Spoke, a startup that wants to simplify the way companies add and process help desk tickets using artificial intelligence underpinnings, announced it has enhanced its AI engine to allow for more complex queries.

The company founders were working at Google after a previous startup had been sold to the search giant when they encountered a problem with help desk ticket processing. It was spread across different tools and generally was more complicated than they thought it needed to be.

Like all good entrepreneurs, when they left Google in 2016 and were looking for their next challenge, they decided to attack this pain point, which they felt acutely in their time at Google. Like many startups, that pain point gave rise to a new company: Spoke .

The product launched last March and the company already has 150 customers. The idea with the service is to provide an intelligent internal ticketing system, whether that’s for HR, IT or other internal help desks.

They wanted to make the tool as conversational as possible, so you simply enter a question or statement such as “the Wi-Fi is down in my conference room” or “how much vacation do I have left.” The system generally recognizes the type of request — Wi-Fi would go to IT and vacation to HR — and it moves the ticket through the system accordingly. If there is a relevant knowledge base article available, it might pull that as suggested reading. They say they have gotten to the point that 50 percent of requests can be resolved automatically without routing to a human.

Along the way, it keeps asking for feedback so that the artificial intelligence engine underlying the tool can learn what it got right and wrong and adjust accordingly in the future.

While the tool has its own complete interface, the founders recognized that people work in different ways, so they have also built integrations with Zapier (the workflow tool) and Slack, allowing customers to take that Spoke functionality and use it inside the tools they commonly use at work without explicitly having to open the Spoke tool.

The company has 20 full-time employees. Customers include DoorDash, Evernote and charity: water. They have raised $28 million.

Well, you have to admire a staggered PR plan. Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that just announced £85 million in Series E funding and its entrance into the fintech unicorn club, is rolling out a new feature today. The banking upstart is adding interest-earning savings accounts as an upgrade to its existing “Pots” functionality that launched last November.

The new “Savings Pots” feature is being offered in partnership with third-party bank Investec Corporate & Investment Banking and lets you earn 1 percent interest on the money you specifically allocate to a Savings Pot. It is the first time Monzo customers have been able to earn interest on their savings through the Monzo app, and is part of a wider “marketplace banking” strategy that will see Monzo increasingly offer various financial products via third-party fintech startups or incumbent providers.

The idea behind Pots is to let you set money aside for specific things, such as a planned holiday, preparing for Christmas or simply saving for a rainy day. You can create up to 10 Pots, each with their own name, and then add money to them manually, schedule payments in and out or round up your day-to-day transactions to the nearest pound and add the additional change to a Pot, piggy bank style.

To that end, you’ll need a minimum of £1,000 to open a Savings Pot, and above this can put as much money as you want in a Savings Pot. The savings accounts are flexible, so you can take money out of your Savings Pots at any time, where it will arrive back in your main Monzo account the next working day. Investec will hold the money in your Savings Pots and pay the 1 percent interest.

Savings Pots are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), meaning up to £85,000 of customers’ savings are protected (i.e. £85,000 across all of your Savings Pots as well as any other money you’ve deposited with Investec). Money you have banked with Monzo outside of Savings Pots is protected by the FSCS separately, again up to £85,000.

Monzo says it will be gradually rolling out the feature to its more than one million customers, and that the bank will email customers once they’re able to start using Savings Pots. I had the feature from yesterday and it is pretty self-explanatory to use.

Shape Security, a fraud-fighting cybersecurity company, has closed a $26 million round of Series E funding.

This will be the fifth round of funding — more than $130 million — since the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was founded in 2011. This latest round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Allegis Capital and others — including JetBlue Ventures and Singtel.

Shape Security said the addition of JetBlue’s investment was because it has benefited first-hand from its fraud-fighting technology.

The company’s primary focus is on preventing imitation attacks — such as when hackers use stolen logins or malware to walk in through the front door. Shape’s enterprise defense technology protects web and mobile apps against automated attacks by utilizing artificial intelligence to differentiate ordinary customers from hackers. Using its massive trove of data, including geolocation and even mouse movements, combined with Shape’s machine learning technology, the company says it can shut down suspicious activity and attacks in real time. The company’s flagship service Blackfish also protects against credential stuffing — where attackers use your stolen credentials to break into other sites.

In total, Shape says it protects 150 million logins each day, and covers one-fifth of the consumer brands in the Fortune 500.

