-time founder, I did not anticipate how difficult it would be to raise venture funding, but the experience offered some insights into why so few Black entrepreneurs are funded by VCs.

Insurance is not the most mainstream venture category, though in recent years many insurtech companies have received funding. And VCs are not accustomed to seeing Black founders in this space. The overall scarcity of Black founders suggests that they’re not used to seeing many of us, period.

The odds of winning a venture round are low for everyone, but Black founders have a better chance playing pro sports than they do landing venture investments.

According to a Harvard study, between 1990 and 2016, just 0.4% of the entrepreneurs who received funding were Black. That’s 188 Black entrepreneurs, versus 34,000 white entrepreneurs in total, or about seven per year. In 2016, nine Black NFL quarterbacks started at least one game during the season. Should anyone wonder why ambitious young Black men pursue sports careers?

I got the meetings and pitched Indenseo to investors in Silicon Valley, New York City, Chicago and Boston. I expected that my experience, my best-in-class team, the compelling Indeseo proposition, market fit, and the financial and advisory backing of notable insurance executives would land the dollars, despite the odds. I was wrong.

One recurring phenomenon we frequently encountered were dismissive and disrespectful investors (in the words of a white colleague). When I had one disappointing meeting after another, people in my multiracial network — many with extensive fundraising experience — told me it didn’t make sense. I’d resisted getting distracted by race as a factor, but white colleagues were saying that something wasn’t adding up.

As Toni Morrison said, “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” My own lived experience is that it’s an added factor that Black entrepreneurs have to manage.

I assumed most investors were jerks, but my white colleagues were shocked

I followed advice given to many Black founders: take a white colleague to your pitch meeting. I brought colleagues who had done a lot of fundraising themselves; some of these meetings were with their contacts. I tried this strategy dozens of times, and my colleagues were repeatedly shocked at the treatment we received.

I assumed most investors were jerks in pitch meetings, but they told me the level of disrespect and dismissiveness I received was not typical.

But if I lose my temper, I’d likely be labeled as just another angry Black man.

I did let my frustration show once when I directed a VC’s attention to the milestones we’d met and industry support we had gathered.

“What does it take for us to get a check from you?” I asked. His response: There is nothing you can say or do to get me to invest, but if you get another VC to lead the round, call me.

In another conversation with a VC, I pointed out the lack of diversity in both the ranks of investors and the entrepreneurs they choose to fund. He replied that Silicon Valley has produced the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history in the last 25 years. Why do we need to change anything?

GW Chew is a friend and a Black founder who was also having difficulty getting VC funding for his vegan meat company, Something Better Foods. He approached investors to raise funds to meet the fast expanding demand for his products. Talk about traction.

A white investor told Chew that if the founder/CEO were white, the company would have raised millions already. My friend told me he’s no longer talking to VCs and is raising funds from alternative sources.

Then there are the grifters. I don’t think Black founders are the only ones whose ideas get stolen after pitch meetings, but it happened to me.

We pitched a VC firm that had a consultant with an insurance background on their team to help evaluate the Indenseo opportunity. VCs don’t sign NDAs, but we did sign one with the consultant, who said Black founders can’t get companies funded but white founders can. (Yes, he said it.)

He later tried to ingratiate himself by saying he was considering investing too. Instead, he founded a company that copied our ideas. (So much for our NDA.)

Eventually, he told me, “I like your team. Call me when the wheels fall off.” When he announced his new company, we saw that he was backed by the VC who brought him into our meeting. He has since gone on to raise more than $40 million.

So why didn’t I sue him for violating the NDA? I consulted with some of our angel investors and they said we would be better off fighting them in the marketplace, given our limited time and resources. It wasn’t the first time our ideas were stolen.

When another company we pitched appropriated some of our ideas, my contact there informed his executives that they’d signed an NDA with Indenseo. Their reply: Indenseo doesn’t have the money to sue us. But they weren’t domain experts and we had left out much about our plans: They announced their launch in The Wall Street Journal, but as I expected, they failed.

I’ve never pitched at a VC firm that had a Black person in the room

Am I calling VCs racists? I don’t know what’s in their hearts, but I do know what’s in their numbers. Dealing with unconscious bias is difficult because as a Black entrepreneur trying to build a company, you know it exists and you have to figure out a way to manage around it. But it’s a subtle problem.

