Sramana Mitra: Give us a flavor of what these companies are and how that aligns with your investment thesis. Help us understand your thought process in what about those companies have compelled you...

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Capital, crypto, and regulation go together like bread, peanut butter, and jelly. And what better way to make a great sandwich than to bring them all together at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’ll be leading a panel with Avichal Garg of Electric Capital, Arianna Simpson of Autonomous Partners, and Valerie Szczepanik of the SEC in San Francisco.

Garg is a longtime investor and former product head at Facebook. He’s currently at Electric Capital where he’s a managing partner. Simpson is a skilled crypto investor and is currently managing director at Autonomous Partners. Szczepanik has had a long career at the SEC and was recently named Associate Director of the Division of Corporation Finance and Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation. All three of them will help us navigate the new world of investment we are no all coming to face.

The future of investment is currently up in the air. With the rise of token sales, fundraising seems like a needless task for most founders. But where will they be with the token world fizzles out? Can the new funding tricks stack up to VC and angel investment?

We’ll explore these concepts in our wide-ranging discussion and hopefully Szczepanik can shed some light on these new forms of investment.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

TraceLink, a nine-year-old, software-as-a-service platform for tracking pharmaceuticals and trying to weed out counterfeit prescription drugs in the process, has raised $93 million in Series D funding. Most of the money — $60 million — was used to buy primary shares, with another $33 million used to buy up the shares of previous shareholders.

Georgian Partners led the round, with participation from Vulcan Capital and Willett Advisors, along with all of the company’s earlier investors. These include Goldman Sachs, whose growth equity arm had led the company’s $51.5 million Series C round last year, as well as FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital and F-Prime Capital.

As TC had reported at the time of that last round, TraceLink helps pharma companies comply with country-specific track-and-trace requirements through their supply chain, which has grown increasingly important following the passage of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in 2013. The consumer-protection measure aims to prevent individuals’ exposure to drugs that could be counterfeit, stolen, contaminated or otherwise harmful.

At the time of its enactment, it also gave the industry one decade before unit-level traceability becomes enforced, meaning the clock is ticking.

Like Uber, WeWork and a small-but-growing number of private companies, TraceLink also appears to be preparing for life as a publicly traded outfit by releasing some of its financial metrics, including, in TraceLink’s case, quarterly revenue and customer growth numbers.

Just last week, the company published its “financial growth highlights,” which include a 62 percent year-over-year increase in its second quarter revenue; a 42 percent year-over-year increase in all bookings over the same period; and two-year revenue compound annual growth rate of 71 percent.

In June, we reported on TraceLink’s initial $60 million of funding after spying an SEC form relating to its fundraising. The company, based in North Reading, Ma., has now raised $167 million altogether.

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to ask you some questions that would help us understand how to work with you for our entrepreneurs. Let’s double-click down on Sand Hill Angels. Could you please explain to...

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From new wearables that detect breast cancer to creating the industrial supply chain for the meat replacement industry, the latest crop of Y Combinator companies showcased the breadth of entrepreneurial innovation that encapsulates the waning days of 2018. While the entire batch of 63 companies was impressive, a few in particular caught our eye.

So take a look below at our picks for some of the hits from this year’s summer cohort of companies.

Oxygen

Breaking freelancers from the month-to-month boom-and-bust payment cycles that bind them, Oxygen provides working capital loans to freelancers who can go months without getting a paycheck. The company is more than willing to work with a group of borrowers who collectively make $1.4 trillion in 1099 income annually and who are locked out of loans. Oxygen offers flat-fee access to credit and free mobile banking, all while using machine learning to determine credit worthiness. Freelance workers of the world unite, indeed!

Why we liked it: Opening a new market in the lending space is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for the company that gets it right.

Higia

By monitoring thermal patterns inside a breast, the startup Higia hopes it can offer women a better, non-invasive method to detect breast cancer. The company’s wearable device, called EVA, can be placed under any sports bra, and offers a new way to fill the gaps that current screening techniques aren’t addressing — things like early breast cancer detection in women with high breast density. The company has already pre-sold 5,000 units in Mexico and will begin shipping them in the fall of 2018. Aiming for accurate and immediate risk assessments, Higia will release its device for $299, focusing on the U.S. market at first and moving forward with clinical trials at Stanford.