With its $26 million cash injection, Shape said it plans a greater international expansion across the U.K., Europe and the Middle East and Asia to support its growing user base — about half of its customers are located outside of the U.S. And, the company will be bolstering its product development work with new products set to be announced down the pike.

Shape declined to say what it was valued at, but PitchBook puts the company’s valuation now at $495 million.

Exactly one year to the day since it launched its line of men’s health products, Hims is announcing its foray into women’s wellness.

The company is using its mountain of venture capital to support the new brand, called Hers. In September, Hims raised another $50 million in a round led by IVP.  The financing valued the startup, which has brought in $97 million to date, at $500 million, according to PitchBook.

At launch, Hers is offering three categories of products: sexual wellness, skin care and hair loss treatments. Its line of sexual health products includes a prescription-based birth control pill and Addyi, the only FDA-approved medication for women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

“Our goal is to help women make the most informed choices about their health at every stage of their healthcare journey,” Hers brand lead Hilary Coles told TechCrunch. “We thought it was offensive really that there have been 26 options out there for men to get hard and this is the first thing offered for women,” Coles added, referring to Addyi — the “female Viagra.” “It’s another area that has been super stigmatized.”

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Hers will also sell a hair, skin and nails vitamin supplement and shampoo & conditioner that protects against damaged hair that sheds. For the skin, Hers will offer a prescription topical cream to treat acne, an anti-aging cream and a melasma corrector for hyperpigmentation.

The company will also begin selling women Minoxidil, a treatment for hair thinning usually prescribed to men, in January. With the exception of birth control and Addyi, the products range from $15 to $75 per month.

Hims is known for selling erectile dysfunction medication, oral hygiene and skin care products to men. Founded in 2017, the San Francisco-based company is backed by Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, SV Angel, 8VC and more.

2018 is a record year for funding in the femtech space, which has included fundings for fertility and birth control startups like Nurx, Future Family and Maven. North of $400 million is expected to be funneled into the sector this year — a more than 10 percent increase than the $354 million raised by femtech startups in 2017.

VICIS has closed its Series B on $28.5 million, with participation from NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers via Rx3 Ventures. Rodgers joins a list of other pro footballers to back the helmet startup, including Roger Staubach, Jerry Rice, Russell Wilson and Doug Baldwin.

VICIS is known for its $950 Zero1 football helmet designed for adult players. The company spent $20 million over the course of three years collaborating with athletes, engineers and neuroscientists to design and fine tune the high-tech head shield, which protects against impact forces and mitigates the effects of collisions through a soft outer shell and several underlying protective layers.

With the fresh funding, which brings total investment in the company to $84 million, VICIS is bringing its youth helmet to market. Founded in 2013, the Seattle-based company says its mission from the get-go was to protect kids and teens playing football.

“There are 2 million kids in the U.S. playing youth football and they deserve the best possible protection,” VICIS co-founder and chief executive officer Dave Marver told TechCrunch. “To be able to offer this technology to kids; it’s our mission fully realized.”

The youth helmet, which retails at $495, is the first-ever to be designed for kids. Most youth helmets are miniaturized versions of adult helmets and fail to take into account the specific needs of a youth player.

VICIS’ youth helmet is tuned for the impact velocities expected in youth play, it’s the lightest helmet available for kids at under 4 pounds and it has the widest field of view of any kids’ helmet currently available.

“We feel like we have the opportunity to catalyze innovation in the youth space,” Marver said.

According to the National SAFE KIDS Campaign and the American Academy of Pediatrics, sports are the cause of 21 percent of traumatic brain injuries per year. Football, in particular, is responsible for the majority of the between 1.6 million and 3.8 million sports-related concussions found annually.

Research linking football to CTE, a degenerative brain disease, has proven that the sport can, in fact, be deadly, yet millions flock to the field every year. VICIS’ smart, tech-enabled helmets could help usher in a new era for safety in the popular sport.

VICIS plans to bring its technology to other sports in the future. It’s also recently inked a contract with the U.S. Army, with plans to provide the Army and Marine Corps a version of its helmet, tailored specifically for combat.

ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski is obsessed with SAR satellites. He’s so obsessed that his company plans to launch dozens of satellites into space. According to him, ICEYE satellites should be much better than existing SAR satellites — call it the Tesla or satellites if you want. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Modrzewski is coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to speak.

SAR stands for synthetic-aperture radar. There are already many SAR satellites around the earth, observing the surface of the planet. But they weigh hundreds of kilograms and cost a small fortune to put into space.

While consumer electronics have greatly benefited from miniaturization, the same can’t be said about space. But ICEYE thinks it’s time to make satellites smaller.

