Innovusion, a two-year-old startup developing LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chinese firms Nio Capital and Eight Roads Ventures along with U.S.-based F-Prime Capital.

Other seed round and strategic investors joined the round, the startup said.

Nio Capital is the venture arm of Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla. Nio, which raised $1 billion when it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September, has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, although it only sells its ES8 vehicle in China.

Innovusion, which was founded in November 2016, says it will use the funding to scale up its operations, specifically to ramp up production of its light detection and ranging sensor system called Innovusion Cheetah. The company began shipping samples of the system in the second quarter of 2018 and is beginning to take customer orders.

The round of funding will allow the Los Altos, California-based company to expand its R&D team and manufacturing facilities to more quickly develop, market and deliver Innovusion Cheetah LiDAR to customers around the world, according to Junwei Bao, the company’s co-founder and CEO. The company primarily is targeting customers in China and the U.S.

LiDAR is used by companies developing autonomous vehicles to detect and measure objects on the road around them. Most of the companies testing AVs believe LiDAR is an essential sensor required to deploy self-driving vehicles safely on public roads. It’s what has propelled demand for LiDAR and, in turn, an array of startups to pop up and try to capture market share away from Velodyne, the long-time dominant leader in the space.

Most students in the U.S. have used or at least heard of Quizlet, the website for creating digital flashcards.

The company leverages machine learning to predict in which areas its users need the most help and provides 300 million user-generated study decks, maps, charts and other tools for learning.

Roughly eight months after closing a $20 million financing, Quizlet chief executive officer Matthew Glotzbach has disclosed some notable feats for the emerging edtech: it’s reached 50 million monthly active users, up from 30 million one year ago, and though it’s not profitable yet, its revenue is growing 100 percent YoY.

As a result of its recent growth, the company is opening its first office outside of Silicon Valley, in Denver.

“We by no means feel like our work is done; 50 million is a very small fraction of the 1.4 billion students on the planet,” Glotzbach told TechCrunch. “Our focus is growing the platform. If we continue to be successful in that mission, we will be the largest study and learning brand.”

The company has been around for a while. Founded in 2005 by then 15-year-old Andrew Sutherland, Quizlet was fully bootstrapped until 2015.

Its growth really began when Glotzbach, a seasoned executive most recently at YouTube, took the reigns in 2016. The $20 million round earlier this year, its largest yet, has allowed the company to blossom, too. Led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and others, it brought Quizlet’s total raised to just over $30 million.

Part of its growth, according to Glotzbach, has to do with its recent focus on its international users. The site has always been accessible around the world, but not until late 2016 did Quizlet begin offering the tool in other languages. Today, it’s available in more than 15 languages, a number the company is actively working to expand.

Newly added capabilities have also contributed to recent spikes in MAUs. Students can now access diagram-based content, which is helpful for STEM subjects, an area the company has historically been less helpful with.

Quizlet operates a freemium model but has three subscription products for power users. At $12 per year, Quizlet Go has no ads and provides an offline studying option on mobile. Quizlet Plus, at $20 per year, also provides an ad-free study experience, as well as image uploading and voice recording capabilities. Finally, Quizlet for Teachers offers educators a $35 per year option that lets them create their own decks for students and access to additional data, analytics and reporting.

During this week’s roundtable, we had three interesting pitches from three different parts of the world. I am particularly thrilled to see Europe and Africa becoming more active on the 1Mby1M...

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NBA legend Michael Jordan is playing the esports game now, leading a $26 million round of funding for the ownership group aXiomatic.

For Jordan and new co-investor Declaration Capital — the family office investing the personal wealth of David Rubenstein, who co-founded and serves as co-executive chairman of the multi-billion-dollar private equity firm, The Carlyle Group — investing in esports looks like a slam dunk.

The company announced the investment from Jordan, Declaration Capital and Curtis Polk, the managing partner and alternate governor of Hornets Sports & Entertainment, and manager of the financial and business affairs of Michael Jordan and his related companies, earlier today. Bloomberg reported the $26 million figure.

As owners of the TeamLiquid esports franchise, which Forbes estimates as the second most valuable gaming team in the industry, aXiomatic has a solid base in the budding world of esports — an increasingly lucrative market.

Indeed, the most successful esports company, Cloud9, just raised $53.6 million in a new round of funding, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“I’m excited to expand my sports equity portfolio through my investment in aXiomatic. Esports is a fast-growing, international industry and I’m glad to partner with this great group of investors,” said Jordan, in a statement.

