Sinemia continues its campaign to take advantage of MoviePass’s high-profile struggles and win over the better-known movie ticket subscription service’s customers. Today, it announced a new plan priced at $9.99 per month.

MoviePass, after all, recently announced that it would be keeping its monthly subscription price at $9.95, but limiting subscribers to three movies per month (with discounts on additional tickets).

The new Sinemia tier also includes three tickets each month, but it has the additional benefit of allowing subscribers to buy tickets for any 2D, non-IMAX screen, and to buy those tickets in advance. MoviePass, in contrast, is rotating the available movies each day, and it requires subscribers to buy their tickets at the theater, on the same day as the screening.

Just a couple weeks ago, Sinemia announced a refer-a-friend program that rewards subscribers who convince their friends to leave other subscription services. The company makes no secret of the fact that it’s targeting MoviePass in particular — in today’s announcement, it describes the new plan as one that “matches MoviePass’ latest.”

Sinemia offers a variety of other options, ranging from $3.99 per month for one ticket, to $14.99 for three tickets, with IMAX and 3D access.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your portfolio. What are the highlights that you’ve invested in? Especially help us understand at what stage you got involved. What excited you about that particular...

___

If you’re a rider on Deliveroo, you can now follow courses on OpenClassrooms and get certificates of achievement for free. You get a free Premium Solo account, which is worth €20 per month ($23.44).

You’ll find courses in French, English and Spanish on many technical and non-technical topics. For instance, you can learn a programming language, UI or project management skills. But you can also follow courses on marketing, leadership and more.

OpenClassrooms is a freemium platform, which means that anyone can access courses for free. But a premium account lets you access additional materials and more features to study at your own pace. You also get certificates of achievement when you go through an entire course.

This isn’t groundbreaking news for Deliveroo riders, but it’s good to see that the company wants to take care of its “partners” with perks — I’m sure they’d rather become employees with traditional benefits.

As long as you’ve worked with Deliveroo for the past three months, you can renew your free Premium Solo subscription. It is limited to some countries for now. In the future, Deliveroo and OpenClassrooms plan to offer Premium Plus subscriptions with grants.

This subscription tier lets you sign up to a path that leads to a diploma and a job. It usually costs €300 per month and replaces traditional universities for those who want to work on the side. It takes months or even years to complete a path.

OpenClassrooms received a $1 million grant from Google.org to develop this program. They pitched the idea to Google’s charitable arm in order to help freelancers learn new skills. As part of this project, OpenClassrooms will create new courses on accounting, business opportunities and other useful skills for freelancers. Deliveroo is the first platform to benefit from this program.

Nebula Genomics, the startup that wants to put your whole genome on the blockchain, has announced the raise of $4.3 million in Series A from Khosla Ventures and other leading tech VC’s such as Arch Venture Partners, Fenbushi Capital, Mayfield, F-Prime Capital Partners, Great Point Ventures, Windham Venture Partners, Hemi Ventures, Mirae Asset, Hikma Ventures and Heartbeat Labs.

Nebula has also has forged a partnership with genome sequencing company Veritas Genetics .

Veritas was one of the first companies to sequence the entire human genome for less than $1,000 in 2015, later adding all that info to the touch of a button on your smartphone. Both Nebula and Veritas were cofounded by MIT professor and “godfather” of the Human Genome Project, George Church.

The partnership between the two companies will allow the Nebula marketplace, or the place where those consenting to share their genetic data can earn Nebula’s cryptocurrency called “Nebula tokens” to build upon Veritas open-source software platform Arvados, which can process and share large amounts of genetic information and other big data. According to the company, this crossover offers privacy and security for the physical storage and management of various data sets according to local rules and regulations.

“As our own database grows to many petabytes, together with the Nebula team we are taking the lead in our industry to protect the privacy of consumers while enabling them to participate in research and benefit from the blockchain-based marketplace Nebula is building,” Veritas CEO Mirza Cifric said in a statement.

The partnership will work with various academic institutions and industry researchers to provide genomic data from individual consumers looking to cash in by sharing their own data, rather than by freely giving it as they might through another genomics company like 23andMe .

“Compared to centralized databases, Nebula’s decentralized and federated architecture will help address privacy concerns and incentivize data sharing,” added Nebula Genomics co-founder Dennis Grishin. “Our goal is to create a data flow that will accelerate medical research and catalyze a transformation of health care.”

Datree, an early-stage startup based in Israel, wants to help companies create a set of policies for their applications, and apply them in GitHub before a commit goes live. Today, it announced $3 million in seed funding from TLV partners.

The check was actually written last September, according to the founders, and they are making the investment public today.

Like many Israeli startups, before they wrote a line of code, they did their research talking to 40 companies, and found a common pain point in modern development techniques. Code was being committed ever faster and teams were more widely distributed. Instead of a monolithic application, you had containerized microservices, often being built by disparate teams. All of this came together in GitHub .