I don’t think VCs wake up in the morning and consciously decide not to invest in Black entrepreneurs or businesses intentionally choose not to buy from companies founded by Black entrepreneurs. But, the results of who receives investment and who doesn’t are quantifiable: few VC funds have Black employees or invest in companies started by Black founders.

I have never pitched at a VC firm that had a Black person in the room. And the pipeline excuse doesn’t work. There are Black people with technical degrees who aren’t hired at VC firms and white VC investment partners who earned liberal arts degrees.

Sure, there are funds started by Black VCs, but they encounter unconscious bias too when raising money. While more Black VCs with more capital is a crucial element of addressing underrepresentation, does that mean VC firms that aren’t founded by Black investors don’t have to change anything?

Deciding to stop the time-consuming VC pitch process and go in another direction to fund and develop the company was quite liberating. Moving forward, we’re free to manage our startup without wondering how VCs will view our decisions in the future when we seek funding.

We raised money from angel investors (including the former CEO of one of the world’s leading analytics software companies and his wife). In addition to money, it expanded our knowledge and it improved our products. Another lesson learned: Angel investors may be more helpful to your company than VCs.

The ultimate judgment on Indenseo’s products and team will be rendered by customers, partners and domain experts. The insurance industry has unique metrics that determine a company’s profitability. If you’re selling analytics software and services, either your solution is helping improve those metrics or it isn’t. The insurance industry is validating our market fit and survival skills.

Don’t let VCs be the gatekeepers of your success

I was able to build Indenseo without VCs because the insurance industry operates differently from VCs. One of the keys to success in the insurance industry is developing trust. Insurance isn’t a tangible product. It offers the promise that when a customer pays its premiums the insurance company will be able to support them when they file a claim. Without trust, a company can’t succeed in the industry.

There is a process to get insurance industry trust, and many senior executives in the industry are reluctant to invest the time in startups that’s necessary for them to get that trust. That’s because they aren’t convinced the startup will persevere to get through the process of getting that trust. We are able to get time with those executives because they trust our team and they don’t doubt that it’s worth their time to talk to Indenseo. They know we won’t fold when times are difficult.

A change I’ve seen since I started Indenseo that works in our favor is insurers don’t rely on VCs to act as a de facto screen for which insurtechs have the best teams and solutions. That’s because they don’t have confidence in investors’ judgments about insurtech companies.

Another lesson I’ve learned from my experiences: Don’t let VCs be the gatekeepers of your success. There are other funding sources, such as angel investors, corporate strategic investors, crowdfunding and more. There is funding outside the United States. Don’t overlook international investors: There is wealth in African countries. I found a way of funding the company that works for Indenseo.

We’ve developed Indenseo with angel investors and sweat equity. The key to our success is the amazing team, our advisory board and using capital efficiently. They remind me that you’re not the only one with an emotional investment in this company. When I started this company the only people in the insurance industry I knew were the people I had interacted with when I worked at Trimble.

Most of the people on our advisory board and team with insurance industry backgrounds are people I’ve met since I started Indenseo. It takes time to build those relationships. Because of them there is no corner of the commercial property casualty insurance industry we can’t access. The head of insurtech at a global reinsurance company told me that ours is the best balanced team of any insurtech company they’ve seen.

We are in the early stages of showing our flagship product, and it isn’t available for general release yet. Our VP of Engineering is telling me about a new concern: that we don’t take on too many customers too quickly.

Glimpse is giving Airbnb hosts a way to make extra money while also supplying their accommodations with new products.

The startup was founded by CEO Akash Raju, COO Anuj Mehta and CPO Kushal Negi, who all attended Purdue University together. It’s part of the current batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator — where, coincidentally or not, Airbnb is the most famous alum.

Raju said that he and his co-founders came up with the idea while they were still in school and working with brands to create pop-up shops on campus. They realized that many new, direct-to-consumer brands are looking to increase awareness, and they decided that Airbnbs were the perfect place to convince someone to try (for example) a new mattress or a new kind of coffee. After all, hotels are already in the product placement business.

If you’re an Airbnb host, you can sign up and then browse offers for free product samples. (If you really want to stock up, you can buy larger quantities at a discounted price.)

