Marketers are increasingly looking for social media celebrities and influencers who can promote their products with more authenticity (or at least, the appearance of authenticity) than a traditional ad.

So Altru CEO Alykhan Rehmatullah wondered: Why can’t businesses do something similar with recruiting?

And that’s what Altru is trying to accomplish, powering a page on a company’s website that highlights videos from real employees answering questions that potential hires might be asking. The videos are searchable (thanks to Altru’s transcriptions), and they also can be shared on social media.

The startup was part of the recent winter batch at Techstars NYC, and it’s already working with companies like L’Oréal, Dell and Unilever. Today, Altru is announcing that it’s raised $1.3 million in new funding led by Birchmere Ventures.

Rehmatullah contrasted Altru’s approach with Glassdoor, which he said features “more polarized” content (since it’s usually employees with really good or really bad experiences who want to write reviews) and where companies are often forced to “play defense.”

On Altru, on the other hand, employers can take the informal conversations that often take place when someone’s deciding whether to accept a job and turn them into an online recruiting tool. Over time, Rehmatullah said the platform could expand beyond recruiting to areas like on-boarding new employees.

Since these videos are posted to the company website, with the employees’ name and face attached, they may not always feel comfortable being completely honest, particularly about a company’s flaws. But at least it’s a message coming from a regular person, not the corporate-speak of a recruiter or manager.

Rehmatullah acknowledged that there’s usually “an educational process” involved in making employers more comfortable with this kind of content.

“These conversations are already happening outside your organization,” he said. “In the long-term, candidates expect more authenticity, more transparency, more true experiences.”

This summer’s wedding season required me to buy a new suit. I vowed to be adventurous and buy a color I normally never would have considered. Alas, I opted for a little more movie-theater usher and a little less Jidenna. Had I known about it at the time, I probably would have used Eison Triple Thread, a company that specializes in creating made-to-order suits.

Working with someone to create a suit can be a hard enough task. You have to consider the occasion the suit is for, body type, taste and other relevant factors. And what other suit company or department store doesn’t already do that? To differentiate itself from the crowd, Eison Triple Thread launched FITS, a web application that creates tailored looks based on clients’ lifestyles and musical preferences.

Eison founder and CEO Julian Eison was the fly kid on the playground and says his parents instilled in him a sense of presentation and to be his best when he was out and about.

“In terms of style and color I was super deliberate about what I wore,” he says. “I was the kid who collected Jordans and wanted to be fashionable because I just cared. I think through that process, and as I grew, I just started to embrace it.”

After six years in private equity, where he says he was able to see tech’s flow from the buy side and the sell side, Eison decided to combine his love of fashion and interest in tech. In 2014, he launched Eison Triple Thread from the garage of his San Francisco home to try his hand at creating an alternative to suit-buying at conventional big-box department stores.

“When we first launched the business, it was about visualization,” Eison says. “How can you visualize your body and think about something going on your body that fits you well?”

But Eison Triple Thread isn’t the only suit company that wants to outfit its customers in sleek styles in a made-to-order fashion. The likes of Indochino, Bonobos and Stitch Fix, all of which came before Eison Triple Thread, ultimately have the same goal. So what’s a suit company do to strike a difference between its competitors? Why, integrate artificial intelligence and Spotify data, naturally.

“Music is at the core of a lot of everyday life; it knows no boundaries or color, and it reveals something about us that we may not know that we kind of project onto people,” Eison says. “So we’re trying to get to the core, the unadulterated piece, and that’s music, and it drives a lot of our decisions, selections, identities and moods.”

During the onboarding process, users first log in to the FITS system with their Spotify credentials and take a lifestyle quiz. Questions include in which industry you work, how you dress for work, what your work commute is, how you spend your free time and which word best describes you. Eison says they can start generating data from this basic information.

“We’ve turned that into a lifestyle quiz that aims to reveal as much about a person in terms of their fashion, their interests, their preferences and how they typically like things to fit. That goes into our analysis and allows us to home in on this fit and this style.”