Read more about Higia here.

Why we liked it: A new diagnostic tool in the battle against breast cancer that clocks in at a reasonable price point for consumers could be a huge win for investors and the world.

C16 Biosciences

C16 Biosciences is aiming to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the globe with their lab-grown palm oil, an alternative to a product that is found in a truly massive amount of goods. C16’s alternative is grown in bioreactors and is 20 percent less expensive to customers but “doesn’t destroy the planet,” the company says.

The startup has already begun early partnerships with a number of beauty and food distributors that together spend $1.2 billion on palm oil annually.

Why we liked it: While everything old is new again in this venture capital cycle, highly touted technologies that were part of the first round of “clean tech” innovation have a chance to hit their stride in the current market.

JITX

Designing circuit boards as a service won JITX a spot in this latest batch of Y Combinator companies. Currently, every circuit board is designed manually by skilled engineers, but using JITX’s machine learning software, circuit boards can be created automatically, which can save both time and money for hardware companies. JITX is already selling circuit board designs that were totally computer generated and HP is on board, alongside at least one other major company they can’t name yet. The team out of Berkeley is taking aim at a $9.2 billion market, charging 20 percent of what a human-crafted design would cost.

Why we liked it: This startup is generating a ton of buzz already among investors, and while its current round is slated to clock in at $800,000, we’re hearing that it’s already three times oversubscribed. The draw? Put simply, the company is pitching a better way to make one of the building blocks of all tech hardware.

HoneyLove

HoneyLove aims to disrupt the traditional shapewear market by making an affordable, high-quality product that actually works.

The $89 product uses supportive structures inside the seams of the garment, similar to the flexible boning used in old-school corsets, and encases those structures in a soft channel of protective fabric. This simple enhancement ensures that the garment doesn’t bunch up around the legs or waistband. The company has already sold $500,000 in product

Read more about HoneyLove here.

Why we liked it: The market is huge and we’re hearing that the company’s early numbers are really, really promising.

Camelot

Camelot is a mobile app for esports betting… and one of the first companies to blaze a trail in the sure-to-be-lucrative business operating at the intersection of video gaming and sports betting. The company gives fans access to live updates and stats and an interface to bet against friends. In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, there are billions of dollars to be made facilitating betting in any sport — including esports. Camelot is rolling the dice that it can hit the right number in this emerging market.

Why we liked it: Sports betting is already a billion-dollar business (at least). Expect esports to follow the same trajectory.

Inokyo

Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go, with a cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of the app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you’ve picked up.

The first store is now open on Mountain View’s Castro Street, selling an array of kombuchas, snacks, protein powders and bath products.

Read more about Inokyo here.

Why we liked it: White-labeling the technology that Amazon and Alibaba have spent untold millions to perfect for a lower price and with rapid deployments for retailers is a persuasive pitch for any startup.

Hepatx

Hepatx is creating therapies for severely damaged livers. Chronic liver disease affects 3.9 million Americans and is the cause of death for more than 40,000. The founders of Hepatx are developing a regenerative solution enabling hepatocyte production for therapeutic purposes. That means regenerating liver cells to avoid the cost and morbidity of whole-organ transplant. More than 200,000 people in the U.S. need a liver transplant but only a few thousand get one. Hepatx aims to fix the liver by taking fat tissue, turning that into liver cells and introducing that into patients to regrow the liver.

Why we liked it: Regenerating or creating new liver tissue is a big swing at a problem that is literally life-or-death. With a solid founding team and positive early trials, Hepatx seems like it could be a home run.

Cambridge Glycoscience

Looking to bake the perfect treat with a sugar substitute that can mimic not just the sweetness, but the gooey caramelization and stickiness that typically only comes from real sugar? Well, YC company Cambridge Glycoscience has the sweetener for you. The company expects to produce its sugar substitutes at a cost that can make low- and no-sugar foods even more accessible for mainstream consumers. So toss that corn syrup and get ready for a new flavor revolution.

