A new study from Versus Systems and the MEMES (Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports) Center at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management examines how gaming and advertising are evolving, and how one influences the other.

As Versus Systems CEO Matthew Pierce put it, the goal was to study, “What is the impact on advertising as interactive media grows, and as more people consume interactive media?”

The individual findings — People like rewards! Not everyone who plays games calls themselves a gamer! — may not be that shocking to TechCrunch readers. And because Versus Systems has built a white-label platform for publishers to offer in-game rewards, the study might also seem a bit self-serving.

But again, this was conducted with UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and both Pierce (who’s a lecturer at the school) and UCLA MEMES head Jay Tucker pointed to the size of the study, with 88,000 (U.S.-based) participants across a broad range of demographic groups.

Of those respondents, 50 percent said they’ve played a video game (on any platform) in the past week, while 41 percent said they’ve played a game in the past 24 hours. However, only 13 percent of respondents described themselves as gamers. That “identification gap” is even larger among women, where 56 percent played a game in the past week but only 11 percent identified themselves as gamers.

Why does that matter? Well, the MEMES Center and Versus Systems argue in the study press release that “advertisers that are recognizing the value in advertising in-game may be underestimating how large and how diverse the gaming audience really is today.”

The study also suggests that traditional advertising may be facing more resistance from consumers, with 46 percent of respondents saying they frequently or always avoid ads by “clicking the X” to close windows or changing channels or closing apps. Only 3.6 percent of respondents said they always watch ads all the way through.

When asked what would make them play games more, the most popular answer was “winning real things that I want when I achieve things in-game” — it was the number one result for 30 percent of respondents, and among millennials, it did even better. (In comparison, 18 percent put “if the games were less expensive” as their top answer and 11 percent said “my friends playing the same game(s).”) This attitude even extended to TV, where 77 percent of respondents listed rewards as one of the things (not necessarily the top reason) that would make them watch more television.

Meanwhile, 24 percent of respondents listed “if more games/more shows were made for people like me” as the number one thing that would convince them to play or watch more.

Tucker suggested that these seemingly scattershot answers are actually connected. On the advertising side, “We’ve got folks who are used to being part of a community all day, every day, whether that’s social media or massively multiplayer games. We see users are increasingly connected and are not really interested in getting pulled out of an experience. Rewards, if done properly, can reinforce being part of a community … you can amplify that sense of connection.”

“The introduction of choice seems to make a big difference,” Pierce added. “We need new models where we can foster choice, foster community, foster more aspirational relationships between viewers and brands that ultimately allows content developers to have a relationship with the brands that isn’t so adversarial.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to content and storytelling, Tucker said we’re entering an “age of personalization.” Among other things, that means more diversity, in what he described as “a generational shift away from stories that assume everybody’s looking at life from the same perspective.”

Pierce and Tucker suggested that they’ll be taking an even closer look at the data in the coming months (“needs further study” was repeated several times during the interview), particularly by examining responses within smaller demographic groups.

PornHub, a popular site that features people in various stages of undress, saw 33.5 billion visits in 2018. There are currently 7.53 billion people on Earth.

Y’all have been busy.

The company, which owns most of the major porn sites online, produces a yearly report that aggregates user behavior on the site. Of particular interest, aside from the fact that all of us are horndogs, is that the U.S., Germany and India are in the top spots for porn browsing and that the company transferred 4,000 petabytes of data, or about 500 MB, per person on the planet.

We ignore this data at our peril. While it doesn’t seem important at first glance, the fact that these porn sites are doing more traffic than most major news organizations is deeply telling. Further, like the meme worlds of Twitter and Facebook, Stormy Daniels and Fortnite made the top searches, which points to the spread of politics and culture into the heart of our desires. TV manufacturers should note that 4K searchers are rising in popularity, which suggests that consumer electronics manufacturers should start getting read for a shift (although it should be noted that there is sadly little free 4K content on these sites, a discovery I just made while researching this brief.)

Need more frightening/enlightening data? Here you go.

