Readdle might not be a familiar name, but chances are you’ve been using some of their mobile apps. The Ukrainian company is a bootstrapped success story with 100 million downloads, 135 employees and a profitable business. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Readdle Vice President Denys Zhadanov is coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about this remarkable journey.

Readdle is behind some of the most popular productivity apps on iOS, such as Spark, PDF Expert, Calendars 5, Scanner Pro and Documents. When you browse the top charts in the App Store, there’s always a Readdle app here and there.

The App Store has been around for ten years and has created a major shift in the tech industry. Many companies wouldn’t be around without the App Store and the Play Store, such as Uber, Snap, Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram.

But the App Store isn’t just about social apps and big venture capital funding rounds. Readdle was there from day one and launched its first app back in 2008. They’ve been growing steadily, launched dozens of paid productivity apps, shut down some of them and iterated on the most successful ones.

Readdle’s biggest bet right now is Spark. The company wants to create a better email client for iOS and the Mac. This is an ambitious product with many competitors, including Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail. The company is trying a software-as-a-service business model for this product with premium features.

In many ways, building such a strong company without external funding is even more impressive than the average startup. And I can’t wait to hear Zhadanov’s take on that.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on November 29-30.

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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Denys Zhadanov

Vice President of Marketing, Readdle

Denys is a Vice President of marketing at Readdle.

He is also an advisor, a speaker, and a connector between Ukraine and Silicon Valley.

Readdle aims to redefine personal productivity and shape the “future of work” by creating best in class apps and services. Readdle apps such as Scanner Pro, Calendars 5, Spark email, Documents and PDF Expert were downloaded over 100 million times worldwide, are always in top charts on the App Store, won numerous awards from Apple and love from the tech industry. Being a pioneer of the App Store, Readdle now employs 130 people in 8 locations, never raised external capital.

Forbes 30 under 30, Denys has often been quoted about app economy, entrepreneurship, and digital marketing by major media outlets such as WSJ, The Verge, USA Today, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Wired, TheNextWeb, FastCompany.

The quintessential venture capitalist’s uniform consists of a pair of designer jeans, a Patagonia fleece vest and $95 wool sneakers.

The company behind the shoes, Allbirds, entered the unicorn club this morning with the announcement of a $50 million Series C from late-stage players T. Rowe Price, which led the round, Tiger Global and Fidelity Investments. The 3-year-old startup founded by Joey Zwillinger and Tim Brown has raised $75 million to date, including a $17.5 million Series B last year. It’s backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Scooter Braun, Maveron, Lerer Hippeau and Elephant, the venture capital firm led by Warby Parker founder Andrew Hunt.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the round values Allbirds at $1.4 billion. The company would not confirm that figure to TechCrunch.

Like Warby Parker, San Francisco-based Allbirds began as a direct-to-consumer online retailer but has since expanded to brick-and-mortar, opening stores in San Francisco and New York. It currently ships to locations across the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Next week, the company plans to open its first storefront in the U.K. in London’s Covent Garden neighborhood. It will begin shipping throughout the U.K. In 2019.

Using its latest investment, Allbirds will double down on its brick-and-mortar business. In addition to the U.K., the company says it will open even more locations in the U.S., as well as open doors in Asia in the coming months. Tiger Global, which has backed Allbirds since its Series B, may be of help. The firm has offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as partners across Asia.

Allbirds makes eco-friendly wool shoes for men, women and kids via its kid’s line, aptly named Smallbirds. The shoes are made of sustainable materials, including merino wool, a fabric made from eucalyptus fiber that the company has dubbed “Tree” and “SweetFoam,” a shoe sole made from sugarcane-based, carbon-negative foam rubber.

“Climate change is the problem of our generation and the private sector has a responsibility to combat it,” Zwillinger, Allbirds’ chief executive officer, said in a statement. “This injection of capital will help us bring our sustainable products to more people around the globe, demonstrating that comfort, design and sustainability don’t have to live exclusive of each other.”

It’s been quite the year for venture investment in … shoes. Rothy’s, which makes sustainable ballet flats for women, has raised $7 million and launched a sneaker. Atoms, a maker of minimalist shoes, brought in $560,000 in seed funding from LinkedIn’s ex-head of growth Aatif Awan and Shrug Capital. And GOAT, the operator of an online sneaker marketplace, nabbed a $60 million Series C in February.