Their manufacturing process will let them produce their sugar substitute at scale and they have a patent portfolio to protect their innovation. Notably, they have signed letters of intent with five companies already, including Haribo.

Why we liked it: Roughly 74 percent of packaged foods and beverages in the U.S. are made with some form of sweetener, which would size that market at roughly $100 billion, according to an article in Fortune citing a study from The Lancet.  If Cambridge Glycoscience can make its replacement at scale, that’s a sweet opportunity.

Seattle Food Tech 

At this point the notion of tastier, better, plant-based meat substitutes is no longer a fantasy. Investors have poured millions into making it a reality. The pitch from Seattle Food Tech is making that tastier, better, cheaper plant-based meat substitute at scale. They are using novel and efficient food processing equipment and facilities that can enable large-scale, low-cost production that can transform the way institutional food service companies that supply the office and university cafeterias across the country deliver tasty foods to hungry breakfast, lunch, and dinner diners.

“We’re using aerospace engineering to make plant-based chicken nuggets,” says chief executive Christie Lagally, a former Boeing engineer and technical project manager.

Why we liked it: While the company’s pitch onstage emphasized those tasty nuggs, what makes Seattle Food Tech compelling is its potential to create an industrial supply chain for the meat replacement market.

Talla is taking aim at the customer service industry with its latest release, an AI-infused knowledge base. Today, the company released version 2.0 of the Talla Intelligent Knowledge Base.

The company also announced that Paula Long, most recently CEO at Data Gravity, has joined the company as SVP of engineering.

This tool combines customer content with automation, chatbots and machine learning. It’s designed to help teams who work directly with customers get at the information they need faster and the machine learning element should allow it to improve over time.

You can deploy the product as a widget on your website to give customers direct access to the information, but Rob May, company founder and CEO says the most common use case involves helping sales, customer service and customer success teams get access to the most relevant and current information, whether that’s maintenance or pricing.

The information can get into the knowledge base in several ways. First of all you can enter elements like product pages and FAQs directly in the Talla product as with any knowledge base. Secondly if an employee asks a question and there isn’t an adequate answer, it exposes the gaps in information.

“It really shows you the unknown unknowns in your business. What are the questions people are asking that you didn’t realize you don’t have content for or you don’t have answers for. And so that allows you to write new content and better content,” May explained.

Finally, the company can import information into the knowledge base from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira or wherever it happens to live, and that can be added to a new page or incorporated into existing page as appropriate.

Employees interact with the system by asking a bot questions and it supplies the answers if one exists. It works with Slack, Microsoft Teams or Talla Chat.

Customer service remains a major pain point for many companies. It is the direct link to customers when they are having issues. A single bad experience can taint a person’s view of a brand, and chances are when a customer is unhappy they let their friends know on social media, making an isolated incident much bigger. Having quicker access to more accurate information could help limit negative experiences.

Today’s announcement builds on an earlier version of the product that took aim at IT help desks. Talla found customers kept asking for a solution that provided similar functionality with customer-facing information and they have tuned it for that.

May launched Talla in 2015 after selling his former startup Backupify to Datto in 2014. The company, which is based near Boston, has raised $12.3 million.

Braavo, a startup that provides financing to mobile app developers, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.

The might not seem like much compared to the $70 million that Braavo announced raising last year, but that was debt financing, used to loan money to developers. This new round is equity financing, used to fund Braavo’s own operations and growth.

Co-founder Mark Loranger told me Braavo was founded in 2015 in response to the “new dynamics” of mobile app businesses. And it’s worked with developers including Verv, Fanatee and Pixite.

“The data is there to create ways to provide financing to companies that otherwise would have to raise more [venture funding] and dilute themselves,” Loranger said.

For its first financing product, Braavo looks at Apple App Store and Google Play data, specifically the amount of money already earned by an app but not yet paid out. It can then provide an advance on some of that revenue.

Loranger described Braavo’s newer product as “more exciting” and “more data-driven.” It looks at user acquisition, user engagement and revenue, projecting how revenue would grow if a developer had more money for user acquisition — and then it can provide debt financing for that growth.