Just as ‘1080p’ searches had been a defining term in 2017, now ‘4k’ ultra-hd has seen a significant increase in popularity through-out 2018. The popularity of ‘Romantic’ videos more than doubled, and remained twice as popular with female visitors when compared to men.

Searches referring to the dating app ‘Tinder’ grew by 161% among women, 113% among men and 131% by visitors aged 35 to 44. It was also a top trending term in many countries including the United Kingdom and Australia. The number of Tinder themed fantasy date videos on the site is now more than 3500.

Life imitates art, and eventually porn imitates everything, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see that ‘Bowsette’ also made our list of searches that defined 2018. After the original Nintendo fan-art went viral, searches for Bowsette exceeded 3 million in just one week and resulted in the release of a live-action Bowsette themed porn parody (NSFW) with more than 720,000 views.

Bowsette. Good. Moving on.

The Bible Belt represented well in the showings, with Mississippi, South Carolina and Arkansas spending the most time looking at porn. Kansas spent the least. Phones got the most use as porn distribution devices and iOS and Android nearly tied in terms of platform popularity.

Windows traffic fell considerably this year, while Chrome OS became decidedly more popular in 2018. Chrome was popular when it came to browsers used, while the PlayStation was the biggest deliverer of flicks to the console user.

Porn is a the canary in the tech coal mine, and where it goes the rest of tech follows. All of these data points, taken together, paint a fascinating picture of a world on the cusp of a fairly unique shift from desktop to mobile and from HD to 4K video. Further, given that these sites are delivering so much data on a daily basis, it’s clear that all of us are sneaking a peek now and again… even if we refuse to admit it.

I have been talking about the applications of AI on Healthcare IT problems. Here is a great case study. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as PeriGen to our audience....

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When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open-sourcing Vitess, a brilliant relational data storage system. But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess.

So today the pair are revealing their new startup PlanetScale that makes it easy to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google or Microsoft’s infrastructure. Battle-tested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value proposition. “Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me. “A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us to help.”

PlanetScale quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April, led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering luminaries. They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons founder Ruchi Sanghvi. If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders, who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s top companies.

But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy? First, by actually working with them. The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly. Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere. That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems.

PlanetScale also promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess. “It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about lock-in” Vaidya says.

Battle-tested, YouTube-approved

He and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out. Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube. Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team.

“YouTube was growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams,” Vaidya recalls. Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess. The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to rapidly run operations. YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since.

“Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other companies five or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem,” Vaidya explains. That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard.

Vaidya left YouTube in 2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox, where he worked for four years. But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed toward MongoDB-style non-relational databases, which Vaidya considers inferior. He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking and commerce apps. “We think horizontally scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need.

Database legends reunite

Fed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale. It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open-source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on PlanetScale’s servers and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other cloud providers. It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes and run on Kubernetes.

PlanetScale’s customers now include Indonesian e-commerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub and New Relic migrate to open-source Vitess. Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries. Last month around when Square Cash became the No. 1 app, its engineering team published a blog post extolling the virtues of Vitess. Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms. “Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape,” says Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire.

The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat. But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one basket.

Finding product market fit is tough enough. Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy. But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust PlanetScale to make databases one less thing they have to worry about.

The simplest needs are often the most vital: power and clean water will get you a long way. But in rural areas of developing countries they can both be hard to come by. OffGridBox is attempting to provide both, sustainably and profitably, while meeting humanitarian and ecological goals at the same time. The company just raised $1.6 million to pursue its lofty agenda.

The idea is fairly simple, though naturally rather difficult to engineer: Use solar power to provide to a small community both electricity (in the form of charged batteries) and potable water. It’s not easy, and it’s not autonomous — but that’s by design.

I met two of the OffGridBox crew, founder and CEO Emiliano Cecchini and U.S. director Troy Billett, much earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, where they were being honored by Not Impossible, alongside the brilliant BecDot braille learning toy. The team had a lot of irons in the fire, but now are ready to announce their seed round and progress in deploying what could be a life-saving innovation.

