Coinbase acquired Earn.com for at least $120 million back in April. And the company now plans to transform Earn.com into Coinbase Earn, a website with educational content to learn more about cryptocurrencies. Users who complete those classes will earn tokens.

Coinbase bought Earn.com partly so that it could appoint Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as Coinbase’s CTO. The previous iteration of Earn.com wasn’t a priority for Coinbase.

Earn.com started as a service where you can contact busy people for a small fee. Busy people would get paid in cryptocurrencies to accept those requests. The platform quickly became a way to massively contact Earn.com’s user base for initial coin offerings and airdrops.

Coinbase Earn is launching today in private beta. But at the time of this article, the new Coinbase Earn service is not live (Update: Coinbase Earn is now live and is a separate website from Earn.com). Some Coinbase users will receive an invitation to the service. The company says that educational content will go beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Developing education pages for obscure cryptocurrencies makes sense as Coinbase plans to add dozens of cryptocurrencies over the coming months.

At first, there is just one track. Users can learn more about 0x (ZRX), a protocol that lets you create decentralized exchanges. Cryptocurrency trades can be executed without a centralized exchange thanks to 0x .

0x content includes video lessons and quizzes — and yes, writing this makes me feel like it’s 2005 and webinars are cool again. Even if you’re not invited to Coinbase Earn, you can view the content. But those who are part of Coinbase Earn will receive a small amount of ZRX at the end of the track.

Coinbase had previously launched a learning hub to understand the basics of cryptocurrencies.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

Adtech cybersecurity company Devcon announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.

Over the past couple of years, ad fraud has become a bigger concern in the industry, but Devcon co-founder and CEO Maggie Louie said most existing solutions focus on things like verifying ad quality and confirming that impressions aren’t coming from bots. Devcon, in contrast, functions more like “a Norton AntiVirus of adtech,” preventing attempts by bad actors who are “using adtech as a catalyst to attack consumers and companies.”

In other words, Louie said Devcon works with ad networks and publishers to “eliminate 99 percent of the nefarious things that are making their way through the system.” It says it can block malicious ads on an individual basis, whether they include pop-ups and redirects or unauthorized tag injectors. Customers can then view the individually blocked ads and see where they came from, and there’s also a dashboard that shows how much money is being lost to fraud.

Louie pointed to the recent DOJ indictment of eight individuals allegedly involved in a digital ad fraud scheme as a sign that the issue is becoming more serious.

“Some of these attacks have some very concerning potential outcomes [for consumers], so being able to stop those before they get out is akin to stopping a water contamination at the source level,” she added.

At the same time, she argued that this is a particularly challenging area for security, because there’s been “a lack of crossover between cybersecurity and ad ops,” leading to a dearth of “security people or cybersecurity people who understand adtech.”

In contrast, the Devcon team combines media veterans like Louie (who was recently vice president of audience at the Athens Banner-Herald and also worked at the Los Angeles Times) with “white hat” hackers like co-founder and CTO Josh Summitt (who was previously on the ethical hacking team at Bank of America). It’s also hired former FBI Cyber Squad Supervisor Michael F. D. Anaya as its head of global cyber investigations and government relations.

In fact, Devcon says it assisted law enforcement in the first-ever conviction for online ad theft and money laundering, which resulted in a four-year prison sentence.

Devcon was founded in Memphis, Tenn., but has since expanded its headquarters to Atlanta, and it was part of this year’s Techstars Barclay accelerator in London. The seed funding was led by Las Olas VC — among other things, Louie said it will allow Devcon to further develop its machine learning technology to automatically identify emerging threats.

PetaGene, the Cambridge, U.K.-based genomics data compression startup, has raised $2.1 million in further funding. Leading the round is U.S. venture firm Romulus Capital, with participation from other unnamed investors Silicon Valley and London. It brings total funding to $3.2 million.

Previous investor Entrepreneur First, the company builder backed by Greylock Partners, also followed on. PetaGene is an alumnus of EF6, although notably its two founders Dan Greenfield and Vaughan Wittorff already knew each other from their time at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge University. Both hold PhDs from Cambridge University, too.

The new funding will be used by the company to grow its technical team based in Cambridge, its global sales team, and further expand PetaGene’s product offerings. I’m also told the new funding comes off the back of signing a large contract with a major undisclosed pharmaceutical company.

“As whole genome sequencing becomes more and more commonplace, the amount of data it creates places great strain on infrastructure. We help organisations with managing that data,” says PetaGene co-founder Dan Greenfield. “Through our compression technology, we make that data up to ten times smaller and faster to transfer for research and analysis, democratising precision medicine in the process”.