While you’re busy thinking about yourself to the best of your ability, FITS is trolling Spotify through its API to gather data about your musical tastes: genre, when you tend to listen to music and for how long. The process from beginning to end takes only about 15 minutes — unless, like me, you have a hard time selecting just one word from a list of four to describe yourself. Reflective, intense, upbeat, energetic: I am all of these things.

Once you complete the quiz, the web app returns a list of “looks,” as Eison calls them, based on data gleaned from your best answers to these questions. The looks come from a collection of images that Eison and product director Dario Smith curate regularly from the internet based on styles they deem worthy. Eison tells me they currently have 3,000 images in their database and curate additional ones seasonally to kick back to customers on a regular basis.

They pull the metadata of photos, including color pairing, assumed cloth texture and other similar data, which the algorithm uses, Eison says. In the next release, he said the company will be able to identify skin tone for those who upload the required photos. In addition, the company uses available photo metadata to understand geography of fashion. When available, Eison says, they are able to gain insight into local fashion and trends to further tune the algorithm.

“If there are X amount of styles, we want to make sure we have representation,” Eison says. “We can aggregate all these images and then serve those periodically based on how important or relevant they are.”

For my part, I answered the questions while Spotify worked in the background to make sense of my musical predilections: showtunes (your Hamiltons, your Ragtimes, your Cabarets), Jidenna, Calle 13, selections from Moana (yeah, that’s right), Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats and a smattering of old R&B.

The result was a list of 25 photos of men of varying ages, races and sizes in a wide range of suits pulled from the Eison database (see five of them below). I was excited about most of them, although there were a few too many double-breasted ones for my liking. That’s on me, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s a look I can pull off. Or maybe that’s the point of a system like this: To present something to someone that he or she might not think they’d ever look good in or visualize themselves even wearing.

Once you select the look you want, there might be further details to tend to, such as number and style of jacket buttons, button-hole color, the color and fabric of the jacket lining, waistband style on the pants and anything else you can possibly think of. One thing I could see in the future is the ability to place these looks on a picture of myself.

Once you make all of these very permanent decisions, you then have to be measured. Or measure yourself if you opted to do this at home. I was in the Eison studio, so Smith did the honors, measuring me in places I never thought needed to be measured. For instance, they noted posture, as well as the way my arms rest on the side of my body. Suddenly I realized why the clothes I’ve worn my entire adult life never fit me very well.

About two weeks later, you have a suit that you picked out not from a rack but one suggested for you based on your lifestyle and musical tastes. And it will fit only you. My suit fits. But because it’s tailored with my measurements, I’m not so surprised by that. The treat here is the unique application of Spotify and machine learning. Having the FITS system tell me to avoid buying a light gray suit is the permission I needed to step outside of my fashion comfort zone and don a look I most likely never would have otherwise. 

Not bad for a music-streaming platform and a little AI-style effort.

While there aren’t many VR hardware startups raising cash out there these days, there are far fewer that are securing investments to actually build the VR headsets themselves.

Even as established tech giants are having a rough go-ahead with the headset market, Beijing-based Pico Interactive is looking to give it a go with a focus on standalone VR headset hardware that can keep up with the innovations of larger firms.

Pico has closed a $24.7 million Series A led by GF Qianhe and GF Xinde Investment, with participation from Jufeng S&T Venture Investment and others, the company said in an announcement. This is the startup’s first bout of outside funding since its founding in 2015.

VR hardware had plenty of entrants around Pico’s founding, but as Oculus competitors were forced to slash prices to keep up with aggressive pricing, margins disappeared, leaving relatively scant space for startups. Pico has made its bet on moving past PC or console-based systems and focusing strongly on self-contained standalone headset options.