They’ve installed 38 boxes so far, some at their own expense and others with the help of backers. Each is about the size of a small shed — a section of a shipping container, with a scaffold on top to attach the solar cells. Inside are the necessary components for storing electricity and distributing it to dozens of rechargeable batteries and lights at a time, plus a water reservoir and purifier.

Water from a nearby unsafe natural (or municipal, really) source is trucked or piped in and replenishes the reservoir. The solar cells run the purifier, providing clean water for cheap — around a third of what a family would normally pay, by the team’s estimate — and potentially with a much shorter trek. Simultaneously, charged batteries and lights are rented out at similarly low rates to people otherwise without electricity. Each box can generate as much as 12 kWh per day, which is split between the two tasks.

The alternatives for these communities would generally be small dedicated solar installations, the upfront cost of which can be unrealistic for them. The average household spend for electricity, Billett told me, is around 43 cents per day; OffGridBox will be offering it for less than half that, about 18 cents.

It doesn’t run itself: The box is administrated by a local merchant, who handles payments and communication with OffGridBox itself. Young women are targeted for this role, as they are more likely to be long-term residents of the area and members of the community. The box acts as a small business for them, essentially drawing money out of the air.

OffGridBox works with local nonprofits to find likely candidates; the women pictured above were recommended by Women for Women. They in turn will support others who, for example, deliver or resell the water or run side businesses that rely on the electricity provided. There’s even an associated local bottled water brand now — “Amaziyateke,” named after a big leaf that collects rainwater, but in Rwanda is also slang for a beautiful woman.

Some boxes are being set up to offer Wi-Fi as well via a cellular or satellite connection, which has its own obvious benefits. And recently people have been asking for the ability to play music at home, so the company started including portable speakers. This was unexpected, but an easy demand to meet, said Billett — “It is critical to listen!”

The company does do some work to keep the tech running efficiently and safely, remotely monitoring for problems and scheduling maintenance calls. So these things aren’t just set down and forgotten. That said, they can and have run for hundreds of thousands of hours — years — without major work being done.

Each box costs about $15,000 to build, plus roughly another $10,000 to deliver and install. The business model has an investor or investors cover this initial cost, then receive a share of the revenue for the life of the box. At capacity usage this might take around two years, after which the revenue split shifts (from a negotiable initial split to 50/50); it’s a small, safe source of income for years to come. At around $10,000 of revenue per year per box with full utilization, the IRR is estimated at 15 percent.

What OffGridBox believes is that this model is better than any other for quick deployment of these boxes. Grants are an option, of course, and they can also be brought in for disaster relief purposes. Originally the idea was to sell these to rich folks who wanted to live off the grid or have a more self-sufficient mountain cabin, but this is definitely better — for a lot of reasons. (You could probably still get one for yourself if you really wanted.)

OffGridBox has been through the Techstars accelerator as part of a 2017 group, and worked through 2018, as I mentioned earlier, to secure funding from a variety of sources. This seed round totaling $1.6 million was led by the Doen and Good Energies Foundations; the Banque Populaire du Rwanda is also a partner.

Along with a series A planned for 2019, this money will support the deployment of a total of 42 box installations in Rwandan communities.

“This will help us become a major player in the energy and water markets in Rwanda while empowering women entrepreneurs, fighting biocontamination for improved health, and introducing lighting in rural homes,” said Cecchini in the press release announcing the funding.

Alternative or complementary sources of power, such as wind, are being looked into, and desalination of water (as opposed to just sterilization) is being actively researched. This would increase the range and reliability of the boxes, naturally, and make island communities much more realistic.

Those 42 boxes are just the beginning: The company hopes to deploy as many as 1,000 throughout Rwanda, and even then that would only reach a fifth of the country’s off-grid market. By partnering with local energy concerns and banks, OffGridBox hopes to deploy as many as 100 boxes a year, potentially bringing water and power to as many as 100,000 more people.

French startup Tempow has been working on software solutions to improve the Bluetooth protocol. The company just unveiled the Tempow True Wireless Bluetooth profile so that anybody can create AirPods clones.

