Fivetran, a startup that builds automated data pipelines between data repositories and cloud data warehouses and analytics tools, announced a $15 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners.

Fivetran helps move data from source repositories like Salesforce and NetSuite to data warehouses like Snowflake or analytics tools like Looker. Company CEO and co-founder George Fraser says the automation is the key differentiator here between his company and competitors like Informatica and SnapLogic.

“What makes Fivetran different is that it’s an automated data pipeline to basically connect all your sources. You can access your data warehouse, and all of the data just appears and gets kept updated automatically,” Fraser explained. While he acknowledges that there is a great deal of complexity behind the scenes to drive that automation, he stresses that his company is hiding that complexity from the customer.

The company launched out of Y Combinator in 2012, and other than $4 million in seed funding along the way, it has relied solely on revenue up until now. That’s a rather refreshing approach to running an enterprise startup, which typically requires piles of cash to build out sales and marketing organizations to compete with the big guys they are trying to unseat.

One of the key reasons they’ve been able to take this approach has been the company’s partner strategy. Having the ability to get data into another company’s solution with a minimum of fuss and expense has attracted data-hungry applications. In addition to the previously mentioned Snowflake and Looker, the company counts Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Redshift, Tableau, Periscope Data, Salesforce, NetSuite and PostgreSQL as partners.

Ilya Sukhar, general partner at Matrix Partners, who will be joining the Fivetran board under the terms of deal sees a lot of potential here. “We’ve gone from companies talking about the move to the cloud to preparing to execute their plans, and the most sophisticated are making Fivetran, along with cloud data warehouses and modern analysis tools, the backbone of their analytical infrastructure,” Sukhar said in a statement.

They currently have 100 employees spread out across four offices in Oakland, Denver, Bangalore and Dublin. They boast 500 customers using their product including Square, WeWork, Vice Media and Lime Scooters, among others.

Changes are afoot at Techstars NYC. Over the summer, Alex Iskold announced that he would be leaving his role as the program’s managing director, and other staff members are departing as well. Now Techstars says Jenny Fielding is taking charge of the program.

Fielding is already a Techstars veteran, having run a number of its industry-focused corporate accelerators, such as Techstars IoT, the Barclays Accelerator and the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. She’s also one of the co-founders at The Fund, a new early-stage fund that backs New York City founders.

Techstars, meanwhile, has become increasingly focused on corporate partnerships, but it still operates a handful of independent, industry-agnostic programs based in cities like Boulder, Boston and New York.

In a blog post, Fielding said that by taking on her new role, she’s “doubling down on my commitment to the NYC tech community.” She continued:

My goal is to build even deeper ties with local organizations that foster community and promote inclusivity … New York is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and Techstars is committed to having founders, mentors, partners, and program staff who reflect this mix of people and cultures. Further supporting this mission of inclusion, Techstars continues to deepen relationships with the many universities and civic initiatives that foster innovation.

The next Techstars NYC class will begin in July of 2019. Applications open on January 7.

It’s been a whirlwind few months for Forethought, a startup with a new way of looking at enterprise search that relies on artificial intelligence. In September, the company took home the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield trophy in San Francisco, and today it announced a $9 million Series A investment.

It’s pretty easy to connect the dots between the two events. CEO and co-founder Deon Nicholas said they’ve seen a strong uptick in interest since the win. “Thanks to TechCrunch Disrupt, we have had a lot of things going on including a bunch of new customer interest, but the biggest news is that we’ve raised our $9 million Series A round,” he told TechCrunch.

The investment was led by NEA with K9 Ventures, Village Global and several angel investors also participating. The angel crew includes Front CEO Mathilde Collin, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and Learnvest CEO Alexa von Tobel.

Forethought aims to change conventional enterprise search by shifting from the old keyword kind of approach to using artificial intelligence underpinnings to retrieve the correct information from a corpus of documents.

“We don’t work on keywords. You can ask questions without keywords and using synonyms to help understand what you actually mean, we can actually pull out the correct answer [from the content] and deliver it to you,” Nicholas told TechCrunch in September.

He points out that it’s still early days for the company. It had been in stealth for a year before launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. Since the event, the three co-founders have brought on six additional employees and they will be looking to hire more in the next year, especially around machine learning and product and UX design.

