The Economist recently did an article titled Why Startups Are Leaving Silicon Valley. The positive message in the article is that entrepreneurship has now spread around the world. Compelling ventures...

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Sramana Mitra: Just to complete that configuration question, because of our activities being global, we see companies everywhere. We see companies all over the United States. We companies in Europe....

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To get an edge on the market, investors must look beyond traditional financial info like revenue and profits. Our every online activity generates data exhaust, like web traffic, Twitter mentions, app downloads and search trends. It’s the ability to overlay the old and new data sets to spot surprising trends that will set the best traders apart. Sentieo wants to be their tool.

Sentieo is an investment research software suite that uses AI to scan financial documents, analyze alternative data sets and create visualizations. The fintech SAAS startup now has 700 customers, including top hedge funds plus mutual funds, Fortune 500s and investment banks that pay around $500 to $1,000 per month per license. That’s a lot cheaper than a $21,000 yearly Bloomberg Terminal subscription. [Correction: Sentieo charges $500 to $1000 per month, not per year.]

Now Sentieo is ready to crank up its name recognition with a sales and marketing blitz fueled by a new $19 million Series A round led by Centana, a $250 million growth equity firm focused on fintech SAAS. Now with $30 million in total funding, the 160-person startup plans to “Educate [traders] that ‘hey, this product is built by people who sat in your seats,'” says CEO Alap Shah.

Sentieo charts Search Trends data and Sentieo Index data on Facebook versus the social network’s revenue.

Ten years ago, Shah was making the Wall Street rounds after graduating from Harvard in economics. He was an analyst in consulting at Novantas, private equity at Castanea, and worked for hedge funds Viking Global and Citadel. “It became clear that there were some really big holes in my process where software wasn’t meeting my needs. Importantly, there was a hole around search,” Shah tells me. “We’ve grown accustomed to going to Google. But unfortunately that’s just not the way the old-school financial data programs are structured.”

So he built his own. “I used all the financial tools out there: Capital IQ, FactSet, Bloomberg — each had their strengths and weaknesses. But they were all over 20 years old, so they pre-date the cloud, pre-date SAAS, pre-date mobile!” With Sentieo, he wanted to develop a tool that could understand the nuances of business momentum before it showed up in the balance sheets.

Sentieo does have a traditional financial equity data terminal with real-time pricing. But there’s also a machine learning and natural language processing-powered document search tool that can sort through SEC documents, earnings call transcripts, press releases and more. It taps Alexa web traffic data, Apptopia app download rates and Twitter chatter, as well as Thomson Reuters analyst estimates and fundamentals. Customers can annotate files, organize ideas, generate visualizations and share their insights through Sentieo’s Notebook.

For example, Sentieo could look through all of Tesla’s earnings calls and financial documents for mentions of guidance on Model 3 production volume. It could highlight them all, analyze the sentiment of those mentions and chart them against Tesla’s share price. Or you could search for all the companies starting to list President Trump as a risk factor for their business, which would surface how the medical cannabis companies are concerned about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ stance on legalization.

Sentieo’s synonym library allows it to hunt down different ways of saying the same thing with the goal of not forcing investors — or their dutiful analysts — to read through 100-page 10-Q documents manually. “You can get the same information at 10x the speed with something like Sentieo,” Shah claims. It wants to a be a “research management system,” like a Salesforce CRM for tracking investment ideas.

But Sentieo’s 65-person India-based engineering must keep data from all 50 feeds, 25 million documents and 64,000 equities flowing to keep customers satisfied. There are a ton of moving parts, and Sentieo is competing with much bigger companies. Beyond Bloomberg, there are lots of alternative data providers out there. And Microsoft’s software suite also has plenty of info management tools.