Athletes and owners of professional sports teams have flooded into the esports industry, plunking down $20 million to own teams in the officially sanctioned Overwatch League and placing similar-sized and smaller bets on companies developing services for the esports ecosystem.

The Philadelphia 76ers were among the first NBA teams to dip their toe in the esports waters when they acquired Team Dignitas in a deal that was rumored to be worth up to $15 million at the time. Earlier this year, Dignitas brought home a world championship in RocketLeague for the Sixers.

Now, the Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers and Houston Rockets are all backing esports teams in Riot Games’ League of Legends tournaments, according to a recent report in Bloomberg.

“The next generation of sports fans are esports fans,” said Ted Leonsis, co-executive chairman of aXiomatic and the founder, chairman, chief executive and majority owner of Monumental Sports & Entertainment (which owns the Washington Wizards, Capitals and the WNBA Mystics franchise), in a statement. “Esports is the fastest-growing sector in sports and entertainment, and aXiomatic is at the forefront of that growth. We are thrilled to welcome Michael and Declaration Capital to aXiomatic and look forward to working together on some truly cutting-edge opportunities.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Tesla earns its first profit in two years

Tesla reported a profit in the third quarter, reversing seven consecutive quarters of losses. This is only the third time in the company’s history that it has achieved this milestone.

The turnaround was driven by sales of the Model 3. The company said customers are trading up their relatively cheaper vehicles to buy a Model 3, even though there is not yet a leasing option and the starting price was $49,000.

2. Trump has two ‘secure’ iPhones, but the Chinese are still listening

A new report by The New York Times puts a spotlight on the president’s array of devices and how he uses them. However, both Trump and a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry have denied the story.

3. Red Dead Redemption 2 sets the bar high for the next generation of open world games

Tomorrow, Red Dead Redemption 2 goes live after months of breathless speculation. And according to Devin Coldewey and Jordan Crook, it’s as good as you’ve been hoping.

4. Facebook is building Lasso, a video music app to steal TikTok’s teens

Facebook is building a standalone product where users can record and share videos of themselves lip syncing or dancing to popular songs, according to information from current and former employees.

5. One-year-old Ribbon raises $225m to remove the biggest stress of home buying

The startup wants to replace the incredible stress of securing a mortgage during the home-buying process with a Ribbon Offer: If a buyer can’t secure a mortgage in time for close, Ribbon will pay for the house itself and give the buyer extra time to get financing.

6. Twitter beats Wall St Q3 estimates with $758M in revenue

Twitter reported a 29 percent increase in ad revenue to $650 million, and the company says total ad engagements increased 50 percent year over year. However, user growth didn’t quite match expectations.

7. Confirmed: ShopRunner acquires Spring, raises $40M

ShopRunner is announcing its first infusion of venture funding under CEO Sam Yagan, plus an acquisition of the shopping app Spring. Sources also say it’s readying a major overhaul of its mobile app.

Teikametrics is a Boston-based startup that helps retailers tackle the challenges of advertising on Amazon. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding.

CEO Alasdair McLean-Foreman said third-party sellers represent 60 percent of the transactions on Amazon. But they don’t have any real data science capabilities, so they need help advertise their goods in a way that maximizes profitability.

“We are using big data to help sellers optimize for profitability,” McLean-Foreman said. He compared it to the work that Amazon has done “optimizing on the consumer side — all the advanced econometrics” to determine things like the price of Amazon Prime. “We’re on the other side. We’re helping sellers and brands.”

That’s a very different challenge from optimizing Facebook ads to get the most clicks. McLean-Foreman argued that it’s not even something Amazon can do properly, because, “They don’t have critical information on cost of goods sold, and they also don’t have the context of being on the supply chain side.”

(At the same time, he emphasized, “We’re aligned with Amazon, we’re pro-Amazon and we’ve built our company off the back of Amazon.”)

In contrast, Teikametrics — through its “retail optimization platform” Flywheel — allows sellers to incorporate things like transaction data, inventory data and pricing data. So when they look at the results of of their campaigns, they can see their gross profit margins and profitability after ad spend.

How appealing is this to sellers? Well, Teikametrics says it’s being used by advertisers who represent 1 percent of all sales on Amazon, including brands like Razer, Power Practical and Zipline Ski. Eventually, the company plans to expand its technology beyond Amazon, to other marketplaces.

