Payments startup Stripe has changed the landscape for how businesses can collect funds online by using a few lines of code, and today the company is announcing that it’s picked up more funding of its own. Stripe has raised $245 million, valuing the company at $20 billion.

This is a big jump on its previous round, two years ago, that valued it at $9 billion.

Led by Tiger Global Management, other new backers included DST Global and Sequoia, along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital.

The company says it plans to use the funding to hire more people for what it describes as its “distributed global engineering team.” It now has hubs in San Francisco, Seattle and Dublin (its co-founders, John and Patrick Collison, hail from Ireland), and it’s also going to launch a new hub in Singapore.

Engineering has been at the heart of the company’s growth from the start, up to now. Recall the famous essay by Paul Graham about Stripe that served as a mantra of sorts for how startups should grow. Fast forward to today, and Stripe boasts that “all told, the company deployed more than 3,200 new versions of its core API over the past year.”

The funding underscores the continuing strong climate for raising money from private backers at increasingly staggering valuations. VCs and private equity firms have raised billions, and they are looking for fast-growing, promising startups where they can invest that money. A number of startups are foregoing, or delaying, going public in favor of staying private for longer, financed by them.

“We have no plans to go public,” said John Collison in an interview. “We’re fortunate to be in the position that the Stripe business is performing very well and the long-term opportunity is that we’re very optimistic to providing the richer stack to businesses. Strong businesses do not always tend to be dependent on outside funding.”

(Not all are following this route: a key competitor of Stripe’s, Adyen, had a very strong IPO debut earlier this year.)

Stripe itself is a prime target for VCs looking to park their money in fast-growing, outsized startups. The company says it now has “millions” of customers, including Google, Didi, Mindbody, Spotify and Uber. It is live in 130 markets for acceptance and 25 countries for originating the charges.

Carving a place out for itself as a faster, easier way to integrate payments infrastructure into websites and apps, by way of a few lines of code, Stripe’s pitch is that it replaces the more laborious, and often more expensive route, of working with banks and other payment providers in a complicated chain of players that includes gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, specialized payment methods, wallets and more.

And although Amazon is one of the world’s biggest companies, and most retailers have a digital presence, e-commerce is still a relatively nascent area, with only about three percent of all transactions occurring online at a global average. That means a big opportunity for companies like Stripe, but also competitors like Adyen, PayPal and others.

“We believe in the contingency of progress,” said Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison, in a statement. “Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship and help upstarts compete with incumbents. By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world.” Stripe estimates there will be $4 trillion in online sales by 2020 globally.

While payments is Stripe’s bread and butter, the company has also been diversifying and now also includes Stripe Issuing, Stripe Terminal, fraud detection and potentially cash advances, among its various offerings. These help the company develop stronger ties with its customers, and also potentially increase its margins.

“No one else is going as deep as us on software and the technology stack as we are,” said co-founder and president John Collison.

Sramana Mitra: Are you looking for billion-dollar TAM companies that are potential unicorns or are you open to the possibility of companies that are going to be solving niche problems with the kinds...

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Sramana Mitra: When did you invest in this company? Vivek Ladsariya: This was a round that was announced in January. It was completed late last year. Sramana Mitra: It’s already acquired? Vivek...

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Today, a new crop of startups is launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. This marks the 15th ERA class, with the past 14 classes comprising 165 startups with a combined market capitalization of more than $2 billion.

Thirteen companies in total are participating in the demo day today, spanning a variety of industries, including e-commerce, real estate and voice collaboration.

Here are the new startups:

Agilis is a B2B commerce platform for chemical distributors. The supply chain for chemical distribution is often complex, but Agilis aggregates supply and demand and facilitates transactions on behalf of all parties involved, from producers to distributors to buyers.

As voice interfaces continue to grow in prominence, Airbud is looking to offer developers and companies a way to add voice capabilities to their websites and apps. Airbud’s technology quickly ingests the information on a website or app to allow users to interact with that information with their voice.

Bikky looks to give restaurant owners more insight into their customers, aggregating data across online ordering channels and using SMS to get real-time feedback on orders. The customer analytics platform for restaurants hopes to help businesses increase their customer retention and better understand what is and isn’t working with their business.

