3D Hubs, like MakeXYZ, was a community-based 3D printing service that let anyone with a printer sell their prints online. Founded in the heyday of the 3D printing revolution, the service let thousands of makers gather a little cash for making and mailing prints on their home 3D printers.

Now, however, the company has moved to a model in which its high-end partners will be manufacturing plastic, metal, and injection molded parts for customers willing to pay extra for a professional print.

“Indeed, more focus on high end printers run by professional companies,” said founder Brian Garret. “So a smaller pool of manufacturing locations (still hundreds around the world), but with more control on standardized quality and repeatability. Our software takes care of the sourcing, so companies order with 3D Hubs directly.”

Not everyone is happy with the decision. 3DPrint.come editor Joris Peels saw the value in a solid, dedicated community of hobbyists in the 3D space. The decision to move away from hobbyist printers, wrote Peels, “has confused many.”

“The value of 3DHubs is in its community; the community gives it granular local presence and a barrier to entry. Now it is just like any 3D printing service upstart and will lose its community entirely. I’ve always liked 3DHubs, although I have been very skeptical of their Trends Report I like the company and what they’re doing. I liked the idealism coupled with business,” he wrote.

The community, for its part, is angry.

The move will happen on October 1 when all prints will be completed by Fulfilled by 3D Hubs partners, dedicated merchants who will offer “source parts for larger, high value engineering projects.” The company wrote that during the early hobbyist days the “platform at that time was very much free-form, with the goal of serving as many, mostly one-off, custom maker projects as possible.”

This slow movement from hobbyist 3D printing to professional parts manufacturer is not surprising or unexpected, but it is jarring. The 3D printing community is small, vociferous, and dedicated to the technology. In the early days, when 3D printers were rare, it was tempting to buy a mid-price printer and become a small, one-person shop online. Now, with the availability of commodity printers that cost less than some paper printers, the novelty and utility of a low-resolution print has fallen considerably.

3D printing never fulfilled its promise in the home and small office. A one-off print can save some of us a trip to the machine shop or music store but in practice home 3D printing has been a bust.

Like most open source technologies that went commercial, the dedicated zealots will complain and the established players will pivot into profitability. It ruffles feathers, to be sure, but that’s how these things work. To paraphrase the White Stripes, “Well, you’re in your little room and you’re printing something good/ But if it’s really good, you’re gonna need a bigger room/ And when you’re in the bigger room, you might not know what to do/ You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.”

Sramana Mitra: We are in 2018. A lot of stuff has already been built. Relative to the amount of capital that is available in the market, there are 700 plus micro-VCs in the market right now. There is...

___

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

After a long run of having guests climb aboard each week, we took a pause on that front, bringing together three of our regular hosts instead: Connie Loizos, Danny Chrichton, and myself.

Despite the fact that there were just three of us instead of the usual four, we got through a mountain of stuff. Which was good as it was a surprisingly busy week, and we didn’t want to leave too much behind.

Up top we dug into the latest in the land of crypto, which Danny had politely summarized for us in an article. The gist of his argument is that the analogies relating crypto as an industry to the Internet may work, but most people have their timelines wrong: Crypto isn’t like the Internet in the 90s, perhaps. More like the 80s.

On the same topic, crypto companies formed a team lobbying effort, and a high-flying crypto fund is struggling to once again post strong profit figures.

Moving along, Juul is back in the news. Not, however, for raising more money or posting quick growth. Well, sort of the latter, as the government is after it. The Food and Drug Administration has put Juul on a countdown to get its act together regarding teens and smoking. That the financially impressive unicorn is in as much trouble as it is, is nearly surprising.

Finally, we ran through the three most recent Chinese IPOs that hit our radar. Here they are:

Meituan Dianping: The Tencent-backed group buying, delivery, and everything company raised over $4 billion in its debut, which was impressive, but also short of expectations. The firm won’t begin trading until the 20th, but it’s one more massive deal that got done in 2018.111: We spent a minute on the show discussing what counts as a technology company thanks to 111. We voted that the Chinese online-to-offline pharmacy startup did in fact count. So, it’s in our list. Some notes on its debut can be found here.NIO: Finally on our list was NIO, a Chinese electric car company with, as we have discussed on Equity before, a shockingly short history of revenue generation. Whether the company is a gamble or not, it did raise $1 billion in its own offering. And its stock is off like a rocket to boot.