Glimpse works with you to showcase the products on your properties, and to email a digital “lookbook” highlighting the various products to guests at the beginning and end of their stay. You then earn a commission fee (Raju said $100 to $500 on average, though it can be even higher for big-ticket items) when these samples lead consumers to make a purchase.

Brands that have marketed themselves through the platform include the GhostBed mattress and Liquid Death water.

The startup first launched in March of this year — not exactly the best time for the travel business. Raju recalled, “We actually launched right before COVID started. After that, what we really spent a lot of time on was empathizing with hosts.”

In fact, some of Glimpse’s early partners stopped listing their properties for a while. But travel is on the rise again, including (or even especially) via Airbnb, and Raju said many of Glimpse’s 750 current properties are now fully booked through September. And given the lost income of the past few months, hosts might be even more interested than usual.

He added that the team will continue building out the platform with new features for product discovery and attribution, but he said, “The key thing that makes us unique is our emphasis on that in-home experience.”

Back in 2016, Mobalytics wowed the judges at Disrupt SF with its data-based coach for the exploding competitive gaming world, winning the Startup Battlefield. The company is building on the success of the past few years with a new funding round and a compelling new collaboration with Tobii that uses eye-tracking to provide powerful insights into gamers’ skills.

Mobalytics began with the idea that, by leveraging the in-game data of a competitive esport like League of Legends (LoL), they could provide objective feedback to players along the lines of how fast or effective they are in different situations. Quantifying things like survivability or teamplay provides an analogue to similar measures in physical sports.

“On an athlete you have all these measurements, like pulse oximeters, ECGs, the 40-yard dash,” said Amine Issa, co-founder and “Warchief of Science.” Not so much with PC games. Their challenge at that time was to take the LoL API provided by Riot and transform it into actionable feedback, which the company’s success in the years since suggests they managed to do.

But Issa had always wanted to use another, more direct and objective measurement of a gamer’s mental processes: eye tracking. And last year they began an internal project to evaluate doing just that, in partnership with eye-tracking hardware maker Tobii.

“If you know where someone is looking, it’s the closest thing to knowing what they’re thinking,” Issa said. “When you combine that with the larger picture you can put together something to help them along. So we spent six months conducting research, taking players of different levels and roles and studying their eye tracking data to find some metrics we could organize the platform around.”

Not surprisingly, there are characteristics of the highly skilled (and practiced) that set them apart, and the team was able to collect them into a set of characteristics that any player can relate to.

“We had to think about how to build a product that people want to use. One thing we learned after TechCrunch is that even a simple score from 0-100 doesn’t work for everyone. You need to provide the context for that. So with something like eye tracking, you’re getting 30 data points per second — how do you break that down in a way that players understand it?”

Talking to professional gamers and coaches during the study helped them form the main categories that Mobalytics now tracks with the aid of a Tobii device, like information processing, map awareness and tunnel vision.

“It’s important to be able to tell a narrative to people. Say you get ganked a lot,” said Issa, referring to the unfortunate occurrence of being picked off by enemy players while alone. “Why are you getting ganked? If your vision score is high but map awareness is low, that’s one thing. Did you know all the information and go in arrogantly, or were you not aware? League is a very complicated game, so players want to know, in this specific fight, what did I do wrong, and what should I have done instead?”

That second question is a tougher one (though perhaps AI MOBA players may have something to say about it), but the metrics are powerful in and of themselves. “Pros are fascinated by this technology,” Issa said. “There’s a lot of ‘I had no idea’ moments. Coaches have said, these are my fastest players but it’s cool to see that as a quantifiable variable.”

Tobii’s head of gaming, Martin Lindgren, echoed this feeling: “Pro teams aren’t interested in being told what to do. They want the data so they can draw their own conclusions.”

Tobii now has a gaming-focused eye-tracker and integrates with a number of AAA games, like Rise of the Tomb Raider, where it can be used in place of fiddly aiming using the analog sticks. As someone who’s bad at specifically that part of games, this is attractive to me, and Lindgren said opportunities like that are only increasing as gaming companies embrace both accessibility and try to stand out in a crowded market.

The companies have worked together to improve the eye-tracking coaching, for instance lowering the number of games a user must play before the system can accurately track their in-game actions; Lindgren said the collaboration with Mobalytics is ongoing — “definitely a long-term partnership” — in fact Tobii’s relationship with the founders predates their startup.

