When in July of last year, SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a whopping $200 million round in the Silicon Valley startup Plenty, investors behind a competing indoor farming startup across the country, New York-based Bowery, were left reeling. Just one month earlier, they’d closed on a round that brought Bowery’s total funding to $31 million. As one of Bowery’s backers told us in the immediate aftermath of Plenty’s enormous round, SoftBank’s involvement “definitely gives you pause.”

Its involvement has not, however, prompted investors to give up. On the contrary, Bowery just today announced that it has raised $90 million in fresh funding led by GV, with participation from Temasek and Almanac Ventures; the company’s Series A investors, General Catalyst and GGV Capital; and numerous of its seed investors, including First Round Capital.

It’s easy to understand investors’ unwavering interest in the company and the space, given the opportunity that Bowery, and Plenty, and hundreds of other indoor farming startups, are chasing. As Bowery outlined in a post this morning, “traditional agriculture uses 700 million pounds of pesticides annually, and fresh food takes weeks” and sometimes longer to land on the dinner table. Along the way, terrible things sometimes happen, including E.coli outbreaks, like the kind recently linked to the sale of romaine lettuce in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Bowery, which is growing crops inside two warehouses in New Jersey, can promise people in New York that their bok choy didn’t travel far at all.

Bowery also appears to be gaining the kind of momentum that VCs want to see. According to the company, it started life with five employees three years ago; today its staff has ballooned to 65 people. It has established a distribution partnership with Whole Foods. It has partnered with sweetgreen, the fast-food chain known for its farm-to-table salad bowls, and Dig Inn, a New York- and Boston-based chain of locally farm-sourced restaurants.

Unsurprisingly, the company says it plans to partner with new retail, food service and restaurant partners in the new year, too.

Bigger picture, Bowery says it plans to build a “global distributed network of farms” that are connected to each other through a kind of operating system, and that it has already begun work on the first of these outside the tri-state area.

Whether it succeeds in that vision is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s hard to know how big an impact that Bowery, or Plenty (which plans to build 300 indoor farms in or near Chinese cities) or any of its many competitors will ultimately have. But given that we’ll need to feed two billion more people by 2050 without overwhelming the planet, it’s also easy to understand from a humanitarian standpoint why investors might be keen to write these companies big checks. In fact, the rest of us should probably be rooting them on, too.

The lines between streetwear and luxury fashion have blurred in recent years, especially as excitement around sneaker brands like Yeezy and Off-White has soared.

A marriage between a luxury fashion marketplace and a sneaker and streetwear reseller seems like a natural way to wrap up M&A in 2018. With that said, Farfetch has acquired New York-based Stadium Goods, opting to pay $250 million for the sneaker startup in a combination of cash and Farfetch stock. Headquartered in London, Farfetch went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September, pricing its shares at $20 apiece and raising $885 million in the process.

What’s more impressive is Stadium Goods’ journey to exit. The company, which sells new and deadstock products online and in a brick-and-mortar store in New York’s Soho neighborhood, was founded in 2015 by John McPheters and Jed Stiller and had only raised $4.6 million in venture capital funding from Forerunner Ventures, The Chernin Group and Mark Cuban, who is an advisor to the startup.

“There was a time not that long ago when you couldn’t wear sneakers and streetwear to nightclubs and restaurants,” McPheters, Stadium Goods’ chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “But adoption of the stuff we are selling has continued to grow at a very large clip.”

The sale to Farfetch not only provides a major boost to the sneaker tech ecosystem, which is surprisingly much larger than those who aren’t familiar with it might have guessed, but it’s yet another successful e-commerce exit for Kirsten Green, the founding partner of Forerunner Ventures, who’s also backed Dollar Shave Club and Bonobos — direct-to-consumer retailers that sold for $1 billion and $310 million, respectively.

Farfetch boarded the sneaker and streetwear hype train a while ago when it incorporated brands like Nike’s Jordan, pairs of which sell for more than $1,000 on the site. The company doubled down on sneakers earlier this year when it began integrating Stadium Goods products. After noticing high-demand, Farfetch founder and CEO José Neves tells TechCrunch, they began acquisition talks with the startup. Stadium Goods will remain independent as part of the deal, with McPheters and Stiller staying on to lead the brand forward. The company’s portfolio of shoes and apparel will be fully available on Farfetch’s e-commerce platform in the coming months.

“Luxury streetwear is a significant part of our business,” Neves said. “For many years now, we have had the largest collection of Off-White, for example, on the internet … What we did not have was the resale, secondary market. It was clear this was an interesting opportunity.”