Teikametrics has been bootstrapped since its founding in 2013, at least until now. McLean-Foreman said he decided to raise outside funding because “the crown jewel is the sheer amount of data that we can model,” which means hiring “a tremendous amount of very, very high-powered machine learning folks.”

The Series A funding was led by Granite Point Capital, Jump Capital and FJ Lab.

A growing number of states has legalized retail marijuana sales, but ensuring that everything works as advertised is no easy task. Among the many things that regulators have to concern themselves with are granting licenses to dispensaries, retail sales, delivery, distribution and ensuring marijuana has been tested for pesticides and other materials before it hits the shelf (or doorstep).

In California, the software system that’s being used statewide to record the inventory and movement of cannabis and cannabis products through the commercial cannabis supply chain is made by Metrc, a low-flying, five-year-old, Lakeland, Florida company. In fact, Metrc now services 11 states altogether, including Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada and Louisiana. It’s also used by regulators in Washington, D.C.

It’s the kind of traction that investors notice, and indeed, today Metrc is announcing its first outside round of funding, in the form of $50 million from Tiger Global Management and Casa Verde Ventures, the three-year-old, cannabis-focused venture firm that was famously co-founded by rapper Snoop Dogg but is largely managed by Goldman Sachs and Nomura Securities alum Karan Wadhera.

Wadhera tells us he’d been following Metrc for a “number of years as it became one of the de facto track-and-trace systems” for government entities that regulate the cannabis industry. Eventually, he introduced to the company Tiger, with which Case Verde “shares deal flow quite regularly,” says Wadhera, pointing to another co-investment the two firms have made together in Green Bits, a maker of point-of-sale software for dispensaries. (Worth noting: Green Bits launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015.)

Certainly, that kind of working relationship helps, but the supply chain expertise of Metrc CEO Jeff Wells also presumably gave Tiger and Casa Verde confidence in their investment. Not so long ago, Metrc was part of a larger company called Franwell that was founded by Wells in 1993 and that quickly began developing products for the RFID market. More specifically, Wells tells us, Franwell began focusing on cold chain management and fresh foods, building up resources, research and knowledge along the way — including about regulated markets — that he believes gives an edge to its clients today, including those of Metrc.

As for how Metrc will use its fresh capital, Wells says the company plans to remain focused solely on regulators but to “look to expand our regulatory focus,” including, eventually, by potentially expanding into “other regulated markets and products that need the type of tools that Metrc has created.” The company, which currently employs roughly 100 people, also expects to work eventually with both domestic and international regulators.

Surely, as more state and sovereign governments legalize cannabis, compliance will play an even more critical role. Says Wadhera of the deal, “Compliance is the backbone of the cannabis industry. If a license holder isn’t compliant, their business will cease to exist.” That’s good for proponents of greater accessibility to cannabis. It’s good for consumers who can be better assured that the products they’re buying are safe. For Metrc and now Tiger and Casa Verde Capital, that’s also good for business.

Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise clients got you to 75,000 end users? Neil Vaswani: Maybe 10. Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal sizes were you closing? Neil Vaswani: We had some big ones...

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ShopRunner chief executive Sam Yagan conquered the online dating world. Can he conquer the e-commerce world, too?

Hot off the heels of its first profitable year, ShopRunner is announcing its first infusion of venture funding under Yagan, an acquisition of the shopping app Spring and, sources tell TechCrunch, it’s readying a major overhaul to its mobile app, signaling what could be a new era for the company.

Yagan, the co-founder of OkCupid, former CEO and vice chairman of The Match Group and managing director of the venture fund Corazon Capital joined ShopRunner in 2016 to test the waters of online retail.

“If you look at founding OkCupid, running Match and incubating Tinder, arguably, I had my hands on the three most important dating businesses ever,” Yagan told TechCrunch. “Finally, I was like, ‘what else is there?’ I am either going to the grave as the online dating guy, or this was the moment.”

Yagan replaced former PayPal president Scott Thompson as ShopRunner’s CEO, moved the Alibaba -backed subscription-based digital shopping company from Silicon Valley to his hometown, Chicago, and readied for battle against Amazon.

ShopRunner teams with mid- to high-end retailers to offer its paying members free two-day shipping and free returns on their sites, taking a small cut of each purchase. As much as it might like to, it doesn’t compete with Amazon Prime. It doesn’t even have a centralized marketplace where users can shop all the ShopRunner partner brands at once, but that may change.

