The U.S.’s COVID-19 caseload continues to set records as major states move to re-shutter their economies in hopes of stemming its spread. For many workers the situation means more time in the home office and less time in their traditional workplace. My colleague Greg Kumparak spent some time talking to companies about how best to work remotely. You can read that on Extra Crunch here.

What the world will look like when safety eventually returns is not clear, but it’s becoming plain that the workplace will not revert to its old normal. New data details changed employee sentiment, showing that a good portion of the working world doesn’t want to get back to its pre-COVID commute, and, in many cases, is eyeing a move to a different city or state in the wake of the pandemic and its economic disruptions.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, and now you can receive it in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which will drop every Saturday starting July 25.

The changing workplace has shifted — accelerated, you could say — demand for all sorts of products and services, from grocery delivery to software. The latter category of tools has seen quickening demand as the world moves to support newly remote workforces, helping keep them both productive and secure.

TechCrunch has covered the accelerating digital transformation — industry slang for companies moving to a more software-and-cloud world — before, noting that investors are making big bets on companies that might benefit from its ramping pace. Thanks to new data from a Twilio-led survey, we have a fresh look at that trend.

Undergirding the digital transformation is how today’s workers are adapting to remote work. If many workers don’t want to stop working from home, the gains that companies serving the digital transformation are seeing could prove permanent. New data from a Qualtrics -led survey may help us understand the new mindset of the domestic and global worker.

At the union of the two datasets is a lens into the future of not only how many information workers, to borrow an old phrase, will labor in the future, but how they’ll feel about it. So, this morning let’s explore the world through two data-driven lenses, helped as we go with notes from interviews with Qualtrics’ CEO Ryan Smith and Twilio’s chief customer officer, Glenn Weinstein.

What workers want

The BeanBon Coffee Roaster is kicking off a crowdfunding campaign for its countertop smart roaster device, seeking a total of $10,000 over the next month. The BeanBon is already a fully realized product, and I was able to test one to confirm it matches its creator’s claims — and it does indeed offer a simple, easy way to get into at-home coffee roasting, with minimal expertise and cleanup required.

The basics

The BeanBon is a relatively small countertop device, about the size of your average juicer or drip coffee maker. It has a simple function: roast coffee beans, in small batches designed to be optimized for daily coffee drinking use. The machine itself arrives fully assembled, and is just as approachable in terms of ease of use as your average coffee maker.

At-home roasting can be accomplished in a number of ways, but BeanBon’s whole approach is designed around simplicity and flexibility. Out of the box, you can be roasting beans in no time with no prior experience, thanks to its simple manual settings. And if you want to get more in-depth, there’s an app for iOS and Android that lets you tune all the roasting settings to fit your exact tastes and needs.

BeanBon plans to retail its roaster for around $1,000, but is offering it to Early Bird backers for $699 during the Kickstarter campaign.

Design and performance

While the BeanBon I tested out is the product of a tooling sample, rather than the shipping version, it’s still pretty well put-together in terms of fit and finish. The exterior is black anodized aluminium and it feels sturdy and well-constructed. The design is modern but relatively understated, so it won’t look out of place in a modern kitchen atop the counter next to a coffee machine.

Because it’s a pre-release product, the tester version I received shipped in generic packaging and didn’t include any instructions. Luckily, none were required for me to figure out how to use it, and to get started actually roasting the two included packs of green coffee beans in just minutes. The design is clever and simple, and by referencing a promotional video for the BeanBon released in Asia, I was quickly able to get up and running.

Operating the BeanBon is as easy as removing the plastic lid of the machine and pouring beans into the central transparent roasting chamber. Once you turn on the the machine, you then turn the dial to select your roast level (1 to 8, 1 being the lightest) and then press to start. The roast cycle runs automatically, showing you a countdown timer. Once that timer runs down, there’s a cooling cycle that follows, and then you simply press a lever located on the side to drop the roasted beans into a collection bin.

One of the most clever things the BeanBon team has done is implement a fan that comes on automatically when you press this lever, which blows up the chaff (coffee bean shells that crack and shed during roasting) to be collected in an easy-to-clean filter located at the top of the machine while dropping the much heavier beans into the pot. Too much chaff can affect the taste of the coffee, resulting in increased bitterness, and this is a clever way to automate the chaff removal process.

One note about operation: The BeanBon roasting process did set off my condo’s smoke alarms, even though no smoke was visible. It gives off a strong (and very pleasant, if you’re a coffee lover) aroma while working, but this is likely enough to trigger your smoke detectors depending on the space in which you’re using it. Turning on the stove vent and using it near that seemed to solve the problem, as did ensuring I use it with windows open and fans going.

Bottom line

The pre-packaged BeanBon coffee I received had an included recommended roasting level, which also makes it very easy to get started. I wasn’t able to test the more advanced app-based features, because the software isn’t yet available here, but the manual modes worked exactly as advertised.

Roasting at home, especially with smart features, can be a very expensive affair — BeanBon’s price point at $699 (and $749 after the Early Bird units are gone) is remarkably low for what it can do. Over time, you can definitely realize cost savings from using unroasted beans and doing it yourself — green beans are easier to buy in bulk because they take longer to go bad than do roasted beans. But if you’re thinking about getting into this world, it’s probably better to be motivated by the skill and enjoyment of custom roasts than anything else.