At launch, they could be embedded in Salesforce and Zendesk, but are looking to expand beyond that.

The company is concentrating on customer service for starters, but with the new money in hand, it intends to begin looking at other areas in the enterprise that could benefit from a smart information retrieval system. “We believe that this can expand beyond customer support to general information retrieval in the enterprise,” Nicholas said.

According to a Grand View Research report published recently, the global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market is expected to grow at 31% from $357.5 million in 2017 to $3.11 billion by 2025. A...

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One of Europe’s most popular fitness applications is poised to flourish in the U.S. market with the help of several Los Angeles-based investors.

Freeletics, headquartered in Munich, Germany, is today announcing its first round of private capital after bootstrapping since 2013. The $45 million Series A was co-led by FitLab, Causeway Media Partners and JAZZ Venture Partners, with participation from Courtside Ventures, Elysian Park Ventures and ward.ventures. Sports teams including the San Francisco 49ers and the Boston Celtics also invested, though Freeletics chief executive officer Daniel Sobhani declined to comment on any partnerships that may be in the works between the startup and the athletes.

As you might expect from the name, Freeletics operates its mobile fitness coaching app on a freemium model, with tiered pricing beginning at $11.99 for one month or $74.99 for a year-long membership. The app, which offers fitness content and AI-powered training plans tailored to individual users, initially focused on Germany but has since grown in popularity across Europe and in the U.S.

“We want to be there for people who want a long-term athletic lifestyle,” Sobhani told TechCrunch. “There are hundreds of millions of people who would love to make a change to their health and fitness but only a fraction of those actually make it. Helping people at scale to solve such a common problem is a tremendous benefit for the person but also for society.”

Sobhani says Freeletics now has 31 million users in more than 160 countries and will use its first bit of VC backing to grow its American user base — where it’s experienced 120 percent growth over the last six months. The company also plans to add a Netflix-style training platform, where “unlimited relevant training plans” will be available to paying users, as well as nutritional guidance to help people stay fit. The startup, however, has no plans to expand into hardware.

“Most of the people out there that want to become fitter or healthier are reverting to choices that have been there for decades, like going to the gym or running but without broader context or understanding,” Sobhani said. “Or they are turning to books or very restrictive diets. Tech solutions are so much better because they can adjust to you; they can make sure what you’re doing is effective.”

I am always thrilled to see great entrepreneurship in various parts of the world that are off-center. Well, here’s a great one from Detroit. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your...

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​Mixcloud​, the audio streaming platform that is popular for long-form content, such as radio shows and DJ sets, has launched a “fan-to-creator” subscription service in a bid to find new ways of monetizing and ensuring both artists and curators get paid.

Dubbed “​Mixcloud Select,” the new feature lets listeners subscribe to a Select creator’s channel so they can directly support them and contribute to the licensing cost of the music played in the shows. Subscribers get an enhanced listening experience that includes the ability to download shows to listen offline and view upfront track lists, making it feel a lot more like on-demand and less tied to the legacy of over-the-air radio.

Nico Perez, co-founder of Mixcloud, frames Mixcloud Select as a pioneering move toward building a “fair and sustainable ecosystem” that works for audio creators, artists and listeners. “We want to enable fans to get closer to the culture and communities they care about, while ensuring that everyone involved in the creative process is recognized and rewarded accordingly,” he says in a statement.

That’s very much in line with the conversation Perez and I had back in April when TechCrunch reported on Mixcloud’s first-ever funding round (despite being founded 10 years ago). At the time the Mixcloud founder hinted at a consumer-facing subscription service, as well as discussing the licensing groundwork the company had laid. It comes as no surprise therefore to see Select launch.

Mixcloud has previously announced direct licensing deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Merlin, Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, ICE (a joint initiative between PRS, GEMA and STIM) and many others. Related to this, the company has a proprietary content ID system that claims to identify individual tracks and underlying rights holders.

Mixcloud Select initially goes live with 47 creators who have already used the Mixcloud platform to build listener communities, and covers a wide range of genres and scenes. Creators range from international DJs, including Afrojack, Nicole Moudaber, Lefto and John Digweed, to homegrown Mixcloud stars such as DJ Blighty and Low Light Mixes; independent radio stations Brooklyn Radio, Soho Radio and Red Light Radio; record labels Defected Records and Axtone Records; and curators Clash Magazine and Stamp the Wax.