This week, it announced a $40 million investment from August Capital, bringing its total equity funding to around $140 million since it was founded in 2009. The company says it plans to use the cash for product development, data science and to amp up its M&A strategy. It’s already begun the latter, confirming to TechCrunch that it’s acquired Alan and David Tisch’s Spring, a deal first reported by Recode.

Yagan declined to disclose both ShopRunner’s latest valuation and the terms of the Spring acquisition. Though he did say ShopRunner’s valuation is in the “hundreds of millions” range and that they had purchased Spring’s platform and 30 of its employees, a majority of which are engineers.

ShopRunner did not take on all of Spring’s employees. Why? Yagan said it was because the two were similar companies and there wasn’t a need for Spring’s entire team. As a result, Spring’s remaining employees, a mix of engineers and otherwise, are joining real estate tech startup Compass as part of a separate transaction, Spring’s CEO Alan Tisch confirmed to TechCrunch.

Backed with $105 million in VC funding, Spring had reportedly struggled to scale and had drifted from the mobile-first strategy it touted right out of the gate. TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden has more on this and Compass’ acquihire.

ShopRunner and Spring had some preexisting ties. Recode reports that Michael Rubin, the billionaire owner of ShopRunner via Kynetic, ShopRunner’s parent company, is close friends with Alan. Moving forward, Alan is serving as an advisor to ShopRunner, while Spring’s president Marshall Porter will continue to lead the startup.

“Shopping on your phone isn’t fun and it’s not easy,” Alan told TechCrunch. “And many of the brands that people love and shop every day you can’t find on Amazon. We wanted to create an experience that was as fun and easy as walking into a great store. We still don’t feel today that the dream has been fully realized but we think combining the scale of ShopRunner and the product Spring has really puts us in the position to make that happen.”

By pairing up with Spring, ShopRunner is multiplying the number of brands available to its paying members by 10 and offering, for the first time, an actual marketplace where customers can gain access to hundreds of those brands at once.

For now, both companies will continue to operate independently, but Yagan says they will revisit whether to fully merge the platforms in 2019.

Spring is ShopRunner’s first major M&A deal, but won’t be its last. Yagan said they have their eyes peeled for any-point solutions that help retailers take on Jeff Bezos, or that have large member bases and provide a great shopping experience.

Finally, according to sources familiar with the company, ShopRunner is planning to unveil a major update to its mobile app in November. Historically, users weren’t able to access ShopRunner brands via its app, making it an essentially useless piece of the company’s product. The update, coupled with the acquisition of Spring, will put ShopRunner on the path toward creating a digital mall with frictionless payments, a necessary step forward for the aspiring Amazon competitor.

Today’s 420th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, October 25, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 420th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, October 25, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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Founders Fund has led the $6 million Series A for Summersalt, an early-stage e-commerce startup embracing the next-gen consumer’s penchant for inclusivity and affordability.

Headquartered in St. Louis, the 1-year old company sells swimsuits designed in-house with eco-friendly fabrics directly to consumers. Like other D2C brands, Summersalt cuts out the middlemen to give its customers access to its swimsuits for $95 or less. What sets it apart is its data-focused fit system. With a patent on recommending garments based on body type and consumer preference, it uses more than 10,000 scans of real women’s bodies and some 1.5 million measurements to create what it says are designer-quality garments.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Lori Coulter and her team design all the swimsuits and source the fabrics directly with factories in the U.S. and Asia. With the latest investment, Coulter says the company will launch a line of travel wear and expand its inventory to offer more sizes.

“A core value of the brand really is inclusivity and we know from an economic perspective that by moving up to size 22, we really can acquire a broader set of consumers,” Coulter told TechCrunch.

Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin, co-founder and chief brand officer, said their strategy is to cater to women like them. Chamberlin herself is an immigrant, originally from Mumbai, while Coulter, a mother of two, was born and raised in Missouri.

“We were both tired of seeing the oversexualized approach to swimwear,” Chamberlain told TechCrunch. “We wanted a brand to appeal to women like us so we could feel sexy on our own terms. We wanted to appeal to women across the country, whether that’s a mom in Missouri or a stylish girl in Brooklyn.”

“Women like us are immigrants. Women like us are moms. Women like us are size 2 and women like us are size 22,” she added.

The pair said the move to incorporate a travel line is in keeping with their wanderlust-themed brand, which appeals to younger consumers.

“It’s a unique time in retail; women prefer experiences over things,” Coulter said. “We really see this as the next frontier in retail. We want to position Summersalt as the next-generation brand focused around travel.”