BeanBon does lower the cleanup and skill requirements considerably, however, making at-home roasting pretty approachable. It’s a great way to get started, provided BeanBon meets its production goals and starts shipping these later this year, as it plans to do.

Sramana Mitra: What is the technology angle to this? Stuart Robertson: All our plans are sold online. We enable anyone to come to the site, get a quote, and buy the plan. Sramana Mitra: How do people...

___

Crisp, a demand forecasting platform for the food industry, has today announced the close of a $12 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Spring Capital and Swell Partners.

Crisp launched out of beta in January of this year with a product that aimed to give food suppliers and distributors a clearer picture of customer demand at retailers. Before Crisp, these organizations usually had several data scientists compiling data from various sources into an unintelligible spreadsheet, making it difficult to see general demand outlooks, and nearly impossible to spot anomalies.

Not only does this lead to losses in revenue, but it also contributes to a terrible amount of food waste.

Crisp looks to solve this by giving these suppliers and distributors a visualization of their data instantly and in real time. The company has built integrations with a large number of ERP software, ingesting historical data from food brands and combining them with a wide range of other signals around demand drivers, such as seasonality, holidays, price sensitivity, past marketing campaigns, changes in the competitive landscape and weather that might affect the sale or shipment of ingredients or the product itself.

The end goal is to consolidate data across the industry, from brands to distributors to grocery stores, so that each individual link in the food chain can do a better job of matching their supply with their demand on an individual basis.

Since launching out of beta, Crisp has expanded beyond food brands and suppliers into retail and distributor space. The company has also expanded beyond produce and dairy into verticals like beverages, bakery, CPG, flowers, meat and poultry. The startup says its seen an 80% increase in the number of customers using the platform since January.

Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic brings its own unique challenges and opportunities to Crisp’s business. On the one hand, grocery store shopping is booming and the supply chain behind it is certainly in need of better data science and demand forecasting as user behavior shifts rapidly. On the other hand, user behavior is shifting rapidly.

With state by state, and sometimes county by county, lockdowns and shifts in the restrictions imposed on small businesses, Crisp has had to manually track what’s going on around the country in order to provide clear insights to its customers.

“This period we’re in has increased that willingness to share data and increased collaboration between everybody in the supply chain,” said founder and CEO Are Traasdahl. “We’ve seen a big shift there. Earlier, everyone assumed that everyone else was able to deliver, but now this ability to have a full, top-down visibility across a whole depth of companies, not just the companies next to you in your trading relationships, but being able to unify data and have more insights from multiple steps away from yourself, and get that data in real time been accelerated.”

Crisp currently has 33 employees (with plans to hire on the back of the funding), which is 33% women and 15% people of color. Half of Crisp’s management team are women.

The Cusp, a newly launched startup offering telemedicine services for women in perimenopause and menopause, is launching an at-home hormone test service that slashes the cost of in-office visits and lab tests.

Women in California can order the test at a cost of $159 for a telemedical consultation and test, versus roughly $500 for having the same test and lab work administered in a clinic, according to the company.

Unlike other, commonly prescribed hormone tests, The Cusp bases its test relies on new research that a key hormone measurement can help predict the time to menopause. The company is currently working with researchers to help the broader medical community validate these findings and believes the combination of consultation and improved access to diagnostics will greatly enhance the ability to more accurately predict onset. 

“Menopause is very stigmatized and midlife care is a highly underserved market. We launched The Cusp to provide women with a new model of care during this stage of life so women can optimize their health,” said The Cusp, chief executive, Taylor Sittler. “Our focus begins with perimenopause treatment, as early care can lead to healthier outcomes.”

The company said that the test is best for women experiencing early signs of perimenopause, typically between the ages of 42 and 50.

“Throughout my career I’ve been focused on the intersection of women’s health, menopause and breast cancer. It was shocking to me how little information is out there for women, so I worked with national committees helping establish guidelines for managing menopause symptoms and sexual functioning in cancer survivors,” said Dr. Mindy Goldman, director of the Gynecology Center for Cancer Survivors and At-Risk Women Program at UCSF, and a physician working with The Cusp . “I’m thrilled to be a part of  The Cusp, as we are on the front lines providing women with comprehensive diagnostic tools and personalized care so that menopause can be faced head-on and managed with a multi-pronged approach that can include medical interventions, naturopathic solutions and/or hormone replacement therapies.”

The company is providing care to roughly 200 patients, and is growing its membership rapidly. With its recent launch, The Cusp has joined startups like CurieMD, Elektra Health and Geneve, which are all focused on providing medical services to women in perimenopause and menopause.

To date, the company has raised $4 million from investors, including HomeBrew, Village Global and individual investors like Katie Stanton and Megan Pai.

Sittler, a co-founder of Color Genomics, sees an opportunity in applying new diagnostics tests and technology to treating women as they enter menopause.

The Cusp charges an initial $210 for its expert care package. That includes the test and three months of care including virtual care visits with clinicians, unlimited chats, personalized treatment plans and discounts on supplements. Should patients want to continue using the company’s services they pay an additional monthly fee of $72 per month.

In the Spring of 2020, parents of young children have suddenly woken up to a world where kids have to be homeschooled. They are supposedly guided by the teachers. These teachers have no experience of...

___

Nick Dazé, the co-founder and chief executive of the new Los Angeles-based apartment rental services company PocketList, likes to say that his company is the first one to put the renter at the core of the platform. 