Together, Farfetch and Stadium Goods will focus on international growth. McPheters tells TechCrunch Stadium Goods already had a significant international base of customers, but a partnership with Farfetch gives them the tools to go places they’ve never been.

“In my mind, we are only just beginning,” McPheters said. “As more and more customers get comfortable with purchasing aftermarket items, we are going to continue to grow.”

The global athletic footwear industry is expected to be worth $95 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, sneaker resale is a $1 billion market and growing, fueled by a cohort of startups making it easier than ever for sneakerheads to locate rare shoes online and have them delivered to their doorsteps. That includes Stadium Goods, Flight Club, GOAT and StockX.

All four of these resellers, which ensure authentication of their products, are backed by VCs. Flight Club merged with GOAT earlier this year and together the pair raised a $60 million Series C. Before that, GOAT had brought in $30 million for its secondary market for collectible shoes from Accel, Upfront Ventures, Matrix Partners and more. StockX, for its part, has raised just over $50 million from Mark Wahlberg, Scooter Braun, Wale, Eminem, SV Angel and others.

According to Crunchbase data, VCs have funneled more than $200 million into sneaker startups in the past two years. Now, given the size of Stadium Goods’ exit, investment in the space will likely pick up significantly as other VCs hope to land an exit multiple that substantial.

Whether the reselling market will continue to expand is in question. Some have called it a bubble poised to burst, claiming it’s at its “height in popularity.” Why? Because corporate shoe brands like Nike and Adidas are keenly aware of the secondary market for their products and how they, too, can profit from it. If they decide to increase the supply of particular shoe models hot on the secondary market, they can radically disrupt the reseller economy. McPheters, however, says this doesn’t concern him.

“Brands need to strangle the demand to keep driving excitement in the space,” McPheters said. “They count on that hype to really move the needle.”

Fintech startup YayPay just raised another $8.4 million for its software-as-a-service solution focused on collecting money from outstanding invoices. The company participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield several years ago.

Information Venture Partners led today’s funding round with existing investors Birchmere, QED, Fifth Third Capital, Gaingels and 500 Fintech Fund also participating.

YayPay targets large companies with an accounting department. The startup provides the perfect service to handle unpaid invoices. YayPay analyzes previous invoices and predicts when you’re supposed to get paid depending on the client and the nature of the invoice. This way, you know which account needs your attention right now.

Teams can collaborate to send reminders and make sure everyone is on the same page. You also can view information about your client directly in YayPay thanks to CRM and ERP integrations.

YayPay also eliminates a bunch of pesky tasks, such as gentle email reminders. You can create automated workflows so that your clients get an email a few days before a payment deadline. If they don’t open the email, you can receive a notification telling you to call them. Customers also can pay invoices directly using YayPay. The platform supports ACH and credit cards.

While this seems like a niche product, the company has managed to attract 480 clients that have generated more than $7 billion in accounts receivables. This represents a 500 percent user base increase over the last 12 months.

Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

Tigera, a startup that offers security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes container deployments, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors Madrona, NEA and Wing also participated in this round.

Like everybody in the Kubernetes ecosystem, Tigera is exhibiting at KubeCon this week, so I caught up with the team to talk about the state of the company and its plans for this new raise.

“We are in a very exciting position,” Tigera president and CEO Ratan Tipirneni told me. “All the four public cloud players [AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud] have adopted us for their public Kubernetes service. The large Kubernetes distros like Red Hat and Docker are using us.” In addition, the team has signed up other enterprises, often in the healthcare and financial industry, and SaaS players (all of which it isn’t allowed to name) that use its service directly.

The company says that it didn’t need to raise right now. “We didn’t need the money right now, but we had a lot of incoming interest,” Tipirneni said. The company will use the funding to expand its engineering, marketing and customer success teams. In total, it plans to quadruple its sales force. In addition, it plans to set up a large office in Vancouver, Canada, mostly because of the availability of talent there.

In the legacy IT world, security and compliance solutions could rely on the knowledge that the underlying infrastructure was relatively stable. Now, though, with the advent of containers and DevOps, workloads are highly dynamic, but that also makes the challenge of securing them and ensuring compliance with regulations like HIPAA or standards like PCI more complex, too. The promise of Tigera’s solution is that it allows enterprises to ensure compliance by using a zero-trust model that authorizes each service on the network, encrypts all the traffic and enforces the policies the admins have set for their company and needs. All of this data is logged in detail and, if necessary, enterprises can pull it for incident management or forensic analysis. 