The company’s SAR satellites only weigh around 70 to 80 kilograms. It’s a cost-effective solution, which means it’s much cheaper to build a complete constellation. The company is aiming for 18 fully operational satellites around the planet.

In many ways, ICEYE is a tech achievement. And the fact that the company operates like a startup makes the venture even more interesting.

If you want to hear Modrzewski tell you more about what they’ve been working on, you should come to Disrupt Berlin. The conference will take place on November 29-30 and you can buy your ticket right now.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

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Rafal Modrzewski

Co-founder & CEO, ICEYE

Rafal Modrzewski is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of ICEYE. ICEYE aims to launch and operate a constellation of micro-SAR satellites providing access to timely and reliable Earth observation data. ICEYE is the first company that has successfully miniaturized a SAR satellite, creating a unit that is 100x more cost-effective than traditional counterparts. With its 18 satellite constellation, ICEYE offers its partners a set of unprecedented satellite imaging capabilities, accessing any area of interest faster, more frequently and at lower cost.

Since co-founding the project in 2012, which became the company in 2014, with Pekka Laurila, Modrzewski is responsible for overseeing the organization’s growth and implementing ICEYE’s overall vision. Modrzewski brings with him deep domain expertise in SAR engineering, and he has received the 2018 Forbes 30 under 30 Technology award based on the world-first achievements of ICEYE.

Prior to co-founding ICEYE, Modrzewski researched innovative products at VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) in the RFID and wireless sensing group. He attended Warsaw University of Technology in Poland, where he studied Electrical Engineering and co-founded the Multimedia Technologies Science Group. Modrzewski continued his studies in Radio Science and Engineering at Aalto University where he led the on-board data handling team working on Aalto-1, Finland’s flagship satellite project.

Mavrck has raised another $5.8 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $13.8 million.

When the company raised its Series A back in 2015, it was focused on helping brands work with “micro-influencers” who were already using their products. Now it describes itself as an “all-in-one” influencer marketing platform, offering a number of tools to automate and measure the process.

Last month, Mavrck announced new features for Pinterest, where it’s now an official marketing partner. It also says it’s been doing more to improve measurement and detect fraud — on the fraud side, it promises to analyze a “statistically significant sample” of an Instagram account’s followers, and of the accounts that engage with their content, to determine if they’re bots.

Customers include P&G, Godiva and PepsiCo, and the company says recurring revenue has grown 400 percent year-over-year.

“Everything that we have done at Mavrck this year has been done with the intention to drive the influencer industry forward,” said co-founder and CEO Lyle Stevens in the funding announcement. “Every new capability that we’ve introduced, every partner that we’ve started working with, every influencer behavior that we’ve tracked was part of our mission to help marketers harness the power of content that people trust to drive tangible business value for their brands.”

The new funding comes from GrandBanks Capital and Kepha Partners. A spokesperson said this isn’t a Series B, but rather additional capital raised to support increased demand and channel partnerships.

Local newspapers may be shuttering and people may be consuming most news on social media, but don’t tell Alex Mather that a subscription news publication can’t grow like a unicorn startup. His 2-year-old sports publisher The Athletic has gained over 100,000 paid subscribers (60 percent under age 34) and has a 90 percent retention rate.

Having already raised $30 million in its short life, the company announced a new $40 million Series C yesterday, led by Founders Fund and Bedrock Capital. It reportedly values The Athletic around $200 million.

I interviewed Alex Mather (The Athletic’s CEO) and Eric Stomberg (partner at Bedrock Capital) to understand what’s behind the breakout success, and why they think this publishing startup can scale to become a multi-billion dollar company.

EP: Bedrock makes concentrated, contrarian bets. Explain how The Athletic fits that.

ES: I first met Alex and Adam in 2016 during Y Combinator. The popular view then, as it remains now, was that people just aren’t willing to pay for content online and that to win in media you have to put out a high volume of free articles on social.

The Athletic took the opposite approach. It’s a narrative violation. Everything is part of a paid subscription, with the belief that instead of writers needing to post 3-4 pieces per day, they should focus on deeper stories that add value to paid subscribers over time. That worldview resonated with us. If you can create content at scale that people are willing to pay for, that’s a powerful economic engine.

There’s so much sports coverage already out there, by professionals and amateurs alike, so why are people willing to pay for The Athletic?

AM: While there appears to be an abundance of content, most of it is aggregated, shallow content for a broad audience. We produce fewer stories and target a diehard fan. Our subscribers consistently tell us that no one else produces the same depth on a daily basis.