Sentieo’s hope is to emerge as an aggregator of information sources and an annotation tool that benefits from being purposefully designed for what analysts need. If Robinhood is on one side of the spectrum making investing easy for novice traders, Sentieo is on the other end making investing smarter for experts. “It’s really at the bleeding edge of how you get the data today,” Shah concludes. “For every company driven by consumer demand, there are all these little breadcrumbs being left all over the internet.”

[Disclosure: I briefly rented a room in an apartment where Shah lived five years ago and I know him from the San Francisco social scene frequented by many Silicon Valley figures.]

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 421st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, November 1, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Concord is raising a new $25 million funding round led by Tenaya Capital, with existing investors CRV and Alven also participating. The company is building a platform that makes it easier to manage your contracts all the way from writing them to signing them.

Even if you used a service like DocuSign to sign a contract in the past, chances are you or the sender used Microsoft Word to write the contract. It’s fine if you’re the only one working on this contract. But it can quickly become a mess as your legal team gets larger.

“It's ultimately bringing a B2C experience to a really complex B2B experience,” VP of Marketing Travis Bickham told me.

And one of the company’s main challenge has been to make it convenient for all teams in your organization. If you work in human resources, you’re dealing with HR contracts. If you’re an office manager, you may need to sign a contract to order a new fridge. If you’re on the sales team, you want to make sure your client signs a contract. The procurement team also wants some sort of legal proof from its partners. And the list goes on.

Concord lets you create templates and workflows. For instance, the most basic contracts don’t require the same attention to details. A non-disclosure agreement is pretty standard. You just have to replace some fields and make the person sign it.

You can create an approval process for more complicated contracts. For instance, you can say that the legal team has to approve any sales contract above $100,000.

Concord has also built integrations with third-party tools. For instance, you can generate a contract in Salesforce using Concord’s integration.

There are currently 80 people working for Concord in San Francisco and Paris. With today’s funding round, the company plans to hire more people, get more clients, target bigger companies, etc. Concord currently works with 200,000 companies.

Last week, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) reported its fiscal first quarter results that surpassed market expectations for the fourth consecutive time. The company continues to deliver tremendous growth...

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HeadSpin has closed a $20 million Series B, valuing the provider of mobile application performance software at $500 million. New investors ICONIQ Capital, Battery Ventures and EQT Ventures participated in the funding round. Existing backers GV, Telstra Ventures, Danhua Capital, Nexus Ventures Partners and NextWorld Capital did not participate.

The company emerged from stealth last year with Manish Lachwani at the helm. Lachwani was the former principal architect of the Amazon Kindle, chief technology officer of mobile gaming company Zynga and co-founder and chief technology officer of Google-acquired Appurify, which helped developers automate testing and optimization of their mobile apps and websites.

He’s been in the application performance management business for a long time; under his leadership, Palo Alto-based HeadSpin has quickly grown into one of the fastest growing, though relatively unknown, startups in Silicon Valley.

“What HeadSpin has been able to achieve in its first three years is remarkable, and it has already attracted dozens of major clients across the mobile ecosystem,” ICONIQ partner Will Griffith said in a statement. “The company is quickly becoming the new standard of record for all mobile ecosystem players going forward. It’s one of the fastest-scaling software companies we’ve seen.”

HeadSpin works with Tinder, DocuSign and some 200 other app providers, allowing the companies to test and monitor their apps in real-time and on real devices before, during and after an app is released. The AI-enabled platform gives developers the ability to experience their app just as any regular user would and highlights high priority issues so companies can quickly resolve customer’s problems at scale.

Founded in 2015, HeadSpin says it expects to double revenue in 2018 but did not disclose any financial metrics.

Chief technology officer Brien Colwell is the other half of the company’s founding team. Colwell is the founder and former CEO of Nextop.io, a Y Combinator graduate and app optimization startup. Colwell and Lachwani are joined by HeadSpin’s head of product Sriram Krishnan, Tinder’s former head of international growth. Krishnan joined HeadSpin in October 2017 after working with HeadSpin’s toolset in his role at the app-based dating company.