Coinciding with the funding announcement, Pico also offered details on a new standalone headset being released in China. Called the Pico G2, it’s an updated version of the Pico Goblin that is built on Qualcomm’s 835 chipset. The company’s hardware runs on HTC’s Vive Wave VR platform.

The company also says that it is planning to release its own augmented reality hardware in 2019.

Sramana Mitra: What do you make of unicorn mania? Silicon Valley is going crazy. India tends to be more conservative, but India went crazy too. Rajul Garg: We all plug into the same mothership....

___

On-demand delivery is painfully difficult. The margins are usually razor thin, each market is wildly different, and the business can be largely dependent on retailers’ willingness to jump into the digital age.

But DoorDash, which launched in 2013 out of Y Combinator, has been a dominant force in the space.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have DoorDash CEO Tony Xu join us at Disrupt SF in September.

In the five years since it’s launched, DoorDash has expanded to hundreds of markets in the U.S. The company, which offers delivery services for restaurants, liquor stores, and even gadget retailers like b8ta, has also penned partnerships with big retailers like Walmart for grocery delivery.

In fact, DoorDash has raised more than $700 million and has achieved unicorn status in its relatively short life.

Much of that success can be attributed to founder and CEO Tony Xu. The son of immigrants, Xu worked in his parents’ restaurant before heading off to Stanford. He then worked at McKinsey, eBay, and Square before bringing his knowledge and experience into the entrepreneurial realm.

This isn’t the first time we’ve hung out with Xu on the Disrupt stage. In 2016, Xu’s biggest focus was balance.

“Hardest part is keeping everything in balance,” he said. “There’s a couple dimensions to this: how do you invest the company’s capital effectively; how do you best serve the marketplace of three audiences, consumers/merchants/dashers; and how do you keep that in check. If you have too many of one, it’s a challenge, and we have the unique challenge where we have to solve product market fit across three audiences.”

While that challenge will always be a factor in DoorDash’s business, we’re particularly interested to hear about the company’s move into the evolving world of grocery delivery. There is plenty to discuss with Xu, and we hope you will join us at the conference, which runs September 5 to September 7.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the Early Bird rate until midnight tonight here.

Fred has built a wonderful company with a virtual architecture. Read on to see how. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,...

___

Kidbox, a subscription clothing box similar to Stitch Fix – but aimed at parents who dislike kids’ clothes shopping (aka all of us) – is now launching its own private label kids’ brands. At launch, the three clothing brands – Miki B., Kid’s Club, and Baby Basics – will join the startup’s over 130 existing brand partners, such as Adidas, DKNY, 7 for All Mankind, Puma, Jessica Simpson, Reebok, Diesel and others.

The company had said earlier this year that it would soon be branching out into its own brands with the arrival of its fall 2018 back-to-school box.

Having sent out its first box of clothing during the back-to-school shopping season in 2016, Kidbox now has two years of data under its belt to inform its designers what kids clothing is selling. Its boxes, similar to Stitch Fix, are put together after parents fill out a profile. The offer their kids’ sizing information, age, and what sort of styles, colors and patterns, they like and hate. Kidbox then preps a box accordingly, and anything the child doesn’t want – or mom or dad don’t want to buy, that is – can be sent back.

However, Kidbox heavily incentives its customers to keep the whole box – it’s around half a dozen items for under $100, which is reasonable. In fact, it can cost more to return items, as you then pay the price on the tag instead of receiving the whole-box discount.

With its new private labels, Kidbox aims to grow its margins further.

“We believe we’ve identified a void in the children’s apparel marketplace,” Kidbox CEO Miki Berardelli told TechCrunch this spring, when referencing its plans to sell its own clothing. “The style sensibility of our exclusive brands will all have a unique personality, and a unique voice that’s akin to how our customers describe themselves. It’s all really based on customer feedback. Our customers tell us what they would love more of; and our merchandising team understands what they would like to be able to procure more of, in terms of rounding out our assortment,” she said.

The company at the time was fresh on the heels of a $15.3 million Series B focused on scaling the business, which included bringing the new lines to its customers.