The company Dazé has built with co-founder Julian Vergel de Dios, has, in fact, flipped the traditional script of relying on landlords and property managers to source information about available rentals and is relying on renters to provide information about the apartments they’re in… and the apartments where they’d like to be. 

PocketList started as an experiment born out of a lot of trial and error, according to Dazé, but it was around the initial revelation that “renters typically know they’re going to be moving way ahead of time.”

The service, which is available as an app and online, was a business nearly four years in the making. Initially Dazé and Vergel de Dios built a service called Block. “The hypothesis with Block was that a big pain point for renters was communication between people looking for apartments together,” Dazé said. “We made a tool that was well designed and well built … it was a cross between Slack and Microsoft Excel, but specifically for renters. The biggest problem was that it didn’t have a good business model.”

What started as Block eventually morphed into PocketList, and the two Los Angeles-based founders quickly took the app to market with little fanfare in November. Growing initially by word of mouth, the service allows for an easy sign-up, where renters fill out a brief description of their apartment — basically letting the community know what it’s like and that it will soon be on the market — and then can search for other apartments in areas in which they’re interested.

Rentals typically sit vacant for an average of 26 days every time they turn over, according to PocketList’s internal data. That delay costs landlords as much as $43 billion and puts pressure on supply-constrained housing markets, the company said. But using PocketList, renters can leave a place more quickly and owners reduce to perhaps one week the time an apartment stands empty. Currently, the average unit on PocketList is rented 67 days before the landlord is given notice, and 97 days before the unit appears on other listing sites, the company said in a statement. 

For renters, the network provides information about apartments that will be available on the market and a way to query current occupants about potential units. Interested renters can also reach out directly to landlords and property managers via the PocketList app to indicate that they’d be interested in looking at a place. To ensure security, no contact information is shared with a property manager until a renter submits an application, and last names and images are hidden until the renter applies for an apartment.

On the other side of the equation, landlords and property managers are able to claim properties for free and see feedback from renters about their buildings — and the thoughts renters have of other properties in their area. They also get earlier access to potential tenants once a previous tenant gives notice.

The next features on the product roadmap include descriptions of areas, which give potential renters the option to select for the kinds of neighborhood features they want, and more tools for landlords, like direct application submissions, renter resumes and other landlord response tools.

The company’s rental marketplace already has tens of thousands of units in Los Angeles described on its platform by the renters themselves, and will be expanding to San Francisco and San Diego later this year, with plans to move into Seattle in 2021 and New York and Chicago later that same year.

Backing the company’s expansion plans and development is a $2.8 million seed round, which came from David Sacks’ investment firm, Craft ventures, along with Abstract VC, Wonder Ventures and Zillow co-founder and recent Los Angeles returnee, Spencer Rascoff. Other, undisclosed, angel investors also participated in the round.

Still pre-revenue, PocketList plans to make money off of charging property managers and landlords for leads on likely renters for their apartments. Landlords can send outbound messages to potential renters that have expressed interest in a property, said Dazé, of one of the company’s planned new services.

“Bringing transparency to real estate has been a nearly 20-year process, and the apartment market is only just getting there,” said Rascoff, PocketList investor and founder of dot.LA and Zillow. “PocketList takes transparency to the next level, bringing exclusive ‘pre-market’ inventory into the light, and it’s no surprise that renters have flocked to the service.”

Renters can download the PocketList app for free, rate their current apartment and get access to the listings available on the app. Meanwhile, property managers and landlords have access to a pro version, which has all of the outreach, management and overview features that they’d want, the company said.

“Given the way the current rental market is set up, there’s almost always a gap between when a renter ‘needs to find a place’ and actually ‘rents a place,’ ” continued Dazé. “PocketList breaks the cycle and gets people into homes they love earlier than ever before.”

A recent market report on endpoint security systems estimates the industry to grow at 6% CAGR to reach $18.6 billion by 2027. As organizations continue to operate under remote working conditions,...

___

Scooters, a common sight on the streets of Taiwan, give commuters an alternative to cars in the country’s densely populated cities. But they also contribute to pollution and jam-packed parking spaces. Over the past few years, several companies haven taken on the challenge of creating more environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional gas scooters. Gogoro is probably best-known internationally for its electric SmartScooters, which are now the category’s top-sellers in Taiwan. While less known outside of the country, however, scooter-sharing startup WeMo has grown steadily since launching in 2016. It now has a fleet of more than 7,000 scooters in three of Taiwan’s biggest cities and says users take about one million rides per month.

WeMo recently announced it has raised a multi-million-dollar Series A led by AppWorks, making it the Taiwanese venture capital firm’s first smart mobility investment. The funding is being used to expand beyond Taipei City, New Taipei City and Kaohsiung, WeMo’s current markets, with plans to go international, too, launching first in Southeast Asian countries.

In Taiwan, WeMo competes with iRent, a car and scooter rental service, as well as GoShare, the mobility-sharing platform Gogoro launched a year ago.

WeMo co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Wu told TechCrunch that his company differentiates because, from the beginning, it has focused on creating smart tech specifically for sharing scooters.

Instead of developing their own electric vehicles, like Gogoro, WeMo partnered with Kymco, one of Taiwan’s largest scooters brands. Each scooter is equipped with an internet-connected black box that was developed in-house by WeMo.