As it stands, the storage and processing of genomics data adds a significant extra cost and acts as a bottleneck for how fast data can be worked with. By some estimates genomics data will reach 40 exabytes per year by 2025 (exabytes, by the way, is a lot of data!). Therefore, better file compression technology has the potential to be a major enabler of innovation and research based on genomics, including developing new personalised medicine and treatments.

Key to this, PetaGene says its software enables compression of huge amounts of genomic data without compromising on access and data quality. The company claims its products go beyond regular data reduction techniques.

“We have dedicated extensive R&D to building extremely high performance compressors for genomic data, the result being that we outperform existing state-of-the-art compression, sometimes by a factor of 6x or more,” explains Greenfield.

“At the same time our customers want to be assured that the original file can be exactly recovered. Other compression solutions unfortunately aren’t able to restore the original file, and can even sometimes discard or modify internal content without telling their users. We’ve spent a great deal of effort to make sure we preserve the original file bit-for-bit, even providing commercial guarantees to our customers. I can’t really go into the details of our secret sauce here, but we’re very proud of our industry-leading performance, and we continue to keep improving it”.

Krishna K. Gupta, founder and general partner of Romulus Capital, says he was impressed by the part of the genomics value chain PetaGene is targeting, which led the firm to first invest in 2017. “Since then, their ability to successfully develop their product for the cloud and the strong interest from potential customers have only served to reinforce our view,” he says.

Meanwhile, PetaGene’s target customers span pharmaceutical companies, academic research institutions, clinical labs in hospitals, and genomic sequencing companies.

“Our clients pay for our software according to the savings they make,” adds the PetaGene co-founder. “The greater the reduction in size of their data files, the more revenue we receive, and the more they are saving in storage and data transfer costs. We don’t charge our clients for accessing or decompressing the compressed data”.

Candid, a teeth aligner startup that aims to make straight teeth more accessible and more affordable than Invisalign, is evolving its direct-to-consumer business. In addition to its at-home impression process, Candid recently started enabling people to come into a physical office to get their teeth scans completed.

Today, Candid is opening physical storefronts in San Francisco, Austin, Columbus, Ohio and Santa Monica, Calif. This is in addition to the two locations in New York City, one in Boston and one in West Hollywood, Calif. By the end of next year, Candid aims to have 75 locations across the U.S.

Candid, which 3D prints its FDA-approved aligners, is designed for people who need mild to moderate orthodontic work. It costs $1,900 upfront or $88 per month over two years, while braces can cost up to $7,000 and Invisalign can cost up to $8,000.

In Candid’s physical locations, customers can get their teeth scanned and order aligners within 30 minutes. The studios are operated by Candid’s orthodontists and dental assistants.

This is on the heels of Candid’s $15 million Series A round led by Greycroft last November. SmileDirectClub, a major competitor of Candid, raised $380 million in October at a $3.2 billion valuation.

But Candid doesn’t seem too fazed, having seen 15x growth year over year and expecting to potentially raise more funding in Q1 of next year, CEO Nick Greenfield told TechCrunch.

“The advantage is, if you don’t have access or live two hours away from the city, the impression kit is a viable and effective way,” Greenfield said. “But if you live in a city with a Candid studio, we recommend you come in for a scan.”

This is similar to Uniform Teeth’s strategy. Uniform Teeth, which raised $4 million earlier this year, is a clear teeth aligner startup that competes with the likes of Invisalign and Smile Direct Club. The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite.

It’s worth noting that the in-person approach aligns more with the values of the American Association of Orthodontists, which has taken issue with the likes of SmileDirectClub and other teeth-straightening services that don’t require in-person visits with a licensed orthodontist.

As Candid grows and opens more physical locations, it wouldn’t be surprising if the company starts to try to funnel more people through the door than through the virtual shopping cart.

Michel Morvan: In general, the human brain is able to do two unique things. The first one is recognition. If I see you in a crowd, I will recognize you. It’s a black box because I’m not able to...

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Dataiku wants to turn buzzwords into an actual service. The company has been focused on data tools for many years, before everybody started talking about big data, data science and machine learning.

And the company just raised $101 million in a round led by Iconiq Capital, with Alven Capital, Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital and FirstMark Capital also participating.

If you’re generating a lot of data, Dataiku helps you find a meaning behind data sets. First, you import your data by connecting Dataiku to your storage system. The platform supports dozens of database formats and sources — Hadoop, NoSQL, images, you name it.