Many companies have tried creating a pair of earbuds with absolutely no wire. But none of them are as good as Apple’s AirPods. Manufacturers can’t quite recreate the same experience because Apple has developed its own chip and software solution.

Putting aside the magical Bluetooth pairing process, AirPods leverage normal Bluetooth audio (A2DP) to communicate with your device. That’s why they work with iPhones, Android phones, old Windows laptops, etc.

But A2DP normally only lets you connect one device with one headphone. And that’s also what’s happening with AirPods. Your phone establishes a link with one of the earbuds. The second earbud then sniffs the first link.

Other manufacturers have tried to create wireless earbuds by establishing a second connection between the second earbud and the main earbud. They often use Near Field Magnetic Induction. This uses a lot of battery and creates latency issues.

Tempow has been rewriting the Bluetooth stack so that manufacturers can use normal Bluetooth chipsets and pair a single device with multiple speakers. Using this solution for wireless earbuds seems like a natural fit.

Yesterday TechCrunch held its first-ever event in Nigeria — our second in Sub-Saharan Africa. The day was packed with Battlefield presentations from 15 startups from across the region, along with panels featuring some of Africa’s best-known tech entrepreneurs and executives.

It was an incredible day and offered a fascinating peek into an absolutely vibrant tech community. For those unable to make the trek through the standstill Lagos traffic, have no fear. We’ve included footage from the day’s event below. And for those who were lucky enough to join, you can relive the highlights right here.

Expats, Repats and Africans

Kwame Acheampong (Mall for Africa), Eleni Gabre-Madhin (blueMoon) and Lexi Novitske (Singularity Investments) discuss the ups and downs of the influence repatriates and outside investors exert on the African startup community.

Fireside Chat with Funke Opeke

Main Street Technologies founder and Main One Cable Company CEO Funke Opeke has led the charge to bring broadband internet to West Africa. She discusses the role of entrepreneurship in helping to scale business.

Investing in African Startups

Kola Aina and other area investors discuss the lessons that can be learned from Silicon Valley VC, and which aspects of the model don’t apply to the African tech ecosystem.

Blockchain’s Potential in Africa

Olugbenga Agboola (Flutterwave), Omolara Awoyemi (SureGroup) and Nichole Yembra (Greenhouse Capital) and Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi (SureRemit) discuss the impact crypto has had on the African tech community and the different ways blockchain technology can help build a broad cross-section of different categories.

The Winner of Startup Battlefield

The winner of the event was M-SCAN from Uganda, which develops portable mobile ultrasound devices (Ultrasonic probes) that are laptop, tablet and mobile phone compatible. The judges were impressed with its scalability potential to make many other medical access devices affordable for Africa, where mother and infant mortality is unforgivably high.

Procore Technologies, a provider of software to manage construction projects, is now worth $3 billion thanks to a new $75 million round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

The new funding shows just how completely software has eaten the world. Once considered an industry that was too analog to ever reap the benefits of technology’s management tools, software and services for the construction industry have seen some big exits and big money come in over the past three years.

Unicorns abound among the companies that are trying to serve various aspects of the construction industry. SoftBank kicked off 2018 by investing $865 million in Katerra — one of many early mega-deals from the firm’s giant Vision Fund — which touts itself as a one-stop shop for everything from planning to permitting to filling new building construction. In November, another software developer that was contending for the construction market, PlanGrid, was acquired by Autodesk in an $875 million transaction.

Taking new money from Tiger Global to expand makes sense, given the competitive advantage that PlanGrid gained in the market by tying up with a $30 billion powerhouse in software development for the architecture, design and construction industry. Autodesk is the maker of AutoCAD — one of the fundamental tools that architects, designers and construction companies use for two and three-dimensional renderings of buildings. By integrating the design management and construction planning toolkits, Autodesk created a more integrated offering for customers.

Indeed, Procore said it would use the cash to ramp up its partner expansion and to continue to invest in new products and services and hiring new talent.

