Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground? Did you build something and then go out to raise money? Jyoti Bansal: I was an engineer in my late 20s. I was convinced that there was a need...

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For the last two and a half years, Iron Ox has been working on perfecting its agricultural robots to tend its indoor farms. After first testing its systems on a small scale, the company is opening its first fully autonomous production farm, with plans to start selling its produce soon.

The farm is currently growing a number of leafy greens, including romaine, butterhead and kale, in addition to basil, cilantro and chives. The robots tending these plants are Angus, a 1,000-pound machine that can lift and move the large hydroponic boxes in which the produce is growing, and Iron Ox’s robotic arm for harvesting the produce.

As Iron Ox co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander told me, the current setup can produce about 26,000 plants per year and is equivalent to a one-acre outdoor farm — though this one is obviously indoors and far more densely packed.

Alexander noted that he and his co-founder Jon Binney decided to get into indoor farming after working at a number of other robotics companies — for Alexander, that includes a stint at Google X — where the focus was often more on building cool technologies and not on how those robots could be used. “We’d seen lots of novelty robotics stuff and wanted to avoid that,” he told me. And while the founding team considered getting into warehouse logistics or drones, they eventually settled on farming because, as Alexander tells it, they didn’t just want to build a good business but also one that would create social good.

Today, the majority of leafy greens (the kind of produce that Iron Ox focuses on) in the U.S. are grown in California and Arizona — especially during the winter months when it’s colder in the rest of the country. That means a romaine lettuce that’s sold on the East Coast in January has often traveled more than 2,000 miles to get there. “That’s why we switched to indoors,” Alexander said. “We can decentralize the farm.”

It also helps that an indoor hydroponic farm can achieve 30 times the yield of an outdoor farm over the course of a year, yet uses far less space.

To get to this point where Iron Ox can operate an autonomous farm, though, took plenty of work and engineering chops. The hardest challenge, Alexander told me, was to get the robotic arm to look at the plants through its stereo cameras and then plan the pickup operation to harvest the produce, which isn’t always uniform. And to run this operation autonomously, it obviously has to do so reliably.

Angus, the larger robot that picks up the 800-pound pallets the produce is grown in and brings them to the robotic arm, also took some time to get right. You don’t want to move those pallets too quickly, after all, or you’ll have plenty of water to mop up.

All of that, including the system that monitors the plants, their growth, the sensors that watch over them and the hydroponics system, is then controlled from a cloud-based service that tells the robots when it’s time to harvest and which operations to perform. The robots themselves, though, then perform those tasks autonomously.

One thing that came as something of a surprise to the team, though, was that running an indoor farm solely with LED lighting still results in electricity bills that are simply too expensive to make the operation profitable. So going forward, Iron Ox is actually betting on more traditional greenhouses that are augmented by high-efficiency LED lighting.

That means the team can’t build these autonomous farms right in the city, though, because you can’t exactly stack a number of greenhouses on top of each other. But as Alexander noted, even if you have to be 20 miles outside of the city, that’s still far better than shipping produce to a supermarket that is thousands of miles away.

As Alexander stressed, the team spent a lot of time talking to both farmers and chefs to figure out what they needed. Farmers, it turned out, were mostly complaining about their inability to find labor. And that’s no surprise. The labor shortage in the agricultural industry is starting to become a major issue for farmers, especially in states like California. As for the chefs, what they were mostly looking for was quality, of course, but also predictability and consistent quality.

The plan now is to start selling the produce from the first farm and then scale to more and larger locations over time. Iron Ox now has the money to do so, given that it has raised more than $5 million in total, including a $3 million round it announced earlier this year.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I’m visiting Y Combinator’s San Francisco headquarters to talk to two of the people who are integral to Y Combinator — Kat Manalac and Michael Seibel.

Michael is CEO of Y Combinator’s accelerator program. He has been through YC himself a couple of times — first in 2007, as co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv — and again in 2012 as co-founder and CEO of Socialcam. Justin.tv later became Twitch and sold to Amazon, and Socialcam was sold to Autodesk.

Kat is a partner at Y Combinator and one of the people who convinced us to apply to join the program back in 2014. She has been at YC for five years, where she focuses on founder outreach, helping companies perfect their pitches, and much more. Prior to joining YC, she was chief of staff to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and also worked on brand and strategy at WIRED.

In this episode we talk about:

The evolution of Y Combinator — it’s changed a ton since Product Hunt went through the program four years ago. They’ve been working on several programs for founders — things that Michael wishes existed when he went through the program.Michael and Kat’s advice for founders, including counter-intuitive tips they’ve learned after working with literally thousands of startups.A key mistake that trips up new founders when pitching their company, as well as advice for founders seeking a technical co-founder.How YC has scaled the organization as a 50-person company with its 4,000 (and growing) alumni.

Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including a virtual assistant that will do anything, a $1,500 smart mirror that will get you fit, and a beverage that will get you high.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Palo Alto Networks launched in 2005 in the age of firewalls. As we all know by now, the enterprise expanded beyond the cozy confines of a firewall long ago and vendors like Palo Alto have moved to securing data in the cloud now too. To that end, the company announced its intent to pay $173 million for RedLock today, an early-stage startup that helps companies make sure their cloud instances are locked down and secure.

The cloud vendors take responsibility for securing their own infrastructure, and for the most part the major vendors have done a decent job. What they can’t do is save their customers from themselves and that’s where a company like RedLock comes in.