You can then use Dataiku to visualize your data, clean your data set, run some algorithms on your data in order to build a machine learning model, deploy it and more. Dataiku has a visual coding tool, or you can use your own code.

But Dataiku isn’t just a tool for data scientists. Even if you’re a business analyst, you can visualize and extract data from Dataiku directly. And because of its software-as-a-service approach, your entire team of data scientists and data analysts can collaborate on Dataiku.

Clients use it to track churn, detect fraud, forecast demand, optimize lifetime values and more. Customers include General Electric, Sephora, Unilever, KUKA, FOX and BNP Paribas.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to double its staff. The company currently works with 200 people in New York, Paris and London. It plans to open offices in Singapore and Sydney, as well.

According to a Market Watch report published recently, the global cloud-based healthcare computing market is estimated to grow 20% annually over the next few years to $11 billion by 2022. Veeva...

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Elementary Robotics has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to begin building a manufacturing facility and expand its presence in Los Angeles as the city continues to grow as a hub for robotics and automation. 

Earlier this year, Embodied announced a $22 million round for its personal robotics platform focused on healthcare and wellness, while InVia Robotics collected $20 million for its own take on the robotics industry.

With lead investors like Fika Ventures and Fathom Capital, and co-investors, including Toyota AI Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Riot.vc, Osage University Partners and Stage Venture Partners, Elementary Robotics is readying itself for commercial pilots with a few undisclosed customers as it proves out its technology.

Elementary Robotics was co-founded by Bill Gross, the brains behind an increasingly resurgent Idealab incubator, and Arye Barnehama, a former head of design at the augmented reality startup DAQRI.

Gross and Barnehama met through a mutual friend in the robotics industry in Los Angeles, the chief executive of Embodied, Paolo Pirjanian, Barnehama wrote in an email. That was around 2017, when the two first began brainstorming how they would build their company. After about a year of research, the company launched with an initial investment of $1.2 million.

At the time, Barnehama had taken time off from DAQRI and had begun thinking about how to use the technologies he’d developed around computer vision and visualization to have more of an impact on human lives. 

“After working in AR on work process automation and making that information useful to humans, I became excited about the idea of designing robots that could leverage these new technologies to actually work alongside humans and the positive impact that could have on the world,” Barnehama wrote in an email.

That thinking became the seeds for Elementary Robotics and was one of the aspects of the company that attracted Toyota AI Ventures as a co-investor.

According to a statement from Jim Adler, the founding managing director of Toyota AI Ventures, “Arye and the Elementary Robotics team share our commitment to improve the quality of human life through AI and robotics. They have the talent, expertise, and vision to deliver on that commitment.” 

The investment is part of the corporate investment arm’s call for innovation through its Toyota Research Institute (TRI). “We launched the first call with TRI’s mobile manipulation team to give talented entrepreneurs a nudge in both direction and capital to make assistive robots more useful, safe, and affordable” said Adler.

Barnehama was tight-lipped about the specifics of the technology that Elementary is using for its robotic stack. “Nothing is final because we are still quite early, but we’re using 3D depth-sensing cameras along with proprietary custom hardware elements. Beyond that I can’t comment further right now,” the chief executive said.

And Barnehama was equally vague about the company’s mission. “We are building our robots to augment current human output and performance, and enable existing workforces to have greater throughput as well as focus on more complex, human judgment-centered decisions. We look to automate high-repetition tasks and processes while avoiding large upfront capital expenditures and complex multi-year custom builds,” he wrote in an email.

In a separate email, Gross laid out exactly what he found so promising about Elementary’s combination of machine learning and image recognition tools software and robotics.

“Up until now, robotic actuation was mostly about super rigid, super stiff, super strong, repeatable actuation, mostly for manufacturing. But with the recent advances in computer vision, machine learning, and adaptive learning, now you can have a robot that is gentler, less stiff, but MORE (sic) accurate using vision as your feedback system,” Gross wrote. “In other words, to get to the right place, you don’t have to rely on precise repeatability – instead you can FIND (sic) the right place dynamically with cameras and depth sensors, cheaply, and in real time.This is a game-changer, and opens up a new frontier of lower cost, easier to program, easier to use robotics for more mainstream operations.”

As a result of the investment, Fika Ventures co-founder and managing partner Eva Ho will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

Elementary is only Fika’s second investment in a hardware company, and Ho said that the commitment was driven by Arye himself.

