Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? You said you raised money right away? Neil Vaswani: Yes. My co-founder and I wrote up a two-page executive summary. We started spamming VCs. We got...

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TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner, and I’m excited to announce that we invited Threads founder Sophie Hill to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping.

Threads is like nothing out there. It isn’t an e-commerce website with warehouses and suppliers. It isn’t a marketplace website for second-hand luxury goods. It isn’t a marketplace website for other brands. In fact, it’s not a website at all.

The startup combines a strong editorial strategy with a distribution method that is quite novel. You get recommendations through your favorite chat app on your phone. It works on services like WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram and iMessage.

On the other end of the conversation, you interact with human shopping assistants. This is what makes the experience so great. You don’t receive a newsletter, you don’t have to download an app. It integrates directly with apps that you were already using.

This way, if you feel overwhelmed and think you’re falling behind on the fashion front, Threads is much more efficient. Chances are you often browse your conversation list anyway. Accessing Threads is just a tap away.

And it’s working. The company recently raised a $20 million round and people spend $3,000 on average per shopping session. Big fashion houses, such as Dior, Fendi and Chopard started working with the startup.

By adopting a WeChat-first approach, the company managed to attract quite a few Chinese customers in particular. But Threads currently has customers in over 100 countries.

If you think you knew everything about e-commerce, come to Disrupt Berlin to listen to Hill’s novel strategy.

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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Sophie Hill

Founder, Threads

Sophie is founder and CEO of Threads, with a mission to pioneer the best luxury shopping experience in the world. By leveraging social media and messaging platforms, Sophie has built a £multi­million global fashion tech business, and is setting the rules for a new form of consumer buying, called chat commerce. Threads joined Future Fifty in 2017 and is now in Tech Track 100 as owner of one of the UK’s fastest growing tech growth companies. In between doubling the size of the company in 2018, Sophie is also figuring out how to sell the first $1m diamond through whatsapp.

At Disrupt SF, CEO Brynn Putnam demoed and launched Mirror, a smart gadget that sits on your wall and offers virtual fitness classes.

The $1500 device can be paired with a monthly subscription to let the user browse fitness classes, mark their progress, and follow along with other Mirror users. The idea here is that people spend thousands of dollars on gym memberships and/or huge fitness machines like the Peloton, but that Mirror offers a way to get a similar experience at home without taking up all that space.

We caught up with Putnam at the Mirror offices in NYC to check out the product and get more info.

Enjoy the video!

RevenueCat, a startup that helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions, has raised $1.5 million in new funding.

The company was part of the most recent batch at Y Combinator, and CEO Jacob Eiting said growth has been “a rocket ship” for the past few months. As of this week, RevenueCat is working with 100 live apps, and it’s crossing $1 million in tracked revenue.

The startup offers an API to address what sounds like a straightforward task, supporting in-app subscriptions in iOS and Android. As Eiting put it when I first interviewed him a few months ago, it’s “boring work” solving a “boring problem” — but that’s one of the reasons why developers don’t want to deal with it. It also means they don’t have to spend time dealing with bugs and updates on the subscription side of either platform.

And RevenueCat continues to add new features, like allowing developers to bring their revenue data into analytics and attribution services. That, in turn, makes it easier for them to see which ads are driving real revenue.

The long-term goal is to build what Eiting (who’s pictured above with his co-founder Miguel Carranza) calls a “revenue management platform.”

“Our mission as a company is to help developers make more money,” he said. “I think we do become this one-stop shop, a service that you integrate with all the payment touch points in your app to help you track your revenue and help you understand how customers are spending.”

The new funding (which is on top of the $120,000 RevenueCat received from YC) was led by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr. Eiting said it’s “an obvious fit,” since the software-as-a-service entrepreneurs who read SaaStr articles, listen to its podcasts and attend its events form “this huge community of companies that are potential customers for us.”

