TripActions, one of the most well-capitalized travel startups in Silicon Valley, has raised yet another round of VC valuing the corporate travel manager at more than $1 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz will join TripActions’ board of directors as part of the startup’s $154 million in Series C funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Zeev Ventures and SGVC also participated in the round.

Co-founders Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig said TripActions’ $236 million raised to date, as well as its new “unicorn” valuation, is justified by its 700 percent annual growth rate and more than 1,000 customers.

“We mean it when we say our solution is so good we want to make sure we are bringing it to as many companies, as many employees as possible,” TripActions’ CEO Cohen told TechCrunch. “The main reason to raise more money is just to continue to go for that as fast as we can.”

Cohen and Twig previously co-founded StreamOnce, business collaboration software that was acquired by Jive Software for an estimated $10 million in 2013. They founded TripActions in 2015.

The Palo Alto-based company provides a corporate travel platform that integrates with company HR and expense systems. Using TripActions, business travelers can arrange flights, hotels and transportation, with 24/7 global support from the startup’s staff. Dropbox, Lyft, Twilio, Allbirds and Tuft & Needle are among its customers.

The company has expanded its platform by adding TripActions Luxe, a VIP program for executive travelers; TripActions’ in-house Meetings & Event solution for group travel; and TripActions’ Guest Invite Portal, designed for HR and recruiting teams. It also recently opened its European headquarters, an engineering and data science hub in Amsterdam, and plans to double down on R&D, AI and machine learning with the fresh investment.

Travel companies have been raking in capital this year in what Cohen sees as a big moment for tech startups in the space. The global travel and tourism market is, after all, one of the most valuable industries, worth some $7 trillion. The online travel market, in particular, is expected to grow to $817 billion by 2020.

“Something is really happening in the industry; something bigger than us,” Cohen said. “Different startups are identifying the opportunity here and the fact that companies want to make sure their employees are happy while they are on the go, that’s why you see investments in companies like Brex and like TripActions.”

“It’s about time that employees really feel great while they are booking their trip, while they are on the go and while they are doing their expenses at the end.”

In just a half hour, we’ll be starting Startup Battlefield LATAM in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Along with interviews with Nubank, Movile, Yellow, and a keynote from Facebook (TC’s partner for the event through FB Start), 15 startups from all across Latin America will be pitching their innovative companies on the TechCrunch stag for the first time.

We will be posting videos of the pitches, panels, and the competition winner on TechCrunch later today, so if you can’t be here in person check back.

In partnership with FB Start, this is the first year that TechCrunch is hosting Startup Battlefield in Latin America. TechCrunch reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of startups from all across the region, finally selecting 15 of the companies most promising startups to compete for Startup Battlefield. Startups are competing for a $25,000 prize (equity free), plus a trip for 2 to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 and the coveted, objectively correct title of “Latin America’s Favorite Startup.”

Founders have received extensive coaching from the TC team and are ready to launch on this prestigious international stage. For each round, teams will pitch for six minutes, including a live demo, followed by an intense six minute Q&A with the judges – elite VCs and product experts. After judge deliberations, five companies will move on to the final round of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield – the same pitch but a more rigorous Q&A.

Who are the 15 top companies? From rapid diagnostic TB tests and cattle weight management artificial intelligence, to finance banking solutions, management systems and point of sale solutions, this batch of companies impacts the lives of millions globally. Companies also include, at-work medical service innovations, music management platforms for brands, blockchain based prescription management, and even innovations in keyless entry for short term rentals and office spaces. Founders in the agricultural tech industry are poised to revolutionize how we grow food.

From innovations in utility tracking and management, farm management platforms, to women focused direct sales optimization platforms, Startup Battlefield LATAM is poised to showcase the regions top innovations. Stay tuned for videos on TechCrunch.com after the event.

Session 1: 9:35am – 10:40am

Cuidas, Nube, Beluga Pay, SimpliRoute, Unima

Session 2: 11:40am – 12:40pm

Elenas, Finerio, Space AG, Agilis, Olho do Dono

Session 3: 1:40pm – 2:40pm

LoopKey, 1Doc3, Brandtrack, RxChain by Prescrypto, Cuenca

Finals: 4:00pm

_________________________________________________

9:30 am – 9:35 am: Welcome Remarks by Jordan Crook (TechCrunch)

9:35 am – 10:40 am: Startup Battlefield Session 1

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is here and for the first time in LATAM, as entrepreneurs from around the region pitch expert judges and vie for US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019.