The team decided that the best way to deal with this kind of chaos was to try to bring some order to it by creating a catalogue of development teams and their work. The idea was to bring these teams and their work together in a central place, then apply a set of internal best practices to their code to catch any policy violations before they committed the code. It’s important to note that they only extract metadata to build this catalogue.

If you can use Datree to confirm that each pull request in GitHub complies with a set of internal policies in an automated fashion, you could potentially save your development teams a lot of pain trying to track down issues after the commit.

This is of course, the whole idea behind the DevOps model. The developers develop as fast as they can and operations is responsible for making sure the code is in decent shape, secure and complies with company policy before it gets published. Datree has created a report engine to scan all this code and report on what aligns with the policies and what doesn’t in an automated fashion. They also recognized that not every policy is rigid and that there will be exceptions, and they allow for that too.

Right now, it’s early days and the company consists of the three founders and 5 additional people “in a garage in Tel Aviv.” They are working with six design partners including HoneyBook, SimilarWeb and PlayBuzz on early versions of the solution, but they have a vision, and they have $3 million to build it out and see if it has a market fit. They plan to split their time between San Francisco and Tel Aviv as they attempt to expand their market.

Cloud-based life sciences solution provider Veeva (NYSE: VEEV) recently announced its second quarter results that outpaced market expectations. The company’s robust performance has helped its stock...

___

Natural Cycles, a Swedish startup which touts its body temperature-based algorithmic method for tracking individual fertility as an effective alternative to hormonal birth control, has been wrapped by the UK advertising regulator which today upheld three complaints that an advert the company ran last year via Facebook’s platform was misleading.

The regulator has banned Natural Cycles from running the advert again, and warned it against exaggerating the efficacy of its product.

The ad had stated that “Natural Cycles is a highly accurate, certified, contraceptive app that adapts to every woman’s unique menstrual cycle. Sign up to get to know your body and prevent pregnancies naturally”, and in a video below the text it had also stated: “Natural Cycles officially offers a new, clinically tested alternative to birth control methods”.

The company has leaned heavily on social media marketing to target its ‘digital contraception’ app at young women.

“We told Natural Cycles Nordic AB Sweden not to state or imply that the app was a highly accurate method of contraception and to take care not to exaggerate the efficacy of the app in preventing pregnancies,” said the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) handing down its decision.

While Natural Cycles gained EU certification for its app as a contraceptive in February 2017, and most recently FDA clearance for marketing the app as a contraception in the US (with the regulator granting its De Novo classification request this month), those regulatory clearances come with plenty of caveats about the complexity of the product.

The FDA, for example, warns that: “Users must be aware that even with consistent use of the device, there is still a possibility of unintended pregnancy.”

At the same time, Natural Cycles has yet to back up the efficacy claims it makes for the product with the scientific ‘gold standard’ of a randomized control trial. So users wanting to be able to compare the product’s efficacy against other more tried and tested birth control methods (such as the pill or condoms) are not able to do so.

No birth control method (barring abstention) is 100% effective of course but, as we’ve reported previously, Natural Cycles’ aggressive marketing and PR has lacked nuance and attempted to downplay concerns about the complexity of its system and the chance of failure even though the product’s performance is impacted by multiple individual factors — from illness, to irregular periods. Which risks being irresponsible.

In the ruling, the ASA flags up the relative complexity of Natural Cycles’ system vs more established forms of contraception — pointing out that:

The Natural Cycles app required considerably more user input than most forms of contraception, with the need to take and input body temperature measurements several times a week, recording when intercourse had taken place, supplemented with LH measurements, abstention or alternative methods of contraception during the fertile period.

The company also remains under investigation in Sweden by the medical regulator after a local hospital reported a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of the app. A spokesperson for the Medical Products Agency told us that it has finalized its investigation and plans to publish the findings next week.

Despite all that, Natural Cycles’ website bills its product as “effective contraception”, claiming the app is “93% effective under typical use” and making the further (and confusingly worded) claim that: “With using the app perfectly, i.e. if you never have unprotected intercourse on red days, Natural Cycles is 99% effective, which means 1 woman out of 100 get pregnant during one year of use.”

Perfect use of the app actually means a woman would accurately perform daily measurement of her body temperature without fail or fault, and before she’s even sat up in bed, at least several times a week, correctly inputting the data. Forgetting to do so once because — say — you got up to go to the toilet or were otherwise interrupted before taking or inputting a reading could constitute imperfect use.

The BBC spoke to a women who says she made the decision to use the app after seeing that 99% effective claim in Natural Cycles’ marketing on Instagram — and subsequently fell pregnant while using it. “I was sort of sucked into this “99% effective” [claim],” she told the broadcaster. “You know “even more effective than the pill”… What could possibly go wrong?”