Lime is doing the most right now. In light of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency denying Lime a permit to operate electric scooters in the city, Lime is gearing up to request a temporary restraining order.

“Lime believes that after selecting two other less experienced electric scooter companies and comparatively weaker applications in a process that was riddled with bias, the SFMTA should revisit the decision and employ a fair selection process,” the company wrote in a press release.

Those two “less experienced” electric scooter companies Lime’s referring to are Skip, which currently operates via an official permit in Washington, D.C., and Scoot, which has successfully and legally operated shared electric mopeds in the city for several years.

Following the SFMTA’s decision, Lime sent an appeal requesting the agency reevaluate its application. At the time, the SFMTA said it was “confident” it picked the right companies.

Now, since the SFMTA still plans to enable both Scoot and Skip to deploy their respective scooters on Monday, Lime says it “believes that it has no choice but to seek emergency relief in the court.”

Ahead of the decision in Santa Monica, Lime, along with Bird, protested recommendations for the city to not grant Lime a permit. Though, the city did end up granting Lime a permit. Lime, however, is not the only company that has appealed the decision in San Francisco. Earlier this week, Lyft reportedly petitioned SF Mayor London Breed, asking her to reconsider the SFMTA’s decision to only grant two permits for electric scooters.

“It’s unfortunate Lime has chosen this course,” John Coté, communications director for City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. “The SFMTA’s permitting process for the pilot program was thoughtful, fair and transparent. It includes an appeal process that Lime should be pursuing instead of wasting everyone’s resources by running to court.”

He added:

Lime appears to be playing games. It had weeks to resolve this and instead chose a last-minute motion in an effort to shut down the entire scooter program. Lime fails to admit that its application simply didn’t match those of its competitors. If Lime succeeds, it will be hurting the very people it purports to want to help – those who are ready to use scooters on Monday.

Last spring, Lime told San Franciscans that electric scooters were a great transportation alternative. Now, Lime is saying that if they can’t run electric scooters in San Francisco, no one can. It’s sour grapes from Lime, plain and simple.

I’ve reached out to the SFMTA and will update this story if I hear back.

One of the latest additions to the on-demand economy is Papa, a mobile app that connects college students with adults over 60 in need of support and companionship.

The recent graduate of Y Combinator’s accelerator program has raised a $2.4 million round of funding to expand its service throughout Florida and to five additional states next year, beginning with Pennsylvania. Initialized Capital led the round, with participation from Sound Ventures.

Headquartered in Miami, the startup was founded last year by chief executive officer Andrew Parker. The idea came to him while he was juggling a full-time job at a startup and caring for his grandfather, who had early onset dementia.

“I’ve always been a connector of humans,” Parker, the former vice president of health systems at telehealth company MDLIVE, told TechCrunch. “I’ve always naturally felt comfortable with all walks of life and all age groups and have just felt human connection is really critical.”

Seniors can request a “Papa Pal” using the company’s mobile app, desktop site or by phone. The pals can pick them up and take them out for an activity or have them over to play a game, complete household chores, teach them how to use social media and other technology or simply to chat. A senior is matched with a student, who must complete a “rigorous” background check, in as little as 30 seconds.

Parker says there are 600 students working with Papa an average of 25 hours per month.

“We’ve been fortunate that this is something the students really want to be part of,” he said. “They aren’t doing this for a couple extra dollars. They are doing this to help the community.”

The service costs seniors $20 per hour, $12 of which is paid to the students and $8 is returned to Papa. It’s not a subscription-based service, but seniors can pay for a premium option that lets them choose between three Papa Pals instead of being randomly paired with one of the several hundred options. The students do not provide any personal care, like bathing or grooming. And they are not a pick-up and drop-off service, like Uber or Lyft.

“We believe the Papa team has found a unique way to combat loneliness and depression in older adults,” said Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, in a statement. “The experience that Papa Pals bring their members make it seem like they are part of a family.”

In addition to expanding to new markets, Papa is in the process of partnering with insurance companies with a goal of allowing seniors to pay for some of its services through their Medicare plans.

“Loneliness is a crisis. It’s a disease. It’s killing people prematurely,” Parker said. “We are providing a really massive impact to these people’s lives.”

During this week’s roundtable, we had as a guest Shuly Galili, Founding Partner, UpWest Labs, who talked to us about pre-seed and seed investments in the Israel – Silicon Valley corridor....

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few case studies of your portfolio. We can do three or four of these. Take us through the evolution of these companies. When did they come to you? What did they have? What...

