Disney Imagineering animatronics wizard Dr. Martin Buehler is a legend in the robotics world. His work leading development of the galloping Big Dog quadruped at Boston Dynamics both inspired and terrified a new generation of makers. But after playing in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction that consumers can’t buy, Buehler has been poached to work on something much more tangible. In fact, it’s edible. He’s joining burger-making robot startup Creator as VP of engineering.

“It was a great experience working on experimental validation [at Boston Dynamics],” Buehler tells me, “But one of the things I really value at Creator is the immediacy of real impact to real people. With burgers being such a big segment of the food market, we have the potential to touch millions of people.” Creator opened its first restaurant to the public in September, selling San Franciscans gourmet hamburgers at a surprisingly low $6 price tag by replacing a kitchen full of cooks with a massive, transparent robot.

Formerly known as Momentum Machines, Creator has raised more than $24 million according to SEC filings. It hopes to make fast-food healthier, tastier and cheaper by saving money on labor to replace preserved ingredients with premium, freshly cut beef, cheese and veggies. Patrons can choose from several burger styles, and then get to watch their bun sliced and toasted as a conveyor belt slides it beneath dispensers for other fixins. Instead of cooking, the restaurant staff serves as concierge to customers while keeping the robot stocked.

Buehler also helped develop the world’s most popular robot: the Roomba. Now with his help, Creator could make the robot more efficient, flexible enough to handle more custom orders and more delightful to watch… and Instagram. The whole restaurant industry is trying to become more shareable on social media, with kitschy decor and plating. But the robot gives Creator natural virality by making the cooking process itself entertainment — like some futuristic Benihana.

“At Disney I was in charge of robotics at Imagineering. We used advanced robotics and AI to bring walking and talking Disney characters to life so our guests who meet the characters on the silver screen first can meet and interact with them physically in the parks. What I really learned was to position technology as second fiddle to the guest experience,” he tells me.

Buehler calls Creator “a stunning symphony of motion — the visual experience supports the central culinary experience. The downfall of a lot of robotics companies is that they fall in love with the technology and they lose track of what it takes to deliver value to the customer.” Creator’s approach is working so far. The company claims to be hitting its revenue targets and have a higher net promoter score than fast-food favorite Chick-fil-A.

But the success of the company will depend on its ability to scale. Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas reveals that “the next announcement is going to be more burger stores.” That means the Creator contraption can’t be a one-off art piece. “Right now the task at hand is to make the current robot scalable — make it cost less and more reliable — so we can provide robots to many more restaurants,” Buehler says. He’ll have help from fellow teammates who hail from Apple, Tesla and NASA.

The concern, though, is that Creator could be the tip of the spear of automation decimating employment as food service workers are replaced by bots. Vardakostas grew up flipping burgers himself at his parents’ restaurant, and he believes machines can take care of the dirty and dangerous work that perhaps humans shouldn’t be doing in the first place. The company already pays its service workers $16 and hour, and offers “five percent time” where they can take time to read or learn about the culinary arts. Eventually it hopes to retrain former fast-food cooks in robot maintenance to offer them a path to get paid more.

“The basic mission of the founders is to build a company culture focused on learning and personal development. I like the aspect of the service of giving back,” Buehler says. “All the team members get coaching to help them grow, not just technically but personally.”

In its pleasant restaurant, seemingly happy workers and its flashy robot team up to make some remarkably delicious burgers. With Buehler’s help, Creator could expand beyond the seemingly fictional world of Silicon Valley and pull people who care about food quality and flare away from McDonald’s.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a blast. Connie and I were in the studio with our guest, True Ventures’s Tony Conrad, while Danny repped the other side of the country, dialing in from New York.

It was another week shaped by news from Asia. Once we had sorted the sartorially expedient, we first turned to the world of SoftBank, this time taking a close look at its debt load. While SoftBank is currently famous for its investments through its Vision Fund, the company is picking up some notable debt-powered investments into its vehicle that could add to its risk profile.

After all, who doesn’t want more risk as 2018 comes to a close?

Moving on, Ford is doubling-down on its wager that mobility means more than cars, this time picking up Spin for some sum of money between $40 and $100 million, with most figures coming in a bit light from the nine-figure range.

We care as it’s a fresh turn in the scooter skirmish, not to mention the greater micromobility wars. Bird and Lime have a new competitor that has, possibly, super-deep pockets.

Next, we took a peek at Luckin Coffe’s meteoric rise. This is where our guest selection really showed off; Conrad is a former investor in Blue Bottle, making him a functional caffeine expert. We dug through margins, growth and why venture players are interested in Luckin at all.