As we’ve seen time and again, data has been exposed in cloud storage services like Amazon S3, not through any fault of Amazon itself, but because a faulty configuration has left the data exposed to the open internet. RedLock watches configurations like this and warns companies when something looks amiss.

When the company emerged from stealth just a year ago, Varun Badhwar, company founder and CEO told TechCrunch that this is part of Amazon’s shared responsibility model. “They have diagrams where they have responsibility to secure physical infrastructure, but ultimately it’s the customer’s responsibility to secure the content, applications and firewall settings,” Badhwar told TechCrunch last year.

Badhwar speaking in a video interview about the acquisition says they have been focused on helping developers build cloud applications safely and securely, whether that’s Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. “We think about [RedLock] as guardrails or as bumper lanes in a bowling alley and just not letting somebody get that gutter ball and from a security standpoint, just making sure we don’t deviate from the best practices,” he explained.

“We built a technology platform that’s entirely cloud-based and very quick time to value since customers can just turn it on through API’s, and we love to shine the light and show our customers how to safely move into public cloud,” he added.

The acquisition will also fit nicely with Evident.io, a cloud infrastructure security startup, the company acquired in March for $300 million. Badhwar believes that customers will benefit from Evident’s compliance capabilities being combined with Red Lock’s analytics capabilities to provide a more complete cloud security solution.

RedLock launched in 2015 and has raised $12 million. The $173 million purchase would appear to be a great return for the investors who put their faith in the startup.

Linux provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) continues to deliver disappointing results. Despite missing expectations, the company does not appear worried. It believes that it has hit the “bottom” and things...

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GoodTime, the algorithmically enhanced interview process management platform, has raised $5 million in a new round of funding led by Bullpen Capital.

The company uses natural language processing to link interview candidates with the right interviewers inside an organization. The idea is to make the hiring process run more smoothly for large organizations and give overworked human resources staffers a new organizational tool in their toolbox to build better staffing processes.

To do this, Ahryun Moon, Jasper Sone and Peter Lee, the co-founders of GoodTime, have built a tool that uses the calendar as its organizing principle. The idea is that the sooner interviews can be booked with the right people, the better it is for an organization.

Staffing is about more than just setting up an interview, though, so GoodTime also factors in relevant information about both an applicant and an interviewer, including data like gender, ethnicity and relevant university and previous work-history information.

Recruiting coordinators can manage the entire process and make it as frictionless as possible for companies — and in this competitive hiring environment, companies may run the risk of losing out if they can’t pull the trigger on a potential applicant quickly enough.

It’s a problem that GoodTime’s chief executive, Moon, knows all too well. As a former recruiting coordinator at MuleSoft, Airbnb and Dropbox, Moon is well-versed in the problems of recruiting professionals.

She even managed to convince her former employers at Airbnb and Dropbox to adopt the new platform. Those companies have seen their applicants confirm interviews within three hours by using the platform and have seen their time-to-hire rates reduced by 40 percent, according to a statement from the company.

GoodTime, which was seed-funded last year with a $2 million investment from Walden Ventures and Big Basin Capital, managed to attract the education and staffing-focused investment firms GSV Accelerate and Array.vc to its latest round. GoodTime is also a graduate of the Alchemist Accelerator program. 

Based in San Francisco, GoodTime currently has 18 employees on staff and has reached profitability on the strength of its existing customers.

Sramana Mitra: Is this the traditional way that you get involved in a company? Do you have people in your community who go out and raise funding and bring you into the cap table? Or are VCs also...

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French startup Alan is expanding beyond health insurance by offering telemedicine appointments directly from Alan . The company is partnering with Livi, Kry’s French subsidiary.

While a handful of European countries already let you talk to a doctor using video calls, France’s national health system just started allowing remote appointments.

If you need to renew your prescription or your doctor already knows you quite well, chances are you don’t need to see your doctor in person every single time. With remote appointements, you can save time and talk to a doctor more quickly. This is particularly useful if you live in the countryside.

Kry is already a well-known startup when it comes to telehealth. The company raised a $66 million Series B round back in July and operates in three countries — Sweden, Norway and Spain. Kry is building its own team of practitioners that you can find on the platform. The company created a new brand for the French market and started operating a few weeks ago.

Alan customers will be able to talk to a doctor on Livi and get reimbursed by the national health system and Alan (Update: Alan reimburses everything). Ideally, you’ll be able to talk to a doctor within a few minutes between 7 AM and 11 PM.

So Alan isn’t going to handle remote appointments directly, but the startup is going to make it as easy as possible to talk to a doctor.

French startup Doctolib is leveraging its own community of practitioners to compete with Livi and other newcomers. In a couple of months, Doctolib users will also be able to book a remote appointment on Doctolib.

Those are two different approaches — an integrated user experience compared to a marketplace. Both provide advantages and disadvantages. But it’s good to see that Alan is on top of recent regulatory changes to improve the user experience.

In what looks like a European first, the London-based early-stage venture capital firm Balderton Capital is announcing it has closed a new $145 million “secondary” fund dedicated to buying equity stakes from early shareholders in European-founded “high growth, scale-up” technology companies.

Dubbed “Balderton Liquidity I,” the new fund will invest in European growth-stage companies through the mechanism of purchasing shares from existing, early shareholders who want to liquidate some or all of their shares “pre-exit.”

“Balderton will take minority stakes, between regular fund-raising rounds, making it possible for early shareholders — including angels, seed funds, current and former founders and employees — to realise early returns, reinvest capital in the ecosystem, or reward founders and early employees,” explains the firm.