Braavo gets paid back as “a fixed percentage of future earnings,” Loranger said, so its incentives are aligned with the developers: “We only make our money back as they earn more revenue in the future.” And if app revenue doesn’t grow as anticipated, that just means Braavo gets paid back more slowly.

“We’ve never, ever lost a dime,” he said.

The company is also announcing the launch of a new analytics product that will allow businesses to track key metrics like the lifetime value of their customers.

Loranger said this will be available for free to anyone to anyone with a “revenue-generating mobile app business.” Rather than charging for the product directly, the goal is to “create more success for mobile app business that may end up qualifying for funding.”

The new round brings Braavo’s total equity financing to nearly $8 million. It was led by e.ventures, with participation from SWS Venture Capital (founded by Green Dot CEO Steve Streit) and Shipt CEO Bill Smith.

IoT devices currently lack a standard way of applying security. It leaves consumers, whether business or individuals, left to wonder if their devices are secure and up-to-date. Foundries.io, a company that launched today, wants to change that by offering a standard way to secure devices and deliver updates over the air.

“Our mission is solving the problem of IoT and embedded space where there is no standardized core platform like Android for phones,” Foundries.io CEO George Grey explained.

What Foundries has created is an open and secure solution that saves everyone from creating their own and reinventing the wheel every time. Grey says Foundries’ approach is not only secure, it provides a long-term solution to the device update problem by providing a way to deliver updates over the air in an automated manner on any device from tiny sensors to smart thermostats to autonomous cars.

He says this approach will allow manufacturers to apply security patches in a similar way that Apple applies regular updates to iOS. “Manufacturers can continuously make sure their devices can be updated with the latest software to fix security flaws or Zero Day flaws,” he said.

The company offers two solutions, depending on the size and complexity of your device. The Zephyr RTOS microPlatform is designed for smaller, less complex devices. For those that are more complex, Foundries offers a version of Linux called the Linux OE microPlatform.

Grey claims that these platforms free manufacturers to build secure devices without having to hire a team of security experts. But he says the real beauty of the product is that the more people who use it, the more secure it will get, as more and more test it against their products in a virtuous cycle.

You may be wondering how they can make money in this model, but they do it by charging a flat fee of $10,000 per year for Zephyr RTOS and $25,000 per year for Linux OE. These are one-time prices and apply by the product, regardless of how many units get sold and there is no lock-in, according to Grey. Companies are free to back out any time. “If you want to stop subscribing you take over maintenance and you still have access to everything up to the point,. You just have to arrange maintenance yourself,” he said.

There is also a hobbyist and education package for $10 a month.

The company spun off from research at Linaro, an organization that promotes development on top of ARM chips.

To be successful, Foundries.io needs to build a broad community of manufacturers. Today’s launch is the first step in that journey. If it eventually takes off, it has the potential to provide a consistent way of securing and updating IoT devices, a move which would certainly be welcome.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 411th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Friday, August 24, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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Canvass Analytics, an AI-based predictive analytics platform that helps streamline industrial operations, announced today that it has raised $5 million in funding led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI investment fund. Bedrock Industries, Viaduct Ventures and returning investors Real Ventures and Barney Pell also participated.

This brings Canvass’ total raised so far to $7.5 million. The Toronto-based startup tells TechCrunch that the new capital will be used to pursue “aggressive sales growth,” with expanded account and technical sales teams in North America, the European Union and Asia, with the goal of signing up more Fortune 500 companies. Many of the companies it serves are in the automotive, aerospace, food and agriculture, energy and metals and mining sectors.

Founded in 2016, Canvass’ analytics platform works with IoT hardware to automatically identify inefficiencies in industrial operations and prevent equipment malfunctions, save energy and increase production. For example, Canvass says it has helped manufacturers reduce greenhouse gas emissions by tens of millions of pounds and also helped an agricultural processing company figure out the best end time for fermentation.