And finally, a look at how recently public companies are selling more shares after their initial debut. So, when it comes to money on the table, don’t fret it too much.

Black Friday giveaways have become a tradition for online sneaker marketplace GOAT. Today it’s announcing the details of this year’s campaign, which will be its first to incorporate augmented reality.

Director of Communications Liz Goodno described this as “the largest digital sneaker event of the year.” The company says it will be offering more than 1,000 prizes, including sneakers like the Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG Shattered Backboard, KAWSx Air Jordan 4 Retro Black, Pharrell x BBC x NMD Human Race Trail Heart/Mind, plus curated sneaker packs and up to $10,000 in GOAT credit.

You can enter the drawing anytime between now and 11:59pm Pacific on Thursday, November 22, with the winners notified at noon on Black Friday.

All participants will receive 100 tickets, but you can earn bonus tickets by visiting locations on an interactive GOAT map, which will highlight spots around the world that are tied to all-time great athletes and to sneaker history. Those locations really are global, and they include “Sneaker Street” in Hong Kong, San Francisco’s Moscone Center (where the iPhone debuted) and the location of Muhammad Ali’s historic victory over George Foreman in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Also on the list are the New York and Los Angeles locations of Flight Club, the famous sneaker retailer that GOAT merged with earlier this year. And you can earn even more tickets by sharing augmented reality graphics that superimpose a “Greatest of All Time” message, or a newspaper highlighting sneaker history, on real-world imagery.

GOAT showed off the AR capabilities at an event with Apple last week at Flight Club New York. The AR elements were built using Apple’s ARKit, and it sounds like the startup plans to do more with the technology in the future.

“We’ve always wanted to incorporate augmented reality technology,” Goodno said, but the challenge, until ARKit, was integrating the technology into the GOAT app. “As a sneaker marketplace there are so many use cases for AR.” (Nike has also been using AR to connect with sneakerheads through its SNKRS app.)

At the event, co-founder and CEO Eddy Lu also talked about the company’s plans beyond AR, saying that “next year, international is a huge thing for us” — which means it’ll be doing more to localize its apps. In addition, it’s getting ready to open its next Flight Club store, this time in Miami.

According to a Grand View Research report, the global B2C e-commerce market is expected to grow 12% annually to $7,724.8 billion by 2025. The growth in the industry is attributed to increased...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 421st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Wednesday, November 14, 2018, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that moment in 2012 when you started RP. What did you start with? Was there an app or was it straight away online consultation? Nick Shaw: It was just me and my buddy....

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Nihal Mehta, Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, who provided a great set of insights into his definition of a full stack founding team....

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AdRoll Group announced today that it has acquired Growlabs, a two-year-old startup with business-to-business sales tools and data.

While AdRoll is best known for its retargeting technology for consumer advertising, it’s been building out a suite of B2B marketing technology under its RollWorks business unit, which launched earlier this year.

The company says that by marrying its artificial intelligence technology with Growlabs’ database of 12 million companies and 320 million business identities, as well as the startup’s lead generation and sales automation tools, it can help customers run multi-channel campaigns with messages that are automatically sequenced to the sales stage.

Asked why Growlabs was an appealing acquisition target, CEO Toby Gabriner (who joined AdRoll last year) told me via email that both quantity and quality of data is crucial for building an account-based marketing program.

“Growlabs has not only built one of the largest B2B data-sets, but more importantly they have developed a number of industry leading techniques to ensure that the data is accurate,” Gabriner said. “With the combination of the Growlabs and AdRoll Group identity graphs, our RollWorks division will provide our customers access to one of the largest independent B2B identity graphs in the world.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Gabriner said the entire 18-person Growlabs team will be joining AdRoll.

“Our mission has always been to help marketers grow fast — a mission we share with AdRoll Group,” said Growlabs CEO Ben Raffi in the acquisition announcement. “Together, we’ll accelerate marketers’ ability to drive revenue.”

Fifteen startups spent the day presenting onstage in São Paulo, Brazil. For the finalists, that meant presenting twice — once in the initial rounds, then again for our finalist judges.

This was all part of Startup Battlefield Latin America, an event that we put on in partnership with Facebook’s FB Start program. After a full day of pitches and panels, the judges have chosen a winner, who will receive $25,000 (equity free) and a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Check back on TechCrunch tomorrow to watch the full videos of the presentation. In the meantime, our winner (all descriptions provided by the companies):

Olho do Dono

Olho do Dono offers software that uses a portable 3D camera to estimate cattle weight, allowing cattle owners to monitor livestock weight evolution in a frequent and stress-free manner.