10:40 am – 11:05 am: A China Twist to Brazil’s Mobility Revolution with Ariel Lambrecht (Yellow), Eduardo Musa (Yellow), Tony Qiu (Didi Chuxing), Hans Tung (GGV Capital)

With Didi Chuxing’s acquisition of car-sharing service 99 and GGV’s investment in scooter / bike mobility startup Yellow, what lessons from China’s mobility revolution will unfold in Brazil?

11:05 am – 11:20 am: Break

11:20 am – 11:40 am: Keynote by Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (Facebook)

Facebook’s Director of Platform Partnerships discusses the Facebook developer ecosystem. Sponsored by Facebook.

11:40 am – 12:40 pm: Startup Battlefield Session 2

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is here and for the first time in LATAM, as entrepreneurs from around the region pitch expert judges and vie for US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019.

12:40 pm – 1:40 pm: Break

1:40 pm – 2:40 pm: Startup Battlefield Session 3

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is here and for the first time in LATAM, as entrepreneurs from around the region pitch expert judges and vie for US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019.

2:40 pm – 3:00: Fireside Chat with Cristina Junqueira (Nubank) and David Velez (Nubank)

With $180 million in fresh capital and a $4 billion valuation, where will Nubank go from here

3:00 pm – 3:20 pm: Keynote by Rodrigo Schmidt (Instagram)

The director of engineering at Instagram discusses the rapid growth and development of the popular photo-sharing app. Sponsored by Facebook.

3:20 pm – 3:45 pm: Venture Investing In Latin America Today Eric Acher (Monashees),Veronica Allende Serra (Innova Capital ), Hernan Kazah (Kaszek), Fernando Lelo de Larrea (ALLVP)

The pace and scale of venture investing in Latin America is accelerating fast. How will the ecosystem adapt?

3:45 pm – 4:00 pm: Break

4:00 pm – 5:15 pm: Startup Battlefield Final

The final round. One of these five finalists will be the winner of Startup Battlefield winning US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019.

5:15 pm – 5:35 pm: 20 Years Ahead of the Curve with Fabricio Bloisi (Movile)

Movile started with SMS and ringtones in 1998 and evolved into a powerful conglomerate of digital businesses on mobile platforms. Founder Fabricio Bloisi discusses the journey and what’s next.

5:35 pm – 6:00 pm: New Wave Latin Founders with David Arana (Konfio), Juan Pablo Bruzzo (Moni), Ana McLaren (Enjoie), Sebastian Mejia (Rappi)

The latest generation of tech founders in Latin America may be more disruptive than their predecessors but also face rapidly rising expectations at home and abroad.

6:00 pm – 6:15 pm: Startup Battlefield Closing Awards Ceremony

Infarm, the Berlin-based startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores, restaurants and local distribution centres to bring fresh and artisan produce much closer to the consumer, is expanding to Paris.

Once again, the company is partnering with Metro in a move that will see Infarm’s “in-store farming” platform installed in the retailer’s flagship store in the French capital city later this month. The 80 metre square “vertical farm” will produce approximately 4 tonnes of premium quality herbs, leafy greens, and microgreens annually, and means that Metro will become completely self-sufficient in its herb production with its own in-store farm.

Founded in 2013 by Osnat Michaeli, and brothers Erez and Guy Galonska, Infarm has developed an “indoor vertical farming” system capable of growing anything from herbs, lettuce and other vegetables, and even fruit. It then places these modular farms in a variety of customer-facing city locations, such as grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls, and schools, thus enabling the end-customer to actually pick the produce themselves.

The distributed system is designed to be infinitely scalable — you simply add more modules, space permitting — whilst the whole thing is cloud-based, meaning the farms can be monitored and controlled from Infarm’s central control centre. It’s data-driven: a combination of IoT, Big Data and cloud analytics akin to “Farming-as-a-Service”.