Based in Carpinteria, Calif., Procore already has more than 1,300 employees working in 12 offices around the world and is working with more than 5,000 different customers on projects.

Additional investors in Procore include Bessemer Venture Partners, Iconiq Capital and Lumia Partners.

Kara Weber: I talked about a female-founded company in LA and a female-founded company in New York. We don’t just invest in companies founded by women but 65% of our companies have female founders....

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Social media has lately been linked to mental health issues, with a recent study showing a causal relationship between the use of social media and depression and loneliness. Wisdo, which just raised $11 million in seed funding from a handful of angel investors, aims to connect and support people in some of their toughest moments.

Communities on Wisdo focus on topics around physical health, mental health, self-growth, sexuality, identity and family. The app works by connecting people seeking help with those who can offer help — often those who have been through similar experiences.

“Wisdo grew out of my own personal experience when my father was diagnosed with cancer – I had no experience with cancer and there was no ‘map’ for what I should do next, no one to give me direction,” Wisdo CEO Boaz Gaon said in a statement. “I also understood that this could not possibly be true: there had to be many millions of people who had lived through this exact situation and who could help guide me – I just needed to find them. This was the seed of Wisdo – connecting people around these experiences, finding the everyday wisdom that we all need, sharing the earned wisdom that we all have, building a map for life’s emotional challenges, and giving people insight into what happens next.”

Wisdo’s timeline feature enables people to lay out their experiences in the form of steps. Based on those steps, Wisdo develops an outline for each life experience. From there, users can engage with each other in one-on-one conversations. In beta, Wisdo grew to 500,000 users.

“Social networks are based on generalized groups of friends and acquaintances where you can’t share openly and honestly about anything,” Richard Klausner, an investor in Wisdo and founder of Juno Therapeutics, said. “Social networks can be a force for good by rewarding empathy and helpfulness, which is why we believe so much in Wisdo’s mission. We want users to not only be open and honest, but move from that to creating human connections, which can improve users’ lives in the long run.”

*An earlier version of this story said Intel Capital invested. The press release sent over was inaccurate.

Ever wonder how much of your personal information is accessible to marketers? Well, there’s a new service called My Number Lookup that makes it easy (and free) for you to check the data that’s publicly available and tied to your mobile phone number.

The service was created by Keepsafe, maker of privacy-centric products. While there is a My Number Lookup website, the service actually operates over SMS — you just text HELLO to (855) 228-4539 and it will start sending you a report.

Keepsafe co-founder and CEO Zouhair Belkoura said that while marketers are able to access this information with relative ease, it’s difficult for consumers to check.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we make it super easy?'” he said. “Here’s a number you can text that tells you what information is publicly available.”

Specifically, My Number Lookup will tell you whether it was able to find a name, home address, age, gender, mobile carrier and associated people tied to your mobile number. It will even show you the data (several of the data points about me were missing, out-of-date or flat-out wrong), then point you toward Keepsafe Unlisted, a service for creating “burner” phone numbers (so you don’t have to share your real number widely), and also toward a Keepsafe blog post that outlines how someone can try to remove their personal information from various data brokers.

Belkoura admitted that even though you’ve got the report, you won’t necessarily be able to scrub the data from the internet. Instead, he sees it as more of “a wake-up call” that people need to be more careful about giving out their phone numbers. And if it leads them to use Keepsafe Unlisted, even better.

“Once information is out there, it’s very difficult to delete,” he said. “The internet is a place that just doesn’t forget.”

As for why the service operates over SMS, Belkoura said My Number Lookup will only provide data about the number you’re texting from. Hopefully that means users will only check on their own data, not someone else’s: “We don’t actually want to create a service where people who don’t have a legitimate interest can pay to look up information.”

Sovrn recently raised $25 million in new funding with the goal of expanding beyond the adtech business through acquisitions. Now it’s announcing the first of those deals: It’s acquiring affiliate marketing company VigLink.