The black boxes enable WeMo to manage its fleet’s batteries, while providing data from rides, including traffic and road quality (for example, it detects when streets are bumpy) that can be shared with policymakers to improve transportation infrastructure. The black boxes also connect with WeMo’s user app, showing where scooters are available, unlocking them and sending alerts about traffic conditions.

WeMo began working on its service in 2015, about a year before launching with an initial fleet of 200 vehicles. Before co-founding WeMo, Wu was a consultant at McKinsey and Company.

“I was going back to my background of being a strategy consultant and at the time, my co-founder and I decided we wanted to do something in Taiwan that was very different from how people had practiced business in the past, because there were a lot of different macro-trends changing the environment,” he said.

“Obviously the shared economy sector was just booming and at the same time, mobile-first technology was beginning to prevail. But we realized that the transportation sector had not changed in a very, very long time, so we thought if we are able to use the sharing economy or pay-as-you-go concept coupled with green vehicles, and provide that on a massive scale to consumers, we could move to a greener, smarter and more convenient form of transportation.”

Wu also sensed a market opportunity because of the number of unused scooters he saw parked on the side of streets day after day. Despite being one of the most common transportation methods in Taiwan, finding parking in major cities is often a hassle, which means many scooters are underutilized.

WeMo fleets are located in parking lots, and scooters can be unlocked through the user app. Rental fees have different tiers, including per minute and hourly rates and monthly plans. The app is available in Chinese and English, to serve local riders as well as tourists. Riders can also now register accounts and rent scooters through LINE, the most widely-used messaging app in Taiwan.

To prepare for expanding into new markets, Wu said part of WeMo’s new funding is being used to expand its research and development center in Taiwan. The company plans to hire up to 100 hardware and software engineers, especially ones who have experience in self-driving technology, vehicle telematics and machine learning. Wu said WeMo’s plan is to be a “mobility-as-a-service” platform, working with partners to launch scooter-sharing services in new markets.

“Over the past five years, people have become used to shared mobility services, but five years ago it wasn’t such a developed space, so we had to come up with the technology and applications,” Wu said. “Now we’re looking at what the future of mobility should look like, and how we use IoT technology to expand outside of transportation and use our data to help users maneuver more easily in their cities.”

Virtual card payment startup Privacy.com has raised $10.2 million in a Series A fundraise, the company announced Wednesday.

The round was led by Teamworthy Ventures, with participation from Tusk Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Quiet Capital, Exor Seeds and Rainfall Ventures.

The startup, if you’re unfamiliar, lets anyone generate virtual and disposable payment card numbers for free, allowing those users to keep their actual credit card number safe while allowing the option to cut off companies from your bank account. In an age of near-constant data breaches and credit card skimmers targeting unsuspecting websites, Privacy.com makes it harder for hackers to get your real credit card details.

It’s a popular idea. In the past three years, Privacy.com has issued 5 million virtual card numbers.

Privacy.com’s chief executive Bo Jiang told TechCrunch that the new funds will help the company launch its new Card Issuing API — in beta testing for the past year — allowing corporate customers to issue virtual cards and manage expenses for their employees in their own back-end systems.

“We’re the first company that allows developers to see upfront, transparent revenue sharing and sign up and create cards programmatically the same day,” he said.

Privacy.com will primarily serve early-stage enterprise companies, which “traditionally need a lighter weight solution for their online payments,” said Jiang. “It’s an underserved market, because most incumbents focus on the larger enterprise with monthly minimums and long time frames.”

Jiang also said the round will help the company “hire and ramp up product development at a much faster pace” as part of its push to serve more enterprise customers.

Lemonade today launched pet insurance, marking its entry into a new vertical of insurance for the first time since it launched its renters/home owners insurance in 2016.

Lemonade CEO Daniel Schreiber told TechCrunch back in February that some 70% of Lemonade customers with a home owners or renters policy are also pet owners, and yet between 1 and 2% of pet owners in the United States have pet insurance.

It’s a relatively straightforward Venn diagram.

Pet insurance from Lemonade will cost users $12/month, with a 10% discount available to existing Lemonade policy holders who choose to bundle their new pet insurance with home/renters insurance. The policy is only available to dog and cat owners — other pets are not covered.

The policy covers blood tests, urinalysis, x-rays, MRIs, labwork, CT scans and ultrasounds, as well as outpatient, specialty and emergency care procedures, along with hospitalization and surgery, according to the Lemonade website. The company also covers medication, including injections and prescription meds. Pet owners can also get an extended Accident and Illness Package that goes beyond the initial coverage of accidental road accidents and poisonings, and a variety illnesses.

Lemonade Pet Insurance comes with an optional wellness package, as well, which provides savings for routine stuff like an annual physical checkup, heartworm tests, fecal tests, annual parasite evaluation tests, blood work and up to three vaccines. The wellness package also gives pet owners access to medical advice chat and offers reminders and tips to keep their pet healthy.

“Health insurance for pets dates back to over 100 years ago,” Schreiber told TechCrunch in February. “It started with horses in the Netherlands, and the heir to that pet insurance is actually car insurance. Horses were a mode of transportation, and the insurance was meant to protect you if something happened to that mode of transportation. But pets are now members of the family.”

According to Fortune, Americans spent upwards of $75 billion on their pets in 2019.