In its ruling, the regulator said it investigated two issues related to the advert run by Natural Cycles on Facebook on July 20, 2017, and both issues were upheld.

The complaints were that Natural Cycles’ advert included misleading and unsubstantiated claims — specifically that the product was: 1. “Highly accurate contraceptive app”; and 2. “Clinically tested alternative to birth control methods”.

Natural Cycles told the ASA that the latter claim is in fact a quote from a Business Insider article which it “considered to be correct” and had thus reproduced in its marketing.

After taking expert evidence, and reviewing three published papers on accumulated data obtained from the app, the regulator deemed the combination of the two claims to be misleading.

It writes:

We considered that in isolation, the claim “clinically tested alternative to birth control methods” was unlikely to mislead. However, when presented alongside the accompanying claim “Highly accurate contraceptive app”, it further contributed to the impression that the app was a precise and reliable method of preventing pregnancies which could be used in place of other established birth control methods, including those which were highly reliable in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Because the evidence did not demonstrate that in typical-use it was “highly accurate” and because it was significantly less effective than the most reliable birth control methods, we considered that in the context of the ad the claim was likely to mislead.

The ASA also found the advert to have breached rules for substantiation and exaggeration of marketing messages in the Medicines, medical devices, health-related products and beauty products category, as well as being misleading.

At the time of writing Natural Cycles had not responded to requests for comment. Update: A spokeswoman has now emailed us the following statement in response to the ASA ruling:

We respect the outcome of the investigation by the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) into one Facebook advertisement, which ran for approximately 4 weeks in mid-2017. The investigation was initiated nearly 12 months ago and the advertisement was removed as soon as we were notified of the complaint.

This investigation triggered an internal review of all our advertisements and the way that we communicate more broadly, to ensure our message is clear and provides women with the information they need to determine if Natural Cycles is right for them.

As part of these efforts, every advertisement now undergoes a strict approval process by a dedicated taskforce to ensure that it gives an accurate overall impression to the viewer. We actively seek feedback from Natural Cycles users to help us improve the quality of our communications and, moving forwards, we plan to work even more closely with HCPs, women and our user community to test and refine our marketing approach.

Natural Cycles has been independently evaluated and cleared by regulators in Europe and the US based on clinical evidence demonstrating its effectiveness as a method of contraception.

This report was updated with comment from the Swedish medical products regulator, and with comment from Natural Cycles

Sarah Kunst has filed to raise $10 million for her debut venture capital fund, Cleo Capital. According to Axios, the firm will give cash to female entrepreneurs who will act as scouts. 

Scouts look for viable early-stage startups for firms to invest in and then receive a cut of the profits on the investments. Kunst, pictured above, is a scout for Sequoia; it’s unclear if that will change now that she’s running her own firm. She’s also the founder of ProDay, a fitness tech startup that had raised at least $500,000 from angel investors, including Arielle Zuckerberg, but folded earlier this year.

We’ve reached out to Kunst for comment.

Cleo isn’t the only female-focused fund with which Kunst is involved. She joined Bumble as a senior adviser in February, and earlier this month, the popular dating app announced the launch of a VC fund targeting early-stage startups with women at the helm. Kunst is co-leading fund strategy alongside Bumble’s COO, Sarah Jones Simmer.

It’s no surprise Kunst is working to deploy capital to the next generation of female-founded companies. She’s been actively championing female and minority founders at least for the last several years and was one of the most vocal in the industry during tech’s #MeToo moment.

She spoke to The New York Times last year about her experience with 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who sent her inappropriate messages on Facebook in 2014. McClure followed up with a public apology in the form of a Medium post titled “I’m a creep. I’m sorry,” and shortly after resigned from the accelerator. 

Kunst spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt last year a few months after The New York Times piece was published. On a panel focused on diversity in tech, she called out tech founders for a lack of diverse hiring practices: “I do this crazy thing that is hiring people that aren’t just white dudes. It works really great — you guys should try it,” she said.

In 2017, only 11.3 percent of partners at VC firms were women, according to PitchBook data. Female founders, meanwhile, raised just 2.2 percent of all venture funding.

On the bright side, it looks like more women are fundraising on the other side of the table. Women-run VC firms have gathered nearly $2.5 billion so far this year, putting them on pace to surpass last year’s decade high of $3.2 billion. That includes Cowboy Ventures’ $95 million fundraise and Aspect Ventures’ $181 million sophomore vehicle. Cowboy is led by Aileen Lee, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, while Aspect is co-led by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing director Jennifer Fonstad and former Accel partner Theresia Gouw.

Venture capitalists are still hungry for food delivery startups.

Foodsby, the provider of a lunch delivery service based out of Minneapolis, has raised a $13.5 million Series B led by Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking. Greycroft Partners, Corazon Capital and Rally Ventures also participated. With the new capital, Foodsby plans to expand to 15 to 25 new markets. The round brings Foodsby’s total raised to $21 million.