For Dash Radio founder Scott Keeney, streaming music and radio are two very different things. On the streaming side, Apple and Spotify dominate, and “there’s not going to be room for much else.” But when it comes to radio, he argued, “It’s the wild, wild west.”

Keeney, a.k.a. DJ Skee, was already one of the biggest radio DJs when he started Dash. For him, radio is a more curated, personality-driven, “lean back” experience — so Dash Radio focuses on live shows, with a lineup of more than 400 shows across 75 stations, with big names like Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and Ice Cube as hosts.

The startup is announcing that it’s now reaching 10 million monthly listeners, and that it’s raised an $8.8 million seed round.

Investors include Nimble Ventures, Slow Ventures, Lazerow Ventures, Muzik, Arab Angel, G Ventures, Lindzon Capital Partners, Jason Flom, Orin Snyder and Ian Schaefer. Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara and Alibaba’s former chairman of U.S. investments Michael Zeisser also invested and are joining the company’s board, as is Passport Capital founder John Burbank.

“I’m honored to be joining the board at Dash, and excited about the real change they’re driving across radio,” said Tsujihara in the funding announcement. “With their great leadership team, terrific original curated content and an offering unmatched in the market, Dash is positioned to disrupt analog radio and convert listeners to Dash users.”

Speaking of analog radio, Keeney acknowledged that there are other services (like iHeartRadio) that bring live radio broadcasts online, but he suggested that they’re coming from “legacy players” who are “all burdened by legacy infrastructure.”

Dash is able to take a different approach. For one thing, it’s cut out the long stretches of advertising — as Keeney put it, “We figured a business model that goes around these traditional insertion-based advertising models.”

That doesn’t means it’s avoiding sponsorships. In fact, it recently opened a studio in the Empire State Building (it already has a studio in Los Angeles) in partnership with Build-A-Bear, which also operates a branded kids’ station on Dash. What Dash isn’t going to do is interrupt the music and shows with ads.

Keeney also suggested that Dash might eventually introduce a paid, premium plan with features like on-demand show archives.

He made it clear that if Dash really is going to be the future of radio, it needs to allow new talent to succeed as well. That includes surfacing new artists (Keeney said Post Malone’s first radio interview was on Dash), and also new DJs. After all, Snoop Dogg is “an incredible talent,” but he’s never going to be known primarily as a Dash Radio personality.

“Now we’re starting to see people emerging, they are going to be known as somebody from Dash Radio,” Keeney said.

PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) recently reported its third quarter results that surpassed all market expectations as it continues to grow rapidly through strategic tie-ups and the launch of newer products....

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Legitimate augmented reality use cases are hard to come by. Spatial, which dubs itself as a cross-reality platform, is launching today with $8 million in seed funding from iNovia Capital, Uber co-founder and Expa founder Garrett Camp, Samsung Next, Joi Ito of MIT Media Lab, Mark Pincus and Andy Hertzfeld to bring augmented reality to enterprise customers. Spatial envisions its solution replacing tools like Google Hangouts, Zoom and the numerous other virtual workplace meeting apps.

While many companies are focused on games and entertainment, Spatial is looking at how everyday people can use AR for everyday work purposes.

“We think the future of work is going to be increasingly distributed,” Spatial co-founder and CEO Anand Agarawala told TechCrunch. “When you put on Spatial, they are in the room with you. It feels like they’re all sitting at the table, and they feel like they’ve been teleported into the space with you.”

Spatial is two things. One is a remote presence that enables people to feel like they’re face-to-face with their colleagues. The other is a suite of knowledge tools and an “infinite desktop” that uses the room as your monitor.

Spatial is purely a software platform that has partnerships with Microsoft HoloLens but is hardware agnostic. Spatial also offers both web and phone apps for people who may not have access to an AR headset.

To use Spatial, you would first pop on an AR headset and scan your current environment. From there, Spatial shares that environment with anyone you’d like and enables them to join the space. When you look around the room, you’re able to see and interact with the avatars of your co-workers. But more importantly, you’re all able to interact with a shared set of documents, websites, images and whatever else you or your teammates decide to put in the shared space.