Channel subscriptions start at ($/£/€) 2.99 per month, with the ability for creators to set a higher price. Subscriptions renew monthly and can be cancelled anytime.

Mixcloud also says it will collaborate with creators to roll out additional new features, such as offering exclusive content and direct messaging with subscribers. All creators can now register their interest in joining Select in the near future.

BIOS, a neural engineering startup originally based out of Cambridge, U.K. and now with an additional newly opened R&D office in Montreal, Canada, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The company is developing a “neural interface” that combines advances in hardware, big data and machine learning/AI, which it’s hoped can be used to develop new cutting-edge treatments on organs and nerve systems throughout the body.

The round is led by Real Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and Ariel Poler (founder of the Human Augmentation syndicate on AngelList). Other funds and angel investors participating include Endure Capital, Heuristic Capital Partners, K5 Ventures and Charles Songhurst (former GM corporate strategy at Microsoft).

The startup and Y Combinator alumnus is also disclosing additional non-dilutive funding in the form of grants and awards from Cisco, MassChallenge UK and Innovate UK. Michael Baum’s Founder.org was also an early backer.

Formerly known as Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS), BIOS’ first product is described as akin to a “USB connector for the body” and has been used to develop a Prosthetic Interface Device (PID) that allows amputees to connect a range of prostheses directly to the nervous system. The PID is about to enter clinical trials and enables neural signals sent by a person’s nervous system to be interpreted and in turn control a connected artificial body part.

BIOS is co-founded by computational neuroscientist Emil Hewage and bioengineer Oliver Armitage, and in a brief call the pair explained that the R&D involved to develop the PID saw the young company not only make significant breakthroughs in the hardware required, including developing safe and accurate hardware, but also enabled the company to amass a very large neural data set and further develop its algorithms for future use cases.

More broadly, the challenge in this field is how to collect and process large amounts of neural data and then accurately interpret the neural signals, which Hewage and Armitage say are incredibly noisy, continuously changing and travel throughout the body at incredible speed. In other words, a job best suited to machines underpinned by machine learning/AI.

Further into the future, BIOS wants to directly connect to the nervous system via its neural interface and then use AI to “read and write” onto the nervous system to deal with the root cause of various chronic conditions. The detection and potential to “correct” neural signals could mean, for example, the development of an alternative way of treating high blood pressure that doesn’t rely on conventional medicine or can treat drug-resistant hypertension.

The plan is for BIOS to develop some products and treatments of its own, but also to partner with various companies and organisations. The premise is that the company can focus on the core interface and related AI, while the eventual applications can be as wide and vertical as advancements and interest allows. Related to this, BIOS is advocating and helping to push industry standards and formats for neural data.

On that note, BIOS says it will use the funding to double its technical team, and further develop its core neural interface technologies. In addition it plans to expand access for commercial and academic partners through a variety of tools, data sets, and algorithms for “discovering and leveraging biomarkers in neural data.”

Zopa, the U.K. peer-to-peer lending company that wants to become a bank, has been awarded a bank license by the U.K.’s financial regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA). The company wants to expand beyond P2P loans and investments to offer things like savings accounts and credit cards.

Technically, however, this is only regulatory part one and Zopa’s bank licence comes “with restrictions,” meaning that it can’t launch fully just yet. Known as the “mobilisation” phase of the license process, Zopa should eventually be granted a full licence once it meets various conditions set by the regulators.

In a statement, Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana says acquiring a banking licence is the starting point that will see the company become a “major force” in retail banking. “When we pioneered the peer-to-peer lending model globally in 2005, we did so by listening to customers and creating a better product for them. We will bring the same focus to our banking products – drawing on tech innovation, our values of fairness and transparency, and better customer service,” he adds.

Once launched, Zopa’s bank will sit alongside its existing business, creating what the fintech says will be the first hybrid peer-to-peer and digital bank offering. It will roll out a money management app, and various financial products.

When the bank-to-be announced the second part of a £60 million funding round last month, a spokesperson told me this will include FSCS-protected savings accounts and P2P investments (including Innovative Finance ISAs) for investors, and personal loans, car finance and credit cards for people looking to borrow.