The idea isn’t just to produce fresher and better tasting produce and re-introduce forgotten or rare varieties, but to disrupt the supply chain as a whole, which remains inefficient and produces a lot of waste.

“Many before have tried to solve the deficiencies in the current supply chain, we wanted to redesign the entire chain from start to finish; Instead of building large-scale farms outside of the city, optimising on a specific yield and then distributing the produce, we decided it would be more effective to distribute the farms themselves and farm directly where people live and eat,” explains Erez Galonska, co-founder and CEO of Infarm, in a statement.

Meanwhile, the move into France follows $25 million in Series A funding raised by Infarm at the start of the year and is part of an expansion plan that has already seen one hundred farms powered by the Infarm platform launch. Other recent installations include Edeka locations in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Hannover. Further expansion into Zurich, Amsterdam, and London is said to be planned over the coming months.

“One thousand in-store farms are being rolled out in Germany alone,” adds Infarm’s Osnat Michaeli. “We are expanding to other European markets each and every day, partnering with leading supermarket chains and planning our North America expansion program for 2019. Recognising the requirements of our customers we have recently launched a new product; DC farm – a ‘Seed to Package’ production facility tailored to the needs of retail chains’ distribution centres. We’ve just installed our very first ‘DC farm’ in EDEKA’s distribution center”.

Obtaining a banking license and then launching an actual new retail bank requires capital. A lot of capital. Enter Zopa, the U.K. peer-to-peer lending company that wants to become a bank, which today is announcing that it has closed £60 million in further funding. Only £16 million is actually new new money, having already disclosed £44 million in August, so this is effectively an extension of that earlier fund-raise.

The purpose remains the same, however: Zopa says it will use the latest round of investment toward the capital needs for its yet-to-launch “next generation bank.” The company began applying for a bank license with the U.K. regulators in 2016. The new funding also comes off the back of what the fintech claims is its sustainable and profitable peer-to-peer business, having achieved full-year profitability in 2017 for the first time since 2012.

An early mover in the space — launching all the way back in 2005 — Zopa says it has served nearly half a million customers, either through loans or investing in peer-to-peer loans. It has lent more than £3.7 billion in unsecured personal loans to customers in the U.K.

The next phase of Zopa is all about becoming a new digital bank, alongside its peer-to-peer business, in order to be able to offer “a unique and broader set of products to customers.”

“Our bank will allow us to give more people a better experience with their finances by introducing more simple, fair products — like savings accounts and credit cards,” a company spokesperson tells me.

At launch this will include offering FSCS-protected savings accounts, and P2P investments (including IFISAs for investors), and personal loans, car finance and credit cards for people looking to borrow.

“Our money management app will offer our customers a more personalised approach to managing their money,” adds the spokesperson.

Cue Jaidev Janardana, Zopa CEO (pictured above): “This new funding takes us a step closer to realising our vision of being the best place for money in the U.K. Having served half a million customers to date, Zopa is set to redefine the finance industry once again through our next generation bank to meet a broader set of U.K. customers’ financial needs.”

Sramana Mitra: Is the woman decision maker in the purchasing decision critical? Kerry Rupp: It is critical. Not all decisions are always going to be made by women, but they are in markets that are...

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Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Venu Pemmaraju: The companies that we invest in must have a go-to market play in North America. Therefore, they should have a leadership presence in North...

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Chris Hays and Mark Jeffrey wanted to create a way for everyone to be able to tell their loved ones if they were in trouble. Their first product, Guardian Circle, did just that, netting a mention a few years ago. Now the same team is truly decentralizing alerts with a new token called, obviously, Guardium.

The plan is to create an ad hoc network of helpers and first responders. “Guardium and Guardian Circle together open the emergency response grid to vetted citizens, private response and compatible devices for the very first time,” write the founders. “Providing an economic framework on our global distributed emergency response network; Guardium brings first responders to the 4 billion people on the planet without government-sponsored emergency response.”

Because the product already works, the team is taking on the token sale as a new challenge.