And that was the end of things. Thanks for sticking with us, as always. Speaking of which, our 100th episode is coming up. Who should we bring onto the show to celebrate?

A recent Market Research Future report published this year Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) recently announced its second quarter results that surpassed all market...

___

Sramana Mitra: You don’t have a Steve Wozniak that you’re paired up with throughout your journey? Jedidiah Yueh: I had co-founders who were technical. Co-founders come at different levels. Some of...

___

During this week’s roundtable, we had three interesting entrepreneur pitches. VedaJunction First up, we had Rahul Sharma, from Dallas, Texas and Ludhiana, India, pitching VedaJunction, an AI-based...

___

Looking for funding as a startup in Latin America is a lot like looking for a watering hole in the middle of the desert. You know it’s out there, but finding it in time is a life or death situation.

Granted, venture capital investment in the region is at an all-time high, with leading firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners having made inaugural investments in markets like Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, respectively. But, at the same time, while startup founders might be tantalized by the news of big investments happening around them, as many of them get closer to the funding stage themselves, they often realize it’s nothing but a mirage.

And this isn’t just a problem in Latin America. All over the world, startups are struggling to find investment, as VCs are investing more money in fewer deals in the endless search for the next unicorn. Due to a dwindling number of VC deals in both the United States and Europe, even entrepreneurs in established ecosystems are having to look further afield for the resources they need to build their businesses, bringing many of them to emerging markets like Latin America.

Fortunately, whether you’re a local or foreign founder in an emerging market, there is a way to quench your thirst for the international investment that you need to scale your company. Here’s what we recommend to the startups that are part of our UTEC Ventures accelerator program in Peru, and what we’d recommend to you, too.

Find local seed money first

As a startup in an emerging market, the prospect of finding local investment can seem challenging. In fact, this is probably why you’re looking for international investment in the first place. But the truth is, finding local seed money to get started is really the first prerequisite for securing international funding later on.

Last year in Peru, for example, US$7.2 million of seed capital was invested in the country’s startups, with barely over US$1 million coming from international funds. This goes to show that international investors peeking into emerging markets are less active in seed rounds, and more interested in later-stage rounds once a company has better demonstrated its worth.

As such, we advise all startups to raise a first or second seed round locally in Peru, and then seek international investors. The same can go for other emerging markets, as well.

To raise these initial rounds, the most important thing is to show that you have a solid team, a business idea that works and has traction with clients chasing your product and that you’re better than any local competition. If you can demonstrate that you meet these requirements, finding local seed capital shouldn’t be too difficult; all you need is a good pitch deck and some patience when networking within local angel groups or at investor events.

Replicate success in a bigger, more competitive market

If you want to attract international investors, you need to be an international startup. In other words, you need to demonstrate that you can sell your product in a bigger, more competitive market before turning the heads of international investors. For startups in Peru and other emerging markets in Latin America, that means successfully expanding to the region’s most developed markets in Mexico, Brazil or Argentina.

Consider, for example, the Colombian courier service Rappi. It wasn’t until after the company expanded its operations to Mexico at the beginning of 2016 that it secured its first major international investment, led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company then went on to close a Series B round just one month later, in addition to a US$130 million venture round at the beginning of this year, led by a German food delivery service with participation from a number of U.S.-based investors.

The same idea goes for emerging markets outside of Latin America, too. In Eastern Europe, which lags behind its western counterpart in terms of VC funding, many entrepreneurs will either set up their businesses in Western European countries from the get-go, or expand there as soon as they’ve achieved product/market fit and demonstrated success in their home countries.

This is a clear demonstration of the broader fact that if you want to start raising money from more developed markets, you generally need to be based in those markets, or at least a market of comparable size. Accordingly, your primary focus when seeking international funding should be to first succeed locally, and then replicate that success in a more developed market — whether that be in the United States, Mexico, Western Europe or anywhere else.

Remember, not all international funding comes from international VCs

While it’s easy to be distracted by the glitz and glamour of securing a round from international VCs, startups have a number of other options at their disposal to secure international funding.

Foreign governments in emerging markets are increasingly stepping up their game with programs designed to bolster their local startup ecosystems as an engine for economic growth. As such, a number of foreign governmental programs have emerged, offering support in the form of equity-free cash to entrepreneurs who decide to set up shop in a given country.