“When I signed up for HeadSpin, I found out how phenomenal the product was,” Krishnan told TechCrunch .

“A lot of what we built was predicated on the fact that the mobile ecosystem is still very new,” he added. “If you think about the apps world, it’s only been around 10 years … It’s the Wild West out there when it comes to understanding performance.”

Sramana Mitra: Did you start this as a bootstrapped company? Gene Caballero: Yes. We aggregated about $100,000 between the co-founders. We blew that by paying a custom shop to build us a website and...

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Former TokBox head Ian Small is replacing Chris O’Neill as CEO of Evernote, the note-taking and productivity app company said this morning. In a blog post, Small said that the leadership change was announced to employees this morning by Evernote’s board. “We are all hugely appreciative of the energy and dedication Chris has shown over the last three years, and in particular for putting Evernote on solid financial footing so we can continue to build for the future,” he wrote.

Small added, “When Stepan Pachikov founded Evernote, he had a vision for how technology could augment memory and how an app could change the way we relate to information at home and at work. Evernote has been more successful at making progress towards Stepan’s dreams than he could have imagined, but Stepan and I both think that there is more to explore and more to invent.”

O”Neill had been Evernote’s CEO since 2015, when he took over the position from co-founder Phil Libin. Small previously served as CEO of TokBox, which operates the OpenTok video calling platform, from 2009 to 2014, and then as its chairman from 2014 to July of this year. During Small’s stint as CEO, TokBox was acquired by Telefonica Digital.

O’Neill’s departure as CEO is the latest significant leadership shift for Evernote, which has withstood several key executive departures over the last few months. In early September, we reported that the company had lost several senior executives, including CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel, and head of HR Michelle Wagner, as it sought funding in a potential down-round from the unicorn valuation it hit in 2012. According to TechCrunch’s sources, Evernote had struggled to grow its base of paid users and active users, as well as enterprise clients, for the last six years.

Then a few weeks later, Evernote announced that had to lay off 54 people, or about 15 percent of its workforce. O’Neill wrote a blog post about the company’s future growth strategy, including streamlining specific functions like sales so it could focus on product development and engineering.

After four months “on the beach,” per his LinkedIn profile, Uber’s former global head of business and corporate development has a new gig. Lime has hired David Richter (pictured) as its first-ever chief business officer and interim chief financial officer.

Based in San Francisco, Richter will be overseeing the bike- and e-scooter-sharing startup’s business operations. Richter spent more than four years at Uber leading the ride-hailing giant’s global business development, corporate development, experiential marketing, autonomous vehicle alliances and brand relevance teams. He left in May after expressing frustrations with a series of departures in his group, according to The Information.

“As Lime continues to grow, David will bring in unparalleled expertise, particularly in the realm of business development and corporate partnerships, as well as in managing our overall business strategy and deal flow,” Lime co-founder and chief executive officer Toby Sun said in a statement. “His leadership experience, coupled with his keen understanding of the fast-moving shared mobility industry will be a huge advantage to our company as we continue to expand our global footprint.”

Lime is said to be completing the fundraising circuit right now, asking investors for a valuation north of $3 billion. The company, which entered the unicorn club in June, has raised a total of $467 million to date from GV, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Section 32, GGV Capital and more.

The company is using the buckets of capital to expand beyond bikes and scooters. Last Monday, rumors emerged that it was planning a brick-and-mortar push. The company confirmed that it would indeed build scooter “lifestyle stores” in major U.S. and international markets, starting with Santa Monica, Calif.

The next day on stage at the JD Power Automotive Roundtable, Lime announced its official foray into car-sharing. The company has since applied for a car-sharing permit in Seattle and plans to rent out small electric vehicles, which it’s calling “transit pods,” by the end of the year.

According to Axios, Lime plans to spend $50 million on the pods, which will cost $1 for consumers to start, plus an additional 40 cents per minute.