How did you determine the $60/year price point?

AM: We think of $60/year ($5/month) as less than the average NBA ticket. It’s a meaningful price but not prohibitive, especially when we do discounts in the first year. Like all subscription companies, whether we like it or not, we have to consider how our pricing stacks up against Netflix. For $10/month, you can subscribe to Netflix which is spending $8 billion per year in content.

Is The Athletic profitable?

AM: We expand by launching in local markets. We are in 47 thus far. The operational focus is on building a local team and becoming profitable in each local market. I can tell you that most markets are profitable in the first year — currently all of our markets over one year old are profitable and most of those over 6 months old are profitable.

Explain your growth strategy in terms of coverage: Which sports did you start with and at which level (local versus national)?

AM: Direct-to-consumer businesses have to really work to earn their subscribers’ hard-earned money. We have to obsess over where we can be different. In the beginning, that was with hockey and baseball, because those have been de-prioritized by the bigger players. That shifted as we gained more subscribers: we needed to become comprehensive. We hired folks to cover the NBA, to cover the NFL, to cover soccer.

Do subscribers usually come just for one local sport or for the broader bundle?

AM: We’ve built a powerful bundle. A local newspaper has local politics, local restaurants, and then local sports. We have just the sports, but add a national perspective and a nationwide bundle. Most of our subscribers are “super bundlers,” meaning they subscribe to content from multiple cities plus at least one national product and usually a college product that’s not local. We provide all that for significantly less than competitors.

Eric — as a VC looking for multi-billion-dollar exits, how are you analyzing the potential scale of a subscription publication like this? Even most people who are bullish on subscriptions believe it’s a choice of going for a niche audience and staying small.

ES: There are two things we look for in a subscription business: retention and a positive flywheel.

Retention. In any subscription business, the key question is: can they maintain their subscribers over time? Most of them don’t. Spotify does, Netflix does, and The Athletic does as well. The Athletic is off the charts, which sets it up for scale. You want to see deep engagement over a very, very long period of time — years.

A positive flywheel. The more you build your subscriber base, the more you build your revenue base. That allows you to get better content, to hire unique writers, to build greater depth. In doing so, you attract people who weren’t ready to subscribe in the early days but now you have writers they follow and content they want. Technology is important here too: as you build a bigger platform with more content, serving the right content at the right time to each user is a key advantage. When this flywheel is working it’s actually quite hard to put a ceiling on the business.

Most publishers did a so-called “pivot to video” over the last couple of years. You’re anchored in writing. Why not more video at the start?

AM: We’re obsessed with the consumer and all our research in the beginning said that people still like to read books and articles. Advertising with text may not be as good as with video, which may be why so many other companies “pivoted to video,” but we think the written word is still the best way to convey certain types of stories. It’s straightforward, it doesn’t require headphones.

There’s an incredible amount of talent out there that can produce these stories and that has been cast aside by many entities. We saw it as an opportunity to give them great jobs and bring value to our subscribers. That has paid off for us.

What are your plans for video or other content formats in the future?

AM: We raised this Series C with audio and video in mind. We can tell even more stories when we add in audio and video possibilities. Our goal is to serve the subscriber: some love to read, some love to listen, others prefer to watch. We look up to things like The Ringer, Andre the Giant on HBO, VICE News, Gimlet, and The Daily by The New York Times all as incredible storytelling, and we ask ourselves “how can we do sports versions of those?”

Why focus on hiring experienced, full-time writers rather than a stable of contributors or curating from the vast pool of content by fans? Lots of amateurs pay close attention to sports.

AM: What’s really important to us is a growth mentality — that by Day 100 on our team a writer is thinking very differently. We’re providing lots of data, lots of feedback. We invest in great people who will figure this out with us over time. Also, scaling so quickly from 0 to 300 editorial staff was possible because we recruited experienced talent who know what to do already.

We do have about 400 contributors as well. These are folks who may be lawyers or accountants but are passionate about the teams they cover. We are a way for them to reach a premium audience. We can pay them really well and give them world-class editors formerly with Sports Illustrated and ESPN.

How are you acquiring your subscribers?

AM: When we expand into a new market, we gain new subscribers by hiring writers who have a following already and by word of mouth from existing subscribers. Then like any direct-to-consumer brand, we are acquiring subscribers through Google, Facebook and Twitter.

You financially incentivize your writers based on them acquiring new subscribers through their articles or by promoting The Athletic with their followers online. That is very uncommon in publishing. Explain that strategy.