Currently, there are a handful of companies using Spatial’s technology. One of those companies is Ford’s incubator, Ford X, which is piloting the software to enable its teams working on mobility to collaborate remotely. As it stands today, Spatial can handle about 15 to 20 people at a time, but the goal is to scale up to be able to manage hundreds of people at once.

Unlike other types of collaboration software, Spatial doesn’t have a presenter mode because the company wants “social etiquette to take over” and make the experience as realistic as possible, Agarawala said.

You can check it out in action below.

Access to timely, quality mental health services can be a struggle. Octave, a mental health studio founded by Sandeep Acharya, One Medical’s former head of strategy, is launching today to help with just that.

“The mission of Octave is to create a society where people are as proactive about their mental well-being as they are about their physical well-being,” Acharya told TechCrunch.

Octave offers individual therapy, a stress management coaching program and daily, drop-in classes for people seeking mindfulness, help with insomnia and general coping skills. Drop-in classes start at $15 per class while coaching is $75 per session. Octave, however, is still quite costly for ongoing therapy ($180 a session) — and cost is often a significant barrier for people seeking mental health services.

Octave is designed to address people’s therapy needs who may not already have a relationship with a therapist.

“We certainly don’t want to disrupt existing relationships,” Acharya said. “But if you’re already in therapy, you can still take our classes or use the coaching format.”

It was during his time at One Medical when Acharya realized younger professionals were struggling from anxiety and depression, he said. But that’s not something One Medical actively addresses.

Upon signing up, Octave does an intake call within a couple of days and aims to get people seen by a therapist within a couple of weeks. Acharya says Octave is in line with market averages in New York, but that Octave hopes to help people save money by producing faster results. It’s worth noting that Octave does not take insurance, but that many insurance companies do offer reimbursement.

Octave’s first studio is located in New York City. The plan is to operate six to eight locations within the next two years. Octave has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round from Felicis Ventures and angel investors.

Sramana Mitra: You got an offer to join YCombinator. What was your acqui-hire deal? Was it an earn-out deal? Karn Saroya: We didn’t completely vest. It was okay with us largely because we had quite a...

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Startup Battlefield Africa is set for December 11 in Lagos and investor Marieme Diop and ICT expert Shikoh Gitau will be there to lend their perspective and expertise. The Lagos TechCrunch event is a return to Africa for the Startup Battlefield series after its debut on the continent in Nairobi, Kenya.

Diop — who is a VC investor in early-stage African startups at Orange Digital Ventures — will speak on venture capital in Africa. And Gitau, who is head of product at Safaricom’s Alpha incubator, joins TechCrunch to discuss talent, innovation, and repatriate entrepreneurs in Africa’s expanding startup landscape.

Alpha opened in 2017 and Gitau led a Pan-African and global search for candidates to form its team. The incubator was established to innovate new products and apps for Safaricom: Kenya’s largest telecom, globally recognized for its M-Pesa mobile money product with 27 million customers.

In April this year, Gitau and her colleagues rolled out Alpha’s first product, called Bonga, to leverage M-Pesa’s extensive financial web as a social and e-commerce network.

Marieme Diop will share insights with the Startup Battlefield crowd on Africa’s VC market. Under her tutelage, Orange Digital Ventures (ODV) participated in a $16 million round for South African fintech startup Yoco and the $8.6 million round to Africa’s Talking—a Pan-African business enterprise software startup.

Formed in 2017 as the venture arm of French telco Orange, ODV is a €150 fund with €50 allocated for Africa, according to Diop. It has made 17 investments globally, with 2 in Africa. These follow pre-fund Orange investments in startups Jumia (Africa’s first unicorn), Afrimarket, and Afrostream.

Orange has €40 left for African startup investments, according to Diop. “Our target is to make 4 African investments each year,” she told TechCrunch.