Observant has found a new way to use the fancy infrared depth sensors included on the iPhone X, XS and XR: analyzing people’s facial expression in order to understand how they’re responding to a product or a piece of content.

Observant was part of the winter batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, but was still in stealth mode on Demo Day. It was created by the same company behind bug-reporting product Buglife, and CEO Dave Schukin said his team created it because they wanted to find better ways to capture user reactions.

We’ve written about other startups that try to do something similar using webcams and eye tracking, but Schukin (who co-founded the company with CTO Daniel DeCovnick) argued that those approaches are less accurate than Observant’s — in particular, he argued that they don’t capture subtler “microexpressions,” and they don’t do as well in low-light settings.

In contrast, he said the infrared depth sensors can map your face in high levels of detail regardless of lighting, and Observant has also created deep learning technology to translate the facial data into emotions in real time.

Observant has created an SDK that can be installed in any iOS app, and it can provide either a full, real-time stream of emotional analysis, or individual snapshots of user responses tied to specific in-app events. The product is currently invite-only, but Schukin said it’s already live in some retail and e-commerce apps, and it’s also being used in focus group testing.

Of course, the idea of your iPhone capturing all your facial expressions might sound a little creepy, so he emphasized that as Observant brings on new customers, it’s working with them to ensure that when the data is collected, “users are crystal clear how it’s being used.” Plus, all the analysis actually happens on the users’ device, so no facial footage or biometric data gets uploaded.

Eventually, Schukin suggested that the technology could be applied more broadly, whether that’s by helping companies provide better recommendations, introduce more “emotional intelligence” to their chatbots or even detect sleepy driving.

As for whether Observant can achieve those goals when it’s only working on three phones, Schukin said, “When we started working on this almost a year go, the iPhone X was the only iPhone [with these depth sensors]. Our thinking at the time was, we know how Apple works, we know how this technology propagates over time, so we’re going to place a bet that eventually these depth sensors will be on every iPhone and every iPad, and they’ll be emulated and replicated on Android.”

So while it’s too early to say whether Observant’s bet will pay off, Schukin pointed to the fact that these sensors have expanded from one to three iPhone models as a sign that things are moving in the right direction.

Kodak isn’t feeling very well. The company, which sold off most of its legacy assets in the last decade, is licensing its name to partners who build products like digital cameras and, most comically, a cryptocurrency. In that deal, Wenn Digital bought the rights to the Kodak name for an estimated $1.5 million, a move that they hoped would immediately lend gravitas to the crypto offering.

Reader, it didn’t. After multiple stories regarding the future of the coin it still has not hit the ICO stage. Now Kodak is talking about another partnership, this time with a Tennessee-based video and film digitization company.

The new product is essentially a rebranding of LegacyBox, a photo digitization company that has gone through multiple iterations after a raft of bad press.

“The Kodak Digitizing Box is a brand licensed product from AMB Media, the creators of Legacy Box. So yes, we’ve licensed the brand to them for this offering,” said Kodak spokesperson Nicholas Rangel. Not much has changed between Kodak’s offering and LegacyBox. The LegacyBox site is almost identical to the Kodak site and very similar to another AMB media product, Southtree.

The product itself is a fairly standard photo digitization service, although Southtree does have a number of complaints, including a very troubling case of missing mementos. The entry-level product is a box into which you can stuff hundreds of photos and videos and have them digitized for a fee.

Ultimately it’s been interesting to see Kodak sell itself off in this way. Like Polaroid before it, the company is now a shell of its former self and this is encouraging parasitical partners to cash in on its brand. Given that Kodak is still a household name for many, it’s no wonder a smaller company like AMB wants hitch itself to that star.

Airware desperately sought cash for 18 months before running out of money and shutting down last month, leaving about 120 employees without jobs after the startup had burned $118 million in funding. Bandaid strategic investments from construction company Caterpillar and others kept Airware alive as it looked for a $15 million round, according to a former employee.