“We’re serial entrepreneurs — both of us have been venture-backed in the past by names like SoftBank and Intel, and we’ve been senior execs in companies backed by Sequoia and Elon Musk. Transitioning to the token sale-backed universe has been an interesting study in contrasts,” said Hays. “There are a number of ‘panic button apps’ — but without exception, all of them have forgotten ‘the second half of the problem’ — organizing the response. Getting people who do not know one another into instant communication and location sharing during an emergency — the importance of that cannot be overstated.”

The founders found that their idea wasn’t fundable in the valley. After all, what VC wants to help people when they can invest in Snapchat? Instead, Hays and Jeffrey are aiming bigger.

“We’re rebooting the world’s safety grid,” said Hays. “We’re creating a new global public utility. And we want it to service everyone, everywhere on earth. Although it is a very big vision, and it is a capitalist, multibillion dollar ecosystem that we’re chasing — it’s still a very different vision, and not the one venture capitalists are looking for.”

The token works to create a flash mob of help. Guard tokens pay first responders and dispatchers and “cities, campuses, and resorts stake $GUARD to access Alerts created within their geofenced borders,” allowing local folks to help immediately. They’ve sold half of their hard cap of $10 million thus far.

While tokens are always an iffy investment, this team has produced product and, more important, it’s clear they’ll never raise venture. A token, no matter how it’s used in the future, seems like a solid solution.

Tiny houses are all the rage, but once you put more than a few people in one you have a problem: Where can you go from there?

Nowhere. Exactly.

What you do is, if you need that extra push over the cliff, you know what you do? Talk to Brian Gaudio. Gaudio is the founder of Module Housing, an incremental-building startup from Pittsburgh. Gaudio, formerly of Walt Disney Imagineering, has an architecture background and saw firsthand the need for incremental housing in his work in Biloxi and Latin America. His idea is simple: create a little house that grows with you over time, allowing a single room to turn into a mansion with a few turns of a wrench.

“We think of the home as a recurring revenue stream — buy a starter home today, purchase additions and upgrades in the future. All our homes are designed to change over time — as a homebuyer’s family grows, income grows or needs change,” he said. “We are capital-light compared to other prefab startups in that we don’t own the manufacturing facilities where our homes are built. We leverage existing network of high-performance prefab manufacturers on the East Coast.”

The service does it all: They offer multiple-room dwellings and work with you to order the modules, find land that lets you add on over time and assemble the houses. Like the Craftsman houses of old, you have a few basic styles, but in this case you can buy a one-bedroom Nook house for $212,000 and then add on over time instead of buying a house with seven rooms and realizing you only needed two.

Additional costs include building a foundation and land preparation. It’s also dead easy to add onto your house when you’re ready, said Gaudio, thanks to work they’ve done in modularizing the houses.

“We have patents pending on a removable roof and wall system that simplifies the addition process when a customer is ready to add on,” he said.

The company has raised $1.2 million so far and they have prototype houses in Pittsburgh. They already have orders and they’ve created a Tesla-like reservation system for the folks who want to try out their product.

“I moved back to Pittsburgh to start Module with the goal of making good design accessible to everyone,” he said. “Affordable housing is one of the most critical issues our country faces today. Module is a vehicle to promote responsible, equitable development in cities. We are reimagining housing to be more sustainable, adaptable and better designed.”

Brooklinen, the direct-to-consumer bed linens brand, has today announced the opening of a four-month pop-up shop in NYC.

The company has been around for four years thus far, and recently hit $100 million in revenue after raising just $10 million in funding.

Part of the company’s success comes down to its attention to detail. The process of shopping for sheets is often difficult for new adults who don’t understand how to weigh quality and price, and usually don’t get much help in stores like Bed Bath & Beyond.

Brooklinen isn’t necessarily inexpensive — 270-thread-count sheets start at $129 for a queen, and 480-thread-count sheets start at $149 for a queen — but the process of purchasing quality sheets is leaps and bounds more convenient. Brooklinen handles fulfillment, including the packaging, and has invested in customer service to ensure that there are no hiccups from the point of purchase to the point of making the bed.

Moreover, Brooklinen has designed many of their sheets to easily mix and match with other sets, creating an environment that begs for repeat purchases.

That said, there are still customers who either need the instant gratification of a purchase or to touch and feel the product before converting. Which is why Brooklinen is launching the pop-up shop on Spring Street in Soho.