Zopa also says it will steer clear of hidden fees and charges, and is placing a lot of emphasis on customer service, delivered via its app or over the phone.

However, whether or not any of the above will be enough to stand out from an increasingly crowded challenger bank space in the U.K., which includes Monzo, Starling, Tandem and many others, remains to be seen. With that said, a fintech nerd can never have enough new banking upstarts.

French startup Agricool is raising another $28 million round of funding (€25 million). The company is working on containers to grow fruits and vegetables in urban areas, starting with strawberries.

Bpifrance, Danone Manifesto Ventures, Marbeuf Capital, Solomon Hykes and other business angels participated in today’s funding round. Some existing investors also participated, such as daphni, XAnge, Henri Seydoux and Kima Ventures.

It might sound crazy but containers can be more efficient than traditional agricultural methods. For instance, a container lets you control the temperature, the humidity, the color spectrum and more. Agricool uses a ton of LEDs to replace the sun.

The result is quite telling. You can grow strawberries all year round, save water as a container is limited when it comes to space, save on transportation and more.

In other words, you end up with locally-produced, GMO-free, pesticide-free strawberries. You can already buy some of those strawberries in a couple of Monoprix in Paris.

Agricool plans to launch a hundred containers by 2021 in Paris and in Dubai. That’s why the company is going to hire around 200 people by 2021 to support this growth rate. Eventually, Agricool also plans to expand to other fruits and vegetables.

I’ve already covered Agricool multiple times in the past. The startup is still following the same roadmap, but with more funding. And it sounds like it requires a lot of capital to build this network of containers as there are not a lot of them out there. But it’s a promising product that could help cut down on gas emissions.

TechCrunch will soon be returning to Africa to hold its Startup Battlefield competition dedicated to the African continent.

The event, in Lagos, Nigeria, on December 11, will showcase the launch of 15 of the hottest startups in Africa onstage for the first time. We’ll also be joined by some of the leading investment firms in the region. The event is now sold out, but keep your eyes on TechCrunch for video of all the panels and the Battlefield competition.

Here are just some of the investors and founders who will be judging the startups competing for US$25,000.

Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave

Olugbenga Agboola is the CEO of Flutterwave, a payments technology company headquartered in San Francisco with operations and offices across Africa and Europe. Prior to co-founding Flutterwave, Olugbenga contributed to the development of fintech solutions at several tech companies and financial institutions such as PayPal and Standard Bank, among others. He is a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits under his belt. He is a software engineer with a Master’s Degree in Information Technology Security and Behavioral Engineering, as well as an MBA.

Barbara Iyayi, Element

Barbara Iyayi is the chief growth officer and managing director of Africa for Element, which deploys AI-powered mobile biometrics software to develop digital platforms globally. Barbara was part of the founding team of Atlas Mara, a London stock exchange-listed company, co-founded by Bob Diamond, ex-CEO of Barclays Bank, which was the first-ever entity to raise more than $1 billion to invest in, operate and manage financial institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the Regional Lead for M&A and Investments, she led investments into banks and developed the banking platform’s entry into seven countries in Africa. Notably, she led the acquisition and first-ever merger of two banks in Rwanda, to be the leading innovative retail bank — Banque Populaire du Rwanda — and led a $250 million equity investment in Union Bank of Nigeria.

Aaron Fu, MEST Africa

Aaron is an early-stage investor, entrepreneur and strategic advisor to both startups as they scale and corporates as they transform to gain agility for disruptive innovation. Over the last five years he has specifically focused on innovation in Africa, working with global brands and entrepreneurs across diverse industries, from financial services to health to mobile to agriculture.

As managing director at MEST, he is dedicated to training, investing in and incubating the next generation of global software entrepreneurs in Africa. He manages a portfolio of 30-plus startups spanning fintech, media, e-commerce and agritech. 

Sam Gichuru, Nailab

Sam Gichuru is founder and CEO of Nailab, one of Kenya’ s leading business incubators. His contribution in establishing the startup business ecosystem in Kenya, through Nailab, has been significant, and as a result was invited as a key speaker during the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, held in Nairobi and officiated by then U.S. President Barack Obama.

Sam has been instrumental in propagating the development of a strong and vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem, and it’s through this engagement that he was most recently selected by Jack Ma to lead, through Nailab, the Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative, a $10 million Initiative that seeks to discover, spotlight and support 10 African entrepreneurs every year for the next 10 years.