“I met Arye almost a year before we wrote the check — and he really articulated a very clear vision of where he saw the gaps were in the robotics industry,” according to Ho. “During his customer research, he was pained by how difficult it was for companies to get robots into production environments — that the investment not only in the expensive robots but the type of talent you needed… to make them work, was so prohibitive… Arye and Bill felt there had to be a better way to introduce automation of repeatable tasks into a multitude of environments in a way that consumers have been trained by Google and Apple.”

In addition, the proximity to some of the world’s best public sector robotics labs makes a compelling case for Los Angeles as a burgeoning hub for the robotics industry.

“Los Angeles is a great place for this, because we have a close relationship with Caltech and JPL,” according to Gross. “JPL is the forerunner in the world of distant robotic missions that have to be failsafe, and amazing research is going on at Caltech on the mechanics and systems. And LA is great for all the design resources as well, with Art Center, and all the great studios with people who are great at human interaction and story-telling. So we’re excited to be building this company in LA.”

On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for education apps.”

It’s launching Kahoot! Ignite, a new accelerator for like-minded startups that are pushing the boundaries of education through gaming and other means.

In addition to that, Kahoot today also said it would move stock exchanges in its home market of Norway, going from the smaller OTC exchange to the Merkur Market, which CEO and co-founder Åsmund Furuseth explained in an interview is also an exchange for private companies, but one that will be able to provide more transparency to the startup’s bigger investors en route to an eventual full public listing. As of last week’s Disney news, the startup is now valued at $376 million.

Participating in the Ignite accelerator, Furuseth said, will give Kahoot the option to invest in startups in each cohort, and if it makes sense for the startup in question, they will build content that will be usable on the Kahoot platform.

“We have close to $30 million in the bank and are in a financial market where we can get more capital,” he said. “We don’t need to invest, but if we want to, we can.” 

The startup today has some 60 million games on its platform, with a good portion of those created by users themselves (making it more like a YouTube than a Netflix). The idea is that bringing in outside developers (in this case, by way of the accelerator) could inject more innovation and interesting takes on the concept of “educational gaming” — not unlike how Netflix and Amazon engage outside studios to develop originals for its platform, alongside what they develop themselves or buy in through deals with rights holders.

In addition to the carrots of investment and distribution on the Kahoot platform — which is likely to hit 100 million monthly active users this month (Furuseth said he was confident of the number today) — Kahoot is offering mentorship to potential cohorts in areas like monetization and product development. Given the fact that educational aides can come in all shapes and sizes, that might not take the form of a piece of content for the Kahoot platform.

“Putting something on Kahoot could be an outcome, but we’re also interested in ‘network products,’ which have the same desire to enable learning,” Furuseth said.

The company today has a double focus, with games for K-12 students as well as for enterprise environments. “Learning is the main topic,” he added. “We like to have the mix.”

By the time you hear about a research project online or in the news it’s probably already gone through countless iterations and changes. Until Morressier, however, that early-stage research was done separately by researchers who barely interacted with each other.

Morressier is a service for early-stage research. This means it allows researchers to “raise the profile of their conference posters, presentations and abstracts and showcase their work from the very beginning.” Because most early-stage research appears at conferences few of us ever see, by making projects more visible at those conferences we all get better research.

“We focus exclusively on the findings from the earliest stage of the research process, content that was traditionally restricted to halls of universities and conferences,” said co-founder Sami Benchekroun. “By bringing this content online and making it accessible, scientists can avoid repeating their peers’ mistakes and easily build on each other’s findings.”

“We help scientists showcase and gain attribution for their previously hidden early-stage research via individual DOIs. On the basis of our content we can showcase signals and trends in science at a far earlier stage than our competitors,” he said.

The service is live now and has raised more than $6 million with help from Redalpine and Cherry Ventures.

“After witnessing the vital exchange happening at academic conferences around the world firsthand, the co-founders were inspired to launch Morressier to digitize the traditionally offline research from these events and ensure the conversation continues year-round. Our aim is to help scientists make progress faster by making previously hidden early-stage research discoverable and accessible,” said Benchekroun.

I spoke to the founder at Disrupt Berlin this year. You can check out the video below.

Dror Ben Naim: We can base adaptation on many factors. We can base it on how students are doing right now on the problems they are working on. We can adapt in a more complex way not only by looking...

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Price f(x), a startup that offers cloud-based pricing software, has raised €25 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is European B2B technology growth investor Digital + Partners, and consulting firm Bain & Company. Prague-based Credo Ventures and London-based Talis Capital, which both backed Price f(x) at Series A, have also participated in this new round.