Co-founder and CEO Rich Fulop explained to TechCrunch that the timing of the pop-up was very intentional.

“We’re doing a four-month pop-up to learn as much as we can and talk to customers,” said Fulop. “We understand that shopping picks up ahead of the holidays, so we set it up to go through the holidays and then into the slower time following the holidays. We want to see the difference between holiday season and through to February so we don’t get a false positive in terms of the model.”

Interestingly, Brooklinen is opting to hold inventory in the store so that purchasing customers can take home their wares. Many pop-up shops offer portals to purchase items and have them shipped as opposed to holding inventory. The company wants to capitalize on any customer who’s flirting with the idea of purchasing and believes holding inventory is the best way to do that.

However, Brooklinen expressed no interest in going the wholesale route, selling inventory to other retailers. Controlling every step of the process, from design all the way to fulfillment, is part of what makes Brooklinen successful, according to the founders.

The 2,000-square-foot space is at 119 Spring St. and officially opens on Friday.

We have done several spotlight posts on entrepreneurship in different parts of the world: Colorado, Utah, Czech Republic. Today, we will turn the spotlight on Florida. As usual, we start with a...

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Fraugster, the Berlin-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to prevent fraud for online retailers, has raised $14 million in a Series B funding. The round is led by CommerzVentures, the venture capital subsidiary of Commerzbank, alongside early Fraugster investors Earlybird, Speedinvest, Seedcamp and Rancilio Cube.

Notably, Munich Re/HSB Ventures, the VC arm of global reinsurer Munich Re, also participated in the round. That’s because Munich Re is insuring Fraugster’s “Fraud Free” product, which takes on the full liability for each transaction to ensure retailers utilizing Fraugster’s fraud detection technology never lose out — a sign that the company is pretty confident in its machine learning.

Selling its wares to payments companies — including Ingenico ePayments and Six Payments — the Fraugster AI technology takes data from multiple sources, then analyzes and cross-checks it in a fraction of a second to determine whether a transaction is fraudulent or not.

The idea isn’t just to block any potential fraud, which rules-based systems can already do, but to actually let more transactions through. That’s because false-positives (i.e. accidentally preventing perfectly valid purchases) is the real bane of the industry.

Citing industry average stats of false positives, Fraugster CEO and co-founder CEO Max Laemmle tells me that for every dollar lost to fraud, $17 is lost through transactions that are wrongly turned down, leading to lower revenues for merchants. He says that Fraugster’s technology has already got that down to $2.

Meanwhile, the anti-fraud startup says it will use the new funds to continue expansion into new markets. This includes the U.S., Asia and Europe, where retailers are facing “an accelerating battle against fraud.”

Storyblocks, formerly known as Videoblocks, is a stock media service that offers videos, images and audio for creatives. One feature that always made it stand out from the competition is its flat-rate model that gives you unlimited access to all of the media files in its library (though there’s also a pay-as-you-go marketplace). Last year, Storyblocks started making similar flat-rate deals with developers who wanted to integrate its library into their own creative applications. Those were pretty bespoke integrations, but starting today, developers will be able to take the Storyblocks library for a test drive and try it in their apps without having to pay a fee or talk to a salesperson.

The new Storyblocks developer portal, which is launching today, allows developers to generate an API key, integrate the Storyblocks API and then, when they are ready, talk to the company to set up a commercial partnership. Developers who want to integrate the service will get full access to the Storyblocks library and because they are paying the flat fee for that service, users won’t have to get a Storyblocks account or worry about the licensing.

Many of the developers who would most likely be interested in using this service likely find themselves in competition with Adobe, which offers a rich set of creative tools and an integration with its own Adobe Stock service. With the Storyblocks API, developers will be able to offer similar integrations to their users, something Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard also acknowledged when I talked to him ahead of today’s announcement.