Kidbox’s brands will focus on the four main personality types of Kidbox shoppers, the company now explains. Miki B. represent a sort of “city cool” aesthetic, while Kid’s Club will encompass sporty athletic, modern casual, and classic preppy styles. Baby Basics, of course, includes baby items.

The lines were created by Kidbox’s own design team, which includes designers from brands like Tory Burch, Burberry, Bonobos, and J.Crew. The team focused on every aspect – like  fabric, color, pattern, and cut. They decided on using 100 percent cotton jersey, so the clothes will hold up and become wardrobe staples.

Each Kidbox shipment will now feature at least one of its own brands, the company says.

In addition to the new brands, Kidbox also teamed up with French Toast on a $68 uniform box for boys and girls that caters to kids whose schools enforce dress codes.

Kidbox today competes with other kids clothing subscription boxes like Rockets of Awesome, Kidpik, Mac & Mia, fabKids, and others. As a parent and customer of a couple of these, what I like about Kidbox is the wearability its items, which tend to be more practical choices, and its affordability. My child likes that the Kidbox often comes with a small surprise – and always includes crayons and stickers, too.

The company declines to share subscriber numbers, but touts 1.2+ million members of its “community” which encompasses social media fans, email subscribers, and paying customers.

The New York-based startup has $28 million to date from Canvas Ventures, Firstime Ventures, HDS Capital, plus strategic partners Fred Langhammer, former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., and The Gindi Family, owners of Century 21 department stores.

PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) recently reported a strong quarter that topped estimates but its revenue outlook missed estimates.   PayPal’s Financials For the second quarter, PayPal reported revenue of...

___

Ram Palaniappan: Then I asked them to fill out a web form if they needed money. Once I had the web form up, people who I didn’t know tried to use it. I got access to their employer’s time attendance...

___

For developers, the process of determining whether every new update is going to botch some core functionality can take up a lot of time and resources, and things get far more complicated when you’re managing a multitude of apps.

Test.ai is building a comprehensive system for app testing that relies on bots, not human labor, to see whether an app is ready to start raking in the downloads.

The startup has just closed an $11 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Also participating in the round were e.ventures, Uncork Capital and Zetta Venture Partners. Test.ai, which was founded in 2015, has raised $17.6 million to date.

“Every advancement in training AI systems enables an advancement in user testing, and test.ai is the leader in AI-powered testing technology. We’re excited to help them supercharge their growth as they test every app in the world,” Gradient Ventures founder Anna Patterson said in a statement. “In a couple years, AI testing will be ingrained into every company’s product flow.”

The company’s technology doesn’t just leverage AI to cut down on how long it takes for an app to be tested; there are much lengthier processes it helps eliminate when it comes to developers readying lists of scenarios to be tested. Test.ai has trained their bots on “tens of thousands of apps” to help it understand what an app looks like and what interface patterns they’re typically composed of. From there, they’re able to build their own scenario list and find what works and what doesn’t.

That can mean, in the case of an app like our own, tracking down a bookmark button and then deducing that there are certain process that users would go through to use its functionality.

Right now, the utility is in the fact that bots scale so broadly and so quickly. While a startup working on a single app may have the flexibility to choose amongst a few options, larger enterprises with several aging products having to grapple with updated systems are in a bit more of a bind. Some of Test.ai’s larger unnamed partners that “make app stores” or devices are working at the stratospheric level having to verify tens of thousands of apps to ensure that everything is in working order.

“That’s an easy sell for us, almost too easy, because they don’t have the resources to individually test ten thousand apps every time something like Android gets updated,” CEO Jason Arbon tells TechCrunch.

The startup’s capabilities operate on a much more quantitative scale than human-powered competitors like UserTesting, which tend to emphasize testing for feedback that’s a bit more qualitative in nature. Test.ai’s founders believe that their system will be able to grapple with more nebulous concepts in the future as it analyzes more apps, and that it’s already gaining insights into concepts like whether a product appears “trustworthy,” though there are certainly other areas where bots are trailing the insights that can be delivered by human testers.