“We have established a successful model for new market entry with a tried and true combination of talent and technology,” Foodsby founder and CEO Ben Cattoor said in a statement. “We look forward to building on our early successes and learnings to deliver continued growth for our investors and our team.”

Founded in 2012, the company connects employees in office buildings in 15 cities with local restaurants. How it works: A hungry worker uses Foodsby to pre-order a meal from a restaurant in its network, Foodsby aggregates all the orders it receives, sends the orders to the restaurants and the restaurants then make all the deliveries at once, streamlining what can be a logistically complicated process. 

That strategy, the company says, sets Foodsby apart from competitors. Because Foodsby only works with businesses and has restaurants make the deliveries rather than its own fleet of delivery agents, the overall costs of the operation are lower. It’s free to join the Foodsby network as both a company that wants to provide the service to its employees and as a restaurant. Deliveries cost $1.99 per person. 

While continued VC support may give the company a vote of confidence, the food delivery space is crowded and competitive. Foodsby is not unlike Peach, a Seattle-based office lunch delivery service that shed one-third of its staff in March. Peach had also landed VC support, raising about $11 million from Madrona and others. Munchery, another similar meal delivery service, also looks to be in hot water, laying off 30 percent of its workforce in May and ceasing operations in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.

Food delivery startups are hit or miss, but VCs continue to flock to investment rounds in hopes of betting on the next Uber of food delivery — though Uber itself is really the Uber of food delivery, its food delivery service is reportedly the most profitable arm of the ride-hailing giant. And Uber, much like Amazon, is not a company you want to be going head-to-head with. 

Back in January, we told you about a young, Austin, Tex.-based startup that fights online disinformation for corporate customers. Turns out we weren’t alone in finding it interesting. The now four-year-old, 40-person outfit, New Knowledge, just sealed up $11 million in new funding led by the cross-border venture firm GGV Capital, with participation from Lux Capital. GGV had also participated in the company’s $1.9 million seed round.

We talked yesterday with co-founder and CEO Jonathon Morgan and the company’s director of research, Renee DiResta, to learn more about its work, which appears to be going well. (They say revenue has grown 1,000 percent over last year.) Our conversation, edited for length, follows.

TC: A lot of people associate coordinated manipulation by bad actors online with trying to disrupt elections here in the U.S. or with pro-government agendas elsewhere, but you’re working with companies that are also battling online propaganda. Who are some of them?

JM: Election interference is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of social media manipulation. Our customers are a little sensitive about being identified, but they are Fortune 100 companies in the entertainment industry, as well as consumer brands. We also have national security customers, though most of our business comes from the private sector.

TC: Renee, just a few weeks ago, you testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about how social media platforms have enabled foreign-influence operations against the United States. What was that like?

RD: It was a great opportunity to educate the public on what happens and to speak directly to the senators about the need for government to be more proactive and to establish a deterrent strategy because [these disinformation campaigns] aren’t impacting just our elections but our society and American industry.

TC: How do companies typically get caught up in these similar practices?

JM: It’s pretty typical for consumer-facing brands, because they are so high-profile, to get involved in quasi-political conversations, whether or not they like it. Communities that know how to game the system will come after them over a pro-immigration stance for example. They mobilize and use the same black market social media content providers, the same tools and tactics that are used by Russia and Iran and other bad actors.

TC: In other words, this is about ideology, not financial gain.

JM: Where we see this more for financial gain is when it involves state intelligence agencies trying to undermine companies where they have nationalized an industry that competes with U.S. institutions like oil and gas and agriculture companies. You can see this is the promotion of anti-GMO narratives, for example. Agricultural tech in the U.S. is a big business, and on the fringes, there’s some debate about whether GMOs are safe to eat, even though the scientific community is clear that they’re completely safe.

Meanwhile, there are documented examples of groups aligned with Russian intelligence using purchased social media to circulate conspiracy theories and manipulate the public conversation about GMOs. They find a grain of truth in a scientific article, then misrepresent the findings through quasi-legitimate outlets, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that are in turn amplified by social media automation.

TC: So you’re selling software-as-a-service that does what exactly?

JM: We have a SaaS product and a team of analysts who come out of the intelligence community and who help customers understand threats to their brand. It’s an AI-driven system that detects subtle social signs of manipulation across accounts. We then help the companies understand who is targeting them, why, and what they can do about it.

TC: Which is what?

JM: First, they can’t be blindsided. Many can’t tell the difference between real and manufactured public outcry, so they don’t even know about it when it’s happening. But there’s a pretty predictable set of tactics that are used to create false public perception. They plant a seed with accounts they control directly that can look quasi-legitimate. Then they amplify it via paid automation, and they target specific individuals who may have an interest in what they have to say. The thinking is that if they can manipulate these microinfluencers, they’ll amplify the message by sharing it with their followers. By then, you can’t put the cat back in the bag.  You need to identify [these campaigns] when they’ve lit the match, but haven’t yet started a fire.