The ultimate goal of Mobalytics is to have a gaming assistant that adapts itself to your playing and preferences, making intelligent suggestions to improve your skills. That’s a ways off, but the company is getting the hang of it. Its first product, the LoL assistant, took a year to build, Issa said. A more recent one, for Legends of Runeterra, took three months. Teamfight Tactics took three weeks.

Admittedly it was more difficult to design one for Valorant, which, being a first-person shooter, is wildly different from the other games — but now that it’s done, a lot of that work could be applied to an assistant for Counter-Strike or Overwatch.

Expansion to other games and genres is the reason for raising an $11 million Series A, led by Almaz Capital and Cabra VC, with HP Tech Ventures, General Catalyst, GGV Capital, RRE Ventures, Axiomatic and T1 Esports participating.

“It was a very different experience from the post-TechCrunch one, where you’re in the spotlight and everyone’s throwing money your way,” said Issa. “But we’ve built a successful product on LoL, expanded to four games, today we have more than seven million monthly active users… Our plan is to double down on what’s worked for us and create the ultimate gaming companion.”

SaaS is hot in 2020. Tooling that helps facilitate remote work is hot in 2020. And we all know that anything related to video chatting in particular is on fire this year. In the midst of all three trends is Kudo, which just raised $6 million in a round led by Felicis.

But Kudo’s video chatting and conferencing tool with built-in support for translators and multiple audio streams wasn’t initially constructed for the COVID-19 era. It got started back in 2016, so let’s talk about how it got to where it is today before we talk about how much the pandemic and ensuing remote-work boom accelerated its growth by what the company described in a release as 3,500%.

Pain to proof to product

TechCrunch spoke to Fardad Zabetian, Kudo’s founder and CEO, earlier this week to learn about how his company got started. According to the executive, he started working on Kudo back in 2016 after feeling the need to add language support to what he calls decentralized meetings.

After getting a proof of concept (could interactive audio and video be compiled for remote participants with less than 500 milliseconds of latency?) in place, the company itself launched in 2017, and after more work its product was put into the market in September, 2018.

During that time, Kudo put together angel and friends-and-family money that Zabetian described as less than $1 million, meaning that the startup got a lot done without spending a lot. (In my experience, talking to founders over the last decade or so, that’s a good sign.)

All that work paid off this year when COVID-19 shook up the world, forcing companies to cancel business travel and instead lean on video conferencing solutions. Given the international nature of modern business — globalization is a fact, regardless of what nationalists want — the change in the world’s meeting landscape scooted demand toward Kudo.

Here’s how it works: Kudo provides a self-serve SaaS video conferencing solution, allowing any company to spin up meetings as they need. It also has a translator pool, and can supply humans to fill out a meeting’s needs if a customer wants. Or, customers can bring their own translators.

So, Kudo is SaaS with an optional services component, though given the lower margins inherent to services over software, I’d hazard that we should think of its services revenue as a helper to its SaaS incomes. There’s no need to fret about their impact on Kudo’s blended gross margins, in other words.

According to Zabetian, about three-quarters of its customers bring their own translators, while about a fourth hire them through Kudo’s cadre.

Growth

As noted, Kudo got into the market back in 2018, which means it was already selling its software in the pre-pandemic days. Lead investor Niki Pezeshki told TechCrunch that Kudo has “stepped up in a big way for its customers during the pandemic,” but that while COVID “has certainly accelerated Kudo’s growth, we think they are enabling a longer-term shift in the market by showing customers that it is possible to effectively run multilingual conferences and meetings without the hassle of international travel and all the planning that goes into it.”

Kudo was already right about where the world was going, then, even if the pandemic provided a boost.

That tailwind is evident in its round size, notably. Kudo’s CEO said that he set out to raise $2 million, not $6 million; the $4 million delta is indicative of a company that has become a competitive asset for the venture class to fight over.

And Kudo’s growth has brought with it notable financial benefits, including several months of cash flow positivity — something nearly unheard of amongst startups of its age and size. But the company will spend from its $6 million and push that line-item negative, it said. Kudo has 30 open positions today that it expects to fill in the next few quarters, including building out its sales and marketing functions, which to date it has not invested in (another good sign among startups is how long they can grow attractively without needing to spend heavily on sales and marketing). That won’t come cheap, in the short-term.

So that’s Kudo and its round. What we want to know next is its H1 2020 year-over-year revenue growth. Do write in if you know that number.