A late pivot from hardware to drone software sales through Caterpillar’s dealers went sour, as Airware lacked the features found in competitors and suffered from slow engineering cycles. “So Caterpillar told them, ‘We’re not going to fund you any more. We’re pulling our money.’ So Airware didn’t make payroll,” the source says. The sudden shutdown of one of the most-funded drone startups sent a shock wave through the industry.

Luckily, at least part of Airware’s team is being rescued from the wreckage. French drone services company Delair is buying Airware’s Redbird analytics software and IP, plus the 26 employees who ran it. Airware had acquired Redbird and its 38-member team in 2016 to integrate its analytics that derived business metrics from 2D maps and 3D models of work sites based on imagery shot by drones.

Now the Redbird team will do that for Delair, bringing along its relationships with 30 drone dealers and 200 customers to try to make sense of aerial imagery from construction sites, mines, energy infrastructure and more. “We managed to keep that business alive with Delair,” says Redbird CEO Emmanuel de Maistre. “Customers wanted us to keep this going. They were very worried to not have a solution anymore.” He says that Airware still isn’t formally in bankruptcy or administration, and that as it’s been “actively reaching out to players in the market, to sell the assets . . . Interest from software companies and hardware companies was quite high.”

[Update: de Maistre has since published some thoughts on the successes and mistakes of Redbird.]

Founded in 2011, Delair now has 180 employees selling its UX11 mapping drone, data processing software and enterprise integration services to get businesses properly equipped with unmanned aerial vehicles. Delair had previously raised $28.5 million, and last month added a strategic Series B of undisclosed size from Intel — also an Airware investor. Delair co-founder Benjamin Benharrosh tells me that while his company started in hardware and bought Trimble’s UAV business Gatewing in 2016, “lots of the growth now is dedicated to the software,” so the Redbird buy makes sense.

Meanwhile, Airware’s hardware assets are going to auction on Wednesday. Heritage Global Partners will be selling dozens of DJI drones plus networking equipment and computers. Terms of the Delair deal weren’t disclosed, but the money from that sale and the auction could help Airware pay off any outstanding debts or commitments. However, Airware’s A-List investors, including Y Combinator, Google’s GV, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round, Shasta, Felicis, Kleiner Perkins and Intel, aren’t likely to recoup much of their capital. We’ve reached out to Airware, its founding CEO Jonathan Downey and its final CEO Yvonne Wassenaar for comment and will update if we hear back.

Founded in 2011, Airware tried to build a drone operating system before moving to sell drone hardware to commercial enterprises. But the rapid ascent of Chinese drone maker DJI pushed Airware to pivot out of hardware sales and toward drone data collection and analysis services. But a source says that since the startup entered this market late after the hardware boondoggle, “Airware’s technology was pretty far behind. They didn’t have a lot of the feature set a lot of others in the space did, like Propeller, 3DR and DroneDeploy.” Airware lacked seamless data uploads and quick processing times.

“What happened in the company wasn’t so much that the management team didn’t manage it correctly. The sales team just couldn’t sell a product that didn’t work as easily as it needed to compared to other products in the market,” our source says. They noted that Wassenaar, who’d replaced Downey as CEO in June 2017, had done a good job and been dedicated to fundraising to save the company since she joined. “Ultimately it was a matter of bad timing, and they didn’t have the engineering to overcome bad timing,” our source says. “The issue Airware had was a lack of funding. They ran out of runway,” confirms Redbird’s de Maistre.

Airware’s story should serve as a warning to startups raising at high-flying valuations. If a pivot doesn’t go smoothly or new competitors emerge, investors may disappear rather than back a down-round that might save the company but leave it in a downward spiral. Once a startup loses momentum, even having top investors and a ripe potential market can’t always stop it from disappearing into the sunset.