At the early stage, we can provide information to social media platforms to determine if what’s going on is acceptable within their policies. Longer term, we’re trying to find consensus between governments and also social media platforms themselves over what is and what isn’t acceptable — what’s aggressive conversation on these platforms and what’s out of bounds.

TC: How can you work with them when they can’t even decide on their own policies?

JM: First, different platforms are used for different reasons. You see peer-to-peer disinformation, where a small group of accounts drives a malicious narrative on Facebook, which can be problematic at the very local level. Twitter is the platform where media gets its pulse on what’s happening, so attacks launched on Twitter are much more likely to be made into mainstream opinion. There are also a lot of disinformation campaigns on Reddit, but those conversations are less likely to be elevated into a topic on CNN, even while they can shape the opinions of large numbers of avid users. Then there are the off-brand platforms like 4chan, where a lot of these campaigns are born. They are all susceptible in different ways.

The platforms have been very receptive. They take these campaigns much more seriously than when they first began looking at election integrity. But platforms are increasingly evolving from more open to more closed spaces, whether it’s WhatsApp groups or private Discord channels or private Facebook channels, and that’s making it harder for the platforms to observe. It’s also making it harder for outsiders who are interested in how these campaigns evolve.

What do you do if you’re a European startup competing against the likes of Box and Dropbox, and are looking to make a splash in international markets like the U.S.?

Well, if you’re the Dutch startup WeTransfer (which raised a cool $25 million about three years ago to take the U.S. market by storm), you get weird. Really, really, avant garde-level weird.

The latest overture to the hipsterati is the company’s three video set collaboration with King Krule (which I applaud for no other reason than it lets me write about King Krule on the site).

Here’s the first video from the collaboration between the (Beyonce-and-Tyler-the-Creator-and-New-Yorker-approved) artist and the file transfer and storage service.

The King Krule collab isn’t the first time that WeTransfer looked to cash in on some cultural cache. The company has teamed up with McSweeney’s on a story collaboration called “Clean” written by Shelly Oria and Alice Sola Kim.

Whether or not these forays into the world of the Kool Kidz are the result of a shift in strategy brought on by the company’s relatively new chief executive, Gordon Willoughby (formerly of Amazon), they’re pretty great. (At least, in the sense that we’re writing about WeTransfer for the first time in a few years.)

I can’t say whether WeTransfer’s file sharing service is notably better or worse than Box or Dropbox, but their hipster cred is undeniable. Points to you, WeTransfer. Points to you.

A fund affiliated with the Singaporean government has a great interest in making sure that American consumers are getting the tech support they need.

Temasek, the multi-billion-dollar investment fund associated with the government in Singapore, has led a $50 million round for Puls Technologies, Inc., a San Francisco-based company aiming to be the tech support for American homes and offices.

Current investors Sequoia Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners, Samsung NEXT and Viola Ventures all participated in the new financing, alongside additional new investors Hanaco Ventures and Hamilton Lane.

Founded only three years ago, Puls pitches a service that can match consumers with the appropriate technician in a little over an hour, any day of the week.

The company has built a network of 2,500 technicians in the top 50 cities in the United States, and will provide same-day installation and repair of over 200 products.

Some things the company’s technicians can service include smartphones, televisions, antennas, garage door openers and smart home devices like voice-activated speakers, video doorbells, keyless locks, AI cameras, thermostats and security systems.

It’s the full circle of consumer electronics crap.

“As consumers depend on electronic devices for every aspect of daily life, the world needs a new service model,” said Eyal Ronen, Puls co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “No one should have to drive across town and stand in line to speak to an expert, or wait hours at home for a local repair van to show up.”

With the new funding, the company said it’s poised to take a large chunk of the $50 billion in home automation services around the world. By the end of 2018, the company predicts there will be 11 billion connected devices globally (although that statistic likely includes connected equipment in factories and other technologies related to the Internet of Things that may not have a place in the home).

The company’s projections are also based on a forecast that predicts an average household will have 50 connected devices (to which I can only say… bless their hearts).

“We’re delighted to have Temasek leading this round,” said Ronen in a statement. “As investors in global online leaders, Temasek brings incredible expertise to our board. It’s a huge vote of confidence in our vision, team and execution, as we accelerate our direct-to-consumer business and expand strategic partnerships with big name retailers, insurance companies, and hardware OEMs.”

Puls raised a $25 million round last year as it completed its rebrand from the cell phone servicing business it had been running under the CellSavers brand.