And our runner up:

Unima

Unima developed a fast and low-cost diagnostic and disease surveillance technology that allows anyone, even people with no technical training, to diagnose a disease at the point of care, without using lab equipment, with results in 15 minutes and at $1 per test.

And our finalists:

1Doc3

1Doc3 has developed a platform that allows users to ask healthcare questions to doctors anonymously, and for free.

Agilis

Agilis is an online asset-backed lending platform, based in Argentina. Agilis monetizes customer assets to empower them with simple and fast access to convenient financing.

Cuenca

Cuenca offers a no fee, fast response banking service.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your portfolio. What have you invested in? As you take us through some of these examples, talk about why you chose to invest in those. We got the woman founder part of it....

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Sramana Mitra: I want to ask you one question about the cyber security practice of Wipro and how all these investments play into the dynamics of that. One thing we are hearing from CISOs is that they...

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Datacoral aims to make it easier for enterprises to build data products by abstracting away all of the complex infrastructure to organize and process data. The company today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A financing round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Social Capital, which also led its $4 million seed round in 2017.

Datacoral CEO Raghu Murthy tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to grow its business team in order to be able to reach more potential customers and to expand its engineering team.

The promise of Datacoral is to offer enterprises an end-to-end data infrastructure that will allow businesses and their data scientists to focus on generating insights over having to manage and integrate their data sources. Because nobody wants to move large amounts of data between clouds — and take the performance hit that comes with that — Datacoral sits right inside a company’s AWS systems. It’s still a fully managed service, though, but the data is encrypted and never leaves a customer’s virtual private cloud.

“As companies look to their data to deliver value – data practitioners are finding that configuring and managing their own data infrastructure is a time-consuming job that is expensive and fraught with errors,” said Murthy. “We have built a platform that easily and automatically brings together data from different applications and databases, organizes that data in any query engine and acts on insights that are critical to running their business. A crucial component is that it works securely and privately within the customer’s cloud, instead of us ingesting data from their systems.”

Murthy was an early engineer at Facebook and part of the team that was in charge of scaling that company’s data infrastructure and ran a part of the engineering team at Bebop, Diane Greene’s startup that was later acquired by Google.

To scale Datacoral, the team is betting on a serverless platform itself. It’s making extensive use of AWS Lambda and other PaaS solutions on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. That doesn’t mean Datacoral plans to only support AWS, though. Murthy tells me that Azure support is next. “We plan to work across all of the top cloud providers by leveraging their unique services and provide a consistent ‘data-centric interface’ to our customers — essentially be ‘cloud best’ instead of ‘cloud agnostic.'”

Current Datacoral users include Greenhouse, Front, Ezetap, Swing Education, mPharma and Mason Finance.

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First, a couple of quick follow-ups to our coverage of Form Ds yesterday, and then a deeper dive into the challenges SoftBank is facing with regards to its revenue in Japan. Finally, some notes on recent articles we have read.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new — provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Arman at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you like or hate something here.

Form D(isappearing)

Form Ds are (usually) filed by startups to the SEC when they take on venture capital. However, there appears to be an increasing pattern of startups foregoing the filing, which has implications for both reporters (we have less info about what’s happening in the venture world) as well as with aggregate VC stats, which often rely at least partially on filings to determine the state of venture capital.

A number of readers emailed us with their views on the matter. One lawyer and multi-time startup founder wrote to say that:

Some additional considerations are cost: the Form D can be expensive with all of the associated state blue sky filings, especially if you have participation from a number of angels or smaller funds.

When you file a Form D, that generally preempts any equivalent state filing. HOWEVER, we were wrong yesterday when we said that “the form preempts most state securities laws so that startups don’t have to file in state jurisdictions.” Startups DO have to file in state jurisdictions, but usually just to point out that they have filed with the SEC.

Beyond cost, one issue with filing is when the round is smaller than the ultimate intended size. One reader reported in:

I was CFO at a startup and after consulting legal counsel, we didn’t file Form D for a Series C capital raising. Why? Because we didn’t want some investors to see how much is left in the round and defer funding.

You might have convinced an investor to put say $30 million into a round, and then they are shocked to find out that the round is really intended to be $50 million when the Form D hits the presses. Obviously, this is something that should be transparent to all parties, but I actually could see this happening more commonly at the seed stage, where some rounds almost certainly fundraise continuously and investors are more skittish.