Sovrn first launched in 2014 — made up, as CEO Walter Knapp put it, from “bits and pieces of different companies.” (It emerged from Federated Media and its roots go back to Lijit, which FM acquired in 2011.) Knapp said the company’s vision is to “enable a professional class of storytellers to do more of what they want to do” by providing tools around content creation, distribution, monetization, operations and capital.

As for VigLink, it was founded in 2009 to help publishers monetize by automatically inserting affiliate links (where merchants share revenue with publishers when those publishers drive sales). Knapp said he’s been interested in the intersection of publishing and commerce because publishers are often the ones influencing consumer purchase decisions, but “they don’t really capture the commerce value of what they’ve created.”

VigLink already plays a big role in that process — Knapp said its links are driving nearly $1 billion in annual sales. But he also noted that there’s less than 10 percent overlap between the domains working with Sovrn and VigLink, so he sees plenty of opportunity to grow.

“We can take what is a really interesting product that has appealed more to high-volume publishers and take it into content publishers,” Knapp said. “Now what’s required there is a pretty deep understanding of the editorial process.”

Knapp intends to bring the entire 35-person VigLink team over to Sovrn, bringing the company’s headcount to 220. He also said that with the addition of VigLink to Sovrn’s business, “transactional adtech” will make up less than half of the company’s total revenue.

And he promised that the VigLink product will continue to evolve, for example by giving publishers more data about the entire customer journey.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, VigLink raised more than $27 million from investors, including GV, Emergence Capital, First Round Capital, RRE Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Foundry Group, Costanoa Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

Robinhood is undercutting the big banks by forgoing brick-and-mortar branches with its new zero-fee checking and savings account features. With no overdraft or monthly fees, a juicy 3 percent interest rate and a claim of more U.S. ATMs than the five biggest banks combined, Robinhood is using the scalability of software to pass impressive perks on to customers. The free stock trading app already used that approach to attack brokers like E*Trade and Charles Schwab that charge a per-trade fee. Now it’s breaking into the larger financial services market with a model that could put the squeeze on Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America. However, Robinhood may not be properly insured to do so.

Today Robinhood launches checking and savings accounts in the U.S. with a Mastercard debit card issued through Sutton Bank that starts shipping December 18th. Users earn 3 percent on all the dough they keep with Robinhood, yet there’s no minimum balance or fees for monthly membership, overdrafts, foreign transactions or card replacements. That’s a pretty sweet deal compared to the other leading banks that all charge for some of that or offer much lower interest rates. The trade-off is that while customers get 24/7 live text chat support, they won’t be able to walk into a local bank branch. Users who want early access can sign up here.

Robinhood expects to turn a profit thanks to a lean 300-employee operation, earning a margin on investing your money in U.S. treasuries and a revenue share with Mastercard on interchange fees charged to merchants when you swipe. The launch could be critical to keeping Robinhood worthy of its $5.6 billion valuation from when it took a $363 million Series D in March just a year after raising at a $1.3 billion valuation. The 6 million-user app invested in launching a free cryptocurrency trading exchange early this year only to see coin prices plummet and mainstream interest fall off. But with banks hammering users with surprise fees and mediocre user experience, there’s a huge opportunity for a mobile-first startup to disrupt how we store money.

“Brick-and-mortar locations are costly. Our goal with this product was to build a completely digital experience so we can reduce our overhead so we can pass more of the value back to customers,” Robinhood co-CEO Baiju Bhatt tells me. [Disclosure: I know Bhatt and co-CEO Vlad Tenev from college.] “Saving accounts in the U.S. pay on average 0.09 percent and we all know the banks are making far more than that from the deposits. With Robinhood you earn 3 percent off all of your money. Mental math is hard, so if you look at the median U.S. household that has about $8,000 in liquid savings, they’d earn $240 a year.”

Robinhood will be sending invites to users in January for the new feature that they can use exclusively or alongside their existing bank. Anyone approved to use Robinhood’s stock brokerage is eligible, but users can also sign up directly for checking and savings with no obligation to trade stocks. Robinhood claims signing up won’t impact your credit score. Users get to customize a Robinhood-branded debit card that’s accepted wherever Mastercard is. Because the feature is run within Robinhood’s brokerage, it’s ensured by the SIPC instead of the FDIC.