There are plenty of examples in Latin America alone. Start-Up Chile, for example, offers entrepreneurs up to US$80,000 to launch their businesses in Chile as a launch pad to reach the rest of the world; Parallel18 in Puerto Rico offers entrepreneurs up to US$75,000 to do the same thing; and the Peruvian government plans to announce a similar program to help startups soft launch in Peru with up to US$40,000 at the upcoming Peru Venture Capital Conference.

Startups have another option, as well. Corporate capital, or startup investment from major corporations, has taken on a very important role in many emerging markets like Latin America. In fact, Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of U.S.-based tech giant Qualcomm, is the most active global corporate investor in Latin America. Naspers, American Express Ventures and other corporate funds have taken an active interest in the region’s startups, as well.

Together, the growing support of foreign governments and interest from international corporations highlights the fact that securing international funding is in fact possible, and not as hard as you’d expect. Knowing that there are options besides getting an international VC on board, you should take the time to find out which alternatives are available in the markets to which you’re hoping to expand.

So, no matter whether you’re a local or foreign entrepreneur in an emerging market, there’s no reason to give up hope on finding international funding. The key is to think globally and use technology to solve real-world challenges. Then, demonstrate success at home first, and duplicate it later in a bigger market. Resources are available to help you when taking your first step abroad, and if you do it well, you’ll find that the investment wells aren’t dry after all.

Watching the current price madness is scary. Bitcoin is falling and rising in $500 increments with regularity and Ethereum and its attendant ICOs are in a seeming freefall with a few “dead cat bounces” to keep things lively. What this signals is not that crypto is dead, however. It signals that the early, elated period of trading whose milestones including the launch of Coinbase and the growth of a vibrant (if often shady) professional ecosystem is over.

Crypto still runs on hype. Gemini announcing a stablecoin, the World Economic Forum saying something hopeful, someone else saying something less hopeful – all of these things and more are helping define the current market. However, something else is happening behind the scenes that is far more important.

As I’ve written before, the socialization and general acceptance of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial pursuits is a very recent thing. In the old days – circa 2000 – building your own business was considered somehow sordid. Chancers who gave it a go were considered get-rich-quick schemers and worth of little more than derision.

As the dot-com market exploded, however, building your own business wasn’t so wacky. But to do it required the imprimaturs and resources of major corporations – Microsoft, Sun, HP, Sybase, etc. – or a connection to academia – Google, Netscape, Yahoo, etc. You didn’t just quit school, buy a laptop, and start Snapchat.

It took a full decade of steady change to make the revolutionary thought that school wasn’t so great and that money was available for all good ideas to take hold. And take hold it did. We owe the success of TechCrunch and Disrupt to that idea and I’ve always said that TC was career pornography for the cubicle dweller, a guilty pleasure for folks who knew there was something better out there and, with the right prodding, they knew they could achieve it.

So in looking at the crypto markets currently we must look at the dot-com markets circa 1999. Massive infrastructure changes, some brought about by Y2K, had computerized nearly every industry. GenXers born in the late 70s and early 80s were in the marketplace of ideas with an understanding of the Internet the oldsters at the helm of media, research, and banking didn’t have. It was a massive wealth transfer from the middle managers who pushed paper since 1950 to the dot-com CEOs who pushed bits with native ease.

Fast forward to today and we see much of the same thing. Blockchain natives boast about having been interest in bitcoin since 2014. Oldsters at banks realize they should get in on things sooner than later and price manipulation is rampant simply because it is easy. The projects we see now are the Kozmo.com of the blockchain era, pie-in-the-sky dream projects that are sucking up millions in funding and will produce little in real terms. But for every hundred Kozmos there is one Amazon .

And that’s what you have to look for.

Will nearly every ICO launched in the last few years fail? Yes. Does it matter?

Not much.

The market is currently eating its young. Early investors made (and probably lost) millions on early ICOs but the resulting noise has created an environment where the best and brightest technical minds are faced with not only creating a technical product but also maintaining a monetary system. There is no need for a smart founder to have to worry about token price but here we are. Most technical CEOs step aside or call for outside help after their IPO, a fact that points to the complexity of managing shareholder expectations. But what happens when your shareholders are 16-year-olds with a lot of Ethereum in a Discord channel? What happens when little Malta becomes the de facto launching spot for token sales and you’re based in Nebraska? What happens when the SEC, FINRA, and Attorneys General from here to Beijing start investigating your hobby?