Future Family is a startup (and a Disrupt Startup Battlefield alum!) that helps families more easily afford fertility services like IVF and egg freezing. They work with fertility clinics to get the often unpredictable costs set in stone, then cover said costs and convert them into a more approachable monthly payment plan.

But covering those costs up front isn’t cheap, which lead to long waitlists for those looking to Future Family for help. With that in mind, the company has locked in a $100 million credit line to help them power through their waitlist and immediately offer their services to more people.

The capital is coming from Atalaya, a capital management firm that specializes in funding specialty finance companies like Future Family (or Point, a startup that provides capital to home buyers in exchange for equity in the home, in which Atalaya invested $150 million earlier this year.)

So what does this mean? Most immediately, it means that Future Family will be able to clear up its waitlists before moving on to offering same-day approval/financing to new customers.

Claire Tomkins founded Future Family after seeing for herself just how complicated and expensive the fertility care process could be. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the fertility care involved with having her first child, she set out to make it less complicated and more accessible.

This news comes a little less than two months after Future Family raised $10 million in a Series A round. A few weeks before that, the company adjusted its model to work more like a monthly subscription than a loan, allowing additional costs (like genetic testing and travel) to be wrapped in should the need arise.

Guru, the enterprise-focused information-sharing platform, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, FirstMark Capital, Slack Fund and Michael Dell’s MSD Capital.

Guru came on to the scene in 2013 with the premise that organizations are not so great at building out informational databases, nor are they very good at using them. So Guru built a Chrome extension that simply sits as a layer on employees’ computers and surfaces the right information whenever asked.

Specifically, this comes in handy for customer service agents and sales people who need to answer questions from people outside of the organization quickly and accurately.

This summer, Guru revamped the platform to incorporate a new feature set called AI Suggest. The feature simply auto-surfaces relevant information as the employee goes about their business, with no searches or inquiries necessary. The company also unveiled two versions of the feature, text and voice, so that it is still useful when employees are on the phone.

Companies that are sensitive about their information being shared with Guru can customize the level of access given to Guru, including or excluding certain third-party integrations etc., as well as how long information is stored on Guru. No personally identifying information about end-customers is ever stored on the Guru platform.

Over the past couple of years, Guru has brought on big-name clients, including BuzzFeed, Glossier, Intercom and Thumbtack.

Guru has signed on 200 new clients since the launch of AI Suggest in July, with a total of around 800 companies on the platform, representing thousands of users.

For now, the company is hyper-focused on growth.

“We are not profitable yet,” said co-founder and CEO Rick Nucci .” But we’re intentionally focused on growth. What prompted us to raise this round right now is to continue to execute on the momentum of the business.”

Guru has now raised a total of $38 million.

This article has been updated to reflect that Guru has raised $38m and not $27.7m.

Sramana Mitra: You said you got involved before anybody else because you met this person long back. You resonated with what they were saying. At what stage did you write the check? Kara Weber: I...

___

Walker & Company Brands, a startup making health and beauty products for people of color, has been acquired by consumer giant Procter & Gamble.

The company was founded five years ago by Tristan Walker, who previously led business development for Foursquare, and who aimed to create products that would better serve the needs of people of color with coarse or curly hair. Walker & Co. started out with its Bevel shaving products for men, then launched Form, a collection of hair products for women.

P&G says the acquisition will help it “better serve consumers of color around the world.” Walker & Co. will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the larger organization, with Walker continuing to serve as CEO, and the entire 15-person team moving to Atlanta.

“When I started Walker & Company Brands, I set out to build a company that would meet the health and beauty needs of people of color on a global scale,” Walker said in the announcement. “Having access to P&G’s outstanding technology, capabilities and expertise helps us to further realize that vision, giving us the power to scale and bring new products to people of color, while staying true to our mission and continuing to nurture the loyal community we’ve worked hard to build.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Walker & Co. had raised more than $33.3 million in funding, most recently in a Series B three years ago. Investors include Institutional Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Upfront Ventures, Daher Capital, Collaborative Fund, Google Ventures, Felicis Ventures and Melo7 Tech Partners.

“We have tremendous respect for the work Tristan Walker has accomplished and we are excited to welcome Walker & Company to the P&G family,” said P&G Beauty CEO Alex Keith in a statement. “The combination of Walker & Company’s deep consumer understanding, authentic connection to its community and unique, highly customized products and P&G’s highly-skilled and experienced people, resources, technical capabilities and global scale will allow us to further improve the lives of the world’s multicultural consumers.”