Ready to do everything in your power to keep your startup on track for success — and keep more of your hard-earned currency in your wallet? Listen up. Early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt 2020 ends in less than two weeks. Buy your pass before the bird expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, and you’ll save up to $300.

Disrupt 2020 will occur on September 14-18 — five full days of exploration, exhibition, education and connection. No matter your role in the startup universe, you’ll see innovative technologies, learn new skills, discover new resources, share ideas and network with people who can help your business move to the next level and beyond. And it all happens on a global scale.

A Digital PRO Pass is your ticket to everything Disrupt offers, including CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform. Based on a profile you create, CrunchMatch makes short work of finding and connecting you with people who share your business goals. The newly upgraded algorithm makes faster, more precise matches, and it gets smarter the more you use it.

It’s the perfect tool to help you meet Disrupt attendees from around the world. Use it as you explore hundreds of cutting-edge early-stage startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley. Meet founders, view product demos and uncover the latest innovations.

Want more? Okay — schedule 1:1 video meetings with potential investors and customers, showcase your innovative products, host private roundtable events or interview prospective employees.

I used CrunchMatch to schedule meetings, and the digital aspect made connecting easier. It helped me stay organized, meet people and still have time to take in a piece of everything at Disrupt. — JC Bodson, founder and CEO of Arbitrage Technologies.

If you like specifics, your Digital PRO Pass lets you view content from multiple stages as it happens, and it provides replays on demand. Our growing speaker roster includes top investors, founders and experts from across the startup ecosystem.

This is not a passive experience, folks. You get to engage with what’s happening while it’s happening. Ask questions and participate in polling during live-streamed sessions.

Don’t miss Startup Battlefield as this year’s cohort of extraordinary startups competes virtually for glory, massive media attention, investor affection and, of course, $100,000 in equity-free cash. Nothing virtual about those benefits, no ma’am.

Disrupt 2020 takes place from September 14-18, but you have less than two weeks to reap the lowest price. Choose the early bird’s smaller bill. Buy your pass before July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, and use the $300 savings to feather your nest.

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Reflect, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 class, is building a tool to automate website and web application testing, making it faster to get your site up and running without waiting for engineers to write testing code, or for human testers to run the site through its paces.

Company CEO and co-founder Fitz Nowlan says his startup’s goal is to allow companies to have the ease of use and convenience of manual testing, but the speed of execution of automated or code-based testing.

“Reflect is a no-code tool for creating automated tests. Typically when you change your website, or your web application, you have to test it, and you have the choice of either having your engineers build coded tests to run through and ensure the correctness of your application, or you can hire human testers to do it manually,” he said.

With Reflect, you simply teach the tool how to test your site or application by running through it once, and based on those actions, Reflect can create a test suite for you. “You enter your URL, and we load it in a browser in a virtual machine in the cloud. From there, you just use your application just like a normal user would, and by using your application, you’re telling us what is important to test,” Nowlan explained.

He adds, “Reflect will observe all of your actions throughout that whole interaction with that whole browser session. And then from those actions, it will distill that down into a repeatable machine executable test.”

Nowlan and co-founder Todd McNeal started the company in September 2019 after spending five years together at a digital marketing startup near Philadelphia, where they experienced problems with web testing first-hand.

They launched a free version of this product in April, just as we were beginning to feel the full force of the pandemic in the U.S, a point that was not lost on him. “We didn’t want to delay any longer and we just felt like, you know you got to get up there and swing the bat,” he said.

Today, the company has 20 paying customers, and he has found that the pandemic has helped speed up sales in some instances, while slowing it down in others.

He says the remote YC experience has been a positive one, and in fact he couldn’t have participated had they had to show up in California as they have families and homes in Pennsylvania.  He says that the remote nature of the current program forces you to be fully engaged mentally to get the most out of the program.

“It’s just a little more mental work to prepare yourself and to have the mental energy to stay locked in for a remote batch. But I think if you can get over that initial hump, the information flow and the knowledge sharing is all the same,” he said.

He says as technical founders, the program has helped them focus on the sales and marketing side of the equation, and taught them that it’s more than building a good product. You still have to go out there and sell it to build a company.

He says his short-term goal is to get as many people as he can using the platform, which will help them refine their ability to automate the test building. For starters, that involves recording activities on-screen, but over time they plan to layer on machine learning and that requires more data.