Finally, it’s not just the finance and legal folks pushing for fewer filings, but also PR firms. One notable PR firm head told me that:

We’ve pushed a bunch of our clients to pursue [a 4(a)(2) exemption], but they were raising / had raised money from Tier One VCs.

That exemption allows startups to avoid a Form D filing, which “protects our launches from getting scooped.” The same PR head told me that this has been a policy for the past 18 months or so.

The data is still early, but the norms for filing do seem to be changing, and we are still doing more work on this. Reach out directly with your thoughts.

Japan is going after carrier revenue

Now for the big story. We have been obsessed this week with SoftBank, first covering the telco group’s penchant for debt, and then covering the unusual financing situation between the IPO of its Japanese mobile division and its bankers, in which SoftBank is demanding its underwriters provide a massive bond to the Vision Fund in order to lever it up and juice returns.

It feels like the more we dig into all of SoftBank’s moving pieces, the stranger the story gets.

Over the past few weeks, the Japanese telco market has been absolutely crushed by traders. Market leader NTT DoCoMo announced about a week ago that it would cut customer rates by 40 percent on mobile services, and warned investors that it may take five years for the company to return to this fiscal year’s profitability. Concerned over industry-wide rate reductions, a possible pricing war and potential upticks in churn, investors rapidly sold the country’s three major wireless companies — including SoftBank — causing their collective market caps to plunge $34 billion the following day.

Japan’s telcos are extraordinarily profitable and exist in a mature market, so why the sudden rate change?

The two-dimensional answer is that the Japanese government has become more strident in its criticisms of the telcos, which charge some of the highest fees of any carriers in the world.

That’s partly because Japan’s mobile market has functioned essentially as an oligopoly, dominated by NTT DoCoMo, au-KDDI and SoftBank, which currently account for around 45 percent, 31 percent and 24 percent market share, respectively. The lack of competition has led to unreasonably high bills for customers, but hefty and growing profits for the telcos.

The Japanese government, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has been trying to force prices lower. As Bloomberg’s Maiko Takahashi and Dave McCombs pointed out in a recent article, the government has been trying to reverse this trend for a while now:

In 2015 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for lower prices and the companies eventually responded by offering reduced-cost service plans that didn’t undermine revenue growth, as they were offset by rising average revenue per user for data. Comments by government officials about lowering prices in 2016 brought a similar response. Still, carriers said they are concerned the pressure could increase this time.

This time around, the Japanese government has gotten more serious. It’s now also pushing for structural changes that will not only create pricing competition, but that will also make it easier for others to enter the market. As Takahashi and McCombs continued:

The government has also been pushing to boost competition by making it harder for the big three to lure new users by offering the latest phones at little or no upfront cost. Officials have also pushed to end SIM locking, a practice by which carriers lock their handsets to be used only on their network.

They are not only looking at bills, but also other competitive barriers,” said [Tachibana Securities GM Shigetoshi] Kamada. “They want bills to drop naturally by making the environment more competitive.

To make matters tougher for the incumbents, Rakuten, Japan’s “Amazon-esque” e-commerce giant, has decided to test the waters in the telco market, having received an operating license to start service in 2019.

All this is backdrop to the main stage, which is that SoftBank intends to IPO its Japanese mobile carrier division, in what could be the world’s largest IPO float in history. That IPO is critical for cleaning up SoftBank Group’s balance sheet, which is heavily loaded with debt.

That leads us to a three-dimensional analysis: could NTT DoCoMo and KDDI be preemptively cutting rates at exactly the time that SoftBank needs to show good financial results and projections to investors in its IPO roadshow? It’s a brilliant play, since some pain today to the bottom line could potentially knock out or at least diminish one competitor in the market, turning this oligopoly into a duopoly, Rakuten’s telco initiative not withstanding.

SoftBank is acutely aware of the changing landscape, yet remains full steam ahead on the IPO front. In fact, SoftBank didn’t even seem slightly worried about the rate cuts, with Group CEO Masayoshi Son stating “I can make a commitment right here that profit and revenue in the mobile business will continue to grow.” SoftBank noted that its telco profits will be fine, with the company planning to cut costs in the business by reducing its workforce by around 40 percent.

We’re not saying this is blatant marketing for the IPO, but what makes SoftBank’s claim seem a bit dubious is the fact that when NTT announced its rate cuts last week, even NTT stated it expected to see its operating profit and revenues drop, not to mention that the company wasn’t even targeting a full recovery from the impact until 2023. And in an already saturated market with well-resourced new entrants, generating enough new users (let alone keeping existing ones) to offset a rate cut and maintain even a steady Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) seems like a pretty tall task.