German startup Unu raised a $12 million funding round led by Ponooc, with existing investors Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital, Michael Baum and NRW.BANK also participating. The company has been building electric scooters (the motorcycle kind) and is working on new products and services.

For the past five years, Unu has sold 10,000 scooters. The market for electric scooters is quite different depending on your country. In parts of Asia, they are massively popular and are slowly overtaking gas-powered scooters. You can see more and more electric scooters in Europe, but it’s still uncharted territories for the most part.

Unu is one of the successful European manufacturers, with Govecs, BMW and others. Compared to electric cars, electric scooters present a massive advantage — weight. It’s much more energy-efficient to power a scooter compared to a full-fledged car.

That’s why batteries remain relatively small. You can open the battery compartment, pull the battery and plug it in at home. It’s quite heavy, as Unu’s battery weighs around 9 kg (nearly 20 pounds). But it’s fine if you just need to carry your battery to your home and plug it in overnight every now and then.

Up next, the company plans to release a second generation of its product. The company doesn’t have much to say just yet. But it sounds like Unu is working on connected vehicles so that Unu could work with scooter-sharing services.

There’s a huge market opportunity as scooter-sharing companies are booming in Europe. In Paris alone, Cityscoot and Coup have flooded the streets with scooters from Govecs and Gogoro. There are many other companies working on similar services across Europe.

If Unu could convince a company to buy some of their scooters for their fleet, that could lead to thousands of sales in no time. The company is working on multiple partnerships. Now let’s see if Unu plans to create its own service in the future and work on other types of vehicles.

Keith McCarty couldn’t stay out of the booming weed business for long.

The co-founder and former chief executive officer of the well-funded marijuana delivery startup Eaze has launched WAYV, a B2B cannabis logistics and compliance platform that delivers inventory to cannabis retailers. Today, the company is announcing its first round of funding, a $5 million seed round led by David Sacks at Craft Ventures. The round represents the former PayPal executive’s first investment in the cannabis technology sector.

Other investors in the round declined to be named.

McCarty and Sacks previously worked together at Yammer, a private social networking tool used by businesses created by Sacks in 2008. The company sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion, giving McCarty and several others enough cash to experiment. For McCarty, that meant exploring the hazy and uncharted territory that was marijuana delivery.

McCarty, however, mysteriously left Eaze right as the company gained significant traction. Neither the company nor McCarty ever explained the shake-up; McCarty was quickly replaced by another former Yammer employee, Jim Patterson, the founder and former CEO of Zinc. In a conversation with TechCrunch, McCarty didn’t clarify the nature of his exit.

He did say that the idea for WAYV came from observing the difficulties of cannabis supply chain logistics during his time at Eaze .

Headquartered in Los Angeles, WAYV connects licensed cannabis companies to licensed brands and provides next-day delivery of cannabis products — it’s essentially Eaze for the cannabis enterprise not the average cannabis consumer. The startup was founded last year and has so far delivered to retailers in California only.

As a second-time cannabis founder, McCarty said building WAYV has been a lot different than launching Eaze, which was one of the first big-name marijuana tech companies.

“Back in 2014, [Eaze was] one of the first to raise venture capital, it was kind of unheard of,” McCarty told TechCrunch. “Now, the majority of Americans favor legalization. For medical, it’s 90 percent and for adult recreational, it’s more than 60 percent. As we Americans continue to favor legalization and that stigma is removed, not just medical but also adult use, it’s going to draw attention and also investment.”

Venture capital investment in cannabis startups has continued to climb, most notably after the state of California voted to legalize recreational marijuana use in 2016. According to Crunchbase, $700 million has been funneled into the space since 2014.

“The industry is moving at such a fast cadence, it’s really exciting to be a part of,” McCarty added.

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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

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This is a fantastic story of a founder duo bootstrapping with a paycheck, now growing from $5M to $15M in one year, with a virtual team of freelancers. Your classic 21st century internet business. No...

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