Diop will join Startup Battlefield Africa to discuss investment at a time when VC rounds and funds on the continent are surging. A recent Crunchbase survey found 51 viable Africa-focused VC funds globally, with 22 (or 43 percent) located on the continent. Of those 22, nearly half (41 percent) were formed since 2016, with 9 in Nigeria.

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Africa in Lagos will be a day-long affair and include a competition with pitches from Africa’s top early-stage startups. TechCrunch will also offer panel discussions to explore the continent’s rapidly growing tech ecosystem, including venture capital. You don’t want to miss out. Buy your tickets here.

With their loud noises and hard plastic flanges, breast pumps are the bane of many a new mother’s existence. Founded in 2013, Naya Health is one of the most notable tech startups working on a better pump. But the company’s support site is now shutdown and it’s stopped updating its social media accounts. In a report today, CNBC spoke to several customers who said their pumps, which cost $1,000 and aren’t covered by insurance, had stopped working, and Naya Health had not provided them with adequate support or replacement parts.

While the Naya Health breast pump’s price tag is significantly more than most competing devices, customers were willing to give it a chance because of its unique flange design, which used silicone and water instead of plastic cups to recreate a nursing baby’s mouth.

Users have left a series of complaints on Naya Health’s Facebook page since May about performance issues, poor customer service, and long shipping times or non-delivery of pumps they ordered months ago. A Kickstarter campaign created for Naya Health’s smart baby bottle, which raised more than $100,000, is also filled with complaints about orders not being fulfilled (the last response from co-founder and CEO Janica Alvarez was posted six months ago).

Naya Health’s Facebook and Instagram accounts haven’t been updated since summer, even though users are still using them to post complaints, while its Twitter account has been set to protected mode. As CNBC noted, many customers have begun turning to the Better Business Bureau’s site to post complaints after saying their messages and calls to Naya Health went unanswered.

An email sent to Alvarez, who co-founded the company with her husband Jeffery Alvarez, Naya Health’s CTO, received an auto-reply. TechCrunch has also contacted Naya Health investors Tandem Capital and Bojiang Capital, the co-leads of its seed round, for comment. The company has raised $4.6 million in angel and seed funding, according to Crunchbase.

Cloudflare is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering with a potential valuation of more than $3.5 billion. According to Reuters, the IPO would take place in the first half of 2019 and be led by Goldman Sachs.

This year is expected to be a strong one for cybersecurity stock debuts, thanks in part to increasing awareness of, and demand for, security and privacy services. Another cybersecurity startup said to be prepping for an IPO is CrowdStrike, which raised $200 million earlier this year on a valuation of $3 billion. According to Reuters, CrowdStrike’s would also be led by Goldman Sachs.

Founded by Lee Holloway, Matthew Prince, and Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare launched in 2010 at TechCrunch Disrupt. Since then, it has raised a total of $182.1 million from investors including NEA, Union Square Capital, Baidu, Microsoft, Qualcomm and capitalG (Alphabet’s investment fund formerly known as Google Capital), according to Crunchbase. Its last funding, a $110 million Series D, was announced in September 2015 and led by Fidelity Investments.

Cloudflare’s services help websites load faster and prevent security breaches. According to the company’s website, it now has more than 154 data centers and serves more than 10 million domains. The company claims that “the average Internet users touches us more than 500 times” each week.

Teamable, a provider of hiring software that leverages employees’ social networks, has brought in $5 million from new investor Foundation Capital and existing backers True Ventures and SaaStr Fund.

The startup also announced its acquisition of Simppler‘s referral recommendation engine and matchmaking recruiting software. Teamable’s co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Bilazarian declined to disclose the terms of the deal but said none of the $5 million investment was used to finance the transaction.

According to Crunchbase, Simppler had raised $3.2 million in equity funding from Foundation Capital, Greylock, Vertex Ventures and others. The company, which is akin to Teamable, creates a referral platform using existing employee networks; it was founded by Vipul Sharma in 2013. Sharma previously ran machine learning at Eventbrite and, according to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been an engineering director at Indeed for the past year.