Insurance policies in general are also quite antiquated, with legal requirements to use language and clauses written decades ago. Lemonade has been trying to launch its Policy 2.0 — a simply worded policy that is open-sourced, allowing anyone to contribute or suggest changes to it — in the United States. Policy 2.0 is currently only available in Europe, but it marks a big change in the way insurance is handled, as one of the biggest issues in the industry is that policy holders simply don’t, and in some cases can’t, know what is and is not covered.

This launch comes at a time when Lemonade has just entered the public market, with a big pop in its first day of trading.

Alongside its public offering, Lemonade has raised $480 million in institutional investment from firms like Sequoia, Allianz and others, with a team of 382 employees globally.

On the U.S. team, 35% of full-time employees are people of color; 61% are women. Globally, Lemonade is 49% women; a quarter of the R&D team are women, and the executive team is 33% women. The eight-member board includes one person of color and one woman.

Sramana Mitra: What were you doing at this point that got you to Kleiner Perkins? Jon Hirschtick: I started when I was 24. I was probably 26 years old at this point. I didn’t know what I was doing....

___

Neobank Revolut launched in the U.S. a couple of months ago. The startup is slowly catching up with features that are available in the U.K. and Europe. This time, Revolut is adding cryptocurrency trading through a partnership with Paxos.

Users in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum from the Revolut app. The feature is going to be available in 49 states as there are some regulatory issues in Tennessee. If you have USD or other currencies in your Revolut account, you can exchange manually whenever you want.

You can also set up alerts in case there are some important price changes happening. Optionally, users can also round up card payments to the nearest whole dollar and convert spare change into crypto assets.

If you’re familiar with Revolut’s cryptocurrency feature, you know that the company gives you access to more cryptocurrencies in Europe, such as Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and XRP. The company says it is starting with BTC and ETH in the U.S. but is already working on bringing more cryptocurrencies.

When it comes to fees, users with a free Revolut account will pay 2.5% in conversion fees. Users with a Premium and Metal subscription will pay 1.5% in fees. Revolut is waving fees for the first 30 days.

This is in line with the company’s current fees in Europe. Revolut also has some monthly limits on currency exchange in general for free users as well — it can be fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. You have to pay a 0.5% fee above that limit or pay for a subscription.

Revolut made some changes to its cryptocurrency feature recently. While you now technically own your cryptocurrencies, you can’t send and receive cryptocurrencies from third-party wallets. The feature is all about trading — buying, holding and selling.

In the U.S., Square’s Cash App and Robinhood also let you buy cryptocurrencies in their respective apps. While those features don’t offer the same flexibility as a full-fledged cryptocurrency exchange, it makes it easy to get started with cryptocurrencies.

There is a lot riding on the use of artificial intelligence technology to help us take giant leaps ahead in solving complex challenges — whether it’s medical breakthroughs, building better cybersecurity or creating better navigation systems for cars and other moving objects. But the more advanced the application, the bigger the need for hardware that can handle the calculations and processing; and that means the race is on for ever-more powerful processing. Now, the U.K. startup Graphcore is announcing its latest contribution to that effort.

Today, it is announcing a new chip, the GC200, and a new IPU Machine that runs on it, the M2000, which Graphcore says is the first AI computer to achieve a petaflop of processing power “in the size of a pizza box.”

Graphcore says there are no plans for the GC200 to be sold separately, and it will come only in the M2000. CEO and co-founder Nigel Toon said the M2000 is now shipping to early access customers and will be more widely available by the end of this year to customers in applications in areas like financial services, healthcare, technology and more, “wherever AI is used.”

This is the second generation of Graphcore’s hardware to be released, and its first in just less than two years, Toon notes.

The IPU Machine uses four of the 7nm GC200 IPU chips, with the GC200 featuring 59.4 billion transistors on each chip. Potentially, Graphcore says that up to 64,000 IPUs can be connected together to create a vast parallel processor of up to 16 exaflops of computing power and petabytes of memory to support models with trillions of parameters. The idea is that these can be scaled up as necessary.

The moves come at a key moment both for Graphcore and the AI hardware industry. The U.K. upstart competes against leviathans in the world of processors, like Nvidia and Intel — Graphcore raised a further $150 million in May at a nearly $2 billion valuation to compete against them, and Toon says the $450 million it has raised so far is enough for now, with customers like Microsoft and others already on its books — but also a plethora of other companies building AI chips. And it was only in May that Nvidia unveiled its own latest chip, the A100, its first Ampere-based GPU that promises 5 petaflops of performance.

Graphcore and its leader Toon — who, with his co-founder Simon Knowles had sold a previous startup called Icera to Nvidia — argue that its IPU approach is more efficient and advanced than the GPU route that Nvidia is taking.

“We are trying to build products that are easy to put into your existing compute infrastructure,” he said. “It means you can scale up to thousands of IPU processors.” And, he added, that means that the cost of ownership can be 10-20 times lower for the IPU approach, which in turn translates to faster take-up of the hardware.

Toon says that while other chipmakers continue to work on a number of other processing applications in parallel with AI — for example for mobile devices, or quantum chips — Graphcore is remaining firmly focused on AI applications, which he says remains a “massive opportunity for us to grow our business and add more customers.”