AM: It ties back to our focus on building for the long term and investing in talent that will grow with us. We like to assign incentives that give us the best chance of building a sustainable business and we think about compensation in that way. We give our team equity in the company and for many, we tie a portion of their comp to the performance of their team, sport, city. It’s a great way to share in the responsibility and success of the business.

At the bottom of articles, you ask readers to rate each story as “Meh,” “Solid,” or “Awesome.” I wish every publisher did this. How do you use this data? How do a writer’s scores impact them?

AM: It’s about feedback loops. Our writers gauge feedback when they share on Twitter. This is another data point. It helps paint a more complete picture. NPS alone isn’t enough of course though. We look at whether articles drive new subscribers, drive deep engagement, drive comments, etc. We don’t use pageviews, but we certainly use metrics. Usually, this results in a writer producing very different work on Day 100 than they were on Day 0.

Explain the interaction between subscribers. It’s not unique to have a comments section: there are bad comments sections, good comments sections and comments sections that go unused. At a tactical level, how do you think about building community?

AM: My co-founder and I met at Strava, the social network for endurance athletes. I ran the product team and we were obsessed with community. We see an incredible connection between community engagement and subscriber retention. The question that drives us is how can we connect users in an authentic way, how can we connect users to our staff in an authentic way, how can we connect users to athletes in an authentic way. We’re doing a lot of experimentation here. We have a distinct opportunity because of our paywall: most of the comments on The Athletic are saying substantive things.

TechCrunch has an exclusive look at the companies participating in 500 Startups‘ 24th startup accelerator batch, which kicked off last week.

Through its four-month seed program, the Silicon Valley seed fund invests $150,000 in exchange for 6 percent equity. The companies below include a mix of industries from cryptocurrency to digital health to e-commerce. 500 Startups says 40 percent of the companies have a female founder, 50 percent have a black, mixed-race or Latinx founder and 31 percent are headquartered outside the U.S.

Here’s a closer look at the 22 companies, which will demo their tech to investors on February 28:

Alba: A Santiago, Chile-based mobile marketplace for babysitters in emerging markets.Assemble: A Los Angeles-based digital platform for automating video content production.Back Office: A Palm Beach, Florida-based financial software provider focused on streamlining personal bookkeeping.BlockVigil: A San Francisco-based platform for building and scaling blockchain applications.Cambridgene: A Cambridge-based developer of clinical-genomic software for personalizing cancer therapy in hospitals.Celer Network: A platform for building and scaling decentralized applications.Crowdz: Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the blockchain-based B2B marketplace builds digitized supply chains.HAMAMA: A San Francisco-based provider of microgreen kits for growing healthy food at home.IOTW: A Hong Kong-based IoT-connected cryptocurrency mining platform.Kura Tech: A San Francisco-based developer of augmented reality glasses with micro-display and variable focus.Memoir Health: A Boston-based behavioral health startup providing physical and virtual mental wellness and substance use services.MessageCube: Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the company is building an integration for people to discuss and purchase shared experiences over chat.Ovation: A Provo, Utah-based online portal for restaurant reviews meant to help businesses measure customer experience.PantyProp: A New York-based seller of underwear and swimwear for women to wear while menstruating.Pilleve: A Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based startup using data to help care providers lower the costs associated with opioid addiction.Savion: A Livermore-based aviation company bringing green, long-range private jets to the middle class.SnapShyft: Headquartered in Indianapolis, the startup provides an on-demand labor marketplace focused on the food and beverage industry.Thrive Agric: An Abuja, Nigeria-based crowdfunding platform for farms and farmers in Africa.TripAfrique: Headquartered in Paris, the online booking platform helps travelers arrange trips to Africa.UTRUST: A Zurich-based cryptocurrency payments platform that offers buyers protection, instant transactions and more.Zeuss Tech: Headquartered in Palo Alto, the blockchain-based anti-money-laundering platform targets cash-intensive industries.No information is available on the final company, which is in stealth mode.

Here’s a look at 500 Startups batch 23, 22 and 21.

Bitcoin turned 10 years old, a milestone for a technology that few have used and even fewer understand. Ultimately, the blockchain it wrought could be the biggest change to banking, finance and politics ever — or it could be a dud. The jury is still out, but let’s take a walk down memory lane and see just how the product grew from White Paper to world beater.

Sramana Mitra: We focus a lot on that product-market fit process. Our guidance to our entrepreneurs most of the time is to figure out that product-market fit before going out to raise money. The vast...