Sharma and the Simppler team will not be joining Teamable .

Using Gmail, Facebook, GitHub and other social media platforms, Teamable aggregates its employees’ contacts to connect recruiters with a more focused set of potential candidates. Companies using Teamable, including Spotify and Lyft, then facilitate a warm introduction between a candidate and the employee in their network. The startup says its social recruiting algorithms lead to more efficient and diverse hiring practices.

“I don’t think candidates love the way recruiting is done,” Bilazarian told TechCrunch. “They are throwing applications over a wall and not hearing back. And I don’t think companies love the way recruiting is done because people are just making guesses based off a job description and they aren’t getting the right applicants.”

“Instead of few people at a company spamming the entire world, you have people who really understand the company reaching out to you,” she added. “Teamable is very precise. It’s reach out to five people to get a hire versus reach out to 200 just to get one response.”

The Foundation-led investment brings Teamable’s total equity funding to date to $10 million, including last year’s $5 million Series A. Bilazarian says the 50-person company is cash flow positive with 200 customers. With offices in San Francisco and Yerevan, Armenia, Teamable will use the capital to expand its team and recruiting platform.

SOSV, a 20-year-old fund with $500 million in assets under management, has been running accelerators for years. Their oldest one, HAX, is the premier hardware accelerator in San Francisco and Shenzhen, and they’ve recently launched a food accelerator in New York and a pair of biology accelerators. Now, however, they’ve just announced DLab, a crypto accelerator that is paired with Cardano to build out distributed apps and solutions.

It is led by Nick Plante, a programmer integral in drafting the JOBS Act and who co-founded Wefunder, a successful crowdfunding platform.

“We can only make this sort of commitment to ecosystems we feel are incredibly compelling; it takes a substantial amount of dedication, education, staffing, and of course the long-term financial commitment to support the space and the companies,” said Plante. “We invest in ecosystems that we identify as ‘macro trends’ like disruptive food, life sciences and synthetic biology, Chinese market entry, IoT and robotics… things that will fundamentally alter the way that we live in the next 100 years.”

“Decentralization is clearly a macro trend, in the macro sense. What’s happening with blockchain and digital ledger technologies has the potential to upend some of the most basic economic incentives that lie beneath the things we do every day; to affect the ways that humans collaborate, identify, trust, govern, and bring new ideas to life… it underlies all of it,” he said.

DLab supplies up to $200,000 in pre-seed funding as well as perks from the SOSV global network of accelerators. They are also offering fellowships in partnership with Cardano to work with projects that would further blockchain research.

“Through last year and the start of this year we kept watching the blockchain ecosystem do some amazing things — along with some criminal things. The surveys and reports about the fraud rates of ICOs and other unpleasantness kept underlining our concerns report after report. The potential for the big economic shifts I mentioned earlier were clearly here but there were so, so many problems; there was a real need for education, for curation, and for proper governance and incentive structures to be put in place,” said Plante.

The group is accepting applications now for a January cohort. The group invests in 150 startups per year, a heady number in these cash-poor times.

A few weeks after Circle announced the launch of USD Coin (or USDC for short), Coinbase also announced that customers can now buy, sell, send and receive USDC on Coinbase. A USDC is a token that is worth exactly 1 USD. Its value is going to stay stable against USD — hence the name stablecoin for this type of coins.

Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, you can be sure that the value of your USDC wallet isn’t going to fluctuate like crazy. It opens up new possibilities and use cases.

While Coinbase lets you hold USD in your Coinbase account, this isn’t safe. If somebody hacks into your account, you could end up with an empty wallet. That’s why you should always try to control the keys of your wallet and transfer your coins to a safer wallet, such as a Ledger wallet or at least a software solution like MyEtherWallet.

But if you want to short cryptocurrencies without sending your USD back to your bank account, you can now convert your tokens to USDC. This way, it’ll be easier to buy cryptocurrencies again in the future. And maybe you can avoid paying taxes by hiding your tokens from taxation authorities…

USDC also works just like a regular token. You just need a wallet address to send some USDC. USDC is an ERC-20 token, which means that it leverages the Ethereum blockchain and ecosystem.