Founded in 2011, Munich-based Price f(x) provides a modular SaaS solution for price optimisation management (PO&M) and configure-price-quote (CPQ) for enterprises of any size.

Pricing optimisation software typically helps companies accurately define the price of goods across a vast and constantly changing spectrum of data and variables. This can include things like customer survey data and segments, competitor data, operating costs, inventories, and historic prices and sales.

CPQ software aggregates these variables, thus enabling companies to configure products or services in the most optimal way (i.e. bundling, up-sells, etc.), and price them according to costs, competition and local economic factors.

This end result is that is that it can drastically speed up and improve the accuracy of the quoting process to give customers the best price possible in accordance with all of the above factors.

Price f(x) says it currently serves over 80 global, blue-chip B2B and B2C customers across a variety of industries, including Robert Bosch, SchneiderElectric, Owens- Illinois, Iron Mountain and Sonoco. The company has also developed a strong partner ecosystem with leading global technology, consulting and integration providers, including new backer Bain & Company, and SAP.

Notably, Price f(x) is in the midst of litigation with U.S. competitor Vendavo over a number of patent disputes. In December 2017, Vendavo launched a lawsuit against Price f(x), which the German company refutes. And earlier this week, Price f(x) filed petitions for “Covered Business Method (“CBM”) Review” of four Vendavo patents, and says it will imminently file a fifth, which together will cover challenges to all of the patent claims that Vendavo has asserted in litigation between the two parties.

“Price f(x) has become the leading SaaS pricing solution provider on the market through its customer centric approach and by offering a feature rich, highly flexible pricing tool that is also risk free and fast to implement,” says Marcin Cichon, CEO and co-Founder of Price f(x), in a statement. “Our success is based on the continued satisfaction and loyalty of our customers. This new funding will allow us to help even more businesses to thrive by further expanding our existing platform capabilities and also introducing a new product offering for the SME market segment”.

“For most companies, pricing is the single most effective lever to boost earnings,” says Ron Kermisch, Bain & Company’s global pricing leader. “Yet many companies leave money on the table because they do not set the best price or ensure customers actually pay the price they have determined. Bain & Company sees investing in Price f(x) as a great opportunity to help Price f(x) to become the de-facto standard in pricing and with that to be also the best-of-breed competitive weapon for Bain’s clients, to stay at the cutting edge of pricing”.

The Wing, the owner of several co-working spaces and social clubs designed for women, has garnered the support of Sequoia Capital in its latest funding round.

The startup has announced a $75 million Series C led by the storied venture capital firm, with support from Airbnb and Upfront Ventures, as well as existing investors NEA and WeWork.

Headquartered in New York, The Wing was founded by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan in 2015. To date, the pair have raised $117.5 million, including a $32 million Series B in November 2017 led by WeWork, a co-working giant presumably interested in an eventual acquisition of its female-friendly counterpart.

A spokesperson for The Wing declined to disclose its valuation.

The Wing has 6,000 members across locations in New York, Washington, DC and San Francisco — where it first opened its doors just two months ago. The company has additional spots slated to open in West Hollywood, Chicago, Boston, London, Toronto and Paris in 2019. Memberships at the workspaces, which are complete with feminist imagery, conference rooms, a cafe, library, lactation room, beauty room, showers and more, are $215 apiece.

The Wing’s staff is majority female and its spaces are designed by female architects. It’s not surprising the investors behind its latest fundraise are mostly women, too.

As part of the Series C funding, Sequoia partner Jess Lee and Upfront partner Kara Nortman have joined The Wing’s board of directors. Lee, in a statement, said the funding would assist The Wing in bringing its physical community of career-oriented women into the digital realm.

Earlier this year, the company launched a mobile application for its members to stay connected with each other and to RSVP to Wing events.

“This investment will enable us to further The Wing’s mission and scale to new heights both offline and online,” Gelman, The Wing’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

“The Wing’s mission is the advancement of women through community, and we could not be more excited to partner with such a powerful community of women who lead their fields in tech, Hollywood, policy, and sports. This round is proof positive that women can be on both sides of the table.”

Also participating in the financing are actress Kerry Washington, producer Katie McGrath, former White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett and two of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense co-founders Robbie Kaplan and Hilary Rosen. U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team players Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Meghan Klingenberg and Becky Sauerbrunn also provided capital to The Wing.