In a statement to press, Gradient Ventures founding partner Ankit Jain said “Autonomous operation is the holy grail of manufacturing and AI is the game-changer that is making it a reality across the industrial landscape. We’re backing Canvass Analytics because of its unique approach to implementing AI and predictive analytics quickly and in an automated manner, without the need for lengthy and often cost-prohibitive consulting engagements.”

According to a Pew Market research conducted a few years ago, more than 75% of parents in the US reached out to social media networks for parenting related issues. It is not just the US, but parents...

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For the past ten to fifteen years, a crop of newer brands have found themselves gobbling up marketshare via direct to consumer channels. Some offer a better value proposition on an existing product category, like Warby Parker and Casper, while others offer a reinvention of the category itself, like Outdoor Voices and Glossier.

TomboyX, which just closed a $4.3 million Series A round, seems to be doing a great job of both.

The company, founded by Fran Dunaway and Naomi Gonzalez, offers gender-neutral underwear for an affordable price to folks who often aren’t represented in mainstream media. The company says that it serves a diverse customer base, including plus-sized, gender non-conforming and specialized tradespeople.

The funding, which was led through funds advised by TAU in conjunction with Redbadge Pacific and SBI Investments Korea, brings total funding to $6.3 million. As part of the deal, LVMH Group former Chairman of North America Pauline Brown has joined TomboyX’s Board of Directors.

TomboyX started in 2013 after cofounder Fran Dunaway found herself struggling to find a Robert Graham-style button down shirt. After a brief run making fun, hip dress shirts, the founders realized that the brand name itself, TomboyX, was really resonating with customers. However, dress shirts didn’t exactly work as a hero product.

The company shifted to underwear in September of 2014, and that’s when things started to take off. TomboyX sold out of its boxer briefs for women in under two weeks, and tripled revenue over the course of the next six months.

“At that point, we realized that we should evaluate the possibility that we’re an underwear company,” said Dunaway.

At the end of 2015, the company revamped the website and removed everything from the website that wasn’t underwear. Before that, TomboyX offered belts, buckles, shoes, and was centered more around a look than a specific product.

Since, the company has stayed laser focused on underwear, swimwear and loungewear, and has seen 2000 percent growth over the last three years running. Dunaway says that TomboyX is the only apparel company who sells every item in XS all the way up to 4XL.

With the new funding, the focus turns to ramping up marketing and awareness, building out the team, and adding more efficiency to the production process.

Semmle, a startup that originally spun out of research at Oxford, announced a $21 million Series B investment today led by Accel Partners. It marked the second time Accel has led an investment in the company.

Work-Bench also participated in the round. Today’s investment brings the total to $31 million.

Semmle has warranted this kind of interest by taking a unique approach to finding vulnerabilities in code. “The key idea behind our technology is to treat code as data and treat analysis problems as simple queries against a database. What this allows you to do is very easily encode domain expertise, security expertise or any other kinds of specialist knowledge in such a way it can be easily and automatically applied to large amounts of code,” Pavel Avgustinov, Semmle co-founder and VP of platform engineering told TechCrunch.

Once you create the right query, you can continuously run it against your code to prevent the same mistakes from entering the code base on subsequent builds. The key here is building the queries and the company has a couple of ways to deal with that.

They can work with customers to help them create queries, although in the long run that is not a sustainable way of working. Instead, they share queries, and encourage customers to share them with the community.

“What we find is that the great tech companies we work with have the best security teams in the world, and they are giving back what they created on the Semmle platform with other users in an open source fashion. There is a GitHub repository where we publish queries, but Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing,” Oege de Moor, company CEO and co-founder explained.

In fact, the Semmle solution is freely available to open source programmers to use with their applications, and the company currently analyzes every commit of almost 80,000 open source projects. Open source developers can run shared queries against their code or create their own.

They also have a paid version with customers like Microsoft, Google, Credit Suisse, NASA and Nasdaq. They have relied mostly on these strategic partners up until now. With today’s investment they plan to build out their sales and marketing departments to expand their customer base into a wider enterprise market.

The company spun out of research at Oxford University in 2006. They are now based in San Francisco with 60 employees, a number that should go up with this investment. They received an $8 million Series A in 2014 and $2 million seed round in 2011.