Basically your hobby stops becoming a hobby. Crypto and blockchain has weaponized nerds in an unprecedented way. In the past if you were a Linux developer or knew a few things about hardware you could build a business and make a little money. Now you can build an empire and make a lot of money.

Crypto is falling because the people in it for the short term are leaving. Long term players – the Amazons of the space – have yet to be identified. Ultimately we are going to face a compression in the ICO and, for a while, it’s going to be a lot harder to build an ICO. But give it a few years – once the various financial authorities get around to reading the Satoshi white paper – and you’ll see a sea change. Coverage will change. Services will change. And the way you raise money will change.

VC used to be about a team and a dream. Now it’s about a team, $1 million in monthly revenue, and a dream. The risk takers are gone. The dentists from Omaha who once visited accelerator demo days and wrote $25,000 checks for new apps are too shy to leave their offices. The flashy VCs from Sand Hill have to keep Uber and Airbnb’s plates spinning until they can cash out. VC is dead for the small entrepreneur.

Which is why the ICO is so important and this is why the ICO is such a mess right now. Because everybody sees the value but nobody – not the SEC, not the investors, not the founders – can understand how to do it right. There is no SAFE note for crypto. There are no serious accelerators. And all of the big names in crypto are either goldbugs, weirdos, or Redditors. No one has tamed the Wild West.

They will.

And when they do expect a whole new crop of Amazons, Ubers, and Oracles. Because the technology changes quickly when there’s money, talent, and a way to marry the two in which everyone wins.

Microsoft today announced that is has acquired Lobe, a startup that lets you build machine learning models with the help of a simple drag-and-drop interface. Microsoft plans to use Lobe, which only launched into beta earlier this year, to build upon its own efforts to make building AI models easier, though, for the time being, Lobe will operate as before.

“As part of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage world-class AI research, global infrastructure, and decades of experience building developer tools,” the team writes. “We plan to continue developing Lobe as a standalone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms.”

Lobe was co-founded by Mike Matas, who previously worked on the iPhone and iPad, as well as Facebook’s Paper and Instant Articles products. The other co-founders are Adam Menges and Markus Beissinger.

In addition to Lobe, Microsoft also recently bought Bonsai.ai, a deep reinforcement learning platform, and Semantic Machines, a conversational AI platform. Last year, it acquired Disrupt Battlefield participant Maluuba. It’s no secret that machine learning talent is hard to come by, so it’s no surprise that all of the major tech firms are acquiring as much talent and technology as they can.

“In many ways though, we’re only just beginning to tap into the full potential AI can provide,” Microsoft’s EVP and CTO Kevin Scott writes in today’s announcement. “This in large part is because AI development and building deep learning models are slow and complex processes even for experienced data scientists and developers. To date, many people have been at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing AI, and we’re committed to changing that.”

It’s worth noting that Lobe’s approach complements Microsoft’s existing Azure ML Studio platform, which also offers a drag-and-drop interface for building machine learning models, though with a more utilitarian design than the slick interface that the Lobe team built. Both Lobe and Azure ML Studio aim to make machine learning easy to use for anybody, without having to know the ins and outs of TensorFlow, Keras or PyTorch. Those approaches always come with some limitations, but just like low-code tools, they do serve a purpose and work well enough for many use cases.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund? Clint Chao: Our first fund is a small fund. It’s a $10 million fund. We launched that officially in 2015. We did a first close on our second fund late last year....

___

Shift Technologies, an online marketplace for used cars, has closed a Series D financing round of more than $140 million in equity and debt.

The round, which consists of about $70 million in debt and $71 million in equity, was led by automotive retailer Lithia Motors. Bryan DeBoer, CEO and president of Lithia, will join Shift’s board of directors.

Previous investors Alliance Ventures, BMW iVentures, DCM, DFJ, G2VP, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Highland Capital also participated. This new capital brings Shift’s total financing of equity and debt to $265 million.

Shift, which is based in San Francisco, serves car buyers and sellers. The company, founded in 2013, has built a software platform that lets customers shop for cars, get financing and schedule test drives. Car owners can use the platform to sell their vehicle, as well. Shift says any car it buys must pass a “rigorous” 150+ point inspection.

The company plans to invest in its technology platform and scale its engineering staff from 35 to more than 80 people by the end of 2019, CEO George Arison noted to TechCrunch in an email.  Shift employs 380 people. The company’s platform has focused on scaling in California; it covers about 80 percent of that market. But the company has long had its sights set on expanding beyond the Golden State.