Airbnb, for its part, has not previously invested in The Wing and is not an active investor in startups. It’s unclear what sort of partnership may be brewing between the home-sharing “unicorn” and the feminist co-working space. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he was “incredibly inspired” by The Wing and was “thrilled to support them.”

Flux, the London fintech that has built a technology platform for banks and merchants to power itemised digital receipts and a lot more, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by VC firm e.ventures (which has previously backed the likes of Farfetch, Sonos and Groupon), with participation from existing investors PROfounders, and Anthemis.

Founded in 2016 by former early employees at Revolut, Flux bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, Flux is currently available through Barclays (via Barclays Launchpad), challenger bank Starling, and for a small alpha group of Monzo customers. Once banking customers link their account to the service, Flux delivers digital receipts (and where available rewards and loyalty) for transactions at Flux retailer partners.

To that end, merchant partnerships include Costa Coffee, EAT, pod and itsu. Flux also recently announced that Pure is joining the service.

“Our mission has always been to liberate the world’s receipt data because by doing this we can enrich trillions of experiences globally,” Flux co-founder and CEO Matty Cusden-Ross tells me.

“The information on a receipt is used all the time in everyday life, from budgeting to loyalty to expensing but today these all require manual steps. We see a future in which all of these manual processes become seamless experiences, simplifying and enriching people’s lives. Our focus today is on establishing a standard, the Flux platform, to make this a reality within the U.K. before expanding to our first international market”.

Of course, Flux’s attempts to become a standard for the interchange of item level digital receipt data — and the proprietary platform that powers that standard — has always faced a chicken and egg problem: It needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. Cracking this problem has clearly started to gather momentum, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by investors.

“We’ve transitioned from having to prove it’s possible to now scaling and that’s a great feeling,” says Cusden-Ross. “The aim for this round is to continue making Flux the gold standard for anything that touches receipt data, [ensuring] Flux remains super easy to use for everyone — consumers, banks and retailers. What this means is going fully live across some of the largest U.K. retail banks as well as ramping our up our live merchants”.

(Related, I understand that Flux has already begun integrating with one of the major U.K. supermarkets and an “international fast food chain,” amongst other unannounced partnerships.)

“Creating a real-time platform that handles massive data volumes is hard, but we’ve cracked it,” adds the Flux CEO. “We’re investing heavily in bringing on the best engineers to continue scaling in a big way. Having figured out the recipe for working with banks and retailers quickly, it’s now all about growing as fast as possible”.

Meet PixelMe, a new software-as-a-service startup that wants to help marketers retarget customers using an URL shortener. The company just raised a $1.3 million at a $4 million pre-money valuation — investors now own 22 percent of the company.

PixelMe is taking a Buffer approach by sharing many behind-the-scene details of the company’s journey. You can even download the pitch deck, the term sheet and the cap table after this round.

The team realized that many people have been using URL shortener to include tracking parameters (UTMs) to track which campaign is working. PixelMe is taking this concept one step further by letting users embed one or multiple retargeting pixels when you follow a PixelMe link.

It means that you can add tracking pixels from Adwords, Facebook or Twitter for instance and leverage that to display relevant ads on Facebook, Twitter or Google later.

If you run your own store or website, you might not see the point of that as you can include all the tracking pixels you want on your website (as long as you remain GDPR compliant). But PixelMe lets you retarget users even if you promote an Amazon page for instance.

And the company claims that it complies with GDPR and works with Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in its pitch deck.

So far, PixelMe has attracted 10,000 users who have generated $130,000 in revenue. The company reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue after 12 months and without raising any money.

Serena Capital is leading the round with €880,000. Kima Ventures is investing €50,000. Thomas Rebaud, Christophe Chausson, Stan Massueras, Manuel Jaffrin, Edouard Dessain-Gelinet, Gregory Gazagne are all investing between €10,000 and €15,000.

During this week’s roundtable, I gave some very tough feedback to the entrepreneurs, and to my great satisfaction, they took it and I think, it made a difference. “Bitter pill to swallow,” said...

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Uber has been granted permission by the state of Pennsylvania to reinstate tests of its autonomous vehicles, as first reported by Reuters.

A spokesperson for Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that the ride-hailing giant received a letter of authorization from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and clarified that the company has not yet resumed self-driving operations.

Uber halted testing of its self-driving cars following a fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona this March that left a pedestrian dead. An autonomous Uber SUV accompanied by a safety driver was driving northbound when it struck a woman, who was taken to the hospital where she later died as a result of her injuries.

Investigators later determined the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, had looked down at a phone 204 times during a 43-minute test drive, according to a 318-page police report released by the Tempe Police Department.