Daivergent was founded by Byran Dai. Inspired by his brother, who has autism, he created Daivergent to allow businesses to hire individuals with autism who are particularly well-suited to perform complex data tasks. The platform provides training, management and workflow functions alongside making the initial connection between these highly skilled workers and companies.

Ettitude is a D2C bedding and homewares brand looking to compete with the likes of Brooklinen. Unlike most competitors, however, Ettitude uses a proprietary supply of organic bamboo lyocell fabric to make soft, cooling, hypoallergenic sheets, pillowcases, etc.

LVRG is a vendor relationship management platform for the enterprise, allowing decision-makers within organizations to make collaborative, informed purchasing decisions with the help of an AI algorithm.

Maivino reinvents the idea of boxed wine by letting users subscribe to receive premium wine in a pouch. Unlike a box or a bottle, Maivino’s pouch keeps wine fresh for 32 days after opening, letting users have control of their own pace.

ProdPerfect wants to make quality assurance regression tests for web applications easier and more effective. By analyzing live user traffic to build test cases from behavior patterns, the company gives engineering teams QA testing coverage that continuously and automatically updates as they add new features.

Rocket Cloud is looking to be the Angie’s List for industrial suppliers. The company has created a marketplace that connects electrical, plumbing and HVAC equipment manufacturers and suppliers to online customers.

Rubik is a data platform for real estate investors, providing up-to-date financial data on 70 million single family homes in the U.S., letting investors search based on their own investment criteria.

Threshing Floor Security collects, aggregates and analyzes internet background noise, network scans, web scrapers and authentication attempts to let security teams find alerts that matter to them. The company integrates its technology with the most popular enterprise security products out there.

Triyo is a secure project collaboration platform for highly regulated industries, particularly financial services. As teams work together on a project, they can use Triyo to collaborate on documents, presentations and spreadsheets efficiently without duplicating work, all within the bounds of internal compliance and regulatory rules.

Woveon is a CRM tool that aggregates data from all channels, including phone calls, email, social media and CRM, so that companies can get a bird’s-eye view of their customer relations. The platform is powered by AI, allowing Woveon to point out the most relevant information for resolving customer inquiries.

When Circle raised its $110 million funding round, the company used this opportunity to talk about its stablecoin — USD Coin, or USDC for short. And you can now buy, sell and send USD Coins on Circle Trade and Circle’s exchange Poloniex.

But what is a stablecoin? As the name suggests, 1 USDC is worth 1 USD. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, you can be sure that the value of USDC isn’t going to fluctuate like crazy.

There are multiple reasons why you’d want to use stablecoins. First, if you want to short cryptocurrencies without cashing out, you can convert your bitcoins or ethers to USDC. This way, it’ll be easier to buy cryptocurrencies again in the future.

Second, if you want to avoid traditional financial institutions, you can send USDC to other people without going through a bank. Sending USDC is like sending any other token — you just need to tell your recipient to get a wallet and ask for their wallet address.

Third, I’m sure many people are going to use stablecoins to avoid taxation issues. It’s easier to hide a bunch of tokens than a big wire transfers hitting your bank statement.

Many people living in countries suffering from hyperinflation or chronic inflation, such as Venezuela or Turkey, could also rely on USDC to convert some of their savings. This way, you don’t have to open a bank account in another country.

USDC is an ERC-20 token, which means that it’s easy to add support for USDC if you’re running an exchange or a wallet. But Circle wants to make sure that issuers are not just printing money without any actual USD in their bank accounts.

Multiple companies partnered to create CENTRE, a consortium that is going to define policies around stablecoins and governance. If you want to issue USDC, you have to comply with a bunch of rules. In particular, you have to send monthly audited reports proving that you have as many USD on deposit as issued tokens.

Multiple companies have already announced that they will begin trading USDC soon, such as DigiFinex, CoinEx, KuCoin, OKCoin, Coinplug and XDAEX. On the wallet front, BitGo, Cobo, Coinbase Wallet, CoolWallet S, Elph, imToken, Ledger, Status and Trust will add native USDC support soon.

According to a report by Cyber Security Ventures, the global spending on cyber security products and services will grow to more than $1 trillion by the year 2021 from $120 billion in 2017. The growth...