The founders say they hope to use this latest funding to scale operations for their growing list of enterprise clients and hire some new people.

Gusto, which sells payroll, benefits and human resources management and monitoring services to small businesses, has raised $140 million in its latest round of funding.

The company said it will use the money to add new services to increase payment flexibility for employees. The company launched a new service called Flexible Pay, which gives employees a way to get paid no matter when a company’s pay schedule dictates.

The late-stage round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates portfolio, MSD Capital (the family investment fund for Michael Dell), Dragoneer Investment Group and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund.

Previous investors, including General Catalyst, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, 137 Ventures and Emergence Capital, also participated in the round.

The company claims that it processes tens of billions of dollars in payroll and offers a range of benefits, including health insurance, 401(k) plans and college savings plans.

Sramana Mitra: Have you seen any analysis or reporting on how many active entrepreneurs there are in the Indian ecosystem right now? Rajul Garg: I do remember seeing that at some point in time, but...

___

The dream of a startup founder can often be summarized by the following well-intentioned, and mostly delusional, quote: “We’ll raise a few rounds and in a few years we’ll IPO on Nasdaq.”

But a more likely scenario looks something like this:

You invest a few years of hard work to build something of value. One day you receive an acquisition offer out of the blue. You’re elated. And you’re not prepared. You drop everything to focus on this opportunity. Exclusive due diligence starts. Your company is a mess (IP, contracts, burn). Days become weeks; weeks become months. You’ve neglected business and fundraising. You’re running out of money. M&A is now your one and only option. The buyer says they found a bunch of cockroaches in the walls and drops the price. Now what?

Sound unlikely?

This is still a favorable situation: You had an offer! Think about how much time you invested in your various funding rounds. The hundreds of names and Google spreadsheet or Streak-powered quasi-CRM process.

Have you spent even a fraction of that on understanding exit paths? If you’d rather not live the situation described above, read along.

The E-word: A strange taboo

Investors live by exits, but many founders keep dreaming of unicornization and avoid the “E-word” until it’s too late. Yet, in 2016, 97 percent of exits were M&As. And most happened before Series B.

Exits matter because that’s when you, your team and your investors get paid. Oddly enough, and to use a chess metaphor, we hear a lot about the “opening game” (lean startup) and the “mid-game” (growth), but very little about this “end game.”

As a result, founders miss opportunities or leave money on the table. This is a shame. Our fund has more than 700 companies in portfolio. We want the best possible exit for each of them. And fortune favors the prepared! Now, how to get 700 exits (and counting)?

To explore the topic, we organized a series of Master Classes tapping corporate buyers, bankers, investors, lawyers and startup CEOs with M&A or IPO experience in San Francisco. It was a group that included the founders of Guitar Hero —  bought by Activision; JUMP Bikes —  a SOSV portfolio company bought by Uber, Ubiquisys —  bought by Cisco and Withings —  bought by Nokia. Each one for hundreds of millions.

Their observations can be summarized below.

Maximize optionality

“Founders must be aware of what contributes to an exit. This means understanding partnerships and how they are formed in the business space the entrepreneur is working in,” said one Master Class participant.  

As founders, you build your product, your company and… optionality. You need to understand the options open to your company, and take steps to enable them.

The most likely one is an acquisition, but there are others like IPO (including small cap), RTO, SBO, LBO, Equity Crowdfunding and even ICO.

“Exit is not a goal ​per se, but as a CEO it is something you should think about as early in your cycle as possible, while being business-focused,” said the London-based investor Frederic Rombaut, of Seraphim Capital.

Indeed, most participants said that exits should always be on the chief executive’s agenda, no matter how early in the process. “Exits should be on the CEO agenda. Not front and center, but on the agenda. M&A is a by-product of a great business and targeted BD. IPOs are always an option once you’ve built significant cashflow forecasting.”