“You’ve got the changing profile of the content creator and they are demanding a more integrated workflow,” he said. “You’re seeing that materialize as Adobe Stock is integrated with Premiere and Photoshop — and Adobe launching [its new video editor] Rush. These are all about producing shorter-form content, distributing it quickly, but also without lowering the bar on the overall quality.” Leonard believes that what he described as “closed ecosystems” will own a large portion of the market, but he obviously also believes there is room for a player like Storyblocks to offer an alternative. And indeed, Leonard told me that API access already drives a double-digit amount of revenue for Storyblocks right now and, unsurprisingly, he expects that number to go up over time.

According to a Transparency Market Research published earlier this year, the global accounting software market was estimated at $5.7 billion last year. It is expected to grow to $11.8 billion this...

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PressLogic, a Hong Kong-based social media content and data analytics startup, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A+ round from Meitu, developer of the popular Chinese selfie app. PressLogic will use the funds to launch its new lifestyle brand GirlStyle and enter e-commerce with its proprietary algorithms, which predict what topics will trend on social media among specific groups.

The new round brings PressLogic’s total raised to $15 million. Meitu first acquired a minority stake in PressLogic last year.

After launching a data-analytics service for social media managers called MediaLens in 2016, founders Ryan Cheung and Edward Chow began creating social media publishing and marketing brands in order to show potential clients how their technology could boost audience engagement. PressLogic, their social media publishing platform, now claims a total of 8 million Facebook and Instagram followers and more than 700 million monthly content impressions across its social media profiles and websites, with about 75 percent of its visitors aged 18 to 34.

MediaLens still serves as PressLogic’s core technology, underpinning its content brands, as well as the insights it provides to partners in order to increase their social media engagement and return on investment. CEO Cheung (Chow serves as PressLogic’s CTO) told TechCrunch that MediaLens “creates a pipeline from data sourcing to content suggestion to optimization” and has an edge against its competitors because it is able to make more granular suggestions about what content is likely to be popular among specific groups based on trending topics.

With its new round of funding, PressLogic will launch GirlStyle, a lifestyle and fashion-based social network targeted to young women, as an app and website in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Korea and Malaysia by the end of this year. In terms of e-commerce, Cheung says the company will start by focusing on skincare and cosmetics by leveraging data from its online traffic and readers.

PressLogic hasn’t revealed if Meitu’s photo imaging technology will be integrated into its platform, but Cheung says it would like to extend MediaLens’ analytics to images, too, as data from photos and videos shared on social media is potentially valuable, but still difficult to transform into the kind of insights that help predict which content will go viral next.

Sramana Mitra: What is the cost implication of all this? What does it cost to deliver this level of service? Rafael Zakinov: By working with a third-party logistics provider, there’s obviously a lot...

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Portify, a London fintech startup that offers an app and various financial products to help gig economy workers better manage their finances and in turn improve financial well-being, has raised £1.3 million in seed investment. The round was led by Kindred Capital and company builder and investor Entrepreneur First (EF), with participation from various unnamed angel investors.

Founded in May last year by EF alumni Sho Sugihara (CEO) and Chris Butcher (CTO), Portify is setting out to address the financial volatility many flexible or so-called gig economy workers face. The startup offers a number of tailored financial products, accessible via its mobile app, to help flexible workers get insights into their current financial status and income, as well as do short and long-term financial planning.

The app — primarily a B2B2C play — is distributed in partnership with various gig economy platforms and also includes earning “rewards” at partnering merchants or service providers. The current Portify website lists TransferWise, Amazon and Spotify as rewards.

“Portify’s vision is to enable financial security and well-being for independent workers,” Portify co-founder and CEO Sho Sugihara tells me. “While we’ve seen rapid growth in the numbers of independent workers (6 million in the U.K., and up to 162 million in the E.U. and U.S., according to McKinsey), there is still a large gap in the market for financial services to ensure these workers are secure, and have access to an economic ladder.

“We work with companies to help build access to financial products that enable this security and progression, and offer this through a mobile app which workers can port between different jobs.”

Sugihara says there are three elements to Portify’s mission: helping flexible workers control “immediate income volatility,” helping them budget effectively on a day-to-day basis and support with financial planning for the long term.

“Once a user gets access to our app, the first thing they do is securely connect their bank account,” he explains. “We then help control volatility by offering emergency credit with select stores to buy essential products if required. We also help our users manage cash flow and budget for tax and other recurring expenses. By building up financial security and well-being from the ground up, our goal is to improve our user’s financial standing over the long term, whether through saving for retirement or helping them invest into their own businesses and careers.”