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Sramana Mitra: Why did this European investor contact you? Ryan Fyfe: Kristof had found some of our online reviews. I had a business partner who was really sales-driven. We had a disagreement where I...

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Instana, an application performance monitoring (APM) service with a focus on modern containerized services, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel. This brings Instana’s total funding to $57 million.

The company, which counts the likes of Audi, Edmunds.com, Yahoo Japan and Franklin American Mortgage as its customers, considers itself an APM 3.0 player. It argues that its solution is far lighter than those of older players like New Relic and AppDynamics (which sold to Cisco hours before it was supposed to go public). Those solutions, the company says, weren’t built for modern software organizations (though I’m sure they would dispute that).

What really makes Instana stand out is its ability to automatically discover and monitor the ever-changing infrastructure that makes up a modern application, especially when it comes to running containerized microservices. The service automatically catalogs all of the endpoints that make up a service’s infrastructure, and then monitors them. It’s also worth noting that the company says that it can offer far more granular metrics that its competitors.

Instana says that its annual sales grew 600 percent over the course of the last year, something that surely attracted this new investment.

“Monitoring containerized microservice applications has become a critical requirement for today’s digital enterprises,” said Meritech Capital’s Alex Kurland. “Instana is packed with industry veterans who understand the APM industry, as well as the paradigm shifts now occurring in agile software development. Meritech is excited to partner with Instana as they continue to disrupt one of the largest and most important markets with their automated APM experience.”

The company plans to use the new funding to fulfill the demand for its service and expand its product line.

Sramana Mitra: In other words, you are okay with companies that have some customer validation but not necessarily revenue? Curtis Feeny: Absolutely. We have a few more deals where we put $250,000 to...

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Bleximo, a startup that aims to build “quantum accelerators” — basically quantum-based, application-specific integrated circuits — today announced it has raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Other investors in this round include Boost VC, Creative Ventures, KEC Ventures and Gyan Kapur.

Instead of building a general-purpose quantum computer like IBM, Rigetti and others, Bleximo, which was founded by Cyclotron Road fellow and quantum physicist Alexei Marchenkov, wants to focus on building quantum processors that focus on very specific applications. Before founding Bleximo, Marchenkov worked at Rigetti Computing, where we worked on developing that company’s technology for general-purpose quantum computers.

“At Eniac, we believe general quantum computing is still far away, but Bleximo’s approach of building vertical quantum computing architecture will bring this nascent technology to the mainstream in a more practical way — much like vertical AI is here today before general AI,” said Vic Singh, founding general partner at Eniac Ventures. “We are excited to support founder Alexei Marchenkov, a recognized expert in quantum computing, and the Bleximo team to help build this reality.”

Right now, Bleximo is mostly looking at speeding up simulations of new materials and molecules for drug development. Quantum computing lends itself to solving these kinds of problems, though the company argues that its technology is just as applicable to solving problems in energy, finance, manufacturing and security.

Not everybody seems to agree that general quantum computing is all that far away, though, so it remains to be seen whether a real market for this kind of specialized quantum co-processors (Bleximo calls it a “qASIC”) will really develop, especially given that a quantum computer will also be some form of hybrid machine that combines classical and quantum computing. If it does, though, Bleximo seems well-positioned to capitalize on it, especially given that its technology will be a bit simpler (as far as one can say that about anything quantum computing) and won’t need the large amount of qubits with long coherence times that a general-purpose quantum computer would need.

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Do you invest all over the United States or just in the two locations where you are located? Vivek Ladsariya: We have companies across the US. We are also looking...

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Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Warby Parker and a long list of other startups of the 21st century have appointed C-level employees to roles focused exclusively on data science.

These digital-age companies have established “data cultures,” which provide employees broad access to high-quality data, advocate for data literacy and have data-driven decision-making processes, according to Carl Anderson, who previously led data analytics and data science at Warby Parker and WeWork.

Fortune 500 companies are still a long way from this ideal. Data.world, a sort of social networking site for data projects and teams, wants to give them the tools to get there. Its collaborative data community gives employees at large businesses a place to upload, exchange and catalog data sets, then discuss their findings with other employees.

“There is a huge data divide that has occurred between these big traditional companies that were built from the ground up from atoms and these digital-age companies that were built from the ground up from bits,” data.world chief executive officer Brett Hurt told TechCrunch.