When you combine the losses other Japanese telcos expect with the fact that SoftBank has been pretty transparent about the IPO proceeds going toward future Vision Fund investments rather than back into the telco unit, it’s a little perplexing on how there can be such a rosy outlook for the business. And that ultimately may fuel disinterest with this particular public float, and therefore broader challenges to both SoftBank and its Vision Fund, with all the implications for growth-stage startups that entails.

Thoughts on articles

‘Gun-Shy’: How Federal Prosecutors Forgot Silicon Valley: Great overview and analysis from Matt Drange at The Information about the decline of white-collar prosecutions out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, which was once managed by Robert Mueller before he became director of the FBI. “The number of white-collar cases prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California has plunged from a peak of 354 in 1995 to 72 in fiscal 2018.” Major challenges include a decline of interest in white-collar prosecutions nationwide, bad office culture and botched executions of several high-profile cases. Definitely worth a full read. (~2,300 words)

LA Is Trying to Fix its Prostitution Problem by Banning Right Turns at Night—and it Might be Working: Too long article about a unique tactic of the LAPD: In order to generate sufficient probable cause to stop a car trolling for sex, the city installed “no right turn” signs at intersections in areas with high prostitution in order to have more reasons to stop cars. What a hack of the system. (~1900 words, but probably should be like 800)

The Bus Is Still Best: Helpful analysis by notable transit pundit Jarrett Walker, discussing the role of microtransit options like Via or Chariot in city transportation networks. Walker doesn’t believe that ridesharing will be the future of mass transit, and instead posits that a properly managed and well-resourced bus system is much more efficient from a cost, coverage, space and equality perspective. While some of the conclusions are a bit binary, he offers an effective and revealing comparison of transportation unit economics, while also providing a useful primer on the actual functions an effective public transport system has to service. Worth reading, even if only to serve as a clear overview of the various aspects city transit agencies have to consider in transportation and infrastructure decisions. (~2,050 words)

What’s next

Definitely drop us a line if you have thoughts about Form Ds or SoftBank — we are continuing to investigate. We are thinking of focusing on Rakuten’s new telco a bit as well, so ping us if you have thoughts or data to share. We’re at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Reading docket

What we are reading (or at least, trying to read)

Articles

Books

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Bonobo AI, an AI-based platform that helps companies get insights from customer support calls, texts and other interactions, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by G20 Ventures and Capri Ventures. Founded in 2016 and led by co-founder and CEO Efrat Rapoport, the Tel Aviv-based startup claims that its technology has been used to analyze more than a billion interactions so far and that it has signed up a “few dozen” clients, including DreamCloud and Honeybook.

The idea behind Bonobo is that even though customer service texts and voice calls can provide companies with a trove of valuable information, these data points are difficult to aggregate and analyze at scale. Bonobo’s technology integrates into the platforms that its clients use to communicate with customers, like Gmail, Zendesk or Twilio) and CRM platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot. Then it analyzes interactions for “events of interest in calls,” Rapoport told TechCrunch, like “when customers ask for a discount, complain, ask for a missing feature, become dissatisfied, etc.”

There are two main types of issues that Bonobo helps its clients with. One is opportunity detection, or identifying things that can either help the closing of a sale, like features that have proven popular among past buyers, or hinder it, such as customer questions that aren’t satisfactorily answered. By doing so, Bonobo is also able to help clients create very targeted marketing campaigns. For example, instead of sending marketing material to all customers who need to renew their subscriptions, Rapoport says Bonobo’s clients can create campaigns to help retain customers who need to renew their subscriptions but have complained about the price being too high or missing a feature.

Another example of how Bonobo can increase conversion rates is predicting customer cancellations and other potentially costly issues. For example, one vehicle repair company was losing millions of dollars due to cancelled jobs. Bonobo helped it identify factors associated with a higher likelihood of cancellations during customer interactions with the company’s representatives, which helped it retain thousands of customers.

The second is risk detection. For example, Bonobo detects if a customer starts mentioning a competitor, threatens to post their complaint on social media or brings up problems that are a legal or compliance risk. Rapoport says that Bonobo’s technology can identify specific segments in conversations, so companies can review it directly from Bonobo’s dashboard without having to perform a time-consuming search.