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Last week was a bad week for the Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) stock. Its disappointing results coupled with the market’s unease saw the stock fall to 6-month low levels after the results announcement. The...

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Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to scrape and convince enough Craigslist lawn mowing people so that you could launch the service? Gene Caballero: It took about three weeks to a month of...

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Brex, the corporate card built for startups, unveiled its new rewards program today.

The billion-dollar company, which announced its $125 million Series C three weeks ago, has partnered with Amazon Web Services, WeWork, Instacart, Google Ads, SendGrid, Salesforce Essentials, Twilio, Zendesk, Caviar, HubSpot, Orrick, Snap, Clerky and DoorDash to give entrepreneurs the ability to accrue and spend points on services and products they use regularly.

Brex is lead by a pair of 22-year-old serial entrepreneurs who are well aware of the costs associated with building a startup. They’ve been carefully crafting Brex’s list of partners over the last year and say their cardholders will earn roughly 20 percent more rewards on Brex than from any competitor program.

“We didn’t want it to be something that everyone else was doing so we thought, what’s different about startups compared to traditional small businesses?” Brex co-founder and chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras told TechCrunch. “The biggest difference is where they spend money. Most credit card reward systems are designed for personal spend but startups spend a lot more on business.”

Companies that use Brex exclusively will receive 7x points on rideshare, 3x on restaurants, 3x on travel, 2x on recurring software and 1x on all other expenses with no cap on points earned. Brex carriers still using other corporate cards will receive just 1x points on all expenses.

Most corporate cards offer similar benefits for travel and restaurant expenses, but Brex is in a league of its own with the rideshare benefits its offering and especially with the recurring software (SalesForce, HubSpot, etc.) benefits.

San Francisco-based Brex has raised about $200 million to date from investors including Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP.  At the time of its fundraise, the company told TechCrunch it planned to use its latest capital infusion to build out its rewards program, hire engineers and figure out how to grow the business’s client base beyond only tech startups.

“This is going to allow us to compete even more with Amex, Chase and the big banks,” Dubugras said.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now boasts more than a million customers, has raised £85 million in Series E funding. The round is led by U.S. venture capital firm General Catalyst, and Accel. Existing backers Passion Capital, Goodwater, Thrive Capital, Orange Digital Ventures, and Stripe also participated.

The latest funding was at a pre-money valuation of £1 billion (~$1.27b), meaning that Monzo is now a bonafide member of the U.K. fintech unicorn club, joining recent entrant Revolut.

Meanwhile, the bank upstart is also planning to launch a large crowdfunding round later this year. Like a lot of other fintechs — and before it was fashionable — Monzo has historically opened up its fundraising to its passionate community and other armchair investors.

In a brief call earlier today with Monzo co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield, he told me the new funding will be primarily used for increasing headcount to further develop the Monzo product line and to cover other operational costs now that the challenger bank has reached “contribution margin positive”.

In other words, on average each customer is generating more revenue than the cost of servicing their current account, which is undoubtedly evidence of how much progress Monzo has made over the last year. This includes bringing down costs, such as weaning customers off costly debit card “top ups” and imposing a cap on fee-free foreign ATM withdrawals — as well as starting to generate meaningful revenue.

On where that revenue is now coming from, Blomfield cited lending in the form of Monzo’s overdraft product, interest it earns on deposits (currently Monzo doesn’t share that interest with customers, even if it is very small in percentage terms), and interchange fees (the money Monzo makes any time you spend on your Monzo debit card).

Another revenue stream is the nascent Monzo marketplace, which he says will be the next focus going forward now that the Monzo current account, with the omission of savings accounts and cash deposits, is basically “done“.

That’s noteworthy given that Monzo embraced developers extremely early on in its existence, holding four very popular hackathons and conducting a few early partnership pilots, but has since mostly stalled on the roll out of marketplace banking and other partnership integrations, sometimes to the frustration of the wider U.K. fintech ecosystem and developers. The exception being the recent integration with TransferWise for sending money abroad.

Blomfield doesn’t dispute this framing but says it wasn’t that Monzo changed course on offering an open API or working on deeper integrations that will put partner products inside of the Monzo banking app, but that gaining a banking license and building out all of the features of the current account had to be the short-term priority. Now that heavy lifting is complete and armed with new operational capital, it is marketplace game on.