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Israeli startup CommonSense Robotics is launching its first automated micro-fulfillment center in Tel Aviv. It’s a tiny 6,000 square feet warehouse that is packed from ground to ceiling with products. Robots do the heavy lifting when it comes to getting items ready to dispatch.

TechCrunch shot a video of CommonSense Robotics’ test fulfillment center. Today’s new warehouse is much bigger than that, but still much smaller than an Amazon warehouse. The company’s first client is Superpharm, Isarel’s largest drug store chain.

The startup wants to convince grocery retailers in urban areas that they can deliver orders in less than an hour. Currently, grocery retailers either leverage their stores (which is a waste of time) or have a giant warehouse outside of the big city.

With CommonSense Robotics, you could imagine a city with multiple micro-fulfillment centers so that you’re never too far. When you order something, robots instantly navigate around the warehouse and the shelves to pick up your stuff. A central server coordinates all the robots in real time to optimize the routes. This way, humans can stay at a scanning station and put together an order without having to move.

CommonSense Robotics remains in charge of the fulfillment centers. E-commerce retailers pay the startup to create and manage those fulfillment centers. This way, you can focus on your product inventory and last mile deliveries.

The company already signed a deal with Israeli grocery retailer Rami Levy for 12 centers. And CommonSense also plans to launch multiple sites in the U.S. in 2019.

SpankChain, a cryptocurrency aimed at decentralized sex cams, has announced that a hacker stole about $38,000 from their payment channel thanks to a broken smart contract. They wrote:

At 6pm PST Saturday, an unknown attacker drained 165.38 ETH (~$38,000) from our payment channel smart contract which also resulted in $4,000 worth of BOOTY on the contract becoming immobilized. Of the stolen/immobilized ETH/BOOTY, 34.99 ETH (~$8,000) and 1271.88 BOOTY belongs to users (~$9,300 total), and the rest belonged to SpankChain.

Our immediate priority has been to provide complete reimbursements to all users who lost funds. We are preparing an ETH airdrop to cover all $9,300 worth of ETH and BOOTY that belonged to users. Funds will be sent directly to users’ SpankPay accounts, and will be available as soon as we reboot Spank.Live.

The hacker used a ‘reentrancy’ bug in which the user calls the same transfer multiple times, draining a little Ethereum each time. The bug is the same one that previously affected the DAO.

The company pointed out that a security audit on their smart contract would have cost $50,000, a bit more than the amount lost. “As we move forward and grow, we will be stepping up our security practices, and making sure to get multiple internal audits for any smart contract code we publish, as well as at least one professional external audit,” they wrote.

I’ve reached out to the company for clarification but in short it seems the spanker has become the spankee.

UPDATE – According to the CEO the hacker returned the cash and offered to help Spankchain fix its smart contract. Who said the crypto world was full of crooks and liars!

Coord, the mobility data startup that spun out of Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs, has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Alliance Ventures, with participation from Trucks, Urban.Us and DB Digital Ventures.

The plan with the funding is to continue to enhance Coord’s APIs and geographic coverage, as well as “build a bridge between the private and public sectors,” Coord co-founder and CEO Stephen Smyth wrote on Medium.

Coord offers a few products for its customers, which includes companies like Zipcar, Mozio and Google’s Maps product. There’s the Tolls API, which keeps tabs on toll roads, bridges and tunnels to determine the costs of trips; the Curbs API that is designed to help drivers easily figure out the parking and passenger loading rules (think ride-hailing drivers) in the area, meter prices and so forth; as well as a Routing API that uses real-time information to surface the best multi-modal routes.

And as bike-sharing and scooter-sharing continue to expand across the world, Coord also offers a Shared Vehicle API to enable its customers to integrate the real-time availability, prices and locations of both bikes and scooters.

“Our goal is to help the public and private sectors speak the same language when it comes to urban transportation,” Smyth wrote. “While many private companies are not well integrated into existing transportation systems of today, we believe that end users will ultimately demand interoperability across all of the systems in a city. To that end, we are driving standardization of transportation-related data across cities.”

Sramana Mitra: One of the trends in your industry is, cloud software companies are starting to offer FinTech solutions. I wrote an article about Intuit very recently. It was a few days ago. It’s...

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Walmart and Eko announced a partnership this morning to create a joint venture for interactive content called W*E Interactive Ventures.