Rapoport says that she and her co-founders (CTO Idan Tsitiat, COO Barak Goldstein and VP of Research and Development Ohad Hen) began working on Bonobo after they realized that while there are many tools from companies like Tableau, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce for gathering insights from structured data (like customer behavior on websites), very few exist for analyzing unstructured data, including conversational data, at scale. “It’s easy to measure how many people go to their cart but then change their mind and exit, but how do you do the same on thousands of customers calls? How do you know what’s the reason customers change their minds?” says Rapoport. “That’s the gap we are filling.”

According to a recent report published by SBWire, the global Data Visualization Applications Market is currently growing at an annualized rate of 10% each year. The market growth is driven by...

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The scooter startups are taking over the world — or trying to.

Earlier this week, Bird debuted its electric scooters in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park; today, Lime is announcing its foray into the land down under with the launch of a three-month scooter pilot at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Lime has also released several hundred of its dockless electric bikes in Sydney and plans to introduce its scooters there, as well as in Brisbane, soon.

“Sydney’s need for innovative transport solutions, which cater to the first and last mile, gives us confidence we will see high uptake of Lime electric bikes within the community,” said Mitchell Price, Lime’s director of government affairs and strategy in Australia and New Zealand.

The company is also announcing that it’s clocked in 20 million rides just two months after it surpassed 10 million.

Using the nearly half a billion dollars it’s raised to date, Lime is rapidly expanding across the globe and filling out its C-suite. Last week, it brought on David Richter as its first-ever chief business officer, followed by the appointment of GV general partner Joe Kraus as its chief operating officer.

Headquartered in San Francisco, the startup is backed by GV, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Section 32, GGV Capital and more.

Nick has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on. You’ll learn a lot. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your...

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RealtimeBoard, a visual collaboration tool particularly suited to distributed teams, has picked up $25 million in Series A funding. Accel led the round, with participation from existing investor AltaIR Capital.

The 150-person company — which itself is distributed across offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Perm — says it will use the additional capital to continue to scale, including building out its customer acquisition capabilities by bolstering sales and marketing teams, and growing its user community.

To that end, RealtimeBoard counts the likes of HubSpot, Skyscanner, Qlik, Autodesk, Netflix and Twitter as customers, and claims 2 million users worldwide. The startup generates revenue by charging for use of its SaaS on a per-seat basis for teams or company-wide.

“As companies continue to compete for talent, and how we work rapidly changes, connecting the dots between teams in different offices, hubs or cultures becomes harder and harder,” says RealtimeBoard founder and CEO Andrey Khusid.

“Often the first teams to be distributed are product teams (to resolve the war for talent), and rituals that are built into product development frameworks like design thinking or scrum, which require visual collaboration (usually on a whiteboard), are challenging to scale.”

To solve this, Khusid says RealtimeBoard is building a visual collaboration platform that enables white-boarding work to happen in a digital space, and can serve as the glue between other collaboration platforms used by companies.

“[It] can be the visual hub for teams to huddle around and use throughout the product development process, design, sprint, or project lifecycle,” he says. “RealtimeBoard creates transparency and continuity through all stages of the product development process from ideation to development to launch.”

Features RealtimeBoard offers include the ability for teams to create virtual spaces or huddle boards to collaborate, where users can sketch, annotate, add posts, create flow charts or draw freehand on an infinite whiteboard canvas. The tool also supports comments, @mentions, live chat and video conferencing.

Crucially, the platform integrates with other commonly used workforce tools such as Google Docs, Slack, Sketch, Jira, Trello, Dropbox and more.

“All the major productivity tools can be embedded into RealtimeBoard, so we are enabling work that happens between systems happen in one place by incorporating all relevant content and conversations into the same visual space,” explains Khusid. “And, with some bi-directional integrations with Google Docs, Office 365, and Jira, you can do work in RealtimeBoard and update information in other systems and vice versa.”

Meanwhile, Khusid tells me the company’s early adopters have been “rapidly scaling tech companies” that leverage modern collaboration frameworks like Agile, Scrum, Lean, Design Thinking, etc., and that these teams are used to leverage whiteboard rituals and are looking for ways to improve and scale in order to better engage remote team members. RealtimeBoard is also being used by around 100 enterprises, such as Salesforce, Netflix, SAP, Autodesk, Ikea and Cisco.

Adds Khusid: “[They] have active workforce transformation initiatives to roll out things like Design Thinking; globally or drive innovation through new tools and ways of collaborating. We also see a lot of management consulting companies like PwC, McKinsey, BCG and Deloitte that leverage RealtimeBoard to innovate with their customers.”