Sramana Mitra: What is your focus? B2B or B2C? Gary Little: Both. I focus more on the B2B. I have a partner Rebecca Lynn who is strong in FinTech and healthcare IT. I have a partner Paul Hsiao who’s...

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Cootek, the Chinese mobile internet company best known for keyboard app TouchPal, has filed for a public offering in the United States. In its F-1 form, submitted last week to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cootek said it wants to raise up to $100 million.

The Shanghai-based company began operating in 2008, when TouchPal was launched, and incorporated as CooTek in March 2012. In its SEC filing, Cootek said it currently has 132 million daily active users, with average DAUs increasing 75% year-over-year as of June. It also said it achieved 453% total ad revenue growth in the six month period before June.

While AI-based TouchPal, which offers glide typing and predictive text, is Cootek’s most popular product, it also has 15 other apps in its portfolio, including fitness apps HiFit and ManFIT and a virtual assistant called Talia. The company uses its proprietary AI and big data technology to analyze language data collected from users and the Internet. Then it uses those insights to develop lifestyle, healthcare and entertainment apps. Together, those 15 apps reached an average of 22.2 million monthly average users and 7.3 million daily average users in June.

TouchPal itself had 125.4 million daily average users in June 2018, with active users launching the app an average of 72 times a day. It currently supports 110 languages.

Most of Cootek’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. It says net revenue grew from $11 million in 2016 to $37.3 million in 2017, or 238.5% year-over-year, while its net loss dropped from $30.7 million in 2016 to $23.7 million in 2017. It achieved net income of $3.5 million for the six months ending in June, compared to a net loss of $16.2 million in the same period a year ago.

Cootek plans to be listed under the ticker symbol CTK on the New York Stock Exchange and will use the IPO’s proceeds to grow its user base, invest in AI and natural language processing tech and improve advertising performance. The offering will be underwritten by underwritten by Credit Suisse, BofA Merrill Lync and Citi.

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

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What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. Instead of being restricted to rich accredited investors willing to pour $5,000 or even $500,000 into a traditional hedge fund that charges 2 percent fees and 20 percent of profits, Titan lets anyone invest as little as $1,000 for just a 1 percent fee on assets while keeping all the profits. Titan picks the top 20 stocks based on data mined from the most prestigious hedge funds, then invests your money directly in those with personalized shorts based on your risk profile.

Titan has more $10 million under management after quietly spinning up five months ago, and this week the startup graduates from Y Combinator. Now Titan is ready to give upscale millennials a more sophisticated way to play the markets.

This startup is hot. It refused to disclose its funding, likely in hopes of not tipping off competitors and incumbents to the opportunity it’s chasing. But it’s the buzz of YC, with several partners already investing their own money through Titan. When you consider Stanford-educated free stock-trading app Robinhood’s stunning $5.6 billion valuation thanks to its disruption of E*Trade, it’s easy to imagine why investors are eager to back Titan’s attack on other financial vehicles.

“We’re all 28 to 30 years old,” says co-founder Clayton Gardner about his team. “We want to actively invest and participate in the market but most of us who don’t have experience have no idea what we’re doing.” Most younger investors end up turning to family, friends or Reddit for unreliable advice. But Titan lets them instantly buy the most reputable stocks without having to stay glued to market tickers, while using an app to cut out the costs of pricey brokers and Wall Street offices.

“We all came from the world of having worked at hedge funds and private equity firms like Goldman Sachs. We spent five years doing that and ultimately were very frustrated that the experiences and products we were building for wealthy people were completely inaccessible to people who weren’t rich or didn’t have a fancy suit,” Gardner recalls. “Instead of charging high fees, we can use software to bring the products directly to consumers.”

How Titan works

Titan wants to build BlackRock for a new generation, but its origin is much more traditional. Gardner and his co-founder Joe Percoco met on their first day of business school at UPenn’s Wharton (of course). Meanwhile, Titan’s third co-founder, Max Bernardy, was studying computer science at Stanford before earning a patent in hedge fund software and doing engineering at a few startups. The unfortunate fact is the world of finance is dominated by alumni from these schools. Titan will enjoy the classic privilege of industry connections as it tries to carve out a client base for a fresh product.

