During my many conversations with seed investors, I’ve asked everyone to talk about their current investment portfolios to help inform early-stage entrepreneurs interested in financing. Here are ten...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Earlier this week, Intuit’s (NASDAQ: INTU) CEO Brad Smith announced plans to step down after eleven years at the helm. He will exit by the end of the year. During his tenure, Brad has turned around...

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Sramana Mitra: That’s exactly where my question comes from. We are in 2018. There is a lot of stuff that has already been built in all different areas of technology. Right now, there are not as many...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had five pitches from different parts of the world. Thinkster First we had Raj Valli from Princeton, NJ, pitching Thinkster Math, an AI-powered online tutoring...

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Demand for sustainable coffee is growing, a boon for socially conscious coffee lovers — but many small growers are missing out because they lack the ability to verify that their coffee beans are grown using sustainable labor and eco-friendly practices. In fact, verification is often accessible only to large coffee estates or cooperatives. Enveritas wants to change that. The nonprofit, which recently completed Y Combinator’s accelerator program, uses geospatial analysis to make the process more efficient, enabling it to offer free verification to smallholder farms.

Enveritas’ goal is to end poverty in the coffee sector by 2030. Before founding Enveritas in 2016, CEO David Browning and head of operations Carl Cervone worked at TechnoServe, a nonprofit that serves businesses in developing economies. Browning led TechnoServe’s global coffee practice, while Cervone advised coffee growers in Africa, Asia and Latin America about sustainability trends.

Browning tells TechCrunch that TechnoServe’s coffee team spent a lot of time working with smallharder farmers, many of whom don’t have access to sustainability verification because their farms are too remote or small. The typical coffee grower served by Enveritas has less than two hectares of land, lives on less than $2 a day and relies on cash crops for their family’s income.

“The existing solutions work well for large estates and it can also be effective for farmers organized into cooperatives, but many of the world’s coffee farmers are smallholder farmers and not organized into cooperatives,” Browning explains. “For those farmers, the existing solutions can be more difficult to access.”

Part of the reason is because many verification solutions rely on field workers who visit farms and track sustainability standards using pen and paper, a time-consuming and costly process.

To develop a more efficient and scalable system, Enveritas uses geospatial and machine learning to identify coffee farms through satellite imagery and monitor for issues like deforestation. Though it still relies on local partners to visit farms and confirm that sustainability standards are being followed, its technology enables Enveritas to provide verification services for free.

Enveritas checks for 30 standards, which it divides into three categories: social, environmental and economic. “Social” includes no child labor and workers’ rights; “environmental” checks for problems like deforestation, pollution or banned pesticides; and “economic” covers minimum wages, ethical business practices and transparent pricing, among other standards.

The organization currently operates in 10 countries, including Uganda, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with plans to expand into more markets.

Sustainable coffee isn’t just in demand by caffeine lovers with a penchant for social justice. Many of the world’s biggest coffee companies, including Illy and Starbucks, have launched sustainability initiatives as part of their corporate responsibility measures. Offering coffee grown using sustainable labor or environmentally friendly practices also helps differentiate their products in a crowded marketplace. Research by the National Coffee Association, an American trade group, recently found that many millennials prefer sustainable coffee, with up to two-thirds of 19 to 24-year-olds surveyed said they pick their coffee based on whether it was grown using sustainable labor and environmentally friendly farming practices.

While coffee is currently its main focus, Browning says Enveritas’ system can be applied to other agricultural products that need more visibility in their supply chains. For example, it also can be used to verify the sustainability of cocoa, cotton and palm oil.

As a nonprofit, Enveritas faces different funding challenges from other tech startups. Browning says it is currently at the equivalent of being ready for a Series A. Much of its backing comes from coffee companies (Enveritas can’t disclose which ones) that hope to benefit from Enveritas’ solutions.

“One of the advantages of this system is that it reduces the cost for coffee companies relative to the traditional pen and paper system, but it’s also simultaneously free for farmers,” Browning says. “That’s one of the most compelling innovations, so it’s a win-win for both.”

Clinc is expanding its focus on fintech into new verticals that could take advantage of its conversational artificial intelligence. The Ann Arbor-based company recently took the wraps off its new system that aims to provide quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s and Taco Bell with a voice assistant in the drive-through window.

I got a demo of the new system. For the most part, even in its early state, it works as advertised. Want a double cheeseburger without pickles and mayo with a side of fries and a Coke? With Clinc’s system, a person can order food as if they were talking to a human. Have questions or want to make changes to the order? Again, the person ordering the food does not have to modify their speech pattern or use a voice menu tree — just talk to the system normally.