“We’re going to focus primarily over the next six to 12 months on growing our customer base — both paid and unpaid — and I really mean that we want people to come in and create tests. Even if they [use the free product], we’re benefiting from that creation of that test,” he said.

Dexterity emerged from stealth this week to announce its full-stack solution aimed at creating collaborative robotics systems. The hardware-software system is designed for a variety of different tasks, including bin picking and box packing, targeted at warehouse fulfillment and logistics needs.

The Bay Area-based startup has already built up significant support from the investment world, with $56.2 million raised to date, from a long list of backers, including Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Obvious Ventures, Pacific West Bank, B37 Ventures, Presidio (Sumitomo) Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and Stanford StartX.

The company was founded back in 2017 as an extension of CEO Samir Menon’s Stanford thesis, described by Dexterity thusly, “Menon worked on a control theory framework to describe how the human brain controls and coordinates the body, which serves as a model to distill human skill into mathematical programs that control robots in a graceful human-like manner.”

Part of the company’s appeal appears to be the versatility of the robotics, which are designed to work alongside their human counterparts and operate collaboratively. Among the early adopters for the system are an unnamed “global food manufacturer,” “a worldwide package delivery provider” and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

Dexterity says it’s also seen a boost from the push for essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many others in the robotics and automation fields, stating that its systems have been involved with the shipping of “half a million units of packaged food.”

We’ve all had annoyingly memorable experiences with websites — websites that invite you to subscribe to browser notifications or bombard you with pop-ups that ask for your email before you’ve even had a chance to look around. That’s no way to do customer service. Yet many brands still use these lead capture tactics, ones that often permanently turn off would-be customers.

The principle that underlies these tactics makes sense; brands want the chance to communicate with those visitors more personally on a channel like email. But a gap most brands never bridge is the one between how personal they want to get with a website visitor and how personal they are in their initial interaction with that visitor.

In my experience as a marketer, there are few better ways to bridge that gap than a thoughtful implementation of messenger tools, those chat bubbles many big brands use to offer real-time customer support.

Implementing this strategy alone has allowed me to help my clients recover millions of dollars in what would have been lost revenue — more than $5 million for a local dentistry I’ve worked with. Here’s how it works, starting with where to deploy it.

Picking candidate pages through observing user flow and bounce rates

When picking pages for where to deploy messenger tools, the one principle to keep in mind is that you don’t want to offer customer support to those who don’t need it. So every time I implement messenger tools, I think about four key customer segments:

Sometimes it’s obvious which category a website visitor falls into; for instance, someone who clicks on your client login portal is obviously already a customer and someone who rapidly clicks off your site is obviously not interested in your offering. But for most other users, it’s a lot less clear. That’s where heat map software used in tandem with Google Analytics could be tremendously helpful in mapping user behavior to a profile.

In a recent article, I covered all of the reasons you might be tempted to hold a highly concentrated position in your company stock as a tech founder and how it fits into your portfolio. I then followed up with a rundown on why resisting diversification is generally a bad idea and the subconscious biases that hold us back from selling.

So now that you understand the benefits of diversification and have taken inventory of your portfolio, what is the most effective way for you to move forward? I will share with you what to keep in mind before selling, how to decide when to sell, and strategies to execute sales such as options, exchange funds, prepaid variable forward contracts, qualified small business stock and tax considerations. Now, let’s take a deep dive into strategic approaches to take as a shareholder and important tax implications to consider.

Keep in mind: Lockups and blackout periods

Most tech companies that IPO have a 180-day lockup period that prevents insiders, employees and VC funds from selling immediately. There is usually language that also prohibits hedging with derivatives (options) during that period. Lockups are intended to help prevent insider trading and provide the company with additional post-IPO price stability.

It is also important to abide by the company’s blackout periods, which prohibit transactions during more share-price-sensitive times, such as earnings or material nonpublic information releases.

Concentrated stock strategies

Ad hoc selling — This is the most straightforward and involves the outright sale of your shares. However, this can be difficult for various reasons such as selling restrictions, the perception by others that you are unloading stock and many psychological biases that act as internal mental obstacles.