Hello, Las Vegas! We are all heading to LV for CES next month and instead of spending all our cash on a booth we’ll be wandering the halls and want to meet you as far away from the Convention Center as possible without ending up in the Grand Canyon.

And we need your help.

While I have some ideas, I’d love it if someone could recommend a nice place to host about 150 people with drinks, food and other goodies. We’ll have beer, exhibitors and some good times.

If you have any ideas or would like to take part as a sponsor or exhibitor, please drop me a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I’m thinking something nice out in Old Las Vegas or somewhere off the strip where we don’t have to push through crowds of people in lanyards. This event will be open to all of you, so get your blue suede dancing shoes ready.

AtScale, the startup that helps companies move massive amounts of data into business intelligence and analytics tools, announced a $50 million Series D round today.

Morgan Stanley led the round, with previous investors Storm Ventures and Atlantic Bridge joining in. New investor Wells Fargo also participated. The funding comes almost exactly a year after the company announced its $25 million Series C. Today’s funding brings the total amount raised to $120 million.

Bringing on an institutional investor like Morgan Stanley is often a signal that the company has reached the stage where it is at least beginning to think about the possibility of going public at some point in the future. AtScale CEO Chris Lynch acknowledged such a connection without making any broad commitment (as you would expect). “We are not close to being IPO-ready, but that was a future consideration in selecting Morgan Stanley,” Lynch told TechCrunch.

What the company does is help take big data and move it into tools where customers can make better use of it. AtScale co-founder Dave Mariani used to be at Yahoo where he helped pioneer the use of big data in the 2009/2010 timeframe. Unfortunately, systems at the time couldn’t deal with the volume of data — and that is still a problem, one that AtScale says it is designed to solve. “We take a bunch of data silos and put a semantic layer across the data platforms and expose them in a consistent way,” Mariani told TechCrunch last year at the time of the Series C round. This allows a company to get a big picture view of their data, rather than consuming it in smaller chunks.

AtScale reported a banner year, bringing on 50 new customers across their target verticals of retail, financial services, advertising and digital sales. These include Rakuten, Dell Technologies, TD Bank and Toyota. What’s more, the company stretched out this year, taking advantage of the last funding round to expand more into international markets in Europe and Asia.

The company was founded in 2013 and is based in San Mateo, California.

According to a recently published Fashion and Apparel Industry report, the global e-commerce-based apparel market is estimated to grow from $481 billion in the current year to $713 billion by the...

___

I’m heading back to Europe to hang out in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

I’ll be at a Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, which is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th at WeWork in Warsaw. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table at TC Disrupt, as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

Juniper Square, a four-year-old startup at the intersection of enterprise software, real estate and financial technology, has brought in an additional $25 million in Series B funding to fuel the growth of its commercial real estate investment platform. Ribbit Capital led the round, with participation from Felicis Ventures.

Founded in 2014 by Alex Robinson, Yonas Fisseha and Adam Ginsburg, the startup’s chief executive officer, vice president of engineering and VP of product, respectively, Juniper has raised a total of $33 million to date.

The company operates a software platform for commercial real estate investment firms — an industry that has been slower to adopt the latest and greatest technology. Robinson tells TechCrunch those firms raise money from pension funds, endowments and elsewhere to purchase and then manage commercial real estate, using Juniper’s software as a tool throughout that process. Juniper supports fundraising and capital management with a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) and productivity tools for its users.

The San Francisco-based company says it currently has hundreds of customers and manages half a trillion dollars in real estate.

“The private markets are just as big as the public markets … but the private markets have typically not been accessible to everyday investors, and that’s part of what we are trying to do with Juniper Square,” Robinson told TechCrunch. “It’s a tremendously large market that almost nobody knows anything about.”

Juniper will use its latest investment to double headcount from 60 to 120 in the year ahead, with plans to beef up its engineering, product and sales teams specifically as the company expects to continue experiencing massive growth. Robinson said it’s grown between 3x and 4x every year for the last three years.

Felicis Ventures managing director Sundeep Peechu said in a statement that Juniper “is one of the fastest growing real estate tech companies” the firm has ever seen: “They are building technology for an industry that touches nearly every human and every corner of the economy. It’s a hard problem that takes time to solve, but the benefits of making these huge markets work better are tremendous.”