It’s important to ask questions like: How many “strategic engagements” with potential buyers have you had this month? Is your message and value clear in their eyes? Have you considered an acquisition track in parallel to a fundraise?

It doesn’t stop there:

One thing is sure: The time to exit is not when you’re running out of money.

Companies are bought, not sold

Unicorn or not, the most likely exit is an acquisition.

As George Patterson, managing director at HSBC in New York said, “Good tech companies are bought, not sold. The question is thus: how to get bought?”

Patterson says it’s important to understand how mergers and acquisitions actually work; how to prepare a startup for an exit; and how to develop a “feel” for the market you’re exiting through and into.

How M&A works

Hearing from corp dev veterans from Cisco, Logitech, Dassault and IBM, a few key ideas emerged:

Motivations vary

It could be from least to most expensive, or as a mix, as listed by Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures:

How corporates find you

Corporates find deals via the development of partnerships, investment (CVC), their business units, corp dev research, media and investor connections.

Asked about the best approach, Todd Neville, manager of Corporate Business Development and Strategy at IBM (who gave the most detailed description of the corp dev process), said, “Do something cool to one of the IBM customers. If they rave about even a POC, we’re interested.”

In other words, business development is corporate development. 

Get the house in order

Buyers typically want to know three things:

For IP, they will check your contracts (staff and contractors), and run some automated code analysis for proprietary code and open source use. They will evaluate potential IP infringement. No point buying you if you end up costing more in lawsuits!

For your team skills: Sitting down with your engineers will tell them plenty enough without understanding the details of this or that algorithm. The last thing a corporate wants is to be accused of stealing!

Lawyers engaged early can help. The later the clean-up, the more costly and painful.

Develop a feel for your “market”

Develop relationships and create champions within corporates. It will help promote your deal when the time comes, and will let you keep your finger on the pulse of corporate strategy to time your moves.

Do you read the earning calls of Cisco or IBM (or others relevant to you)? This is where strategies are presented. Are your keywords coming up there or in their press releases?

Chris Gilbert, former CEO of Ubiquisys (sold to Cisco for more than $300 million) was very deliberate in planning his exit.

“Selling starts on day one and is a leadership-only function —  work out who will be your buyer. Only the CEO can do this. Constantly articulate why a company should buy you,” Gilbert said. Bring clear messages into the acquiring company so it can be presented upwards: give them the presentation you would like them to show their boss! When the time is right, force decisions through competition. If you know they have to buy you, your starting position is strong.”

The dark art of price discovery

There are dozens of formulas (from DCF to comparables) to evaluate a deal —  which also means none is “correct.” What matters is: How much would you sell for, and how much is the buyer ready to pay?

Gilbert, at Ubiquisys, described how close interactions with his banker helped drive the price up among the bidders assembled.

Just like buyers, we meet bankers and lawyers too rarely at startup events, but there is much to learn with them. They make deals happen, avoid value erosion and optimize price. They often also make introductions before you engage them, to build goodwill and earn your business.

And if you worry about fees, the right banker handsomely pays for itself by finding more bidders and playing “bad cop” for you, avoiding direct confrontation with your future employer. Do you want a slice of the watermelon or the whole grape?

Final twist: Exits are not exits

When asked about what happens after an M&A or IPO, buyers said they generally hoped the founders would stay with them for many years. Often using re-vesting, earn-outs or shares of the acquiring company to incentivize them. Neville, from IBM, mentioned a security company they acquired whose founder is now the head of one of the largest IBM divisions.

In the case of IPOs, supposedly the ultimate “exit,” any block of shares sold by founders would face extreme scrutiny and might cause a price drop.

So who’s exiting during those deals? Investors (and not always).

Eventually, if the average age of a startup at exit is 8-10 years, the active duty period of founders (if not replaced in the meantime) extends even more. Better love the problem you’re solving, and your customers!