Scheduled selling — Selling all your stock at once could be both emotionally challenging and tax-inefficient. Scheduled selling involves the selling of a set number of shares over a specific period. This selling strategy can help by spreading the tax impact over a few years. It also provides an advantage from a psychological standpoint since the plan is determined upfront, then mechanically executed.

As an example, a founder might plan to sell 500,000 shares over 18 months. The founder is comfortable selling quarterly, which equals six selling periods of 83,333 shares per quarter. In a scenario where a founder is subject to blackout periods, a 10b5-1 trading plan can be implemented and set on autopilot. The company may even allow you to sell your shares during blackout periods with a 10b5-1 trading plan. See the example of scheduled selling below.

Hedging with options — Multiple hedging strategies can be implemented to protect your downside; however, some of the more common approaches used are the protective put and the protective collar. Below are basic examples of how these strategies are executed, for illustrative purposes.

Each strategy allows the owner to continue holding the stock while providing some downside protection against a stock’s decline. However, these strategies are not tax-efficient and are complicated, so working with an expert is essential. Both puts and certain types of collars would have been extremely expensive to implement during the recent market crisis because market volatility is a factor in options prices. See the below chart of the VIX (volatility index) during peak crisis. However, in some instances, these strategies can make sense.

Sramana Mitra: Your business model is a SaaS business model, right? Sashi Narahari: Yes, but we charge based on transactions. Sramana Mitra: So it’s not a subscription fee model; it’s a transaction...

___

After the bell yesterday, Apple-device management company Jamf announced its final IPO pricing. We’ve been tracking the Jamf IPO for some time, as it is yet another example of a technology company worth $1 billion or more going public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in March, we’d have guessed that today’s IPO market would be devoid of any public offerings, let alone a litany of successful flotations. But, 2020 is unpredictable; instead of seeing an IPO drought, there have been a modest deluge of debuts.

And yesterday Jamf continued the trend of recent IPO pricing strongly, at times selling more shares in the bargain.

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.

Jamf’s IPO underscores that public market investors are hungry for new technology offerings and keen on growth but are willing to accept what startups would consider middling expansion — and sufficiently greedy to pay up both before and after a company begins to trade.

This is the IPO market that unicorns were waiting for.

Happily, more companies — and let’s be so bold as to say unicorns — could approach the public markets in short order. The Exchange spoke with Wouter Witvoet, CEO of startup equity service provider Secfi, yesterday to get his view on today’s IPO market and coming offerings. Sitting as he does between growing startups and their vested employees, Secfi has a fascinating lens into the maturity of the firms we discuss when we talk about future IPOs.

On the subject of companies going public today with strong pricing runs, Witvoet said that “what you’re seeing is that IPOs have dried up for a very long time, and people want to deploy cash.” More cash means more dollars chasing IPOs, which helps explain the current pricing cycles we’ve seen. Witvoet cited Palantir as a company that is “making use of the opportunity that there is somewhat of an IPO window now to go public,” going on to say that he had expected Snowflake to stay private longer, but that it instead opted to start its own IPO process, perhaps due to attractive market conditions.

Cooks Venture has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox, with participation from Larry Schwartz and John Roulac.

At its most basic level, Cooks Venture provides a proprietary breed of chicken to grocery stores for consumption. The company also lists Fresh Direct and direct online sales to its distribution channels. But it’s far more complex than that.

For one, Cooks Venture spent years researching the genetic lines of chickens to develop its own breed of heirloom chickens. Why? Cooks Venture chickens grow more slowly, can live in a wider range of climates, get sick less frequently, and most importantly, can thrive on a much more diverse diet than your average chicken.

These features breed (see what I did there?) their own benefits. For one, this proprietary breed (called Pioneer breed) can be sold to emerging nations that perhaps can’t afford to build state-of-the-art temperature-controlled facilities or don’t have access to tons of corn (but do have access to yucca or quinoa) for feed. Cooks Venture also color sexes its chickens, making it easier for a farm without advanced infrastructure to quickly tell the difference between male and female chickens, which have different uses.

Secondly, feed for livestock is a huge source of demand on the agricultural industry, but much of that demand is for a small number of grains, like corn.

With Cooks Venture Pioneer chickens, which can eat a wide variety of foods, farmers can practice regenerative agriculture and run a biodiverse farm with a reliable place to sell those yields.

As part of the fundraising deal, Cooks Venture has also partnered with FoodID.