The best example of the interactivity that Eko enables is probably “That Moment When,” a comedy web series that the startup created last year in partnership with Sony. In a series of short videos, you take on the role of Jill, a young-ish woman struggling to get her life together — the viewer decides what Jill says and also plays mini-games to help her achieve her goals.

According to the announcement, W*E content will include a variety of formats like cooking shows and interactive toy catalogues.

Eko CEO Yoni Bloch said they aren’t announcing any specific shows yet, but they will be “free and distributed everywhere,” and will be united by an aim to make the viewer “be the hero, be a part of the decision-making in the story.” The plan is to start releasing this content sometime next year.

Walmart might not seem like the most obvious partner on something like this, but the company has been expanding into digital media with efforts like Vudu (it just announced a partnership with MGM) and, more recently, Walmart eBooks.

Bloch said the deal also includes a Walmart investment of undisclosed size into Eko. Apparently the joint venture will work primarily as “the funding vehicle” for this new content, with Walmart staying out of the creative decisions.

“Walmart has been an incredible partner, allowing us to have creative control, which we are passing on to the creators,” Bloch said.

Tribeca Productions co-founder Jane Rosenthal will serve as strategic advisor to W&E Interactive Ventures, and Eko Chief Media Officer Nancy Tellem will be on the board.

“Our partnership with Eko will help us accelerate efforts to deepen relationships with customers and connect with new audiences in innovative ways and is one part of an overall entertainment ecosystem we’re building,” said Scott McCall, senior vice president for entertainment, toys and seasonal at Walmart U.S, in the announcement.

Today’s 418th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, October 11, 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 418th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, October 11, 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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With its regulatory woes behind it — and the acqui-hire of fintech startup Pariti — Tandem‘s product roadmap appears to be picking up pace.

The challenger bank founded by Ricky Knox has launched its second credit card today, this time targeting people in the U.K. who have yet to build up a credit history at all. Credit cards are already one of the most effective ways of improving your credit score (presuming you are approved for one and always repay on time, of course) and it seems that Tandem wants a piece of that action.

Dubbed the “Journey Card,” Tandem says the new credit card is “a way for those who haven’t had credit before to build up a strong credit profile”. The upstart bank says it is tapping into a climate where people are realising the importance of credit scores for building a better future and how essential a decent credit score is when taking out further credit such as a car loan, mortgage and other longer-term financial products.

However, although the new Journey Card shares the same low FX fees when spending abroad, there are some key differences compared to the original Tandem Cashback Card. These include no cash back, for starters, and what appears to be a higher APR in recognition of the higher risk Tandem is taking on.

With that said, both cards integrate with the Tandem mobile banking app, which acts as a Personal Finance Manager (PFM), including letting you aggregate your non-Tandem bank account data from other bank accounts or credit cards you might have. Very recently the app has released a plethora of updates (including digital statements, at last!), and these include some useful budgeting tools, which sits well alongside a credit card designed to help you build your credit score.

Meanwhile, it is becoming clearer that Tandem sees consumer credit as its “attack vector” in the consumer banking space, as opposed to offering a current account or pre-paid/debit card, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see the challenger bank go there eventually. It already offers a fixed-saver account, after all.

Says Ricky Knox, CEO of Tandem: “The integration of credit products into our app is a game-changer for the industry. Our competitors have launched some great pre-loaded and debit cards, but we will own credit in this space”.

According to a recent Grand View Research report, the global on-demand transportation market is expected to grow 20% annually over the next few years to $290.3 billion by 2025. The high growth rate...

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Shimon is a marbima-playing robot with some real soul. This crazy little robot, created by Gil Weinberg at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, can listen to the other players around it and play out little ditties in response to the music. In short, it’s the world’s best jazz and hip hop collaborator because, unlike humans, Shimon can never get drunk and forget the van keys back at that Taco Bell in Fresno.

“Most of what Shimon is playing is generated using a new process where he creates hundreds of melodies off line based on deep learning analysis of large musical data sets,” said Weinberg. “Then us humans (me and my students) choose melodies we like and orchestrate / structure them into songs. It’s a new form of robot-human collaboration, at least for us.”

In this video Shimon and crew jam along to Dash Smith, an Atlanta-based rapper who freestyles. You’ll also notice another Georgia Tech product, a robotic drumming prosthesis that gives the drummer the power of four Neil Perts.

Weinberg, Shimon’s human, is excited by the new developments.