To that end, Sugihara says Portify is currently being used by independent workers in the gig economy and temp staffing sector. This covers couriers, ride-hailing drivers, retail shop floor staff and hospitality workers, amongst others. Its B2B customers span large gig economy platforms and digital temporary staffing agencies “with global coverage.”

Home Made, the London premium online lettings agency, has raised a further £2 million in funding. The round is led by Athens-based venture capital firm VentureFriends, and follows the proptech startup’s £850,000 “pre-seed” round nine months ago.

Founded in 2016 by Asaf Navot, a former Bain strategy consultant and INSEAD graduate, and Nick Binnington, a former British Army Captain and LBS graduate, Home Made’s proposition is based on the premise that the letting agent model is broken. Specifically, that high-street agents offer average service and charge extortionate fees, while online agents typically charge low fees but offer a worse service as a result.

The company positions itself as the only estate agency in the U.K. that offers a premium service akin to a high-end traditional estate agent, including accompanied property viewings and working until 10 pm at night, on weekends and bank holidays — for a low online fee starting at £948 +VAT. However, competitor Rentify also occupies a more upmarket space, but charges a monthly fee and is fully-managed and provides a ‘rent guarantee’. At the lower end are startups like OpenRent and uPad that operate more more an à la carte model with various services to help you rent out your property.

To that end, Home Made says it plans to use the new funding to expand its offering and further develop its underlying technology, focus on growing its customer base in London “and beyond”. This will include hiring 20-25 new sales and marketing staff in the coming months.

The company’s proprietary online platform allows landlords to manage their properties from marketing to move-in. This includes full control during the marketing phase – landlords can add or remove marketing photos on the portals, write or enhance existing descriptions and change the price – and visibility of progress during tenancy progression.
 
International expansion has also begin: Home Made recently opened an office in Athens and says it is looking to develop several company functions in the country, including lead generation, tech support, and customer service and support. The startup says it has selected Greece for its first international office primarily due to “the growing Greek startup ecosystem which offers access to high caliber talent with international experience”.

Meanwhile, Home Made recently announced the launch of Sentinel, a tool that detects illegal subletting by tenants via short-let websites such as AirBnB. The idea is to help landlords tackle a growing illegal subletting problem that sees “tenants” rent out properties with no intention of ever ever staying in the property.

This activity commonly violates the terms of a Tenancy Agreement, and may also violate the building lease, local authority regulations, buildings insurance, and mortgage terms. It also withdraws these properties from the market for long-
term tenants, which in turn contributes to rental increases in London.

IndieBio, the biotech startup accelerator that’s produced heaps of notable companies (including several that have graced the Startup Battlefield), is holding its twice-annual demo day today at 3PM Pacific Time. An even dozen young companies will be pitching their work, from AI-informed research to artificial meat, and you can watch them present live right here.

The IndieBio program is a four-month one that takes companies at the seed stage, often researchers straight out of graduate programs or university research groups, and gets them into shape for a proper Silicon Valley debut. Right now the companies get $250K in funding to take part, as well as plenty of resources, which parent VC firm SOSV can surely afford these days, what with raising $150 million last year.

Off the top of my head I remember two companies that competed at Disrupt SF 2016, Amaryllis Nucleics and mFluiDx, both very technical and highly talented teams. I’m always rooting for these kinds of wet lab companies, and it sounds like the current batch has plenty.

Watch the live pitches starting at 3PM below, and consult the list below the video for a summary of the companies presenting. We’ll be watching too!

New Age Meats: Pig farms are hell on earth. New Age Meats is a “cell-based meat company” that’s looking to replace animal-based pork sausage with a cleaner, more ethical grown alternative that goes just as well with pancakes.

NovoNutrients: Another non-traditional protein source, NovoNutrients uses industrial CO2 emissions to produce high-protein bacteria, which are harvested and sold as sustainable feed stock for aquaculture animals like fish.

BioRosa: An early detection method for autism spectrum disorders using blood tests that could shift diagnosis time to well before the current four years of age to potentially before the child is born.