“We’re 100% focused on silicon processors for AI, and on building systems that can plug into existing centers. Why would we want to build CPUs or GPUs if those already work well? This is just a different toolbox.” He said he believes it will be a 10 to 15-year window before quantum or molecular computing comes along, a trajectory that might pose a lot of challenges for smaller startups trying to build in that area against biggies like IBM. 

Toon noted that AI stands among the trends that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated — not just around the many applications being pursued around the health crisis and fighting the virus itself, but also around working and improving processes for other services resulting from that.

“We’ll probably burn $100 million more investing in technology and people” — the company now has 450 employees, Toon noted, “but our revenues are also ramping, and the $300 million in cash we have today should be sufficient to get us to a fast and profitable business.”

Ravelin, the London-based company using machine learning to help companies fight fraud when accepting online payments, has raised $20 million in new funding.

The Series C round is led by Draper Esprit, with participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, BlackFin Tech and Passion Capital. Ravelin disclosed $10 million in Series B funding in September 2018.

Launched in 2016, Ravelin utilises machine learning and graph network technologies to help online businesses reduce losses to fraud and improve acceptance rates of orders. The idea is to do away with cruder, rule-based systems and use machine learning to negate false positives and give merchants more confidence accepting customers/transactions.

With regards to product-market fit, Ravelin says it first found success with large-scale food and cab-ride marketplaces, but has since expanded into travel, ticketing, entertainment, gaming, gambling and retail. In addition to identifying card fraud, Ravelin also works with clients to find compromised accounts (referred to as “account takeover”), spot incentive abuse and tackle supplier fraud in marketplaces.

Account takeover is where fraudsters use credentials that have been exposed in data breaches to take over an individual’s online account for their own use or to sell on the dark web. “We have a product that helps secure accounts in the first place, identify at risk accounts and help the merchant reclaim the account for the original user,” explains Ravelin’s chief marketing officer Gerry Carr. “It’s a complex problem and due to the ease that it can be done, a fast growing issue.”

Incentive abuse sees users re-using and/or sharing vouchers and sign-up incentives to defraud a merchant. To prevent this, Ravelin is able to map out the network of users and their associated voucher codes to spot if a voucher is already used by another user and block it.

Supplier fraud typically affects marketplaces where the customer, the courier or the product supplier is working to defraud the marketplace. “There are many ways this can happen,” says Carr, “a simple example might be a supplier uses a fake account to place an order with cash delivery. In this scenario the marketplace advances the restaurant the payment. Once they receive the payment, the restaurant cancels the order and keeps the payment. We can help a marketplace identify anomalous activity in the network and put a stop to fraudulent behaviour.”

Ravelin is also developing “Ravelin Accept,” a product aimed at helping businesses navigate PDS2 and confidently accept rather than reject more transactions. PSD2 means there will be a lot more authentication required for transactions.

“This risks a lot of failed transactions as consumers struggle with the step-up authentication and merchants are unsure about how to get exemptions to the secure authentication,” explains Carr. “Ravelin Accept will have built-in intelligence about how the major issuers like to manage transactions. It will route a transaction to an exemption to authentication where possible, and where it is not, [it] will manage that step-up dynamically to give it the best chance of acceptance. The hard deadline of PSD2 at the end of this year should see significant demand for Ravelin Accept to help with acceptance rates.”

Meanwhile, Ravelin says it will use its Series C round to further invest in these innovations, and to reach more markets and industries globally.

Comments Draper Esprit’s Vinoth Jayakumar: “Our model is to invest in innovation over the long term. Ravelin perfectly aligns with that thesis. The team at Ravelin are world-class and continue to work to push the boundaries of their products… What got us really excited was the range of problems they solve for clients and the suite of products they are developing.”

Layer is not trying to replace Excel or Google Sheets. Instead the Berlin-based productivity startup wants to make life easier for those whose job entails wrangling massive spreadsheets and managing data inputs from across an organization — such as for budgeting, financial reporting or HR functions — by adding a granular control access layer on top.

The idea for a ‘SaaS to supercharge spreadsheets’ came to the co-founders as a result of their own experience of workflow process pain-points at the place they used to work, as is often the case with productivity startups.

“Constantin [Schünemann] and I met at Helpling, the marketplace for cleaning services, where I was the company’s CFO and I had to deal with spreadsheets on a daily level,” explains co-founder Moritz ten Eikelder. “There was one particular reference case for what we’re building here — the update of the company’s financial model and business case which was a 20MB Excel file with 30 different tabs, hundreds of roles of assumptions. It was a key steering tool for management and founders. It was also the basis for the financial reporting.

“On average it needed to be updated twice per month. And that required input by around about 20-25 people across the organization. So right then about 40 different country managers and various department heads. The problem was we could not share the entire file with [all the] people involved because it contained a lot of very sensitive information like salary data, cash burn, cash management etc.”

While sharing a Dropbox link to the file with the necessary individuals so they could update the sheet with their respective contributions would have risked breaking the master file. So instead he says they created individual templates and “carve outs” for different contributors. But this was still far from optimal from a productivity point of view. Hence feeling the workflow burn — and their own entrepreneurial itch.

“Once all the input was collected from the stakeholders you would start a very extensive and tedious copy paste exercise — where you would copy from these 25 difference sources and insert them data into your master file in order to create an up to date version,” says ten Eikelder, adding: “The pain points are pretty clear. It’s an extremely time consuming and tedious process… And it’s extremely prone to error.”