Today, Austin-based data.world is announcing a $12 million investment led by Workday Ventures, with participation from The Associated Press (AP) and OurCrowd. The round brings the company’s total raised since its 2016 launch to $45.3 million, including an $18.7 million Series B in February 2017.

Data.world will use the capital to continue building out its enterprise offering, which it rolled out recently. The enterprise product, which counts AP as a customer, connects with Tableau, Microsoft Excel and Power BI, IBM SPSS, MicroStrategy, Google Data Studio and more.

Hurt, who previously founded the now-public customer reviews and social commerce platform BazaarVoice, says GitHub was a big inspiration for data.world.

“They’ve done an incredible job of democratizing access to code,” he said. “They made every programmer in the world better by giving them access to the world’s code, and data is one of those things that’s very liberating if you have access to [it].”

The data.world platform is also widely used by journalists, hence the investment from the AP. Using data.world, journalists can access complex data sets quickly and efficiently. Hurt says it’s “changed the game for data journalism.”

“AP was born back in 1846 as a cooperative of newspaper publishers sharing access to a fast horse to get news updates from the war in Mexico,” said Jim Kennedy, AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development in a statement. “The data.world platform is like that fast horse, enabling us to open important new territory for newsgathering in the 21st century.”

Other backers of data.world include Chicago Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Fyrfly Venture Partners, Hunt Technology Ventures LP, LiveOak Venture Partners and Sherpa Asset Management AG.

Last quarter we were searching for answers to what Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) was looking to acquire with its $6 billion cash reserve. This quarter it answered that question by making some big...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 416th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, September 27, 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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Sramana Mitra: Was there a particular segment of companies that you went after? Ryan Fyfe: There was. I took a very online, digital marketing-first approach. From that perspective, these were early...

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Picfair, the photo marketplace that competes with Getty and Shutterstock by giving photographers a fairer deal, is adding a major update to its offering today. The London-based startup is launching Picfair Stores, giving the 35,000 photographers on its marketplace the ability to create their own free independent online store. Customers who buy from a Picfair Store can choose a licensed digital copy or a physical print.

“We’re moving beyond being just a new generation stock image marketplace,” Picfair founder Benji Lanyado, who used to be a journalist at The Guardian, tells me. “With stores, and prints, and more… we’re becoming a fully featured commercial ecosystem for photographers. At the heart of it all: the principle that anyone should be able to make money from their images, simply and fairly”.

In addition, every image on a photographer’s individual Picfair Store will also be available simultaneously on Picfair’s marketplace, which Lanyado likens to “thousands of local image stores across the globe, with a central Amazon-style megastore they all feed in to”.

He reckons it is the first time anyone has combined a marketplace with the added control of website builders, such as Wix or Squarespace, and the on-demand print functionality of Smugmug or Zenfolio, all built with amateur photographers in mind (although the line between amateur and professional is becoming increasingly blurred).

“Picfair is uniting all of this. The control of a website builder. The commercial structures of an e-commerce platform. The exposure of a marketplace, with added price control and fair royalty splits,” Lanyado says.

Less tech-driven but perhaps equally significant, Picfair has recently launched a photo agency unit, building on top of its bread and butter business of selling image licenses to editorial and marketing companies. It came about slightly accidentally, says Lanyado, after brands and creative agencies started approaching the company asking if it could help them find photographers across the globe.

“Initially we just introduced the photographers to the clients directly, like idiots,” he tells me. “Then we started acting like non-idiots and offered our services as a photographer-finder agency, with a very handy black book of 35,000 photographers around the world. We’ve already worked with Google, VisitBritain, Ogilvy and a few other big brands too. The cool bit: all of our leads have come from our community. Most of our photographers aren’t professionals, and their jobs cover the creative gamut: production people in creative agencies, marketing folk etc. The marketplace is generating leads for the agency!”.

Meanwhile, Picfair has just closed a $540,000 equity crowdfunding round. This saw many of its photographers take part, meaning that the company is now part photographer-owned. It adds to a £1.5 million seed round raised a year ago.

Chinese electric scooter startup Niu Technologies has filed for an initial public offering on Nasdaq to raise up to $150 million. In its form, Niu said it is “the largest lithium-ion battery-powered e-scooters company in China,” according to data from China Insights Consultancy, and also a market leader in Europe based on sales volume.