The move essentially formalises the secondary share dealing that already happens — typically as part of a Series C or other later rounds — which often sees founders take some money off the table so they can improve their own financial situation and won’t be tempted to sell their company too soon, but also gives early investors a way out so they can begin the cycle all over again. Otherwise it can literally take five to 10 years before a liquidity event happens, either via IPO or through a private acquisition, if it happens at all.

“The bigger picture is there are lots of shareholders who either want or need or have to take liquidity at some point,” Balderton partner Daniel Waterhouse tells me on a call. “Founders are one part of that… but I think the majority of this fund is more targeted at other shareholders — business angels, seed funds, maybe employees who left, founders who left — who want to reinvest their money, want to solve a personal financial issue, want to de-risk their personal balance sheets, etc. So we’re not obsessed with founders in this fund, we’re obsessed with many different types of early shareholders, which for many different reasons would like to get liquidity before the grand exit event.”

Waterhouse says that one of the big drivers for doing this now is that Balderton’s analysis suggests there is “a critical mass of interesting companies” that are in the growth stage: “businesses that have got a scalable commercial engine” and a proven commercial model. This critical mass has happened only over the last two years, which is why — unlike in Silicon Valley — we haven’t yet seen a fund of this kind launch in Europe.

“We think there’s now about 500 companies in Europe that have raised over $20 million. That doesn’t mean they are all great companies but it’s an interesting, crude data point in terms of the scale they’ve got to. As a consequence, within that 500 we expect there to be quite a lot of interesting companies for this fund to help and we obviously have a pretty good lens on the market. Through our early-stage investing, and working with companies from the early-stage through to exit, and then obviously staying in touch with companies we don’t necessarily invest in, we have a pretty good sense of that from a bottom up perspective on how many opportunities are out there.”

He explained that there are three aspects behind the secondary funding strategy. First is that by investing via secondary funding, more companies will gain access to the “Balderton platform,” which includes an extensive executive and CEO network and support with recruitment and marketing. Secondly, it is good for the ecosystem as it will not only help relieve financial pressure from founders so they can “shoot for the next growth point” but will also let business angels cash out and recycle their money by investing in new startups. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Balderton thinks it represents a good investment opportunity for the firm and its LPs as secondary liquidity is “underserved as a market.”

(Separately, one London VC I spoke to said a dedicated secondary fund in Europe made sense except in one scenario: that European valuations see a price correction sometime in the future promoted by the current trajectory of available funding slowing down, which he believes will eventually happen. “Funds are 10 years so they just have to get out in time,” is how said VC framed it.)

To that end, Waterhouse says Balderton is looking to do around 15-20 investments out of the fund, but in some instances may start slowly and then buy more shares in the same company at an even later stage. It will be managed by Waterhouse with support from investment principal Laura Connell, who recently joined the VC firm.

Struggling to see many downsides to the new fund — which by virtue of being later-stage is less risky and will likely command a discount on secondary shares it does purchase — I ask if perhaps Balderton is being a little opportunistic in bringing a reasonably large amount of institutional capital to the secondary market.

“No, I don’t think so,” he replies. “What we’ve seen in our portfolio is [that] the point in time when someone is looking for liquidity isn’t set on the calendar alongside when companies do fund raising. In particular as a company gets more mature, the gap between fund raises can stretch out because the businesses are more close to profitability. And so it’s not deterministic. We want to just be there to help people who are actually looking to sell out of cycle in those points of time and at the moment have very little options. If someone wants to wait, they’ll wait.”

Finally, I was curious to know how it might feel the first time Balderton buys a substantial amount of secondary shares in a company that it previously turned its nose down at during the Series A stage. After pointing out that companies usually look very different at Series A compared to later on in their existence — and that Balderton can’t and doesn’t invest in every promising company — Waterhouse replies diplomatically: “Maybe we kick ourselves a bit, but we’re quite happy with the performance of our early funds and obviously we’ll be happy to add other new companies that are doing really well into the family.”

Cratejoy, a startup that runs a marketplace for subscription businesses and helps founders launch and scale their own subscription box services, has laid off 18 members of its 43-person team.

The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Amir Elaguizy confirmed the lay-offs to TechCrunch. He says the cuts are part of a restructuring effort to keep costs in line and that subscribers and merchants will not be impacted.

The startup has raised a total of $10 million to date from investors, including Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, Maverick Capital, Start Fund and ACE Venture Fund. Cratejoy completed the Y Combinator accelerator program in the summer of 2013 alongside DoorDash, Le Tote and Bloom That, which itself recently hit pause on its on-demand flower service.

Not even Techstars NYC can avoid the end of summer, where 10 startups are wrapping up their participation in the accelerator’s summer program.

This also marks the end of Alex Iskold’s tenure as managing director of the program. He’s certainly going out with a varied groups of startups — these entrepreneurs are working on everything from tampons to spices to skin care, plus more traditional tech categories like finance and security.

Here’s a quick rundown of each company.