But stablecoins need to be regulated more tightly. Circle, Coinbase and a bunch of other companies have created the CENTRE consortium to define the policies around stablecoins. For instance, if you want to handle stablecoins on your exchange, you need to send regular audited reports that prove that you have as many USD sitting on a bank account as issued tokens.

With both Coinbase and Circle on board, it’s clear that USDC is off to a good start. Now let’s see if there’s enough interest to create other stablecoins based on EUR, CNY and other fiat currencies.

We already knew that the electronic scooter space in Europe was heating up, with Berlin’s Tier announcing today it has raised €25 million in a round led by Northzone, and rumours circulating that Delivery Hero founder Lukasz Gadowski has ventured into the space — all within the context of U.S. companies Bird and Lime recently expanding to Europe. However, now it seems that Balderton Capital could be about to make its move by investing in Sweden’s VOI Technology, another e-scooter rental play with pan-European ambitions.

According to multiple sources, the London-based venture capital firm is gearing up to lead a round in Stockholm-based VOI. Two sources say the amount being invested is $15 million at a pre-money valuation of between $35-40 million, while another source said it could be as much as $25 million. Separately, I’m hearing that with multiple term sheets on the table and the pace at which the company is growing, VOI is actually considering increasing the round to $50 million.

Other VC firms thought to be participating are Berlin’s Project A, and Netherlands-based Prime Ventures.

To date, VOI has raised just shy of $3 million in seed funding from Vostok New Ventures.

I contacted Balderton Capital earlier today, but haven’t heard back. A spokesperson for Project A also declined to comment. Neither Prime Ventures or VOI could be reached at the time of publication.

What is particularly noteworthy about Balderton’s entrance into the e-scooter market is that three of the other “big four” London VC firms have already made U.S. investments in the space. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.

As I noted in my earlier Tier funding story — which marked the biggest financial backing for a European company in the space to date — this isn’t stopping a number of European investors getting busy trying to create the “Bird or Lime of Europe,” even if it is far from clear that Bird or Lime won’t take that title for themselves (which is obviously the bet being made by Index, Accel and Atomico). The general sentiment of European VCs steadfastly trying to nurture a European born competitor is that they don’t want to see the e-scooter rental market be rolled over by the U.S. in the same way that Uber rode in and knocked out many local players.

With that said, the worse-case scenario in the eyes of many of those same VCs (and those VCs standing on the sidelines not participating) is that Bird or Lime will eventually acquire the most promising European e-scooter company or companies. In other words, the downside is mitigated somewhat, failing an outright home run.

Meanwhile, Tier, VOI and Gadowski’s Go Flash aren’t the only European born e-scooter startups with pan-European ambitions. There’s also Coup, an e-scooter subsidiary owned by Bosch and backed by BCG Digital Ventures that operates in Berlin, Paris and Madrid. And just two month’s ago Taxify announced its intention to do e-scooter rentals under the brand Bolt, first launched in Paris but also planning to be pan-European, including Germany.

Not that everyone is convinced. Two early-stage European VCs I spoke to today said they hated the space. “I just don’t understand, isn’t it going to be a massive bloodbath?” said one of the VCs, before questioning the total number of rides we could see in Europe annually. “I just don’t see how Europe is going to produce multiple multibillion dollar businesses in this space. I think the market size caps it.”

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Algorithmia, what kinds of use cases are they? It sounds like it’s a horizontal platform that could be applied to all sorts of use cases. You said it’s a Fortune 500...

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Industry vets and students alike crammed into UCLA’s historic Royce Hall last week for TC Sessions: AR/VR, our one-day event on the fast-moving (and hype-plagued) industry and the people in it. Disney, Snap, Oculus and more stopped by to chat and show off their latest; if you didn’t happen to be in LA that day, read on and find out what we learned — and follow the links to watch the interviews and panels yourself.