Thanks to speakers, participants and supporters of this Master Class series:

London: Frederic Rombaut (Seraphim Capital), Joe Tabberer (FirstBank), Chris Gilbert (Ubiquisys), Jonathan Keeling (Crowdcube), Fred Destin, Tony Fish (AMF Ventures, James Clark (London Stock Exchange), Denise Law (SGCIB).

Paris: Frederic Rombaut (Seraphim Capital), Manuel Gruson (Dassault Systemes), Pierre-Henri Chappaz (Rothschild Global Advisory), Christine Lambert-Goue (All Invest), Olivier Younes (EXPEN), Eric Carreel (Withings), Fabien Bardinet (Balyo), Xavier Lazarus (Elaia Partners), Pierre-Eric Leibovici(Daphni). Jean de La Rochebrochard (Kima Ventures), Jeremy Sartre (SmartAngels), Gwen Regina Tan (Entrepreneur First).

San Francisco: Natasha Ligai (Logitech), Matt Cutler (Cisco),Will Hawthorne, (CODE Advisors), Ryan Rzepecki (JUMP Bikes), Charles Huang (Guitar Hero), Jeff Thomas (Nasdaq), Shahin Farshchi (Lux Capital), Ammar Hanafi (Moment Ventures), Adam J. Epstein (Third Creek Advisors), Nathan Harding (EKSO Bionics), Kate Whitcomb, Anthony Marino and Ethan Haigh (SOSV).

New York: Todd Neville (IBM), George Patterson (HSBC), Ryan Rzepecki (JUMP Bikes), Aaron Kellner (SeedInvest), Jeremy Levine (Bessemer Venture Partners), Taylor Greene (Collaborative Fund), Adam Rothenberg (BoxGroup), Eli Curi (Fenwick & West), Ian Engstrand and Salil Gandhi (Goodwin), Warren Spar(Sparring Partners Capital), Duncan Turner, Vivian Law and Sheng Ge (SOSV).

Marc Piette had a revelation as he buzzed in and out of the Palo Alto Airport in pursuit of his pilot’s license. Instead of freedom, he saw restraint. He also saw potential.

“It became pretty apparent that there were major issues with the general aviation industry with smaller aircraft,” Piette said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “And yet it had enormous potential to change the way people moved around.”

Now, Piette’s two-year-old autonomous-aviation startup Xwing is ramping up to unlock that potential. The company, which has kept a low profile since its founding, isn’t building autonomous helicopters and planes. Instead, it’s focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of small passenger aircraft.

The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Array Ventures, along with Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison and Nat Friedman of Xamarin, Microsoft and GitHub, also participated in the round.

The funding will be used by the San Francisco-based company to scale operations and continue to hire aerospace and software talent.

The startup has about a dozen employees, including some uniquely talented folks who have experience with optionally piloted vehicles, unmanned systems and certified avionics. For example, the company’s CTO, Maxime Gariel, worked on autonomous-aviation projects such as DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo autonomous helicopter. Other members of the small team previously worked at Rockwill Collins, with the Naval Research Lab, Google, and McKinsey.

Piette, whose last company Locu was acquired by GoDaddy, sees several restraints to small passenger aircraft: the skill level required to fly a plane and the cost of earning a pilot’s license and accessing a plane. The relatively puny sales volume of small aircraft — just 3,293 general aviation aircraft, including helicopters, were delivered last year worldwide, in contrast to more than 80 million cars — has depressed innovation and kept prices high.

And even when people have both a license and an aircraft, they still must travel from a small airport to their final destination.

The company is focusing on the key functions of autonomous flight, such as sensing, reasoning and control.

Xwing isn’t pinned to one kind of aircraft. Piette said the system is designed to work across different kinds of aircraft. For instance, the company spent 18 months testing on a subscale fixed-wing aircraft. It tested on a helicopter more recently.