Shift is focused on, and is heavily investing in, its peer-to-peer business, in which the company acquires cars from individuals and then sells them. Buying, refurbishing and then selling cars online is a logistics-heavy business pursuit, and one that has seen a number of competitors come and go in the past several years. But Arison says the company has not just survived; it has grown. 

Shift didn’t provide revenue numbers. But Arison cited the company’s more than 70 percent revenue growth in the past six months as an example of the company’s success.

The company did have a partnership with rental giant Hertz, but that has since ended. At the time, Shift was going to feature vehicles from Hertz’s fleet inventory. It was meant to be a win-win: Hertz gets access to a new retail sales channel and Shift benefits from the rental car company’s ready supply of lightly used cars.

The partnership ended after Hertz opened its own retail stores that competed against Shift

Tyler Cowen, who I interviewed here, is a fascinating economist. Part pragmatist and part dreamer, he has been researching and writing about the future for a long time in books and his blog, Marginal Revolution. Now he and his university, George Mason, are putting some money where his mouth is.

Cowen and the team at GMU are working on Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program for moon shots. The goal is to give people with big ideas a little capital to help them build out their dreams.

“It has long been my view that risk-takers are not sufficiently rewarded in the world of ideas and that academic incentives are too conservative,” he said. “The intellectual scene should learn something from Silicon Valley and venture capital.”

Cowen is raising $4 million for the first fund. He announced the fund in a podcast on the Mercatus website.

“People such as Satoshi and Jordan Peterson have had huge impacts (regardless of one’s degree of enthusiasm for their ideas), and yet in terms of philanthropic funding the world just isn’t geared to seed their ambitions,” said Cowen.

The project is part of the GMU Mercatus Center, a “source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” The fund has just opened applications and the amounts granted depend on the project and creator.

Cowen, for his part, is optimistic about the prospects of the future-focused fund.

“I expect to produce a better and freer world, some degree of human self-realization, a better climate for public intellectuals and other creators of ideas, more innovation, and to bring the intellectual side of America more in touch with the entrepreneurial side,” said Cowen.

iHeartMedia has agreed to acquire Stuff Media, the company that owns the HowStuffWorks podcasting business.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but both the Wall Street Journal and Variety are reporting that the acquisition price was $55 million.

According to the announcement, Stuff Media podcasts will retain their branding and the organization will remain headquartered in Atlanta, while President and CEO Conal Byrne joins iHeartMedia as the head of its podcasting division.

HowStuffWorks was originally founded in 1998 and had a number of owners before spinning out as an independent company and raising a $15 million Series A last year. In recent years, its focus has shifted from explainer articles and videos to podcasts, and in fact, it says those podcasts receive more than 61 million downloads and streams each month, with Stuff You Should Know surpassing 500 million downloads this year.

iHeartMedia, meanwhile, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. (The media company was formerly known as Clear Channel.) Prior to announcing the acquisition, it was already working with   Stuff Media on its true crime podcast Atlanta Monster.

“Stuff Media is the original trailblazer of the podcasting industry, and we’ve been impressed by its ability to grow a massive, loyal audience over the past decade, led by a strong, experienced and cohesive management team, who we welcome to iHeartMedia,”  said iHeartMedia’s chairman and CEO Bob Pittman in the announcement. “This strategic acquisition will pair Stuff Media’s wildly popular content and strong creative capabilities with iHeartMedia’s extensive resources and massive scale through our digital platforms, social reach and broadcast radio stations, introducing podcasts to the vast majority of the country and offering even more unique opportunities for advertisers to reach their consumers.”

Today’s 414th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, September 13, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

___

Sramana Mitra: When you look at the Indian geography, what is the distribution of deal flow that you’re seeing? Is there a bias towards Bangalore? I know Chennai and Pune have done well. Ben Mathias:...

___

Today’s 414th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, September 13, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

___

Cloud services — where our data, apps and computing power are all being managed in servers owned by others, many miles from where we are sitting — have taken off like a rocket in the decade with the rise of smaller devices, but in the business world, hybrid solutions — mixing cloud with on-premise architectures — remains the order of the day. And today, a provider of hybrid cloud services has raised a round of funding to capitalise on that. Datrium, a provider of back-up and other services for businesses that store and use data in hybrid environments, has raised $60 million in a Series D round of funding.