Aunt Flow helps businesses and schools stock free tampons. Founder and CEO Claire Coder argues that if businesses are providing toilet paper for free, they should do the same with menstrual products. Current customers include Viacom, Twitter, and Brown University. (And it’s also selling products directly to customers.)Burlap and Barrel finds spices from farmers all over the world, selling them to consumers and restaurants (including Dig Inn). The startup emphasizes the stories behind the spices, and it says it currently offers organic black peppercorns from Zanzibar, wild mountain cumin from Afghanistan, smoked pimenton paprika from Spain, plus 40 other spices.Clever Girl Finance offers financial education content and tools for women of color. Founder and CEO Bola Sokunbi is an immigrant, computer science major and a certified financial educator. The startup currently offers more than 20 different courses, covering topics like getting out of debt and managing your wedding on the budget, all accessible for $10 per month.Concert Finance automates financial reporting, starting with sales commissions. This allows sales reps to get real-time updates on the commissions that they’re earning. It works on top of Salesforce with no developer integration work required.FlyThere connects customers with drone operators, allowing those customers to fly drones remotely. The company is pitching this as a way for people to experience locations around the world without actually traveling there. It’s available for visits to eight locations already, including the Big Buddha temple in Thailand and the pirate ship in Cancun.With Le CultureClub, customers can test the “microbiome” of their skin by swabbing their skin and sending a sample to the startup. Le CultureClub can then give them access to a dashboard with personalized skincard recommendations.Pandium aims to make it easier for B2B software companies to support integrations. The platform handles authentication, scheduling and other basic issues. That doesn’t eliminate the work for developers, but it’s supposed to allow them on the core integration logic, and supposedly reduces engineering time by 80 percent.Perch aims to improve physical training and coaching by installing a camera and tablet, which is mounted on gym equipment to track and display data like number of reps and velocity. It’s currently targeting college and professional teams, and plans to expand to commercial and home gyms.SeekWell co-founder Mike Ritchie spent 15 years leading analytics teams at Bank of America and at startups. His goal is to change the way analytics teams share code by offering them an analytics platform and common code repository, allowing them to share and reuse SQL queries.SIEmonster is focused on security information and event management, using deep learning to detect and defend against attacks. Its partners include HP, which is distributing the platform to financial institutions.

People procrastinate about buying insurance because it’s such a boring and complicated chore to compare policies. But Cover combines plans from 45 insurance companies into a single marketplace so it’s easy to find the best one for your car, home, rental, business, personal property, pets, jewelry and more. Now Cover is building powerful onboarding tricks like a driving school that earns you lower car insurance rates, and a way for Shopify merchants to sell warranties for their items.

The potential to use tech to run circles around the old insurance brokers has attracted a new $16 million Series B for Cover led by Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi, who led the Series A and sits on the startup’s board. The round was joined by Y Combinator, Social Capital, Exor and Samsung, and brings the company to a total of $27.1 million in funding.

“Insurance isn’t very different from being a white-collar bookie, where the house’s rake is too high and the dollars at stake are in the hundreds of billions in the U.S. alone,” says co-founder and CEO Karn Saroya. “This, all to the detriment of regular people, who view insurance as a tax. We’re here to change that perception.”

Saroya and his co-founders have deep ties. He went to high school with Anand Dhillon, is engaged to Natalie Gray and hired Ben Aneesh at the team’s previous startup, a high-end fashion marketplace called StyleKick that was eventually acqui-hired by Shopify. “We were tossing around ideas for what we wanted to do after StyleKick/Shopify, running hackathons on weekends. We built a couple different apps, but Cover — the MVP, where we just asked potential customers to take pictures of things they wanted to insure, surprised us” says Saroya. “Our customers sent us walkthroughs of their homes, pictures of their dogs and videos of themselves washing their cars. When you come across behavior that violates your expectations in consumers, that’s usually when you double-down.”

So they built Cover, where you don’t have to cobble together an endless set of insurance websites or wait on hold. You download the app, pick your item, list how much you paid and where, provide some photos or video of its condition using its TensorFlow-equipped camera and Cover will check across its insurance partners and find you the best quote instantly. You can easily see what is and isn’t covered, learn how to make claims, and text with an agent if you have questions. For example, I was quickly quoted $5 per month to insure my new iPhone against damage but not loss or theft.

Cover earns between 10 to 35 percent per dollar of premium you pay. Its annualized premium already exceeds $8.5 million and is growing 30 percent per month. Thanks to its low-churn business model, easy cross-promotion of products, low training requirements for customers and no need to constantly update its existing subscriptions, Cover starts to look like a very efficient software-as-a-service business.

The big question remains whether Cover can consistently find the best rates for customers so they don’t second guess its quotes and search somewhere else. It will have to outcompete multi-insurance providers, like State Farm and Geico, as well as startups like MetroMile tackling specific insurance verticals with mobile apps. To really earn the big profits, Cover is building out its own in-house insurance plans. But that will put it under constant threat of insuring the wrong risks and ending up paying out too much.

“We built Cover because we saw an opportunity to build elegant products that could deliver on pricing and customer experience in a way that no incumbent insurance entity can,” Saroya concludes. By bringing the service to mobile and making it a seamless part of owning something, Cover could ensure you’re insured, even if insurance is the last thing you want to think about.

We’ve finalized the Vancouver micro meetup for this Thursday. We’ll be holding it at Hootsuite HQ on 5, East 8th Ave at 7pm on October 4. Extra special thanks to the folks at Hootsuite for helping out.

You must RSVP here so we know how many are attending. If you’d like to pitch please fill out this form and I will contact you ONLY IF YOU ARE CHOSEN. The best pitch will win a table at Disrupt Berlin.

Since there will be no booze at the event we’ll have an extra special drinkathon at 9pm at a bar of your choosing. I’m open to suggestions.