Enter Layer: A web app that’s billed as a productivity platform for spreadsheets which augments rather than replaces them — sitting atop Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets files and bringing in a range of granular controls.

The idea is to offer a one-stop shop for managing access and data flows around multi-stakeholder spreadsheets, enabling access down to individual cell level and aiding collaboration and overall productivity around these key documents by streamlining the process of making and receiving data input requests.

“You start off by uploading an Excel file to our web application. In that web app you can start to build workflows across a feature spectrum,” says Schünemann — noting, for example, that the web viewer allows users to drag the curser to highlight a range of cells they wish to share.

“You can do granular user provisioning on top of that where in the offline world you’d have to create manual carve outs or manual copies of that file to be able to shield away data for example,” he goes on. “On top of that you can then request input [via an email asking for a data submission].

“Your colleagues keep on working in their known environments and then once he has submitted input we’ve built something that is very similar to a track changes functionality in Word. So you as a master user could review all changes in the Layer app — regardless of whether they’re coming through Excel or Google Sheets… And then we’ve built a consolidation feature so that you don’t need to manually copy-paste from different spreadsheets into one. So with just a couple of clicks you can accept changes and they will be taken over into your master file.”

Layer’s initial sales focus is on the financial reporting function but the co-founders say they see this as a way of getting a toe in the door of their target mid-sized companies.

The team believes there are wider use-cases for the tool, given the ubiquity of spreadsheets as a business tool. Although, for now, their target users are organizations with between 150-250 employees so they’re not (yet) going after the enterprise market.

“We believe this is a pretty big [opportunity],” Schünemann tells TechCrunch. “Why because back in 2018 when we did our first research we initially started out with this one spreadsheet at Helpling but after talking to 50 executives, most of them from the finance world or from the financial function of different sized companies, it’s pretty clear that the spreadsheet dependency is still to this day extremely high. And that holds true for financial use cases — 87% of all budgeting globally is still done via spreadsheets and not big ERP systems… but it also goes beyond that. If you think about it spreadsheets are really the number one workflow platform still used to this day. It’s probably the most used user interface in any given company of a certain size.”

“Our current users we have, for example, a real estate company whereby the finance function is using Layer but also the project controller and also some parts of the HR team,” he adds. “And this is a similar pattern. You have similarly structured workflows on top of spreadsheets in almost all functions of a company. And the bigger you get, the more of them you have.

“We use the finance function as our wedge into a company — just because it’s where our domain experience lies. You also usually have a couple of selective use cases which tend to have these problems more because of the intersections between other departments… However sharing or collecting data in spreadsheets is used not only in finance functions.”

The 2019 founded startup’s productivity platform remains in private beta for now — and likely the rest of this year — but they’ve just nabbed €5 million (~$5.6M) in seed funding to get the product to market, with a launch pegged for Q1 2021.

The seed round is led by Index Ventures (Max Rimpel is lead there), and with participation from earlier backers btov Partners. Angel investors also joining the seed include Ajay Vashee (CFO at Dropbox); Carlos Gonzales-Cadenaz (COO of GoCardless), Felix Jahn (founder and CEO of McMakler), Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless and Nested) and Max Tayenthal (co-founder and CFO of N26).

Commenting in a statement, Index’s Rimpel emphasized the utility the tool offers for “large distributed organizations”, saying: “Spreadsheets are one of the most successful UI’s ever created, but they’ve been built primarily for a single user, not for large distributed organisations with many teams and departments inputting data to a single document. Just as GitHub has helped developers contribute seamlessly to a single code base, Layer is now bringing sophisticated collaboration tools to the one billion spreadsheet users across the globe.”

On the competition front, Layer said it sees its product as complementary to tech giants Google and Microsoft, given the platform plugs directly into those spreadsheet standards. Whereas other productivity startups, such as the likes of Airtable (a database tool for non-coders) and Smartsheets (which bills itself as a “collaboration platform”) are taking a more direct swing at the giants by gunning to assimilate the spreadsheet function itself, at least for certain use cases.

“We never want to be a new Excel and we’re also not aiming to be a new Google Sheets,” says Schünemann, discussing the differences between Layer and Airtable et al. “What Github is to code we want to be to spreadsheets.”

Given it’s working with the prevailing spreadsheet standard it’s a productivity play which, should it prove successful, could see tech giants copying or cloning some of its features. Given enough scale, the startup could even end up as an acquisition target for a larger productivity focused giant wanting to enhance its own product offering. Though the team claims not to have entertained anything but the most passing thoughts of such an exit at this early stage of their business building journey.

“Right now we are really complementary to both big platforms [Google and Microsoft],” says Schünemann. “However it would be naive for us to think that one or the other feature that we build won’t make it onto the product roadmap of either Microsoft or Google. However our value proposition goes beyond just a single feature. So we really view ourselves as being complementary now and also in the future. Because we don’t push out Excel or Google Sheets from an organization. We augment both.”

“Our biggest competitor right now is probably the ‘we’ve always done it like that’ attitude in companies,” he adds, rolling out the standard early stage startup response when asked to name major obstacles. “Because any company has hacked their processes and tools to make it work for them. Some have built little macros. Some are using Jira or Atlassian tools for their project management. Some have hired people to manage their spreadsheet ensembles for them.”