In the aftermath of the accident, Uber paused all of its AV testing operations in Pittsburgh, Toronto, San Francisco and Phoenix.

Moving forward, Uber will test its self-driving cars more cautiously, per a recently released Uber safety report. The company will require that two employees are in the front seat of its cars at all times, that an automatic braking system is enabled and that its safety employees are more strictly monitored.

Uber, which first began developing its autonomous vehicle fleet in 2015 and initiated tests the following year, confidentially filed for an initial public offering two weeks ago. The company, currently valued at $72 billion, is expected to debut at a valuation as high as $120 billion early next year.

Rothy’s, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes a variety of colorful flats for women, has some more walking-around money today. According to Bloomberg, the company just closed on $35 million in funding from Goldman Sachs’ asset management unit.

The round brings the young company’s total funding to $42 million, including an early $5 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and $2 million in convertible notes, including from Finn Capital Partners, M13 and Grace Beauty Capital.

Goldman’s interest in the company isn’t surprising. Rothy’s doesn’t disclose how many pairs of shoes it has sold, but the company tells Bloomberg that it expects to see slightly more than $140 million in revenue this year, and, as the outlet surmises from some back-of-the-napkin math, that equates to roughly 1.4 million pairs of shoes sold.

Judging by its enthusiastic consumer base — it has 161,000 Instagram followers, for example — many of those are likely women who own multiple pairs, too.

What they love about the shoes, seemingly: their style, in large part. On this front, it helps that some fashion icons have gravitated toward the shoes, including actress-turned-Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, who has been photographed in Rothy’s.

The company is also selling eco-conscious comfort by making the shoes out of recycled materials that include water bottles. Because of their constitution, they are also machine washable, yet another selling point.

Yet where Rothy’s has really shined is in marketing, including spending hugely on Facebook and to a lesser extent, Instagram and other social media platforms. Indeed, the company has been recognized repeatedly (including by us) for its shoes’ seeming ubiquity online. Though these platforms have grown more crowded in the short time since Rothy’s launched, it spent big on marketing from the outset — it flooded the zone, so to speak — and that campaign has seemingly paid off for the startup.

Today, the company, which runs its own 100,000-square-foot factory in China and employs roughly 500 people — including 50 people in the Bay Area — is selling four types of shoes, including its two best-known silhouettes — a $125 rounded flat shoe and a $145 pointed flat — along with loafers and, more newly, sneakers that are reminiscent of Van’s iconic shoes. 

Somewhat ironically, one of the biggest threats to Rothy’s ongoing rise — other than fickle shoppers — is companies that are beginning to copy Rothy’s designs, reports Bloomberg.

The company says, for instance, that it is currently suing at least one outfit, a Virginia-based company, for selling a shoe that looks to Rothy’s alarmingly like one of its own productions.

It’s hard to believe that you still had to convert your BTC into USD in order to buy ETH on Coinbase. The company is finally adding direct cryptocurrency-to-cryptocurrency conversions.

The feature works with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Litecoin (LTC), 0x (ZRX) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). It is only available to U.S. customers for now, but the company plans to roll out the feature to other countries too.

Let’s look at the fees more closely. If you live in Europe or the U.S., every time you buy or sell cryptocurrencies using USD or EUR, you pay at least 1.49 percent in fees on top of the spread (the difference between the highest selling price and the lowest purchasing price). Fees are even higher if you’re using a credit or debit card.

Coinbase says that the spread between a fiat currency and a cryptocurrency should be around 0.5 percent but may vary depending on the trading pair and the order queue.

If you buy or sell less than 200 USD or equivalent, fees get much more expensive. For instance, a $10 order will generate $0.99 in fees, or 9.9 percent. Customers pay 3 percent in fees for a $100 order.

But the good news is that it’s a completely different story with token-to-token transactions. Coinbase doesn’t charge you any markup fee — but there’s some inevitable spread. And with some obscure trading pairs (exchanging ZRX for BCH for instance), you might end up paying around 1 percent in spread. Still, it’s a much better user experience for those who just want to trade on Coinbase.

Without even mentioning other exchanges, Coinbase Pro users have been able to trade between multiple cryptocurrencies for a long time. But Coinbase is still the entry gate for many new cryptocurrency users.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

Our distinct skill sets and shortcomings mean people and robots will join forces for the next few decades. Robots are tireless, efficient and reliable, but in a millisecond through intuition and situational awareness, humans can make decisions machine can’t. Until workplace robots are truly autonomous and don’t require any human thinking, we’ll need software to supervise them at scale. Formant comes out of stealth today to “help people speak robot,” says co-founder and CEO Jeff Linnell. “What’s really going to move the needle in the innovation economy is using humans as an empowering element in automation.”