Xwing is developing and integrating those technologies for rotorcraft, general aviation fixed-wing and the emerging electric vertical takeoff and landing (known as eVTOL) aircraft.

The company’s sensor integration software enables aircraft to perceive the world around it and reliably detect ground-based and airborne hazards and precisely determine the vehicle’s position.

This perception technology is the building block for autonomous aircraft, and also can be used to increase the operational envelope of current-day piloted aircraft, according to Xwing.

From here, the company’s Autonomy Flight Management System (AFMS) allows the aircraft to act upon the information from its surroundings. The system will integrate with air traffic control, generate flight paths to navigate the airspace, monitor system health and address all contingencies to ensure passenger safety, the company says.

Now, Xwing is in discussion with various, and still unnamed, large companies about integrating the system into their aircraft.

Poland-based CallPage offers something other customer interaction apps don’t: the ability to call your website visitors as soon as they click on your page. In a world where the difference between a sale and a click past your site onto Facebook, this is a pretty cool little feature.

CallPage began in 2015 when the founders, Ross Knap, Sergey Butko, and Andrew Tkachiv, tried to figure out why website visitors would leave their sites. They started out as a consultancy and the product was born out of some after-hours tinkering by the team. Instead of messaging users, they thought, why not let managers talk to them on the phone?

“Our widget analyzes user behavior on your website,” said CEO Knap. “Then when it sees an interested visitor, it offers him a free callback in 28 seconds. The interested visitor leaves a phone number on your site, our widget calls to the first available manager’s mobile phone and then the next one if no one picks up. After the conversation client will receive an SMS of thanks. It doesn’t require any extra work.”

The team raised a $4.5 million Series A from TDJ Pitango Ventures, Innovation Nest, and Market One Capital. They have 3,000 customers and it makes 280,000 calls monthly. The team started with a $50,000 seed check from an early investor.

Knap and the team have big plans.

“CallPage will continue the realization of our development plan,” said Knap. “The company is going to change into a product more from the perspective of ‘All your company calls in one place.’ The R&D department have already started working on using machine learning and AI which allows analyzing of hundreds of thousands of calls through the CallPage system. Thanks to this, companies will be able to run their communications more effectively.”

Sramana Mitra: You said you like early exits. Does that mean that if the company is raising more money after your angel round, you actually sell out on those rounds? Nitin Rai: If we have an...

___

In September of 2013, Jason Citron hopped on to the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage to pitch Fates Forever, a multiplayer online battle arena game for the iPad. Now, five years later, Citron is gearing up to join us once again on the Disrupt stage to discuss the stellar growth of Discord.

Though Fates Forever had all the components to be a great mobile game, users simply never took much interest. The company struggled to monetize, and like any good startup, the team began to reassess its own situation.

The conversation turned to communication, where the space contained a few players with lack-luster products.

“Can we make a 10X project?,” said CMO Eros Resmini, relaying the tale of the company’s pivot to TechCrunch. “Low-friction usage, no renting servers, beautiful design we took from mobile.”

That’s how Discord was born. The platform launched in 2015, and has since grown to over 130 million registered users, and has raised $150 million in funding.

Coming from the publishing side, the Discord team had a keen awareness of what gamers want and need: a clean, secure communications platform. Since launch, the team has launched features that let game developers integrate Discord chat into their own games, as well as video-chat and screen-sharing.

But the progress has not been without discord . The company shut down several servers associated with the alt-right for violating the terms of service, bringing Discord to the center of the on-going conversation around censorship and political bias.

That said, Discord has seemed to find its stride, forming partnerships with various esports organizations for verified servers.

There is plenty to discuss with Jason Citron at Disrupt SF, and we hope you’ll join us to check out the conversation live.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the early-bird rate until August 1 here.

John Stewart, CEO at MapAnything, discusses how he has bootstrapped his company using the “Bootstrapping Using Services on Salesforce.com” blueprint.

___