On the acquisition point, Schünemann also has this to say: “A pre-requisite for any successful exit is building a successful company beforehand and I think we believe we are in a space where there are a couple of interesting exit routes to be taken. And Microsoft and Google are obviously candidates where there would be a very obvious fit but the list goes beyond that — all the file hosting tools like Dropbox or the big CRM tools, Salesforce, could also be interesting for them because it very much integrates into the heart of any organization… But we haven’t gone beyond that simple high level thought of who could acquire us at some point.” 

Adam Neumann, the controversial co-founder and former CEO of WeWork, has taken a 33% equity stake in GoTo Global, a shared mobility company that operates in Israel and Malta and aims to expand into Europe later this year.

Neumann’s family office, 166 2nd Financial Services, invested $10 million into GoTo Global as part of a $19 million Series B round. As part of his investment, Neumann will be able to appoint one board member on his behalf. Existing shareholder Shagrir Group Vehicle Services, a publicly traded Israeli company, also participated in the round.

GoTo Global (also referred to as GoTo Mobility) is a mobility-as-a-service company that is aiming to cover the entire range of shared vehicles from cars and mopeds to bicycles and electric scooters. The company, which started in 2008 with a focus on car sharing, previously raised $3 million in seed funding. It had also secured a $9 million loan from Shagrir, which has been converted into the equity investment.

This latest funding will be used to expand its shared services into Europe, beginning with Madrid.

Since forming 166 2nd Financial Services, Neumann has made about 15 investments in startups in Canada, Israel, the U.K. and the United States, including EquityBee, Moon Active and Peach Street.

However, this is Neumann’s first investment since he filed a lawsuit against Softbank Group for alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty for pulling a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares. SoftBank Group pulled its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares April 1, citing COVID-19’s impact on the business but also closing conditions not being met.

COVID-19, or more specifically changing consumer behaviors due to the pandemic, is largely what has driven Neumann’s investment in GoTo Global, according to a source familiar with the investment. Neumann isn’t speaking publicly due the lawsuit.

Neumann made the investment because he believes flexibility will be a key component in people’s lives post-COVID-19, the source said.

GoTo Global is just as bullish on its post-COVID future.

“Shared mobility, and transportation in general, was one of the industries hit hard by the economy lock-downs as people were required to self-isolate,” GoTo Global CEO Gil Laser said in a statement announcing the raise. “But we are the ones who made the come-back fastest, we are +12% back to pre-lockdown baseline. We understand that although on one hand shared transport may not seem to be the safest solution, on the other hand it is perceived as a safer option than a public transport and it is definitely a much cheaper option than an owned car.”

VidMob, which started out as a marketplace connecting marketers and video editors, now bills itself as a “creative technology platform.” Now there’s a “creator network” that’s part of a broader suite of tools for managing video production and turning those videos into online ads.

And the company has continued to evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic. Founder and CEO Alex Collmer told me that how customers use the platform has changed substantially in recent months. For example, he said that one of the platform’s “best skills” involved taking existing footage — including footage shot for TV commercials — and other creative assets and turning them into social media ads. But of course, “Over the last few months, all physical shoots were canceled.”

So Collmer said that rather than simply treating VidMob as a social media advertising tool, brands are increasingly turning to the startup for a way to manage remote video production. The result is that the company saw 100% year-over-year “logo growth” (a.k.a. new customers) in the first quarter, and then grew another 50% in Q2.

“What we have seen here is the acceleration of the digital transformation of the enterprise,” he said. “Pretty much every client we have, every marketer we talk to is looking very seriously at how to move all their creative operations onto some sort of unifying software platform, so that they feel safe in the event that they continue to have to work in a remote environment, and to be more efficient with existing media.”

One of those customers is gin brand Monkey 47, whose brand lead Jennifer Schwartz said in a statement, “We have worked multiple times with VidMob as they quickly and efficiently help a lean and nimble brand like ours get out our message to millions of consumers.”

Another client is Citi, whose Chief Brand Officer Carla Hassan told me her team has been working with VidMob since last year. She said that as as a result of the pandemic, like many marketers, “We were required to really be flexible and adjust and scale programs quickly.”

For example, in response to the #InItTogether hashtag, Citi used VidMob to create a series of inspirational videos showcasing the work of its employees — such as Mihir in the video above, who was 3D printing protective equipment for his communities.

“As we thought about how we told the stories, we realized that your colleagues are some of the most important heroes that you have,” Hassan said.

According to Citi, the videos have been viewed nearly 250,000 times since the campaign launched in early May, with 80% of that viewing on LinkedIn.

And although dealing with the initial pandemic and shutdown was difficult enough, the news keeps coming, with protests for racial justice, a COVID-19 resurgence, resulting closures and more.

“We’re going to be in a period of uncertainty for a while, but to be honest, I see that as an opportunity,” Hassan said. “Brands who understand what their consumers want, brands who are tuned into the cultural zeitgeist, brands [who] pivot quickly to create content that is relevant and engaging and drive business KPIs … that will be what wins in the future.”

Similarly, Collmer said that in a period of uncertainty, brands need to respond more quickly, rather than simply falling silent: “Shutting up and going away is not a great way to position yourself.”

Update: This post has been updated to correctly identify the executive at Citi and to include a quote from Monkey 47.

Joe Silver, CFO at Lighter Capital, discusses his firm’s debt-financing model for startups.

___