This is Clinc’s second implementation of it conversational AI system. This isn’t Siri or Alexa. This technology is from the next generation.

The company started with a solution for fintech and currently has several contracts with major banks such as USAA, Barclays and S&P Global. In most cases, when integrated into the bank’s system, Clinc’s technology emulates human intelligence and can interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. The idea is to let users converse with their bank account using natural language without pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus.

Clinc was founded by University of Michigan professors Dr. Jason Mars, Dr. Johann Hauswald, Dr. Lingjia Tang and Dr. Michael Laurenzano.

Mars tells me Clinc spun up the quick-service restaurant (QSR) product in about two weeks. He explains that Clinc’s platform allows programmers to drag and drop a restaurant’s menu to add items to the voice service.

I watched a Clinc engineer use the system for about an hour. Over and over again, the system processed the order correctly, but occasionally it got it wrong. It seems changing an order is just as easy as placing one though, and the engineer was able to modify the order on the fly.

When using the system, it’s obvious a computer is speaking. Good or bad, if implemented by restaurants, this could be one of the largest barriers to adoption by consumers. For the most part, ordering from a fast food restaurant is an easy affair, but occasionally it gets complicated and Clinc’s system has to be able to handle everything — or have triggers that cause the system to connect the orderer with a live person to resolve the issue.

The QSR product is coming to market at a critical time. Fast-food restaurants are increasingly looking for ways to reduce the number of workers in their stores while also looking for new ways for customers to order food. It’s clear this product can be modified to address other voice-heavy industries, too, such as call centers and appointment booking services.

Sramana Mitra: What do you think of the Series A gap? There are hundred thousand seed investments and 1,200 to 1,500 venture investments. How do you process that? Yipeng Zhao: Seed and Series A is...

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Today’s 412th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, August 30, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Sramana Mitra: I have two questions to narrow down on your style of investment. First and foremost, it sounds like you invest across multiple sectors. You do B2B SaaS and you do medical. Do you also...

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Today’s 412th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, August 30, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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InVision today announced a newly expanded integration and strategic partnership with Atlassian that will let users of Confluence, Trello and Jira see and share InVision prototypes from within those programs.

Atlassian’s product suite is built around making product teams faster and more efficient. These tools streamline and organize communication so developers and designers can focus on getting the job done. Meanwhile, InVision’s collaboration platform has caught on to the idea that design is now a team sport, letting designers, engineers, executives and other shareholders be involved in the design process right from the get-go.

Specifically, the expanded integration allows designers to share InVision Studio designs and prototypes right within Jira, Trello and Confluence. InVision Studio was unveiled late last year, offering designers an alternative to Sketch and Adobe.

Given the way design and development teams use both product suites, it only makes sense to let these product suites communicate with one another.

As part of the partnership, Atlassian has also made a strategic financial investment in InVision, though the companies declined to share the amount.

Here’s what InVision CEO Clark Valberg had to say about it in a prepared statement:

In today’s digital world creating delightful, highly effective customer experiences has become a central business imperative for every company in the world. InVision and Atlassian represent the essential platforms for organizations looking to unleash the potential of their design and development teams. We’re looking forward to all the opportunities to deepen our relationship on both a product and strategic basis, and build toward a more cohesive digital product operating system that enables every organization to build better products, faster.

InVision has been working to position itself as the Salesforce of the design world. Alongside InVision and InVision Studio, the company has also built out an asset and app store, as well as launched a small fund to invest in design startups. In short, InVision wants the design ecosystem to revolve around it.

Considering that InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500, it would seem that the strategy is paying off.

Social media stocks have had a rough time this year amid rising concerns surrounding fake news. More recently, the stocks were in question as the President accused internet and social media firms of...

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Toward the end of 2017, Instacart penned a partnership with one of the country’s biggest grocery retailers, Kroger. At the time, it was a smaller deal with one of Kroger’s chains called Ralphs.

But today Instacart is expanding its partnership with Kroger, bringing Instacart delivery to 75 additional Kroger markets, growing Instacart’s Kroger footprint by 50 percent nationwide. The expansion will be completed by late October, bringing Instacart delivery to more than 1,600 Kroger stores.

This builds on Instacart’s momentum, following partnership deals with chains like Albertsons, Aldi, Sam’s Club, and Loblaw.

In all, Instacart is now available to 70 percent of all households across the country. Last year, the company announced its goal to reach 80 percent of U.S. households by the end of 2018, and its most recent funding round seems to be propelling the startup to achieve that goal.