Existing in a relatively niche intersection, Juniper’s job now is to prove itself more efficient and user-friendly than Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which, Robinson says, are still its biggest competitor.

“Our goal is to be the de facto platform for real estate investment and we are well on our way to becoming that.”

Sramana Mitra: How many people come to these trips? Matt Wilson: Usually, 18 people and a trip leader. Sramana Mitra: In one year, how many of these trips are you orchestrating? Matt Wilson: We did...

___

India has 22 official languages, which usually presents a challenge for businesses that want to scale across the entire country. Video-sharing app Roposo, however, uses that to its advantage by offering content in several regional languages. Based in Gurgaon, Roposo announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series C from returning investors Tiger Global and Bertelsmann, bringing its total funding so far to $31 million. Roposo will use the new funding for hiring, product development and user acquisition.

Tiger Global first invested in Roposo’s Series A round and also returned for its Series B, according to Crunchbase. After an Indian startup funding spree, the firm hit pause on new investments there for a couple of years before reportedly closing a $3.75 billion fund this year to focus on India, the U.S. and China. Roposo’s funding news comes a week after facility management company Facilio, another Indian startup, announced that it also received funding from Tiger Global.

Roposo originally launched as a fashion-based social network in 2013 before pivoting to videos in August 2017. It now claims 7.5 million monthly active users, 250,000 user-generated videos and 160 million video views a day.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Mayank Bhangadia tells TechCrunch that Roposo’s pivot came from “a gradual evolution of the platform from a fashion social network into rebooting as a complete social video network to enter the next big level of game play.” Users still share videos about fashion, but now it is one of several topics, including music, comedy, spirituality, tech, travel and current events (Roposo organizes videos into about 25 interest-based channels).

Roposo currently claims a total of 25 million users. One obvious question is how the app plans to keep their attention as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram each aggressively promote their live-streaming video features.

One of Roposo’s key advantages is its focus on multiple Indian languages (it offers content in 10 so far), which gives it an edge in smaller Indian cities and towns. Bhangadia says it also differentiates by creating a TV-like viewing experience and offering editing tools that make it easy for people to start broadcasting (about 30 percent of Roposo’s users have created content). Video creators can also make money based on how much user engagement their content generates.

Wix is taking a big step beyond website building today with the launch of a suite of products called Ascend.

PR Manager Matt Rosenberg explained that just as Wix was founded with the aim of “demystifying and democratizing how you get online,” Ascend has a similar mission: “You don’t have to be a developer and designer to bring the same thing to business management and marketing.”

Other website builders like Squarespace and Weebly (now owned by Square) have also introduced marketing tools, but Ascend seems like a particularly ambitious expansion, encompassing 20 products in areas like chat, memberships, email marketing and search engine optimization (in some cases, these are existing Wix products being brought under the Ascend umbrella).

For example, Nitzan Achsaf, the company’s vice president and general manager of customer experience, demonstrated how a (fictional) tennis instructor could use the various Ascend products to answer questions from and offer discounts to one customer interested in purchasing a tennis racket, while also interacting with and providing official price quotes to someone else looking to book a birthday party for their child.

“What we’re proud of is, there’s no juggling of vendors or of third-party platforms,” Rosenberg added.

In fact, all of a business’ interactions with a customer, regardless of channel, are routed into a single inbox, which can be accessed on any device — in the case of the tennis instructor, Achsaf said, “The whole conversation is [conducted via mobile phone] on the court, probably in-between sessions.”

Wix is also developing a workflow editor, so that a business’ website and other channels can respond automatically depending on how customers behave.

Ascend by Wix is available as a separate subscription, with pricing ranging from $9 to $45 per month. Technically, you could use it even if you don’t have a Wix subscription, but Achsaf said, “The tight integration into a Wix website is a very big advantage for our users.”

In a disappointing year for female-founded startups — at least those looking to raise venture capital — The Riveter not only closed its first institutional funding round, but it’s today announcing a $15 million Series A funding, bringing its total backing to $20.5 million.

The Seattle-based co-working startup, led by co-founder and chief executive Amy Nelson (pictured), has raised the capital from lead investor Alpha Edison, with support from Madrona Venture Group, New America president and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, fashion designer Liz Lange and TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie .

As of November, startups founded by all-female teams had closed 391 deals worth $2.3 billion, an increase from the $2 billion invested in 2017, though still just 2.2 percent of all VC invested this year.