The platform tests for the presence of antibiotics and other adulterants in near real time, providing a solution to the problem of label fraud.

Cooks Venture founder and CEO Matt Wadiak (cofounder of Blue Apron) explained that the USDA runs what is called a follicle test, “and one of the issues [they’ve] determined with this kind of testing is that the thresholds for those tests will never lead to a positive test.”

He said the same animal (that wouldn’t test positive in the USDA’s test) would be found to test positive for various proteins and antibiotics when submitted to FoodID’s mass spectrometer test. Moreover, your basic mass spectrometer test takes a few weeks to offer results, which by then means that the flock has already been slaughtered and is in the midst of being processed and sent off to stores. The FoodID test can be done in near real time.

Wadiak says that food fraud is one of the biggest challenges to Cooks Venture, which goes above and beyond to provide healthy chickens to customers. If other products can simply fake it, it’s all the more difficult for Cooks Venture to stand out at the point of sale.

Cooks Venture says that, through this partnership, it’s the first company in America to test for synthetic inputs and the only company that can independently validate that it never uses antibiotics and provides verified non-GMO feed to its birds.

The company has significantly expanded since its $12 million fundraise in September 2019, serving broad swaths of California, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Seattle, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Northeast.

The Cooks Venture team is made up of about 240 people, 42 percent of whom are female and 52 percent of whom are people of color. The leadership team, made up of 11 people, includes six women and two people of color.

Misfits Market, the e-commerce platform that sells “ugly” produce (among other things), has today announced the close of an $85 million Series B financing round. The funding was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Greenoaks Capital, Third Kind Venture Capital and Sound Ventures.

Misfits Market started as a subscription box that allowed folks to buy ugly or misshapen produce on the cheap each week. This produce would have been thrown out at the farm, before ever heading to a distributor or grocery store, because it usually goes to waste sitting on a grocery store shelf.

There’s nothing actually wrong with this produce, except for the fact that shoppers wouldn’t normally choose it from a pile of fruit or vegetables that look more pleasing.

Since raising its Series A, Misfits Market has been working to expand its selection, which now includes chocolate, snacks, chips, coffee, herbs, grains, lentils, sauces and spices. Users can add these products to their usual weekly produce box on an à la carte basis, and they’re priced 20-25% below retail. These products are available to “add to box” once a week (on Thursdays).

At its core, Misfits Market looks at any structural inefficiencies in the food supply chain and capitalizes on them, getting the product at a discount and passing those savings on to the customer. These inefficiencies may include issues with sell-by date — some products must be on store shelves nine months before their sell by date — or an ineffectual mistake (like the olive oil company that works with Misfits Market and has a bad habit of attaching its labels upside down on the cans).

Where timing is concerned, Misifts Market doesn’t have to play by the same rules as a distributor or grocery store, as it sends products directly to consumers, benefiting from a much faster logistical operation.

Alongside the funding announcement, Misfits Market is also announcing a new warehouse in Delanco, New Jersey that will allow the startup to double its capacity across the East Coast, the South and into the Midwest. This expands Misfits Market’s delivery footprint to Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, and the company has plans to launch in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan soon.

Obviously, the food industry doesn’t want to be inefficient to the point of massive food waste. We’ve seen startups like Crisp look to solve these problems on the data science side. I asked Misfits Market founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh if improvements to supply chain efficiency and the continued growth of Misfits might create challenges ahead.

“Despite these technological advancements that are happening, the amount of product that goes to waste in absolute and relative terms is increasing every year,” said Ramesh. “When you look at food waste over the past five years and compare that to the amount of food that went to waste in the prior five years, it’s increased. It’s one of those super long-term risks, but at least what we’re seeing, and what the data is showing directionally around food waste, is that it’s growing in magnitude, which means there will always be opportunities for us, or a version of us, to go in there and eliminate waste and provide affordability for customers.”

A study by Boston Consulting Group expects food waste to increase in the next 10 years to 2.1 billion tons, worth $1.5 trillion, which represents a one-third increase in the next decade.

On the heels of the funding, Misfits will continue to build out the team, which has been growing rapidly in the midst of the pandemic. The company has hired 400 people since March, compared to 150 in the three-month period prior. The total team is 750 people, with an even split (51% male, 49% female) on gender. The executive team is 30% women and 20% racially diverse.

Misfits Market has raised a total of $101.5 million.