I love doing these little meetups because it gives me a good view on the startup scene in a city so I hope you’ll join us. See you all soon!

Sramana Mitra: Your primary business is in the small investment area. You have a $100 million fund and you’re doing Series A and pre-Series A. What is your current e-commerce strategy in terms of...

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Maybe you’ve never heard about Tiny, but chances are, you’ve used its products. Tiny is the company behind the text editors you’ve likely used in WordPress, Marketo, Zendesk, Atlassian and other products. The company is actually the result of the merger of Moxiecode, the two-person team behind the open source TinyMCE editor, and Ephox, the company behind the Textbox.io editor. Ephox was the larger company in this deal, but TinyMCE had a significantly larger user base, so Tiny’s focus is now almost exclusively on that.

And the future of Tiny looks bright thanks to a $4 million funding round led by BlueRun Ventures, the company announced today (in addition to a number of new products). Tiny CEO Andrew Roberts told me the round mostly came together thanks to personal connections. While both Ephox and Moxiecode were profitable, now seemed like the right time to try to push for growth.

Roberts also noted that the merger itself is a sign of the company’s ambitions. “I think we’ve always been searching for how we could get that hockey stick growth to kick in,” he said. “I don’t think we would’ve done the merger if we weren’t hungry for that next level of success. So after two or three years [after the merger], we started to feel like we had the signs of a business that could grow into something significant and big and with some good numbers behind it. So were: ‘alright, now is the time.'”

While Tiny continues to offer its free open-source editor, it offers a cloud-hosted version of its service with a fee based on the number of users for developers who want the company to handle the backend infrastructure, as well as a self-hosted version that Tiny charges for based on the number of servers it runs on.

Roberts noted that quite a few developers try to build their own text editors. Yet handling all the edge cases and ensuring compatibility is actually quite hard. He estimates that it would take two or three years to build a new text editor from the ground up.

As part of today’s announcement, Tiny is also launching a number of new products. The most important of those from a business perspective is surely Tiny Drive, a file storage service that developers can integrate with the TinyMCE editor. Tiny Drive offers all of the file storage features that one would expect, including the ability to handle images and other assets. Tiny Drive uses AWS’s S3 file storage service and CloudFront CDN to distribute files.

Also new is the Tiny App Directory, which Roberts likened to the Slack App Directory. The idea here is to offer a curated list of TinyMCE plugins. For now, there is no revenue sharing here or any other advanced features, but it’s definitely a play for creating a larger ecosystem around the editor.

Tiny also today announced the first developer preview of the TinyMCE 5 editor. The updated editor features a new user interface that gives the editor a more modern look. Developers can customize it to their hearts’ content, with plenty of compatible plugins and advanced features to extend the editor based on their specific needs. There’s also now an emoticon plugin.

Talking about customized editors: You’re probably aware of WordPress’ efforts to modernize its text editor. The new editor, called Gutenberg, focuses more on page building than the current one, but as Roberts stressed, the underlying rich text editor is still based on the TinyMCE libraries. He noted that even the classic version, though, was always a subset of TinyMCE’s editor. What’s maybe even more important for Tiny as a company, though, is that none of WordPress’ changes will influence its business, even though WordPress and TinyMCE have long had what he describes as a “symbiotic relationship.”

“Tiny’s core business comes from a mix of software vendors, large enterprises, and agencies building custom solutions for clients that has little to do with the WordPress ecosystem,” he notes. “It is a popular and commercially viable project in its own right.”

If a twinkle in the eye of a venture capitalist could predict the longevity of a startup, Vital Labs is going all the way.

During a quick demo of the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup’s app, called Vitality, True Ventures partner Adam D’Augelli’s enthusiasm was potent. The company, which emerges from stealth today, is pioneering a new era of personalized cardiovascular healthcare, he said.

Vitality can read changes in a person’s blood pressure using an iPhone’s camera and graphics processing power. The goal is to replace blood pressure cuffs to become the most accurate method of measuring changes in blood pressure and eventually other changes in the cardiovascular system.

The app is still in beta testing and is expected to complete an official commercial rollout in 2019.

Here’s how it works: The technology relies on a technique called photoplethysmography. By turning on the light from a phone’s flash and placing a person’s index finger over the camera on the back of the phone, the light illuminates the blood vessels in the fingertip and the camera captures changes in intensity as blood flows through the vessels with each heartbeat. This technique results in a time-varying signal called the blood-pulse waveform (BPW). The app captures a 1080p video at 120 frames per second and processes that data in real time using the iPhone’s graphics processing unit to provide a high-resolution version of a person’s BPW.

The startup was founded by Tuhin Sinha, Ph.D., the former technical director for the University of California, San Francisco’s Health eHeart Study. He’s been working on the app for several years.

“Part of the reason this project strikes a chord with me is because if I look at the stats of my own family, I probably only have 20 years left,” Sinha told TechCrunch. “Most people on my dad’s side of the family have passed away before 60 from cardiovascular disease.”

Prior to joining UCSF, Sinha was an instructor at Vanderbilt University and the director of the Center for Image Analysis, where he directed and developed medical image analysis algorithms.

He linked up with True Ventures in June 2015, raising a total of $1 million from the early-stage venture capital firm.

“[Sinha] saw an opportunity to improve a stagnant practice and invented a new approach that takes full advantage of today’s technologies,” True’s D’Augelli said in a statement.