To that end, the Monzo CEO says headcount over the next year could double again, from around 450 now to 900. And in terms of customer growth, extrapolating stats from a recent Nationwide annual report (PDF link), the challenger bank says it now accounts for 15 percent of all new bank accounts opened each month in the U.K. It also says it has 800,000 monthly active users.

Account switching — that is customers ditching their existing bank — still makes up the bulk of customer acquisition, even if Monzo recently began targeting 16-18 year olds who would be opening their first ever bank account. Another key metric: the number of customers who deposit their salary each month with Monzo is now at around 26 percent, although I’m told that this isn’t as important for Monzo as it might be for traditional banks and isn’t the main correlation with engagement or those accessing a Monzo overdraft.

Asked what Monzo’s biggest challenge will be over the next year, its CEO doesn’t mince his words: “Increasing revenue,” he says. This means ensuring that its lending models are correct (ie avoiding too many defaults as it scales) and steadfastly growing the marketplace and third-party product partnerships that will bring in additional revenue.

I was also intrigued to see a U.S. venture capital firm once again back the U.K. challenger bank — many of its existing backers have a U.S. bent and Blomfield has made no secret of his ambitions to expand across the pond at some stage. In an email exchange a few hours before publication, General Catalyst’s Adam Valkin (who was previously at Accel in London where he invested in GoCardless, which Blomfield also co-founded), gave me the following statement:

We’re investing in Tom and his team because they are delivering a high-quality banking experience for consumers at scale that is sorely missing from the market. Today’s incumbent UK banks represent billions of market cap but suffer from low NPS scores, reflecting their inability to meet their customers’ needs. Monzo, in contrast, explicitly builds product and banking features in a community-driven approach based on customers’ feedback and requests. This has driven very high organic growth, strong retention and engagement, and unprecedented customer love for and trust in Monzo. Beyond this, Tom and the Monzo team have improved upon the traditional business model of banking, removing the traditional offline retail-based banking model in favor of a highly scalable and lower cost mobile-only experience. All of this creates the potential for Monzo to become a leading U.K. bank, launch a successful financial marketplace, and eventually expand internationally.

On the heels of a funding round to the tune of $18.8 million, Even Financial has acquired Birch Finance for an undisclosed sum.

Even offers products like a pre-approval API, real-time pricing, machine learning optimization, a product comparison and recommendation engine for consumers and more. Birch Finance, a TC Startup Battlefield alum that raised $1 million earlier this year, aims to help people make the most of the credit cards in their wallets by telling them which cards will earn them the most points. It works by analyzing your transaction history to identify missed rewards opportunities. Even’s plan with this acquisition is for Even to expand its offerings within the credit card space.

“The credit card market continues to expand with millions of consumers opening up hundreds of different types of credit cards every year for countless reasons,” Phillip Rosen said in a statement. “Birch already has one of the largest credit card databases and their technology perfectly complements our existing platform as we expand our offering to the credit card space. This acquisition will allow our partners to optimize the process of getting the right cards to the right consumers.”

Even’s slate of partners includes Credit.com, a personal loans marketplace, The Penny Hoarder and Transunion. With the Birch team on board, Even will enable its partners to save on consumer acquisition while also scaling its credit card recommendation platform. At Even, Birch co-founder Alex Cohen will serve as senior director of the credit card marketplace.

In a statement, Cohen said, “We saw a clear synergy with Even’s business strategy and growth plans, and I’m thrilled to join Even’s team as we expand and scale our offerings into new areas.”

Local advertising startup ZypMedia is announcing that it has raised $5.6 million in Series C funding.

That’s a relatively small amount of money for a Series C (the company had previously raised $6.9 million total, according to Crunchbase), but co-founder Aman Sareen said, “We had the opportunity to raise a lot more, but we chose not to.” In fact, Sareen said ZypMedia became profitable last year.

So the new funding round should allow the company to continue expanding its product lineup and its team — it has plans to double its headcount in the United States and India over the next year — while still leaving room for organic growth.

“We didn’t want to be a cautionary tale [like] other previous adtech companies,” Sareen said. “We are buckling down for the long haul … We didn’t want to necessarily raise money just for the sake of it.”

Sareen founded ZypMedia with his former college roommate Ramandeep Ahuja, as well as former Current TV executive Mark Goldman, with the aim of helping local broadcasters move into programmatic advertising.

The idea is to help those media companies offer campaigns that can reach advertisers’ desired audiences across traditional and digital channels, such as display, video (including over-the-top), social media and native advertising.

“Local digital advertising has been very neglected,” Sareen said. “It’s a huge market, and our goal was to be one of the leaders. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t an easy to task, but we have been decently successful in our mission.”