The company is not disclosing its valuation — we’re asking — but PitchBook estimates that it was at $222 million pre-money, putting it at $282 million post-money. This was an upround compared to previous raises, but it’s also playing on a more modest field than some of its competitors. As a point of comparison, another notable hybrid cloud back-up and data management startup, Rubrik, raised $180 million at a $1.3 billion valuation last year.

Interestingly, Datrium and Rubrik share an investor. This latest round was led by Samsung’s Catalyst Fund, with Icon Ventures, NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating. Lightspeed (whose investing partner founded and leads Rubrik) also backs Rubrik.

Large enterprises are gradually making the move to the cloud, but they are doing so while also continuing to use their legacy services and architectures — in part to continue sweating those assets, and in part because if something isn’t broken, it’s tempting fate to try to fix it. As a result of that, hybrid cloud services have been a big business up to now, with estimates that it will be a $44.6 billion market this year, and growing to $97.6 billion by 2023.

“As a world leader in memory and storage technologies, we’re always looking for novel and innovative ways to advance datacenter technology,” said Shankar Chandran, senior vice president and managing director, Samsung Catalyst Fund, in a statement. “At this unique moment in time—when data is powering the economy—cutting-edge infrastructure, like Datrium’s hybrid cloud platform, will help enterprises overcome major obstacles in data analysis and storage. We are excited to be an investor in their future.”

And with a market of that size, startups are not only ones targeting it. Google has gone all-in on hybrid; VMware is also interested; and HPE has made some acquisitions to expand its hybrid computing business, as has Microsoft (at least twice), and Cisco.

Datrium — with its flagship DVX platform — has been one of the hopefuls in providing a specific area of data services to enterprises operating hybrid environments: data management and data backup, with customers ranging from large players in healthcare and finance through to media and entertainment. Interestingly, it’s doing so at a time when others like Rubrik have gradually been building more cloud-only solutions to expand beyond hybrid environments customers relying on these.

With this round Michael Mullany of Icon Ventures — formerly a VP of marketing and products for VMware — is joining the board of Datrium.

“We are thrilled to partner with Samsung and Icon Ventures to expand our technical and geographical momentum,” said Tim Page, CEO of Datrium, in a statement. “Enterprises globally have the same problems in simplifying compute and data management across on-prem and cloud. Where SANs don’t even have a  path to cloud, traditional HCI has too many tradeoffs for core datacenters – backup requires separate purchasing and administration, and cloud DR automation is seldom guaranteed. Larger enterprises are realizing that Datrium software offers them a simpler path.”

In the 1990s when the web was young, companies like Yahoo, created directories of web pages to help make them more discoverable. Hacera wants to bring that same idea to blockchain, and today it announced the launch of the Hacera Network Registry.

CEO Jonathan Levi says that blockchains being established today risk being isolated because people simply can’t find them. If you have a project like the IBM -Maersk supply chain blockchain announced last month, how does an interested party like a supplier or customs authority find it and ask to participate? Up until the creation of this registry, there was no easy way to search for projects.

Early participants include heavy hitters like Microsoft, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, SAP and Oracle, who are linking to projects being created on their platforms. The registry supports projects based on major digital ledger communities including Hyperledger, Quorum, Cosmos, Ethereum and Corda. The Hacera Network Registry is built on Hyperledger Fabric, and the code is open source. (Levi was Risk Manager for Hyperledger Fabric 1.0.)

While early sponsors of the project include IBM and Hyperledger Fabric, Levi stressed the network is open to all. Blockchain projects can create information pages, not unlike a personal LinkedIn page, and Hacera verifies the data before adding it to the registry. There are currently more than 70 networks in the registry, and Hacera is hoping this is just the beginning.

Jerry Cuomo, VP of blockchain technologies at IBM, says for blockchain to grow it will require a way to register, lookup, join and transact across a variety of blockchain solutions. “As the number of blockchain consortiums, networks and applications continues to grow we need a means to list them and make them known to the world, in order to unleash the power of blockchain,” Cuomo told TechCrunch. Hacera is solving that problem.

This is exactly the kind of underlying infrastructure that the blockchain requires to expand as a technology. Cuomo certainly recognizes this.”We realized from the start that you cannot do blockchain on your own; you need a vibrant community and ecosystem of like-minded innovators who share the vision of helping to transform the way companies conduct business in the global economy,” he said.