Olufunbi Falayi, Savannah Fund

Olufunbi Falayi  is a partner at Passion Incubator, an early-stage technology incubator and accelerator that invests in early-stage startups. He co-led investment in 12 startups, including Riby, BeatDrone, AdsDirect, TradeBuza and Waracake. Olufunbi also a principal at Savannah Fund, driving investment in West Africa.

Chewse, a food catering and company culture startup, just announced a $19 million fundraising round as it gears up to expand its operations in the Silicon Valley area. This brings Chewse’s total funding to more than $30 million. Chewse’s investors include Foundry Group, 500 Startups and Gingerbread Capital.

Instead of plopping down meals in the office and bouncing, Chewse aims to create a full experience for its customers by offering family-style meals. In order to ensure quality, Chewse employs drivers and meal hosts so that it can provide them with training. Chewse also offers it drivers and meal hosts benefits.

“We initially started with a contractor model but then very quickly started to realize our customers often mentioned the host or the driver in their feedback,” Chewse CEO and co-founder Tracy Lawrence told TechCrunch.

“I know there’s a lot of other companies that are like food tech or logistics but for us, it’s all about elevating and improving company culture,” Lawrence said. “We have technology but we’re investing in it to create an exceptional real-life experience.”

“On the tech side, we’re using a ton of machine learning and algorithms to learn what people like to eat and create custom meal schedules,” Lawrence said.

To date, Chewse has hundreds of customers across three markets. Chewse initially launched in Los Angeles, but paused operations for a little over one year in order to focus on achieving market profitability in San Francisco. Chewse has since relaunched in Los Angeles, in addition to launching in cities like Palo Alto and San Jose. As part of the Silicon Valley launch, Chewse has partnered with restaurants like Smoking Pig, HOM Korean Kitchen and Oren’s Hummus Shop.

Within the next year, the goal is to double the number of markets where Chewse operates. But Chewse faces tough competition in the corporate meal catering space.

Earlier this year, Square acquired Zesty to become part of its food delivery service, Caviar. The aim of the acquisition was to strengthen Caviar’s corporate food ordering business, Caviar for Teams.

At the time, Zesty counted about 150 restaurant customers in San Francisco, which is the only city in which it operates. Some of Zesty’s customers include Snap, Splunk and TechCrunch. Zesty, which first launched in 2013 under a different name, had previously raised $20.7 million in venture funding.

“Zesty is a direct competitor of ours for sure,” Lawrence said. “When we’re thinking about the things that set us apart from Zesty and ZeroCater, the investment in using the technology and building a meal algorithm — which is something we know they’re doing by hand — and then automatically calibrate when we’re getting feedback because we employ our hosts and our drivers. Yes, it’s more expensive for us but because it provides such a superior experience, we retain our customer longer.”

*Zesty has reached out to clarify it, too, has an algorithm at play to determine best foods and meals to serve.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re mostly doing B2B. Is that a reasonable point? Shuly Galili: I would say that most of our companies are B2B. We do have a few companies that are more on the...

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I’ll be heading back to Europe in December to run a pitch-off in Wroclaw, Poland. It’s a bit out of the way, but well worth a visit if only for the sausages.

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

I’m also thinking about an event in Warsaw on the 21st but WeWork didn’t look doable (and I don’t like co-working spaces). If anyone has thoughts on a new venue drop me a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Otherwise, I’ll see you in Wroclaw! Wesołych Świat!

Sramana Mitra: My mind is running as I’m listening to you. You’re talking about a jet engine being consumed as an opex and not as a capex? Flavio Gomes: That’s correct. Sramana Mitra: Wow! Flavio...

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Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m trying to answer the same question in this context. As we go along, the notion of composite search becomes critical. Grant Ingersoll: Could you define that...

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We have done several spotlight posts on entrepreneurship in different parts of the world: Colorado, Utah, Czech Republic, Florida, Illinois, Arizona. Today, we will look at the entrepreneurship...

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In September this year, OYO Rooms checked into the Billion Dollar Unicorn club with a massive funding of $1 billion from Softbank and other investors. It is now the second most valuable startup after...

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By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis reflects on the demise and death of once-giants....

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