To kick off the day we had Jon Snoddy from Walt Disney Imagineering. As you can imagine, this is a company deeply invested in “experiences.” But he warned that VR and AR storytelling isn’t ready for prime time: “I don’t feel like we’re there yet. We know it’s extraordinary, we know it’s really interesting, but it’s not yet speaking to us deeply the way it will.”

Next came Snap’s Eitan Pilipski. Snapchat wants to leave augmented reality creativity up to the creators rather than prescribing what they should build. AR headsets people want to wear in real life might take years to arrive, but nevertheless Snap confirmed that it’s prototyping new AI-powered face filters and VR experiences in the meantime.

I was onstage next with a collection of startups which, while very different from each other, collectively embody a willingness to pursue alternative display methods — holography and projection — as businesses. Ashley Crowder from VNTANA and Shawn Frayne from Looking Glass explained how they essentially built the technology they saw demand for: holographic display tech that makes 3D visualization simple and real. And Lightform’s Brett Jones talked about embracing and extending the real world and creating shared experiences rather than isolated ones.

Frayne’s holographic desktop display was there in the lobby, I should add, and very impressive it was. People were crowding three or four deep to try to understand how the giant block of acrylic could hold 3D characters and landscapes.

Maureen Fan from BaoBab Studios touched on the importance of conserving cash for entertainment-focused virtual reality companies. Previewing her new film, Crow, Fan noted that new modes of storytelling need to be explored for the medium, such as the creative merging of gaming and cinematic experiences.

Up next was a large panel of investors: Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Jacob Mullins (Shasta Ventures), Catherine Ulrich (FirstMark Capital) and Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia). The consensus of this lively discussion was that (as Fan noted earlier) this is a time for startups to go lean. Competition has been thinned out by companies burning VC cash and a bootstrapped, efficient company stands out from the crowd.

Oculus is getting serious about non-gaming experiences in virtual reality. In our chat with Oculus Executive Producer Yelena Rachitsky, we heard more details about how the company is looking to new hardware to deepen the interactions users can have in VR and that new hardware like the Oculus Quest will allow users to go far beyond the capabilities of 360-degree VR video.

Of course if Oculus is around, its parent company can’t be far away. Facebook’s Ficus Kirkpatrick believes it must build exemplary “lighthouse” AR experiences to guide independent developers toward use cases they could enhance. Beyond creative expression, AR is progressing slowly because no one wants to hold a phone in the air for too long. But that’s also why Facebook is already investing in efforts to build its own AR headset.

Matt Miesnieks, from 6d.ai, announced the opening of his company’s augmented reality development platform to the public and made a case of the creation of an open mapping platform and toolkit for opening augmented reality to collaborative experiences and the masses.

Augmented reality headsets like Magic Leap and HoloLens tend to hog the spotlight, but phones are where most people will have their first taste. Parham Aarabi (ModiFace), Kirin Sinha (Illumix) and Allison Wood (Camera IQ) agreed that mainstreaming the tech is about three to five years away, with a successful standalone device like a headset somewhere beyond that. They also agreed that while there are countless tech demos and novelties, there’s still no killer app for AR.

Derek Belch (STRIVR), Clorama Dorvilias (DebiasVR) and Morgan Mercer (Vantage Point) took on the potential of VR in commercial and industrial applications. They concluded that making consumer technology enterprise-grade remains one of the most significant adoptions to virtual reality applications in business. (Companies like StarVR are specifically targeting businesses, but it remains to be seen whether that play will succeed.)

With Facebook running the VR show, how are small VR startups making a dent in social? The CEOs of TheWaveVR, Mindshow and SVRF all say that part of the key is finding the best ways for users to interact and making experiences that bring people together in different ways.

After a break, we were treated to a live demo of the VR versus boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory, by developer Survios co-founders Alex Silkin and James Iliff. They then joined me for a discussion of the difficulties and possibilities of social and multiplayer VR, both in how they can create intimate experiences and how developers can inoculate against isolation or abuse in the player base.