“You can’t hack what isn’t there,” Very Good Security co-founder Mahmoud Abdelkader tells me. His startup assumes the liability of storing sensitive data for other companies, substituting dummy credit card or Social Security numbers for the real ones. Then when the data needs to be moved or operated on, VGS injects the original info without clients having to change their code.

It’s essentially a data bank that allows businesses to stop storing confidential info under their unsecured mattress. Or you could think of it as Amazon Web Services for data instead of servers. Given all the high-profile breaches of late, it’s clear that many companies can’t be trusted to house sensitive data. Andreessen Horowitz is betting that they’d rather leave it to an expert.

That’s why the famous venture firm is leading an $8.5 million Series A for VGS, and its partner Alex Rampell is joining the board. The round also includes NYCA, Vertex Ventures, Slow Ventures and PayPal mafioso Max Levchin. The cash builds on VGS’ $1.4 million seed round, and will pay for its first big marketing initiative and more salespeople.

“Hey! Stop doing this yourself!,” Abdelkader asserts. “Put it on VGS and we’ll let you operate on your data as if you possess it with none of the liability.” While no data is ever 100 percent unhackable, putting it in VGS’ meticulously secured vaults means clients don’t have to become security geniuses themselves and instead can focus on what’s unique to their business.

“Privacy is a part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We should be able to build innovative applications without sacrificing our privacy and security,” says Abdelkader. He got his start in the industry by reverse-engineering games like StarCraft to build cheats and trainer software. But after studying discrete mathematics, cryptology and number theory, he craved a headier challenge.

Abdelkader co-founded Y Combinator-backed payment system Balanced in 2010, which also raised cash from Andreessen. But out-muscled by Stripe, Balanced shut down in 2015. While transitioning customers over to fellow YC alumni Stripe, Balanced received interest from other companies wanting it to store their data so they could be PCI-compliant.

Now Abdelkader and his VP from Balanced, Marshall Jones, have returned with VGS to sell that as a service. It’s targeting startups that handle data like payment card information, Social Security numbers and medical info, though eventually it could invade the larger enterprise market. It can quickly help these clients achieve compliance certifications for PCI, SOC2, EI3PA, HIPAA and other standards.

VGS’ innovation comes in replacing this data with “format preserving aliases” that are privacy safe. “Your app code doesn’t know the difference between this and actually sensitive data,” Abdelkader explains. In 30 minutes of integration, apps can be reworked to route traffic through VGS without ever talking to a salesperson. VGS locks up the real strings and sends the aliases to you instead, then intercepts those aliases and swaps them with the originals when necessary.

“We don’t actually see your data that you vault on VGS,” Abdelkader tells me. “It’s basically modeled after prison. The valuables are stored in isolation.” That means a business’ differentiator is their business logic, not the way they store data.

For example, fintech startup LendUp works with VGS to issue virtual credit card numbers that are replaced with fake numbers in LendUp’s databases. That way if it’s hacked, users’ don’t get their cards stolen. But when those card numbers are sent to a processor to actually make a payment, the real card numbers are subbed in last-minute.

VGS charges per data record and operation, with the first 500 records and 100,000 sensitive API calls free; $20 a month gets clients double that, and then they pay 4 cent per record and 2 cents per operation. VGS provides access to insurance too, working with a variety of underwriters. It starts with $1 million policies that can be much larger for Fortune 500s and other big companies, which might want $20 million per incident.

Obviously, VGS has to be obsessive about its own security. A breach of its vaults could kill its brand. “I don’t sleep. I worry I’ll miss something. Are we a giant honey pot?,” Abdelkader wonders. “We’ve invested a significant amount of our money into 24/7 monitoring for intrusions.”

Beyond the threat of hackers, VGS also has to battle with others picking away at part of its stack or trying to compete with the whole, like TokenEx, HP’s Voltage, Thales’ Vormetric, Oracle and more. But it’s do-it-yourself security that’s the status quo and what VGS is really trying to disrupt.

But VGS has a big accruing advantage. Each time it works with a clients’ partners like Experian or TransUnion for a company working with credit checks, it already has a relationship with them the next time another clients has to connect with these partners. Abdelkader hopes that, “Effectively, we become a standard of data security and privacy. All the institutions will just say ‘why don’t you use VGS?'”

That standard only works if it’s constantly evolving to win the cat-and-mouse game versus attackers. While a company is worrying about the particular value it adds to the world, these intelligent human adversaries can find a weak link in their security — costing them a fortune and ruining their relationships. “I’m selling trust,” Abdelkader concludes. That peace of mind is often worth the price.

Spotinst, the startup that helps companies purchase and manage excess cloud infrastructure capacity, announced a hefty $35 million Series B today led by Highland Capital.

Existing investors Leaders Fund, Intel Capital and Vertex Ventures also participated. Today’s round brings the total investment to over $52 million.