Three years after that initial funding, Sinha says Vital Labs is looking to raise another round of capital with plans to create additional digital tools to advance cardiovascular health.

Heed, a startup looking to create new ways for sports leagues and clubs to engage with fans, is announcing that it has raised $35 million led by SoftBank Group International.

As laid out for me by CEO Danna Rabin, the company sits at the intersection of sports and IoT — which makes sense, since it was founded by Internet of Things company AGT International and talent agency Endeavor .

“Our primary mission is to connect the young audience with sports leagues and clubs,” Rabin said. “[Those] audiences are consuming less broadcast TV, consuming less of anything linearly. Sports clubs and brands are having more and more issues connecting with and reengaging those younger audiences.”

To create that connection, Heed places sensors around the match or game venue, even potentially on players’ clothing and equipment.

For example, the team let me make a couple punches using gloves with sensors inside, which were created for the mixed martial arts league UFC. Afterwards, I could see the measured force of each of my swings. (I didn’t really have any points of comparison, but I think it’s safe to say that my numbers weren’t too impressive.)

Rabin emphasized that Heed’s real focus isn’t on building fancy hardware, but rather on the artificial intelligence it uses to take that data (which can also be drawn from video and audio footage of the match) and transform it into a general narrative that can be viewed on the Heed smartphone app.

Pointing to the UFC glove, Rabin said, “We extract, only from this sensor, 70 different data points. What’s happening is, the fusion of these data points is what creates the stories.”

Put another way, the goal is to replace the generic commentary that you often get in sports coverage and live games with unique details about how the game or match is unfolding. Those aren’t just numbers like how hard someone is punching, but also inferences about a player’s emotional state based on the data.

“One of our core promises is that it’s not editorial driven,” Rabin added. “The AI is selecting what’s interesting in a match. Of course, we have a creative team that designs the formats, the visuals, how the packaging should look like, but that’s incorporated into the technology, which is automatically selecting the moments and creating the experiences with no human interpretation.”

So does Heed aim to be a technology provider or a sports media company of its own? Well, Rabin said it didn’t make sense to simply provide the tech to individual leagues or teams.

“A specific club does not have the breadth of technologies to keep evolving,” she said. Plus, she argued that the audience isn’t looking for just a one-off site with stories about one team, but an all-around destination where they can “get a bit of everything.”

In addition to the UFC, Heed is also working with EuroLeague (the European basketball league), various soccer clubs and Professional Bull Riding. In the latter case, it’s not just creating content, but actually working with the organization to create a more automated and objective form of judging.

“By leveraging AI and IoT, HEED has developed a unique platform that is changing the way fans watch and interact with sports,” said Softbank President and CFO Alok Sama. “HEED is taking a traditionally static experience and providing fans with deeper insights into the physical and emotional aspects of the sporting event by gathering and analyzing large, complex data in real time.”

Empires rise and fall, and none more so than business empires. Whole industries that once dominated the planet are just a figment in memory’s eye, while new industries quietly grow into massive behemoths.

New York City has certainly seen its share of empires. Today, the city is a global center of finance, real estate, legal services, technology, and many, many more industries. It hosts the headquarters of roughly 10% of the Fortune 500, and the metro’s GDP is roughly equivalent to that of Canada.

So much wealth and power, and all under constant attack. The value of technology and data has skyrocketed, and so has the value of stealing and disrupting the services that rely upon it. Cyber crime and cyber wars are adding up: according to a report published jointly between McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the costs of these operations are in the hundreds of billions of dollars – and New York’s top industries such as financial services bear the brunt of the losses.

Yet, New York City has hardly been a bastion for the cybersecurity industry. Boston and Washington DC are far stronger today on the Acela corridor, and San Francisco and Israel have both made huge impacts on the space. Now, NYC’s leaders are looking to build a whole new local empire that might just act as a bulwark for its other leading ecosystems.

Today, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) announced the launch of Cyber NYC, a $30 million “catalyzing” investment designed to rapidly grow the city’s ecosystem and infrastructure for cybersecurity.

James Patchett, CEO of NYCEDC, explained in an interview with TechCrunch that cybersecurity is “both an incredible opportunity and also a huge threat.” He noted that “the financial industry has been the lifeblood of this city for our entire history,” and the costs of cybercrime are rising quickly. “It’s a lose-lose if we fail to invest in the innovation that keeps the city strong” but “it’s a win if we can create all of that innovation here and the corresponding jobs,” he said.

The Cyber NYC program is made up of a constellation of programs:

Partnering with Jerusalem Venture Partners, an accelerator called Hub.NYC will develop enterprise cybersecurity companies by connecting them with advisors and customers. The program will be hosted in a nearly 100,000 square foot building in SoHo.Partnering with SOSA, the city will create a new, 15,000 square foot Global Cyber Center co-working facility in Chelsea, where talented individuals in the cyber industry can hang out and learn from each other through event programming and meetups.With Fullstack Academy and Laguardia Community College, a Cyber Boot Camp will be created to enhance the ability of local workers to find jobs in the cybersecurity space.Through an “Applied Learning Initiative,” students will be able to earn a “CUNY-Facebook Master’s Degree” in cybersecurity. The program has participation from the City University of New York, New York University, Columbia University, Cornell Tech, and iQ4.With Columbia University’s Technology Ventures, NYCEDC will introduce a program called Inventors to Founders that will work to commercialize university research.