Early-stage investments are key to the success of any emerging industry, and the VR space is seeing a slowdown in that area. Peter Rojas of Betaworks and Greg Castle from Anorak offered more details on their investment strategies and how they see success in the AR space coming along as the tech industry’s biggest companies continue to pump money into the technologies.

UCLA contributed a moderator with Anderson’s Jay Tucker, who talked with Mariana Acuna (Opaque Studios) and Guy Primus (Virtual Reality Company) about how storytelling in VR may be in very early days, but that this period of exploration and experimentation is something to be encouraged and experienced. Movies didn’t begin with Netflix and Marvel — they started with picture palaces and one-reel silent shorts. VR is following the same path.

And what would an AR/VR conference be without the creators of the most popular AR game ever created? Niantic already has some big plans as it expands its success beyond Pokémon GO. The company, which is deep in development of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, is building out a developer platform based on their cutting-edge AR technologies. In our chat, AR research head Ross Finman talks about privacy in the upcoming AR age and just how much of a challenger Apple is to them in the space.

That wrapped the show; you can see more images (perhaps of yourself) at our Flickr page. Thanks to our sponsors, our generous hosts at UCLA, the motivated and interesting speakers and most of all the attendees. See you again soon!

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 420th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, October 25, 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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Online dating is trash. Seriously, try to find anyone who disagrees with me.

Vibes, operated by an all-women team, aims to be different. Sure, the swipe mechanics are still there, but that’s about the only similarity you’ll find between Vibes and the likes of Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and others.

“Because of how crowded the space is, when people hear the words ‘dating app’ they’re like ‘ugh, why do I need another one? My dance card’s full,” Vibes CEO Jenais Zarlin told TechCrunch. “But those same people are also the ones to say the ratio of good experiences to negative ones, or ones that feel transactional is way off.”

The basis for Vibes is that meaningful connections are rooted in respect and authenticity, Zarlin told me. That’s why she sees Vibes as an extension of physical safe spaces “we know and admire.”

“Text and semi-anonymity really embolden people to behave in ways they wouldn’t in person,” Zarlin said.

That’s why text-based messaging is not part of the experience at all. When you sign up (via Facebook)*, you first must agree to the app’s code of conduct. Vibes’ code of conduct centers around respecting difference (not being racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and body-shaming) and generally respecting others by not being sexually explicit or threatening harm.

Next, you select whether you’re down to vibe with people whose preferred pronouns are him, her or them.

“In other apps, the heteronormative agenda is pretty front and center and gender binaries are pretty core to them,” Zarlin said. “It feels like we’re at a time where we need to move past that.”

Next, you select some photos you want to feature and then choose a conversation starter. If you match with someone, you’ll record a short, pixelated video answering their question.

Vibes pixelates the video for those who may be shy. But even with the video pixelated, people can still hear your voice and pick up on mannerisms, just as they would be able to in person.

“It’s a much heavier lift sending a video message, but we expect that it will result in more quality interactions — but probably fewer overall interactions,” Zarlin said.

Its emphasis on moderation also sets Vibes apart from other dating apps. For every first message you receive, Vibes requires you to actively acknowledge if the message was or was not okay with you.

The present day also feels like the right time for Vibes to launch to the masses, Zarlin told me.

“2018 has been a very interesting year for a lot of reasons and there’s been dialogue around self-care, respect and equality,” Zarlin said. “We’ve never talked so much about those issues and yet I think we’re still not innovating around them, or not innovating enough. So Vibes really does to me feel like it has so much potential to be transformative and it was always designed with all of those ideals and values in mind.”

Vibes soft-launched back in July and currently has a few hundred people using the app. Vibes, which has $1.5 million in funding, is free to use but envisions developing a freemium model down the road.

*Zarlin said the decision to use Facebook was made before all of Facebook’s data scandals. Vibes does eventually plan to remove Facebook from the sign-up process.