Cloud infrastructure vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform run massive data centers to have enough capacity at any given moment to respond to customer demand. That means there are always going to be some machines sitting idle. To make use of this excess capacity, the vendors offer deep discounts of up to 80 percent, but there’s a catch.

If the vendor needs that virtual machine at any given moment, the discount customers are going to get kicked off. That leaves developers wary of putting anything critical on the discounted servers, no matter how much they are saving.

That’s where Spotinst comes in. “With machine learning and artificial intelligence, Spotinst can predict trends of availability. We know how long an instance will live and we can smoothly move our customers from one instance to another, allowing them to run complex or mission critical applications,” Spotinst co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar told TechCrunch.

He sees the two trends of developers moving toward serverless and containerization really helping to drive his business growth. The company announced support for Lambda, AWS’s serverless product, last fall and they are also seeing a big rise in the use of containers. “What we’ve seen in the past six months is that our containers offering is growing exponentially month over month. And as customers are deploying containers we’re able to run them on excess capacity, and save them huge amounts of money,” he explained.

Shachar is clear that they are not offering a brokerage service here. Instead, his customers sign up for Spotinst as a cloud service, and his company makes money by taking a percentage of the money customers save by using this spot capacity.

The company began by working with AWS spot instances, but has since expanded its market to include Google and Microsoft extra capacity as well. In the future, depending on their requirements, customers could potentially move across clouds seamlessly if they wish, moving to wherever the best available price is at any given moment, using Spotinst to manage the transitions. While that’s not something they offer now, it is on the roadmap, he says.

It’s worth noting that just yesterday, VMware bought CloudHealth Technologies, a company that helps customers manage a multi-cloud environment from a single console. Shachar acknowledges that a company like his could be also be an attractive target for a large company, but he and his co-founders are only looking toward building the business and continuing to improve the product.

The company currently has 100 employees, but with the additional investment, Shachar expects to double that in the next year between their U.S. office in San Francisco and their engineering office in Tel Aviv.

Planday, the workforce collaboration platform for shift workers, has raised €35 million in new funding. The Series C round is led by SEB Private Equity, with participation from previous backers, including Creandum and Idinvest.

The Danish startup plans to use the additional investment to further develop the cloud-based software and to expand into new markets across Europe and North America. This will also include establishing a U.K.-based technology development hub — which represents a major market for Planday — as well as to grow sales and customer support teams in its London office.

Founded in 2013, Planday has developed a flexible rota scheduling platform that is used by businesses to help manage shift workers. The cloud software enables “real-time, contextual communication” between employees, managers and co-workers in shift-based industries that have been traditionally underserved by tech.

Specifically, employees can communicate with each other, swap shifts and clock in and out. Managers can also create ‘smart’ schedule templates, measure their target revenue compared to wage costs and track hours worked.

Planday is also arguably a platform in the true sense of the word, in terms of integrating with integrating with various third-party software offerings that are used by shift-based businesses. This includes payroll/accounting software from Intuit and Sage, and EPOS software from Lightspeed and iZettle.

“Our mission is to deliver fully integrated solutions that provide a seamless experience for our customers,” says John Coldicutt, Chief Commercial Officer at Planday.

Meanwhile, Planday says its customer base spans 39 countries, and in the U.K., where it is estimated that 26 percent of all work is shift-based, the startup is growing 250 percent annually, although it doesn’t break out actual numbers.

  We spent six days in August 2018 at Brijrama Palace, a heritage hotel in Varanasi, and loved every moment of it. With me were my elderly parents. I am an experienced traveler. Thus, this...

___

Reaching event organizers to help them sell tickets isn’t cheap. Eventbrite — the 12-year-old, San Francisco-based ticketing company that announced plans last week to go public and sell $200 million worth of shares on the NYSE — has been losing money since 2016, posting losses of $40.4 million in 2016, $38.5 million for 2017 and $15.6 million so far this year.

Now the company is trying to make up for some of those losses by announcing a new pricing scheme. Today, it sent customers a note explaining that for those using its “Essentials” package (unlike its “Professional” package, whose bells and whistles include customer support, customer questions for attendees and more), reduced prices are coming for many. Specifically, payment processing fees are dropping from 3 percent to 2.5 percent. Fees for tickets are falling from .99 cents to .70 cents.

The moves don’t really mean that Eventbrite is charging less. In fact, instead of charging one percent of every ticket price as a service fee, Eventbrite will now take a 2 percent cut, which should add up for organizers that use the service for bigger events. It’s also removing a service fee cap of $19.99 that it used to institute no matter how much an event organizer was charging.

Asked about the pricing changes, a spokesperson sent us a fairly bland statement: “At Eventbrite we have always been committed to enabling event creators to deliver a diverse range of live experiences by offering a superior product at a fair price. The changes we announced today will mean lower ticket fees for the vast majority of our creators, and the millions of people that attend the events they plan, promote and produce each year. We succeed when our creators succeed and this change is indicative of a focus on ensuring we make the best decisions for the majority of our customers.”