It’s the Peter Thiel -owned Founders Fund’s first investment in the startup, which previously raised a $2 million seed round in March 2018. Lewis and Clark Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Dundee Venture Capital, Breakout Capital, Cultivation Capital, Victress Capital, Amplifyher Ventures, M25 and Giuliana and Bill Rancic also participated in the funding.

News rooms and studios don’t necessarily find out about breaking news through reporters. These days, a lot of them rely on real-time information discovery platforms such as the Billion...

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Sramana Mitra: There’s some reason why you were drawn to insurance? Why insurance? Karn Saroya: When we were running Stylekick, we worked with some insurance brokers. One day, I walked into one of...

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Armed with new capital (following a recent £8 million Series C round) and now doing £1 million per month in revenue, job meta-search engine Adzuna has acquired the U.K. tech startup job board Work In Startups.

Terms of deal aren’t being disclosed. However, it will see Adzuna take over operation of the Work In Startups website but continue to run it as an independent brand and community. Notably, the site will remain free to post jobs.

Launched in 2011 by Diana Ilinca and Alex Borbely, Work In Startups set out to create a way for startups to more easily find tech and creative talent, without having to go through recruiters or use more generic job sites. It is said to have become an important tool in U.K. startup hiring over the past few years, and, I understand, has been used by Adzuna itself.

“As we continue to grow and learn more and more about the market, we’ve realised that ‘generalist’ search is not always the best solution for all jobseekers/employers, and sometimes a focussed, niche site can offer a more tailored experience and build a stronger community,” Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter tells me.

“Tech startup jobs and companies are cutting-edge, early adopters and have very particular needs… and this is truly a really strong but underdeveloped market-leading community asset with a freemium model like Adzuna. So it’s a great way for us to learn better how we can take what we’re good at — tech, traffic acquisition, data etc. — and apply it to create more value for a site like this and its users.”

Related to this, Adzuna’s data shows there are currently 1.1 million open job roles in the U.K. and that 90,000 (more than 8 percent) are in tech.

“On a personal note, I want to make hiring great people easier and less expensive for U.K. startups,” continues Hunter. “I’ve been through ‘the struggle’ and it’s f***ing hard to attract the best talent when your company is just getting going (let alone having to compete with big banks and established tech companies for talent!). We’d like to change that by taking on this community and growing it to new heights”.

With that said, he cautions me not to expect other imminent acquisitions. “Would we do other similar acquisitions in the future? For now, it’s a one-off but maybe for right asset,” says the Adzuna co-founder.

Tado, the smart thermostat and AC control maker, has raised a further $50 million in funding from an array of noteworthy and strategic investors. Backing the Munich-headquartered company this time around is Amazon, E.ON, Total Energy Ventures, Energy Innovation Capital, Inven Capital, and the European Investment Bank.

It brings total funding to $102 million since being founded in 2011, while the new capital will be used to develop new products and to extend its service offerings. The latter already includes “proactive” boiler maintenance via data the app collects and analyses and Tado’s 40,000 strong network of heating engineer partners.

That Amazon has chosen to invest is probably the most interesting aspect of this new financing round. The e-retail and technology giant has made multiple moves into the smart home space over the last few years, including acquisitions such as Ring (smart doorbell and security), and Blink (more smart doorbell and security cameras). Prior to buying Ring it was an investor via its Amazon Alexa Fund, and has also backed U.S. focussed smart thermostat company Ecobee.

Zooming out further, Amazon’s Echo powered by Alexa has positioned itself as the device that can bring the disparate smart home ecosystem under a single voice interface, alongside competitors Apple (Siri) and Google (Google Home), of course. (Tado supports all three digital assistants and is sold by Amazon and in Apple retail stores). Amazon has also ventured into smart home device installation and other home services, and given that Tado has a strong services component, the strategic fit looks even stronger.

In a call with Tado co-founder Christian Deilmann, he reiterated the three pillars of the company’s offering. The first is helping you manage your home’s climate to make it more comfortable and convenient/cost-effective. This includes being able to connect your existing central heating or air conditioning to the internet for remote and smartphone control, but also geo-location and other “smart” features that detect when residents are leaving or approaching home, the weather is changing, or when windows are opened.

However, as we’ve noted before, Tado’s engineering play goes deeper than simply smart phone and location-based control of your home’s heating and cooling systems alone. The startup’s smart thermostat has been painstakingly engineered to be able to connect to the digital serial interface of thousands of different boilers/manufacturers typically found in heating systems in Europe and in newer systems in general. This enables the Tado cloud to do a number of interesting things, such as modulating heating, rather than simple switching the boiler on or off, and provide remote diagnostics — which is where Tado’s second pillar, its service model, comes into play.