In addition to Facebook, other companies have made commitments to the program, including Goldman Sachs, MasterCard, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and edX.org. Two Goldman execs, Chief Operational Risk Officer Phil Venables and Chief Information Security Officer Andy Ozment, have joined the initiative’s advisory boards.

The NYCEDC estimates that there are roughly 6,000 cybersecurity professionals currently employed in New York City. Through these programs, it estimates that the number could increase by another 10,000. Patchett said that “it is as close to a no-brainer in economic development because of the opportunity and the risk.”

From Jerusalem to New York

To tackle its ambitious cybersecurity goals, the NYCEDC is partnering with two venture firms, Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and SOSA, with significant experience investing, operating, and growing companies in the sector.

Jerusalem-based JVP is an established investor that should help founders at Hub.NYC get access to smart capital, sector expertise, and the entrepreneurial experience needed to help their startups scale. JVP invests in early-, late-, and growth-stage companies focused on cybersecurity, big data, media, and enterprise software.

Erel Margalit, who founded the firm in 1993, said that “If you look at what JVP has done … we create ecosystems.” Working with Jerusalem’s metro government, Margalit and the firm pioneered a number of institutions such as accelerators that turned Israel into an economic powerhouse in the cybersecurity industry. His social and economic work eventually led him to the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral legislature, where he served as an MP from 2015-2017 with the Labor Party.

Israel is a very small country with a relative dearth of large companies though, a huge challenge for startups looking to scale up. “Today if you want to build the next-generation leading companies, you have to be not only where the ideas are being brewed, but also where the solutions are being [purchased],” Margalit explained. “You need to be working with the biggest customers in the world.”

That place, in his mind, is New York City. It’s a city he has known since his youth – he worked at Moshe’s Moving IN NYC while attending Columbia as a grad student where he got his PhD in philosophy. Now, he can pack up his own success from Israel and scale it up to an even larger ecosystem.

Since its founding, JVP has successfully raised $1.1 billion across eight funds, including a $60 million fund specifically focused on the cybersecurity space. Over the same period, the firm has seen 32 successful exits, including cybersecurity companies CyberArk (IPO in 2014) and CyActive (Acquired by PayPal in 2013).

JVP’s efforts in the cybersecurity space also go beyond the investment process, with the firm recently establishing an incubator, known as JVP Cyber Labs, specifically focused on identifying, nurturing and building the next wave of Israeli cybersecurity and big data companies.

On average, the firm has focused on deals in the $5-$10 million range, with a general proclivity for earlier-stage companies where the firm can take a more hands-on mentorship role. Some of JVP’s notable active portfolio companies include Source Defense, which uses automation to protect against website supply chain attacks, ThetaRay, which uses big data to analyze threats, and Morphisec, which sells endpoint security solutions.

Opening up innovation with SOSA

The self-described “open-innovation platform,” SOSA is a global network of corporations, investors, and entrepreneurs that connects major institutions with innovative startups tackling core needs.

SOSA works closely with its partner startups, providing investor sourcing, hands-on mentorship and the physical resources needed to achieve growth. The group’s areas of expertise include cybersecurity, fintech, automation, energy, mobility, and logistics. Though headquartered in Tel Aviv, SOSA recently opened an innovation lab in New York, backed by major partners including HP, RBC, and Jefferies.

With the eight-floor Global Cyber Center located in Chelsea, it is turning its attention to an even more ambitious agenda. Uzi Scheffer, CEO of SOSA, said to TechCrunch in a statement that “The Global Cyber Center will serve as a center of gravity for the entire cybersecurity industry where they can meet, interact and connect to the finest talent from New York, the States, Israel and our entire global network.”

With an already established presence in New York, SOSA’s local network could help spur the local corporate participation key to the EDC’s plan, while SOSA’s broader global network can help achieve aspirations of turning New York City into a global cybersecurity leader.

It is no coincidence that both of the EDC’s venture partners are familiar with the Israeli cybersecurity ecosystem. Israel has long been viewed as a leader in cybersecurity innovation and policy, and has benefited from the same successful public-private sector coordination New York hopes to replicate.

Furthermore, while New York hopes to create organic growth within its own local ecosystem, the partnerships could also benefit the city if leading Israeli cybersecurity companies look to relocate due to the limited size of the Israeli market.

Big plans, big results?

While we spent comparatively less time discussing them, the NYCEDC’s educational programs are particularly interesting. Students will be able to take classes at any university in the five-member consortium, and transfer credits freely, a concept that the NYCEDC bills as “stackable certificates.”

Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the City University of New York to create a professional master’s degree program to train up a new class of cybersecurity leaders. The idea is to provide a pathway to a widely-respected credential without having to take too much time off of work. NYCEDC CEO Patchett said, ”you probably don’t have the time to take two years off to do a masters program,” and so the program’s flexibility should provide better access to more professionals.

Together, all of these disparate programs add up to a bold attempt to put New York City on the map for cybersecurity. Talent development, founder development, customer development – all have been addressed with capital and new initiatives.

Yet, despite the time that NYCEDC has spent to put all of these partners together cohesively under one initiative, the real challenge starts with getting the community to participate and build upon these nascent institutions. “What we hear from folks a lot of time,” Patchett said to us, is that “there is no community for cyber professionals in New York City.” Now the buildings have been placed, but the people need to walk through the front doors.

The city wants these programs to be self-sustaining as soon as possible. “In all cases, we don’t want to support these ecosystems forever,” Patchett said. “If we don’t think they’re financially sustainable, we haven’t done our job right.” He believes that “there should be a natural incentive to invest once the ecosystem is off the ground.”