It isn’t surprising that Eventbrite is looking for ways to fight rising acquisition costs owing to the competition it faces from all corners. In addition to platforms for smaller get-togethers like Paperless Post and competition for bigger events like Ticketmaster (which owns Live Nation), Eventbrite acknowledged in its S-1 filing that it could face competition from large internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, too.

Eventbrite had reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO back in July. As noted on TechCrunch’s “Equity” podcast last week by Susan Mac Cormac, a partner at the global law firm Morrison Foerster, companies often file confidentially first if they are exploring other options, including, most notably, M&A.

“These unicorns,” says Mac Cormac, “it’s difficult for them to go public because they have such a huge valuation to begin with that M&A is often a better option. You don’t want to go out and have your stock fall 30, 40, 50 percent as sometimes happens.”

Partly through acquisitions, Eventbrite saw its revenue rise from $133 million in 2016 to $201 million last year. Last year, for example, Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly, a ticketing company that focused largely on the live entertainment industry and which had sold to the streaming music company Pandora in 2015 for a reported $335 million but Eventbrite was able to nab last year at the discounted price of $200 million.

Eventbrite has also made a broader international push in recent years, acquiring Ticketea, one of Spain’s leading ticketing providers, back in April, and acquiring Amsterdam-based Ticketscript back in January of last year. And those deals followed roughly half a dozen others.

Over the years, the company has raised roughly $330 million from investors, according to Crunchbase. Its biggest shareholders, shows its S-1, are Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital and T. Rowe Price. Collectively, the three entities own roughly half of Eventbrite’s pre-IPO shares.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Yipeng Zhao of Embark Ventures was recorded in...

___

VMware is hosting its VMworld customer conference in Las Vegas this week, and to get things going it announced that it’s acquiring Boston-based CloudHealth Technologies. They did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Reuters is reporting the price is $500 million.

CloudHealth provides VMware with a crucial multi-cloud management platform that works across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, giving customers a way to manage cloud cost, usage, security and performance from a single interface.

Although AWS leads the cloud market by a large margin, it is a vast and growing market and most companies are not putting their eggs in a single vendor basket. Instead, they are looking at best of breed options for different cloud services.

This multi-cloud approach is great for customers in that they are not tied down to any single provider, but it does create a management headache as a consequence. CloudHealth gives multi-cloud users a way to manage their environment from a single tool.

VMware’s chief operating officer for products and cloud services, Raghu Raghuram, says CloudHealth solves the multi-cloud operational dilemma. “With the addition of CloudHealth Technologies we are delivering a consistent and actionable view into cost and resource management, security and performance for applications across multiple clouds,” Raghuram said in a statement.

CloudHealth began offering support for Google Cloud Platform just last month. CTO Joe Kinsella told TechCrunch why they had decided to expand their platform to include GCP support: “I think a lot of the initiatives that have been driven since Diane Greene joined Google [at the end of 2015] and began really driving towards the enterprise are bearing fruit. And as a result, we’re starting to see a really substantial uptick in interest.”

It also gave them a complete solution for managing across the three of the biggest cloud vendors. That last piece very likely made them an even more attractive target for a company like VMware, who apparently was looking for a solution to buy that would help customers manage across a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

The company had been planning future expansion to manage not just the public cloud, but also private clouds and data centers from one place, a strategy that should fit well with what VMware has been trying to do in recent years to help companies manage a hybrid environment, regardless of where their virtual machines live.

With CloudHealth, VMware not only gets the multi-cloud management solution, it gains its 3000 customers which include Yelp, Dow Jones, Zendesk and Pinterest.

CloudHealth was founded in 2012 and has raised over $87 million. Its most recent round was a $46 million Series D in June 2017 led by Kleiner Perkins. Other lead investors across earlier rounds have included Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and .406 Ventures.

French cloud hosting company OVH just announced a new CEO. Michel Paulin is now heading the company. Founder Octave Klaba remains Chairman of the Board and plans to focus on the big picture.

Paulin recently worked at telecom company SFR. If you look further in the past, he also was a key member at Neuf Cegetel, another telecom company. He overlooked the IPO of Neuf Cegetel and the merger with SFR more than ten years ago.

While telecom companies and cloud hosting companies aren’t the same thing, it sounds like Paulin could bring his operational and M&A experience at OVH.

OVH is currently trying to morph its cloud offering into a leading alternative service to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. The company is currently working on simplifying its offering and attracting new clients.

The company currently has 2,500 employees and generated $488 million in revenue in 2017 (€420 million). OVH still plans to invest a ton of money in hiring more people, opening more data centers and launching new offerings.

The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. More recently, OVH got a $467 million credit line (€400 million) from multiple banks to expand aggressively. The new executive team could help when it comes to… executing this roadmap.