Longer term, a third pillar will see Tado more directly benefit energy management overall, including at the national grid level. In practice this means partnerships with local utilities companies — a number of pilots are already underway — to enable Tado and its customers to opt into ‘demand response’ schemes so that a home’s heating and cooling systems are utilised where possible outside of known peak energy times.

This could be as simple as turning your heating down by a few points without it really being noticeable or heating your home up a little ahead of time. In aggregate, this can make a tangible difference to the national grid’s ability to stabilise energy consumption, something that becomes ever more crucial as more renewable energy that is sporadic in nature, such as wind and solar, is supplied to the grid.

Meanwhile, energy company E.ON joining this latest funding round builds on a number of partnerships that Tado has with utilities companies as a route to market other than its B2C sales in retail stores. Deilmann tells me Tado can be purchased from over 30 utility companies and that B2B makes up around 50 percent of sales. The company also counts Čez Group, a multinational energy conglomerate based in the Czech Republic, and Statkraft Venture Capital, the investment company of Europe’s largest producer of renewable energy, as previous backers.

If your Instagram followers aren’t aware that you’ve voted, did you really even vote?

In 2018, the act of voting is great social media fodder. People want their friends to know they’ve registered to vote, or that they’ve just mailed in their absentee ballot or even that they’ve bought some sort of “look, I voted” t-shirt. These announcements are being shared across social platforms like it’s a required part of the voting process.

Whether or not those people only voted for the likes doesn’t really matter, the important thing is that they voted. Social media, because of the unprecedented access it grants people to the lives of their peers and influencers, is an effective strategy of pushing eligible voters to the polls. Why? Because people care about their friends and often even more about what their friends think of them. No one wants to be that friend that didn’t vote.

Vote.org and Outvote, a texting app for political campaigns, have taken note. The nonprofit platform for voter registration, information and advocacy has teamed up with the Y Combinator graduate to launch a new nonpartisan social media app that syncs with a user’s address book to help them quickly and efficiently remind their friends to check their registration status, find their polling place location and vote.

According to Outvote’s research, one text message from a known contact made people 10 percent more likely to vote versus 8 percent from a typical conversation with a political canvasser. Using the app, you can essentially perform 2 hours of canvassing in 5 minutes, from the comfort of your own bed.

“This November, reminding your friends is your new civic duty,” Outvote co-founder Naseem Makiya said in a statement. 

Outvote’s flagship app is tailored for Democrats and is meant to inspire and personalize grassroots-style campaigning. Using that app, you can send messages to your friends using Facebook Messenger, too, though the app doesn’t sync with any contacts outside of your phone’s address book.

In addition to YC backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding. The startup was founded by Makiya, formerly of startups Moovweb and DataCamp, as well as Nadeem Mazen, the former chief executive officer of a creative agency called Nimblebot.

Axios reported earlier today that while TV and email campaigns are still used by political campaigns, text messaging has proven to be a whole lot more successful. Per Opn Sesame, 90 percent of text messages are read within 5 minutes: “That intimate delivery, and the ability to target and personalize messages, is what makes them so effective for campaigns — but also annoying for many voters who didn’t sign up for them,” Axios’ Kim Hart wrote.

Social media companies, other avenues for targeted and personalized messaging, have stepped up their voter education efforts ahead of the midterm elections.

Snap announced yesterday that after adding a vote button to its app, more than 400,000 of its users registered to vote via TurboVote. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have added small reminders to their feeds, as have Reddit, Tinder, Bumble, Lyft and several other big tech companies.

Instagram, for its part, has Taylor Swift. Her recent social media campaign, beginning with a post earlier this month prodding her fans to vote, caused a big spike in voter registrations. According to Vote.org, 65,000 people registered to vote in the 24-hour period that followed her first-ever politically fueled gram.

Since then, Swift has been sharing on her Instagram story images of her fans who voted. It’s her reward to those who followed her advice to express their political opinions.

So vote, and you may be featured on a pop star’s Instagram. That’s 2018 for you.

Sramana Mitra: It’s fascinating, isn’t it? It’s a really exciting field. Are you chasing unicorns? Ankit Jain: Given that we’re investing $1 million to $10 million, we’re looking at a lot of...

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