Founded in 2014 and based in Beijing, Niu says it currently holds a market share of 26% in China based on sales volume. Niu’s debut will the latest in a string of recent Chinese tech IPOs, the most prominent of which include the recent Hong Kong listings of Xiaomi and Meituan.

Niu’s scooters connect with an app that give drivers maintenance and performance data and also delivers firmware updates. As of the end of June, Niu claims it had sold more than 431,500 smart electric scooters in China, Europe and other markets.

According to the CIC’s data, China is the largest market for electric two-wheeled vehicles, with retail sales expected to increase to $13 million by 2022, up from $8 billion in 2017. Niu says its growth markets also include Southeast Asia and India, where scooters are a popular form of transportation.

In its filing, Niu said its net revenue in 2017 was RMB 769.4 million ($116.2 million), an increase of 116.8% from RMB 354.8 million in 2016. Its net losses during that time decreased to RMB 184.7 million ($27.9 million) in 2017 from RMB 232.7 million in 2016. More recently, net revenue for the first six months of 2018 was RMB 557.1 million ($84.2 million), an increase of 95.4% from RMB 285.1 million the same period a year earlier. Net loss was RMB 314.9 million ($47.6 million) during that period, compared to RMB 96.6 million the year before.

French startup BlaBlaCar just released some interesting metrics. The company has reached profitability if you look at revenue between January 2018 and today.

BlaBlaCar forecasts that 50 million people will book a ride on BlaBlaCar in 2018, which represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2017.

BlaBlaCar is a marketplace for long-distance rides. People driving from point A to point B can find riders willing to go in the same direction to share the cost of the ride.

A few years ago, when BlaBlaCar raised multiple megarounds, co-founder and now president Frédéric Mazzella told me that the company was at a crossroad and had to choose between growth first then profitability, or profitability then growth. It looks like the company has now completed its growth-then-profitability journey.

There are now 65 million registered users on the platform, including 15 million users in France. The service is currently live in 22 countries.

In France in particular, 40 percent of people aged between 18 and 35 are using BlaBlaCar. While the company is reaching market saturation on this segment, elderly people currently represent a growth opportunity.

It is the fastest growing segment and the user base has doubled in six years when you look at this part of the user base in particular — I know, these are some soft metrics so it’s hard to understand if it’s going to impact the company’s bottom line.

Foreign countries now represent 75 percent of BlaBlaCar’s activity.

When it comes to features, BlaBlaCar finally started automatically matching people who are departing or arriving from a small city. Drivers don’t have to manually input a list of cities on the way. 20 percent of departure or arrival cities surface thanks to this new algorithm.

One way of reaching profitability is by reducing costs. And it’s true that BlaBlaCar faced some growth pains and is now a leaner company.

Now, BlaBlaCar is in great shape for an acquisition or an IPO. But the company says that it’ll keep investing to innovate, diversify and open new markets. So all options are still on the table.

I have been watching a small corner of the technology entrepreneurship universe with great interest. It has come up phenomenally well, and the eco-system is producing wonderful and pragmatic...

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Following an acquisition by FTD Companies earlier this year for a reportedly small amount of cash, on-demand flower service BloomThat is pausing its services as it works “to figure out how to best integrate BloomThat as part of the FTD portfolio of brands,” the founders wrote to its customers a few days ago.

“Before we go, we want to say a heartfelt thank you to all of our loyal bloomers,” the founders wrote. “Over the last five years, you’ve brightened many lives with a simple, thoughtful gesture. Thank you for entrusting us with your most important moments – we’re honored to have been a part of a truly special movement.”

In February 2016, BloomThat launched its flower delivery service nationwide. But instead of offering delivery within a couple of hours, BloomThat guaranteed next-day delivery, which effectively moved the startup into the territory of 1-800-FLOWERS and FTD.

BloomThat will continue to fulfill orders through September 28, 2018. Those who are interested in continuing to buy flowers after the end of this month are being directed to FTD or ProFlowers.com.

Prior to the acquisition, BloomThat had raised $7.5 million from investors like Rothenberg Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Sherpa Capital and others, with the most recent round in April 2015.

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