As the world encounters an ever-increasing array of cyber threats, old empires can falter – and new empires can grow. Cybersecurity may well be one of the next great industries, and it may just provide the needed defenses to ensure that New York City’s other empires can live another day.

It is four months since fintech ‘unicorn’ Revolut announced its intention to add commission-free trading to its banking app, in a bid to compete with Silicon Valley’s Robinhood (although, curiously, the two companies share two investors, namely Index and DST).

However, one London startup looks to be first out of the gate this side of the pond: Freetrade, founded by Adam Dodds, is officially launching today, and offers “zero-fee” stocks and ETF trading, alongside various premium paid features.

A year in the making, Freetrade has built a bona-fide “challenger broker,” including obtaining the required license from the FCA (the U.K. regulator), rather than simply partnering with an established broker as it is understood Revolut initially plans to do. This, Dodds explained on a call, has enabled the startup to plug directly into the capital markets “piping,” with as few intermediaries as possible. It means Freetrade can execute trades on its own behalf and ultimately be much more in control of its own destiny. It should also help the startup maintain a lower cost-base as the app scales.

The fintech has begun to onboard its 60,000-strong waitlist as of today, after a prolonged period in private beta. During that time, the company has run a number of private equity crowdfunding campaigns, shunning venture capital entirely. Asked why Freetrade chose not to raise VC money, Dodds says “the short answer is, we didn’t have to”.

“We got our start with a modest crowdfunding campaign for £100,000 in 2016. That was the seed that grew our community and waiting list to over 60,000 people. To date, we’ve raised over £4 million from our community to fund the business and from our point of view, there couldn’t be a better way. Our investors care so much about the business – they spread the word to everyone they know, they give us feedback on the product, and of course, they are our customers too!”.

Dodds says that many startups worry about getting the first 1,000 customers to love the product. In contrast, Freetrade “has over 3,000 [customers] that already believe in it so much they invested their own money to make it a reality”.

At launch, Freetrade lets you invest in U.K. stocks and ETFs, but will soon add U.S. stocks, too. Trades are “fee-free” if you are happy for your buy or sell trades to execute at the close of business each day. If you want to execute immediately, the startup charges a very low £1 per trade, and will soon add an all-inclusive monthly paid subscription to the app.

The idea, Dodds tells me, is to lower the price of entry so that anybody can begin putting together their own investment portfolio, no matter how small to begin with.

“The first thing to understand is that the commissions legacy stockbrokers charge are completely detached from the actual cost of making trades. They charge what they can get away with,” he says. “The lack of competition has allowed an oligopoly to settle in where all the legacy online brokers charge around £10 to make a trade.

“What we offer is a free option to start investing in real shares and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), where you don’t need to worry about any fees or commissions or timing your orders as free orders are filled at the end of the day. Or you can pay £1 for Instant orders that are filled immediately when the market is open. We’ll also offer a paid subscription tier that includes all our services, including instant execution and ISAs (tax-free account) for £10 a month”.

But how does this all compare to what Revolut has planned and how will Freetrade compete? Dodds wouldn’t be drawn on too many specifics, but reiterated that his startup has “built a new FCA-authorised financial institution from the ground up” and has now launched what he describes as the U.K.’s “first modern stockbroker”.

“Revolut seems to be burning masses of VC cash in a land grab for every vertical in fintech. I’m sure they’ll launch something to compete with us at some point, but we’re singularly focused on making the absolute best investment app out there and building a sustainable business,” he says.

Lingokids, the Madrid, Spain-based (and U.S. incorporated) edtech startup that helps children to learn a second language, has bolstered its balance sheet. The company has raised $6 million in Series A funding, and been awarded a $1.3 million grant from the European Union’s taxpayer funded H2020 programme,

Leading the Series A is HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, with participation from existing investors JME Venture Capital, Sabadell Ventures, Big Sur Ventures, and Gwynne Shotwell (President and COO of SpaceX). A number of new investors joined, too, including Silicon Valley ed-tech investor Reach Capital, Athos Capital, and All Iron Ventures. It brings total funding for Lingokids to over $11 million in the last year.

Meanwhile, I’m told a lot has happened since the startup’s last funding round a year ago. The team has grown to 40-plus employees, and the platform now counts a user base of over 7 million registered families around the world in 180 countries.

Notably — and presumably after finding market fit — Lingokids has also decided to focus only on English language learning (it had previously ventured into simplified Chinese and had plans to add Spanish). However, its central proposition remains the same.

The subscription-based platform teaches English to children ages 2 to 8 through a series of activities, games, and songs that adapt in difficulty to each child’s level. This, Lingokids maintains, allows for a fun and personalized learning experience, with an emphasis placed on parental involvement, which is key to language learning outcomes.

To that end, Lingokids says it will use the new capital for three main purposes: accelerating growth, acquiring new talent, and developing new features for the app. This includes plans to offer an “even more personalized experience for students and to increase parental involvement in the learning process​,” which will see the startup revamp the app’s parent section, and provide new types of interactive content formats. The platform will also add improved speech recognition features.

“There is a growing interest in English language learning in early childhood, with market figures suggesting that at least 500 million children under the age of 8 will be learning English by 2020,” says Cristobal Viedma, Lingokids founder and CEO, in a statement​. “We will continue to satisfy this demand and tackle English literacy around the world by offering high quality educational content at an affordable price.”