Nelson, an advocate for female entrepreneurs who’s spoken publicly about women’s struggles in the workplace, the difficulties of launching a business in a man’s world and raising venture dollars as a solo female founder, started The Riveter in 2016 after a decade-long career as a lawyer. Today, the startup operates five locations in the U.S., with ambitious plans to open another 100 female-focused co-working spaces by 2022.

“I want The Riveter to be the place people think of when they think of women and work,” Nelson told TechCrunch.

The Riveter has 2,000 members throughout its locations in Seattle, Bellevue, Wash. and Los Angeles. Its expansion plans include new spots in Texas, Colorado and Portland.

The spaces are built with women in mind but are not exclusive to one gender. Nelson tells us The Riveter’s membership is 25 percent male, setting it apart from spaces like The Wing, which is only available to female-identifying people.

“I don’t think the future is female, I think the future is fluid,” she said. “Gender is becoming an outdated idea but at the same time, it’s important to think of women when we build these spaces … There is a lot of value to women’s only spaces but our take on it is we want to redefine the future of work for women and we want everyone to be part of it.”

The Riveter provides space to work and collaborate; a digital network, currently in beta, for its members to connect; and programming ranging from office hours with venture capitalists to “self-care Saturday.”

Other investors in the startup include Brilliant Ventures, The Helm and X Factor Ventures.

We were promised jetpacks, but let’s be honest, they’re just plain unsafe. So a nice drone ride is probably all we should reasonably expect. Lift Aircraft is the latest to make a play for the passenger multirotor market, theoretical as it is, and its craft is a sleek little thing with some interesting design choices to make it suitable for laypeople to “pilot.”

The Austin-based company just took the wraps off the Hexa, the 18-rotor craft it intends to make available for short recreational flights. It just flew for the first time last month, and could be taking passengers aloft as early as next year.

The Hexa is considerably more lightweight than the aircraft that seemed to be getting announced every month or two earlier this year. Lift’s focus isn’t on transport, which is a phenomenally complicated problem both in terms of regulation and engineering. Instead, it wants to simply make the experience of flying in a giant drone available for thrill-seekers with a bit of pocket money.

This reduced scope means the craft can get away with being just 432 pounds and capable of 10-15 minutes of sustained flight with a single passenger. Compared with Lilium’s VTOL engines or Volocopter’s 36-foot wingspan, this thing looks like a toy. And that’s essentially what it is, for now. But there’s something to be said for proving your design in a comparatively easily accessed market and moving up, rather than trying to invent an air taxi business from scratch.

“Multi-seat eVTOL air taxis, especially those that are designed to transition to wing-borne flight, are probably 10 years away and will require new regulations and significant advances in battery technology to be practical and safe. We didn’t want to wait for major technology or regulatory breakthroughs to start flying,” said CEO Matt Chasen in a news release. “We’ll be flying years before anyone else.”

The Hexa is flown with a single joystick and an iPad; direct movements and attitude control are done with the former, while destination-based movement, take-off and landing take place on the latter. This way people can go from walking in the front door to flying one of these things — or rather riding in one and suggesting some directions to go — in an hour or so.

It’s small enough that it doesn’t even count as a “real” aircraft; it’s a “powered ultralight,” which is a plus and a minus: no pilot’s license necessary, but you can’t go past a few hundred feet of altitude or fly over populated areas. No doubt there’s still a good deal of fun you can have flying around a sort of drone theme park, though. The whole area will have been 3D mapped prior to flight, of course.

Lifting the Hexa are 18 rotors, each of which is powered by its own battery, which spreads the risk out considerably and makes it simple to swap them out. As far as safety is concerned, it can run with up to six engines down, and has pontoons in case of a water landing and an emergency parachute should the unthinkable happen.

The team is looking to roll out its drone-riding experience soon, but it has yet to select its first city. Finding a good location, checking with the community, getting the proper permits — not simple. Chasen told New Atlas the craft is “not very loud, but they’re also not whisper-quiet, either.” I’m thinking “not very loud” is in comparison to jets — every drone I’ve ever come across, from palm-sized to cargo-bearing, has made an incredible racket, and if someone wanted to start a drone preserve next door I’d fight it tooth and nail. (Apparently Seattle is high on the list, too, so this may come to pass.)

In a sense, engineering a working autonomous multirotor aircraft was the easy part of building this business. Chasen told GeekWire that the company has raised a “typical-size seed round,” and is preparing for a Series A — probably once it has a launch city in its sights.

We’ll likely hear more at SXSW in March, where the Hexa will likely fly its first passengers.