[Update 12/14/2018: It’s increasingly unclear whether the SIPC’s insurance would cover Robinhood’s checking and savings feature to protect users in the event that Robinhood loses their money investing it in treasury securities if there was a market downturn. It’s also unclear if Robinhood or its partner Sutton Bank had explicit approval from the SIPC to use its insurance for checking/savings instead of as a brokerage. Robinhood initially told TechCrunch users would be fully protected by the SIPC. However, SIPC CEO Stephen Harbeck tells me the SIPC would not cover checking and savings, and that Robinhood did not get explicit permission for this. He’s referred the issue to the SEC. Read our full story on the risks of Robinhood checking and savings here.]

One of the most appealing features of Robinhood checking and savings is getting access to 75,000 free-to-use ATMs in places like Target, Walgreens and 7-Eleven. Users won’t be able to tell just by looking at an ATM whether it’s in the network, but the Robinhood app features a map for finding the nearest one. You can deposit checks via Robinhood’s app too, and if you need to send a check, you can just tell the startup how much to deliver to whom and it will mail the check for you.

“These fees like overdraft fees — they’re not fees millionaires are paying. It’s ordinary folks paying. It’s actually more expensive for those that have less money and it’s cheaper for those that have more money. We think that isn’t right and we think that’s bad business,” Bhatt gripes. Because Robinhood built its own clearing house for moving money, and it lacks the overhead of traditional banks, it’s able to save enough money to make its no-fee structure work. “We want to build a financial services company that democratizes America’s financial system.”

Robinhood will have to convince users it’s worthy of their trust, as a security breach could be disastrous. There’s also the question of whether people are ready to ditch their bank branch. “Behaviors about and going into a branch are definitely changing,” says Bhatt. My biggest concern was not having any consistency in who I talk to when I need banking help. Bhatt tells me the company plans to roll out more personalized customer service features in the coming months, but there may always be edge cases that make the lack of in-person support annoying.

Getting into banking could open a lucrative revenue stream for Robinhood as it charts its path to IPO. The startup recently hired Jason Warnick, a 20-year veteran of Amazon, to be its CFO and get it prepped to go public. Wall Street will want to see a more robust business that’s not as vulnerable to foes like stock brokerage Charles Schwab, which is already lowering fees to stay competitive with Robinhood. Not only will checking and savings see users move more money into their Robinhood accounts that it can invest to earn a profit, but it also poises the startup to tackle more financial services in the future. More lucrative products like loans could make paying 3 percent much easier for Robinhood to handle. But for now it must get insurance sorted out and guarantee users are protected before they should consider signing up.

Months after a big round, African fintech startup Jumo has pulled in a fresh $12.5 million to add more fuel for its expansion into Asia Pacific.

The new investment comes from London-based investment fund Odey Asset Management, and it is an extension to a $52 million round that closed back in September. The deal takes Jumo, which recently moved its headquarters to Singapore, to $103 million raised from investors. Its backers include Goldman Sachs, Proparco — which is attached to the French Development Agency — and Finnfund, and it was part of Google’s Launchpad accelerator last year.

Founded in 2014, Jumo specializes in social impact financial products, such as microloans, savings and insurance. It started in Tanzania, and today claims to have originated more than $1 billion in loans. Since September, when it announced a first expansion into Asia via Pakistan, it claims it has grown to 10 million people saving or borrowing from its platform (from a previous nine million). The company has some 350 staff across 10 offices in Africa, Europe and Asia.

Over the last year, the company said it has doubled the number of financial service providers and telcos on its platform. Of those deals, one of its highest profile is a digital finance product for Uber drivers that’s live in Kenya. That collaboration is likely to expand in Africa and potentially beyond, Jumo said.

Expansion is very much the name of the game all round for the company. Jumo CEO Andrew Watkins-Ball told TechCrunch in September that there are plans to expand to more Asian markets next year but, for now, the company isn’t saying which ones.