Chronus Health: Hospitals need to do blood tests constantly, but often have to send samples to a central lab, which can take hours or days. Chronus has made a portable device they claim can provide complete blood count and metabolic panel tests essentially in real time.

Clinicai: Colorectal cancer, like other cancers, is best treated when detected early — and collecting and analyzing stool samples is a big part of that. These guys made a (prototype) device that attaches to ordinary toilets and non-invasively does what it needs to do, which could help people worldwide get proactive diagnosis and care.

Convalesce: Parkinson’s is a stubborn and tragic disease, but Convalesce is working on a treatment method involving injecting stem cells directly into areas affected by neurodegeneration.

Oralta: You can floss, brush, and rinse, but bad news bacteria are still going to take up residence in your mouth. Oralta hopes to combat them with good bacteria, reinforced by probiotic supplements. Fight fire with fire!

Ember: If someone is having a heart attack and it’ll take the EMTs 8-12 minutes to arrive, but your neighbor is a nurse trained in CPR, wouldn’t it be nice if they could stop by and help? That’s the idea with Ember, which hopes to improve outcomes by connecting patients with health professionals nearby.

Filtricine: The cancer treatment method being pursued by this company, instead of adding something lethal to cancer cells into the bloodstream, subtracts what they need to live while leaving normal cells unharmed. It could combine effectiveness with a blessed lack of side effects to become another tool in oncologists’ arsenals.

Serenity Bioworks: Gene therapy is another important therapeutic tool for a variety of problems, but some viral delivery methods can be fought by the body as if it’s fighting infection. Serenity is working on a system that suppresses that immune response and allows the friendly virus to deliver its payload.

Quartolio: So much scientific literature is published every year that there’s no way doctors and researchers can keep up. Quartolio aims to apply national language processing to journal articles to find connections and research opportunities that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Stämm: Bioreactors are used in practically every branch of biotech, whether for testing or drug manufacturing. Stämm is advancing the art with a modular, scalable microfluidic platform with highly tunable physical and chemical parameters.

TransferWise, the European fintech unicorn that enables low-cost international money transfer, has always had ambitions of being a platform in the truest sense. In addition to its direct-to-consumer app, the company offers an API for integration with other fintechs and banks, although it is fair to say that third-party integrations of this kind have been quite slow to come by. With that said, the number of third-party integrations appears to be picking up pace.

The latest bank to offer TransferWise functionality is Dutch challenger Bunq, which is enabling customers to make “fast, low-cost international payments” powered by TransferWise. Similar to other third-party integrations, the TransferWise feature sits within Bunq’s own app, giving users the “real exchange rate”, in addition to a small, transparent fee. At launch, 15 currencies are supported, and over the coming weeks more currencies will be added.

Back in June when TransferWise unveiled its partnership with fast-growing U.K. challenger bank Monzo, I asked co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann how different the conversation is with the challenger banks compared to longer established incumbents who historically have made a lot of revenue from foreign exchange fees. Perhaps being diplomatic, he argued that those conversations are quite similar, and usually centres on the fact that customers are already using TransferWise and that if a bank wants to put those customers first it makes sense to offer TransferWise functionality within its own app.

“When we announced the large French bank [BPCE Groupe], which is clearly an incumbent — a massive incumbent — they were thinking about their customer,” he told me at the time. “That maybe does feel a little bit rare for banks to think this way, but they figured that ‘if we are going to do this, then why don’t we do it properly’. They were actually fully driven by their users and thinking about how to get the best user experience”.

Cue a statement from Bunq founder and CEO Ali Niknam: “Our mission is to free our users from borders and barriers in traditional banking, such as hidden fees. We think TransferWise is a valuable addition to solidify that mission. This is the next big step in bringing freedom to the traditional banking industry”.

Meanwhile, the Bunq tie-in is TransferWise’s fifth bank partnership. In addition to Monzo, and upcoming integration with France’s BPCE, the international money transfer service has partnered with Germany’s N26, and Estonia’s LHV. However, a previously announced partnership with the U.K.’s Starling Bank never materialised and has since been disbanded.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Kerry  Rupp was recorded in October 2018. Kerry...

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