Linnell learned the grace of uniting flesh and steel while working on the movie Gravity. “We put cameras and Sandra Bullock on dollies,” he bluntly recalls. Artistic vision and robotic precision combined to create gorgeous zero-gravity scenes that made audiences feel weightless. Google bought his startup Bot & Dolly, and Linnell spent four years there as a director of robotics while forming his thesis.

Now with Formant, he wants to make hybrid workforce cooperation feel frictionless.

The company has raised a $6 million seed round from SignalFire, a data-driven VC fund with software for recruiting engineers. Formant is launching its closed beta that equips businesses with cloud infrastructure for collecting, making sense of and acting on data from fleets of robots. It allows a single human to oversee 10, 20 or 100 machines, stepping in to clear confusion when they aren’t sure what to do.

“The tooling is 10 years behind the web,” Linnell explains. “If you build a data company today, you’ll use AWS or Google Cloud, but that simply doesn’t exist for robotics. We’re building that layer.”

A beautiful marriage

“This is going to sound completely bizarre,” Formant CTO Anthony Jules warns me. “I had a recurring dream [as a child] in which I was a ship captain and I had a little mechanical parrot on my should that would look at situations and help me decide what to do as we’d sail the seas trying to avoid this octopus. Since then I knew that building intelligent machines is what I would do in this world.”

So he went to MIT, left a robotics PhD program to build a startup called Sapient Corporation that he built into a 4,000-employee public company, and worked on the Tony Hawk video games. He too joined Google through an acquisition, meeting Linnell after Redwood Robotics, where he was COO, got acquired. “We came up with some similar beliefs. There are a few places where full autonomy will actually work, but it’s really about creating a beautiful marriage of what machines are good at and what humans are good at,” Jules tells me.

Formant now has SaaS pilots running with businesses in several verticals to make their “robot-shaped data” usable. They range from food manufacturing to heavy infrastructure inspection to construction, and even training animals. Linnell also foresees retail increasingly employing fleets of robots not just in the warehouse but on the showroom floor, and they’ll require precise coordination.

What’s different about Formant is it doesn’t build the bots. Instead, it builds the reins for people to deftly control them.

First, Formant connects to sensors to fill up a cloud with LiDAR, depth imagery, video, photos, log files, metrics, motor torques and scalar values. The software parses that data and when something goes wrong or the system isn’t sure how to move forward, Formant alerts the human “foreman” that they need to intervene. It can monitor the fleet, sniff out the source of errors, and suggest options for what to do next.

For example, “when an autonomous digger encounters an obstacle in the foundation of a construction site, an operator is necessary to evaluate whether it is safe for the robot to proceed or stop,” Linnell writes. “This decision is made in tandem: the rich data gathered by the robot is easily interpreted by a human but difficult or legally questionable for a machine. This choice still depends on the value judgment of the human, and will change depending on if the obstacle is a gas main, a boulder, or an electrical wire.”

Any single data stream alone can’t reveal the mysteries that arise, and people would struggle to juggle the different feeds in their minds. But not only can Formant align the data for humans to act on, it also can turn their choices into valuable training data for artificial intelligence. Formant learns, so next time the machine won’t need assistance.

The industrial revolution, continued

With rock-star talent poached from Google and tides lifting all automated boats, Formant’s biggest threat is competition from tech giants. Old engineering companies like SAP could try to adapt to the new real-time data type, yet Formant hopes to out-code them. Google itself has built reliable cloud scaffolding and has robotics experience from Boston Dynamics, plus buying Linnell’s and Jules’ companies. But the enterprise customization necessary to connect with different clients isn’t typical for the search juggernaut.

Linnell fears that companies that try to build their own robot management software could get hacked. “I worry about people who do homegrown solutions or don’t have the experience we have from being at a place like Google. Putting robots online in an insecure way is a pretty bad problem.” Formant is looking to squash any bugs before it opens its platform to customers in 2019.

With time, humans will become less and less necessary, and that will surface enormous societal challenges for employment and welfare. “It’s in some ways a continuation of the industrial revolution,” Jules opines. “We take some of this for granted but it’s been happening for 100 years. Photographer — that’s a profession that doesn’t exist without the machine that they use. We think that transformation will continue to happen across the workforce.”