“Decently successful” means signing up partners like Sinclair Broadcast Group and Univision. It also means enlisting Archer Venture Capital as the lead investor in the new round. (Existing investors US Venture Partners and Sinclair also participated.)

“Not only have Aman and Ramandeep created a superior tech stack for delivering local advertising, they’ve also developed a really smart and defensible business model, partnering with local media companies to act as their direct sales force,” said Archer Managing Director John Hadl in the funding announcement.

And ultimately, the vision goes beyond bringing incremental revenue to traditional media companies. Sareen argued that ZypMedia’s model positions it right at the intersection of traditional and digital advertising.

“Within the next two-to-five years, digital or linear, over-the-top or over-the-air, it will jump through one platform,” he said. “Everything will use the same technology and currency.”

Aura, an app for emotional well-being, has raised a $2.7 million seed round co-led by Cowboy Ventures and Reach Capital, with participation from others.

When Aura first launched a couple of years ago, its bread and butter was short, three-to-seven-minute meditations based on your current mood — be that stressed, anxious, happy or sad. Since then, co-founders Steve and Daniel Lee say the company has grown to a few million users.

“We’ve since grown to become everyone’s emotional wellness assistant,” Steve told me. “We ask how people are feeling right now and then offer content to help them feel better.”

Aura works with therapists, coaches and meditation teachers to offer a variety of content to help people get the type of help they’re looking for. In addition to meditation, Aura offers life coaching, music and inspirational stories.

Premium users, who pay $60 per year, have unlimited access to content, while free users are limited to three minutes of wellness content once every two hours. Aura is not currently sharing how many paid customers it has.

“At Reach, we often ask how we can empower people to achieve at their fullest potential,” Reach Capital Partner Wayee Chu said in a statement. “We are thrilled to be supporting two founders who are not only deeply driven by their own personal narrative in living with a family member with a mental illness, but who have committed themselves in building a world-class technology and tool to empower others in building a regular mental health and wellness practice.”

With the funding in tow, Aura has plans to expand its base of content creators and grow its team — which currently consists just of the Lee brothers. Down the road, Aura envisions integrating the app with wearable devices and their respective sensors to detect mood automatically. That way, Aura would be able to serve up what you need before you know you need it. The company also plans to become more than just a content platform by building additional tools on top of the core service.

There are few things more irritating than a canceled flight, whether it’s on your way to a friend’s wedding, a conference or to celebrate a holiday back home. Wouldn’t it be nifty if technology could put an end to our travel woes? Freebird, a travel rebooking service, has raised an $8 million Series A to do just that.

The startup charges a minimum of $19 per flight — more depending on distance, time of year, location and more — to independent travelers and companies that partner with the service to help travelers rebook flights after cancellations or other “disruption events.” Most of the time, flights are on-time and without issue, which means that most of the time, Freebird pockets all of its customer’s cash. But if there is a disruption event, Freebird guarantees it will rebook you with just three taps of your phone and without any additional charge.

American Express Ventures has led the round, with support from Citi Ventures, PAR Capital Ventures, General Catalyst and Accomplice. Freebird is currently in discussions with Amex and Citi, as well as other banks, to roll its travel benefits into their corporate card services. To date, the startup works with 100 corporate clients and 10 corporate travel agency partners, including BCD Travel. Freebird says it expects to support 250,000 travelers this year.

Founded in 2015 by Ethan Bernstein, Cambridge, Mass.-based Freebird aggregates data on flight patterns to predict the probability of a flight disruption. If the probability is high, Freebird charges more for access to its mobile rebooking tool.

“If you’re flying out of Buffalo in the winter, it’s going to be a higher-risk flight,” Freebird chief executive officer Bernstein told TechCrunch. “If you’re flying out of Phoenix in the summer, you’re at a very low risk of being disrupted. We understand those risks and we are able to price our product differently based on those factors.”

Freebird has raised a total of $16.5 million in funding to date. It’s one of many travel technology startups to bring in venture capital this year. IfOnly, a marketplace for experiences, secured $20 million in April; luggage startup Away brought in a $50 million in June; and travel activities platform Klook raised $200 million in August, to name a few.

Freebird, though focused specifically on flights, says its experiences are at the forefront of its business model.

“There are a million different products that will help you automate your life but one of the things we are focused on is transforming personal experiences,” Bernstein said. “Do they go through these disruption events tearing their hair out or do they go through it knowing that they have control, agency, support and information? It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”