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Finalcad, a mobile platform that enables the construction industry to digitize much of its processes, has closed $40 million in Series C funding. The round was led by publicly listed London venture capital firm Draper Esprit, and Cathay Innovation, with the support of Salesforce Ventures. Existing existing French investors Serena, Aster and CapHorn Invest also participated.

Funded in 2012 by Jimmy Louchart, Joffroy Louchart and David Vauthrin, Finalcad has set out to solve the construction industry’s “chronic low productivity” problem. The Paris-based company has developed a SaaS and mobile app to help construction workers and other construction stakeholders collaborate digitally, which is believed to be the key to removing many of the efficiencies in construction.

Specifically — and according to McKinsey — labor-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy and 3.6 percent in the case of manufacturing. The construction industry is also lagging behind in terms of digitization: MGI’s digitization index places it among the least digitized sectors.

To help remedy this, Finalcad’s SaaS lets construction site engineers, foremen, architects and consultants work together via the Finalcad mobile app, enabling collaboration across a wide variety of workflows both on site and at the office.

Along with acting as a communication tool — akin to a ‘Yammer for construction’ — the software also enables stakeholders to work on drawings, BIM models, tasks, controls, safety procedures and progress monitoring. From this vantage point, Finalcad is able to provide insights and “best practices at a company level,” powered by its analytics technology.

On who Finalcad’s competition is, unsurprisingly co-founder and CMO David Vauthrin says it’s a “mix of paper and pencil, excel sheets, and IM platforms,” such as WhatsApp or WeChat etc.

“On direct competiton, we face some players, but they are all very small companies, limited to one trade (e.g. buildings) or to a [single] geography,” he says.

Vauthrin also tells me that the Paris-based company’s business model is not based on per project sales, but is designed to encourage company-wide digital transformation. This sees Finalcad operate a subscription model based on a percentage of a company’s turnover.

“We created and implement into our customer’s organisation a ‘change management’ methodology to make sure that the majority of our customer’s workforce is going to embrace this change,” he adds.

To that end, Finalcad says it will use the new Series C funding to extend its SaaS, which spans support for buildings and infrastructure to energy, operations, and maintenance. It will also invest in R&D related to its Construction Insight Platform, and plans to hire an additional 100 people globally, adding to a current headcount of 170 people across 12 countries.

“When we raised our Series B in 2016, we intended to implement pivotal change: moving from a project-based business model to a company-wide digital transformation one. This involved covering all the main activities of our industry: buildings, infrastructure, energy, operations and maintenance,” says Jimmy Louchart, co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

“Since then, we validated this shift with some major contract wins in Europe and Asia. Now this Series C allows us to fully deploy our new strategy on a global scale. We firmly believe that this unique approach is coming to fruition, and the value we bring to our customers is the right path towards changing the way we build”.

Fintech startup Revolut is now officially a bank. While the startup initially expected to get its European banking license during the first half of 2018, the company has finally come out of the regulatory tunnel with a license in hand.

As expected, Revolut applied for a license through the Bank of Lithuania and is leveraging passporting rules to operate in other European countries. Users will see some changes over the coming months.

First, the company expects to roll out new features in the U.K., France, Germany and Poland. Right now, Revolut is more like an e-wallet that you can top up in many different ways. Users in those countries will get a true current account and a non-prepaid debit card in a few months.

After transferring your money to Revolut’s own infrastructure, funds will be covered up to €100,000 under the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. It should convince more users to switch to Revolut for their salaries and big sums of money.

Eventually, the startup expects to be able to offer overdrafts and loans. All fintech startups end up offering credit at some point as it’s a good way to generate revenue.

There are currently 8,000 to 10,000 people opening a Revolut account per day. Users generate $4 billion in monthly transaction volume.

It’s going to be interesting to see if current accounts will affect growth. It’s currently quite easy to open a Revolut account as users don’t need to go through a lot of KYC processes. This is going to change once the startup starts opening current accounts.