In February, Instacart raised $200 million led by Coatue Management, as well as Glade Brook Capital Partners and existing investors. The round valued Instacart at $4.2 billion.

Since Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, Instacart has been put in a challenging position. But, in many ways, that challenge has represented opportunity. The nearly $14 billion acquisition has spurred an even more rapid evolution of the grocery industry, leaving incumbents with a choice: Acquire (or build) your own delivery platform or partner with Instacart to compete with online grocery purchase and delivery from Amazon.

Some retailers, like Target, have chosen to purchase their own platform. But other big players, such as Albertsons and Sam’s Club, seem to have been motivated by the Whole Foods deal to partner up with Instacart.

This has grown Instacart’s marketplace to feature more than 300 different retail partners on the platform, which has in turn helped grow Instacart’s community of shoppers, which has topped 50,000 this year.

As this growth continues, a great deal is dependent on Instacart’s ability to maintain the quality of the product. But the company is also taking steps toward shoring up the platform. Instacart has begun testing a partnership with Postmates to help make deliveries during peak hours in San Francisco.

Editors Note: An earlier version of this post had a headline that said Instacart now serves 70 percent of U.S. households. It has been updated to reflect that Instacart is available to 70 percent of U.S. households.

Yanai Oron: There are some very interesting programs in Israel of large corporates creating commercialization programs. They would sometimes look for early-stage companies and sometimes late-stage....

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Paroon Chadha, Co-founder and CEO at Passageways. The company has been bootstrapped from Indiana to $10 million ARR and has recently raised funding....

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Sramana Mitra: When you say you are comfortable investing $250,000 to $2 million, what do you want to see in terms of validation to be willing to invest? Yipeng Zhao: A lot of the time, it depends on...

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In the past couple of decades, Elon Musk’s efforts with SpaceX have partially kicked off a space race in the VC-funded rocket startup scene. At Disrupt SF 2018, we’re thrilled to host a panel of some of Silicon Valley’s top investors whose firms are eyeing the stars.

Rob Coneybeer from Shasta Ventures, Tess Hatch from Bessemer Venture Partners and Matt Ocko from DCVC will all be joining us to discuss their points of view on the commercial space industry and where the major opportunities lie for startups looking to penetrate the market.

We’ll hopefully get a closer look at some of the dominating trends in the industry from the trio whose careers have taken them through legacy space companies and led them to make several investments in young space startups.

Rob Coneybeer is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, a firm he co-founded back in 2004. He has a masters in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked as an engineer in Martin Marietta’s Astro Space division earlier in his career. Coneybeer has directed a number of investments in the space sector, including Accion Systems, Spire and Vector.

Tess Hatch is an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. Hatch has a masters in aeronautical engineering from Stanford and has had stints at NASA, SpaceX, Northrup Grumman and Boeing previous to joining Bessemer. She’s currently the board observer for a number of the firm’s investments, including Spire and Rocket Lab.

Matt Ocko co-founded DCVC seven years ago and has continued to serve as the firm’s co-managing director. Ocko has several decades of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Since its co-founding, DCVC has made investments in Akash Systems, Capella Space, Descartes Labs, Planet and Rocket Lab.

We’ll be dialing into the attitudes among investors regarding the competitive arena and we’ll be looking for insights into how the esteemed group sees the industry transforming in the next decade.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5-7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

If you want to convert Netflix gift cards into dollars on a PayPal account, you usually have to find someone willing to do the same transaction in the other direction. It can quickly go wrong if you never receive your money.

Meet AirTM, a service that makes it easier to convert any form of money into any other form of money. You can deposit money using banks, gift cards, cash through Western Union and other equivalent services, cryptocurrencies and more. You can withdraw money through any of those protocols as well. AirTM is raising a $7 million Series A with BlueYard leading the round.

While many of you probably don’t see why you’d use a service like this, AirTM’s users in Venezuela are willing to pay high fees to convert their bolívars into anything else. Multiple years of hyperinflation have turned everyone’s savings into piles of bills that are worth close to nothing.

AirTM accounts aren’t bank accounts. When you create an account, you get an e-wallet in AirUSD. You can deposit and withdraw money as well as send and receive money. Depending on your payment method, you’ll get different fees.

For instance, there’s a huge supply of money from PayPal, which means that you’ll pay quite a lot to deposit money using PayPal and convert it into AirUSD.

While AirTM sounds great for money laundering, the company is a registered money service business and follow anti-money laundering and know-your-customer requirements. The company is just getting started as it manages $9 million in monthly transaction volume with 4,000 daily active users. But it’s clear that it has the potential of creating an alternative to traditional banking in countries with volatile currencies.