“Still under development is the other new element – we are working letting Shimon analyze in real time the rhythm, melodies and semantic meaning of the free style rapper lyrics and use this analysis to drive Shimon’s improvisation. As you know we have explored mostly improvised music, starting with drum circles moving to Jazz, rock jam-bands, and African marimba bands,” said Weinberg. “We are now ready to move to the next frontier of real time collaborative improvisation – free style rapping, where the hope is that the rapper will be influenced by what Shimon is coming up with and vice versa.”

Sramana Mitra: How long from there did you launch your MVP? Cooper Harris: After we got the money, we built out the product. I guess it was an MVP. We didn’t put a ton of bells and whistles, but it...

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Enterprise cloud service management company ServiceNow announced today that it will acquire FriendlyData and integrate the startup’s natural language search technology into apps on its Now platform. Founded in 2016, FriendlyData’s natural language query (NLQ) technology enables enterprise customers to build search tools that allow users to ask technical questions even if they don’t know the right jargon.

FriendlyData’s NLQ tech figures out what they are trying to say and then answers with text responses or easy-to-understand data visualizations. ServiceNow said it will integrate FriendlyData’s tech into the Now Platform, which includes apps for IT, human resources, security operations, and customer service management. It will also be available in products for developers and ServiceNow’s partners.

In a statement, Pat Casey, senior vice president of development and operations at ServiceNow, said “ServiceNow is bringing NLQ capabilities to the Now Platform, enabling companies to ask technical questions in plain English and receive direct answers. With this technical enhancement, our goal is to allow anyone to easily make data driven decisions, increasing productivity and driving businesses forward faster.”

The acquisition of FriendlyData is the latest in ServiceNow’s initiative to reduce the friction of support requests within organizations with AI-based tools. For example, it launched a chatbot-building tools called Virtual Agent in May, which enables companies to create custom chatbots for services like Slack or Microsoft Teams to automatically handle routine inquiries such as equipment requests. It also announced the acquisition of Parlo, a chatbot startup, around the same time.

SmileDirectClub, the at-home teeth-straightening startup, has just raised $380 million at a $3.2 billion valuation, the company announced today. Investors from Clayton, Dubilier & Rice led the round, which featured participation from Kleiner Perkins and Spark Capital.

This funding comes on top of Align Technology’s $46.7 million investment in SmileDirectClub in 2016, and another $12.8 million investment in 2017 to own a total of 19 percent of the company.

“We are very excited with the outcome of our most recent fundraising round,” SmileDirectClub co-founder Alex Fenkell said in a statement. “Our mission has always been to provide an affordable and convenient option to anyone who wants to transform their smile. We are excited to continue our growth into new spaces and be given the incredible opportunity to reach even more people with our life-changing service,” said Fenkell. “We can’t wait to see what the future holds and are grateful for the support from our new investors.”

SmileDirectClub is a direct-to-consumer teeth-aligner startup that started with the idea of using teledentistry to virtually connect licensed dentists and orthodontists with people who want to straighten their teeth. Since its inception in 2014, SmileDirectClub says it has helped more than 300,000 people straighten and brighten their teeth.

The company ships invisible aligners directly to customers, and licensed dental professionals (either orthodontists or general dentists) remotely monitor the progress of the patient. Before shipping the aligners, patients either take their dental impressions at home and send them to SmileDirectClub or visit one of the company’s “SmileShops” to be scanned in person. SmileDirectClub says it costs 60 percent less than other types of teeth-straightening treatments, with the length of treatments ranging from four to 14 months. The average treatment lasts six months.

Though, members of the American Association of Orthodontists have taken issue with SmileDirectClub, previously asserting that SmileDirectClub violates the law because its methods of allowing people to skip in-person visits and X-rays is “illegal and creates medical risks.” The organization has also filed complaints against SmileDirectClub in 36 states, alleging violations of statutes and regulations governing the practice of dentistry. Those complaints were filed with the regulatory boards that oversee dentistry practices and with the attorneys general of each state.

Back in June, the AAO expressed its disappointment in learning about Macy’s decision to offer SmileDirectClub in some of its locations, saying “orthodontic treatment is not a product. Rather, it is a complex medical process.”

In the statement, the AAO said “it is in the best interest of consumers to have orthodontic treatment conducted under the direct and ongoing, in-person supervision of a licensed orthodontist.”

But SmileDirectClub is not the only startup in this space. Check out the story below to learn more about the competitive market that has popped up around your teeth.