Hacera understands that every cloud vendor wants people using their blockchain service. Yet they also see that to move the technology forward, there need to be some standard ways of conducting business, and they want to provide that layer. Levi has a broader vision for the network beyond pure discoverability. He hopes eventually to provide the means to share data through the registry.

PlayVS, the startup bringing an e-sports infrastructure to the high school level, has today announced that it will partner with Riot’s League of Legends for its early-access season.

High school students across five states, including Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, will be able to sign up to play for their school in Season Zero, which begins in October 2018.

Around 200 colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada are offering esports scholarships, but without any infrastructure around high school esports, those recruiters are left at the mercy of the publishers and a grueling tournament schedule.

Meanwhile, young gamers who want to go pro are forced to gain a following via Twitch, or hit up all those tournaments and find a way to shine.

PlayVS offers access to recruiters while giving high school students the chance to play competitive esports at the high school level. The startup, backed by Science with $15.5 million in funding, has partnered with the NFHS (essentially the NCAA of high school) to offer turnkey competition through its dashboard.

PlayVS partners with publishers, and lets players sign up, receive team and league schedules, check standings and stats, and actually play the game all within the PlayVS online portal.

PlayVS has a no-cut policy, letting high schools submit as many unique teams as they like. Given that the company makes money from players themselves ($64/season/player), it makes sense that the company would take a ‘the more the merrier’ approach.

The company then divides up those teams into conferences, and the teams play to be conference champions, advance to semi-finals, and eventually head to the state championship. All the games will be played from the students’ own school through the online portal, except for the State Championship tournament which will have a live spectator audience.

This season, which includes five states, gives PlayVS a chance to roll out the platform to a smaller pool of players and work out any issues ahead of the inaugural season, which starts February 2019.

After selling their ridesharing startup, 99, to Didi Chuxing for $1 billion last year, Ariel Lambrecht and Renato Freitas didn’t waste any time throwing their hats back in the ring.

Months after their big exit, the pair joined forces with Eduardo Musa, who spent two decades in the bicycle industry, to start another São Paulo-based mobility startup. Yellow, a bike- and scooter-sharing service, quickly captured the attention of venture capitalists, raising a $12.3 million seed round in April and now, the company is announcing the close of a $63 million Series A.

The round is the largest Series A financing ever for a startup in Latin America, where tech investment, especially from U.S.-based firms, has historically remained low. 2017, however, was a banner year for Latin American startups; 2018, it seems, is following suit. More than $600 million was invested in the first quarter of 2018, partly as a result of increased activity from international investors. And just last month, on-demand delivery startup Rappi brought in $200 million to become the second Latin American company to garner a billion-dollar valuation.

GGV Capital has led the round for Yellow . The Silicon Valley firm is a backer of several other mobility companies, including Grab, Lime, Hellobike and Didi Chuxing. Yellow represents the firm’s first foray into the Latin American tech ecosystem. Brazilian VC firm Monashees, Grishin Robotics, Base10 Partners and Class 5 also participated.

“We think there’s a new economy emerging in Latin America,” GGV managing partner Hans Tung told TechCrunch. “A lot of people are more cautious but what we’ve seen with our experience in China, when internet penetration started to happen, a new economy started to emerge that’s more efficient.”

Yellow’s bikes and e-scooters are only available in São Paulo. With the investment, the startup plans to expand to Mexico City, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, as well as add e-bikes to its portfolio of micro-mobility options.

The company also plans to tap into local resources by building a scooter manufacturing facility in the region. Yellow CEO Eduardo Musa told me the company doesn’t want to be reliant on Chinese manufacturers to import scooters and that a local supplier is a whole lot cheaper. The company’s bikes are already sourced locally.

“Since the beginning, we wanted to be vertically integrated,” Musa told TechCrunch. “We definitely believe you need a constant inflow of hardware and you need control and management over the supply chain … not only because of the cost but also because of the quality control.”

Yellow is one of several e-scooter startups to raise VC in 2018. Bird and Lime, for example, both raised large rounds of capital at billion-dollar valuations. A good chunk of that capital has gone into building more scooters, placing a huge demand on the few Chinese manufacturers that’ve tapped into the market.

“There was simply not available capacity or factories prepared to fulfill the demand that arose from the other scooter sharing companies,” Musa said. “This became, very, very quickly, a major bottleneck for this industry.”