“We were frustrated that millennials only have two options for investing: buying and selling stocks themselves or investing in a market-weighted index,” says Gardner. “We’re building the third.”

Titan’s first product isn’t technically a hedge fund, but it’s built like one. It piggybacks off the big hedgies that have to report their holdings. Titan uses its software to determine which are the top 20 stocks across these funds based on turnover, concentration and more. All users download the Titan iOS or Android app, fund their account and are automatically invested into fractional shares of the same 20 stocks.

Titan earns a 1 percent annual fee on what you invest. There is a minimum $1,000 investment, so some younger adults may be below the bar. “We’re targeting a more premium millennial for start. A lot of our early users are in the tech field and are already investing,” says Gardner.

For downside protection, Titan collects information about its users to assess their risk tolerance and hedge their investment by shorting the market index 0 to 20 percent so they’ll earn some if everything crashes. Rather than Titan controlling the assets itself, an industry favorite custodian called Apex keeps them secure. The app uses 256-bit encryption and SSL for data transfers, and funds are insured up to $500,000.

How have its bets and traction been doing? “We’ve been pleasantly surprised so far,” Gardner beams, noting Titan’s thousands of clients. It claims it’s up 10 percent year-to-date and up 33 percent in one year compared to the S&P 500’s 2 percent year-to-date and 22 percent in one year. Since users can pull out their funds in three to four business days, Titan is incentivized to properly manage the portfolio or clients will bail.

But beyond the demographic and business model, it’s the educational elements that set Titan apart. Users don’t have to hunt online for investment research. Titan compiles it into deep dives into top stocks like Amazon or Comcast, laying out investment theses for why you should want your money in “the everything store” or “a toll road for the Internet.” Through in-app videos, push notifications and reports, Titan tries to make its users smarter, not just richer.

With time and funding, “Eventually we hope to launch other financial products, including crypto, bonds, international equities, etc.,” Percoco tells me. That could put Titan on a collision course with Wealthfront, Coinbase and the recently crypto-equipped Robinhood, as well as direct competitors like asset managers BlackRock and JP Morgan.

“If we fast-forward 10 to 20 years in the future, millennials will have inherited $10 trillion, and at this rate they’re not equipped to handle that money,” says Gardner. “Financial management isn’t something taught in school.”

Worryingly, when I ask what they see as the top threats to Titan, the co-founders exhibited some Ivy League hubris, with Gardner telling me, “Nothing that jumps out…” Back in reality, building software that reliably prints money is no easy feat. A security failure or big drop could crater the app’s brand. And if its education materials are too frothy, they could instill blind confidence in younger investors without the cash to sustain sizable losses. Competitors like Robinhood could try to swoop in an offer managed portfolios.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that had banned gambling on sporting events in most states. That ruling is set to unlock billions of dollars in new business opportunities for online fantasy sports sites like DraftKings.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have DraftKings CEO Jason Robins join us on stage at Disrupt SF.

DraftKings launched back in 2012 and quickly grew into a household name by offering daily and weekly fantasy sports contests across a number of sports.

In fact, as of 2017, DraftKings had roughly 8 million users, and together with its top competitor FanDuel, the two companies owned more than 90 percent of the $2.6 billion daily fantasy sports market.

In 2016, DraftKings and FanDuel announced their intention to merge, but were met with resistance from the FTC who sued to block the merger. If it had been approved, the merger would have allowed both companies to combine resources with regards to regulatory approval and advertising spend.

At the time, Robins said that DraftKings has a “growing customer base of nearly 8 million, our revenue is growing over 30% year-over-year, and we are only just beginning to take our product overseas to the billions of international sports fans we have yet to even reach.”

At Disrupt, we’ll chat with Robins about the growth of the company, DraftKings’ plans for the 2018 NFL season, and what’s in store for the company following the Supreme Court ruling.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Amos Ben-Meir of Sand Hill Angels was recorded in...

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