InkHunter, an augmented reality tattoo try-on app that was born out of a 48-hour hackathon back in the altogether gentler days of 2014, has bagged a place in Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch, scoring itself the seed accelerator’s standard $120,000 deal in exchange for 7 percent equity.

We first covered InkHunter in April 2016 when it had just launched an MVP on iOS and was toying with building a marketplace for tattoo artists. Several months and 2.5 million downloads later, InkHunter launched its Android app, having spent summer 2016 going through the ERA accelerator program in New York.

At that time the team was considering a B2B business model pivot, based on licensing their core AR tech to e-commerce apps and other developers. Though they wanted to keep the tattoo try-on app ticking over as a showcase.

Fast-forward two years and it’s the SDK idea on ice after InkHunter’s app gained enough traction in the tattoo community for the team to revive their marketplace idea — having passed eight million users — so they’ve relocated to Mountain View and swung back around to the original concept of a try-before-you buy tattoo app, using AR to drive bookings for local tattoo artists.

“We are focusing on iterating from ‘try’ to ‘try and buy’ experience, based on feedback we got from our users. And this is our goal for the YC program, which places a lot of focus on growth and user interactions,” CTO Pavlo Razumovskyi tells us.

“Last time we have talked, we did not expect such adoption on the tattoo market. But when we saw really strong usage and feedback from the tattoo community, we decided to double down on that audience.”

The newly added booking option is very much an MVP at this stage — with InkHunter using a Typeform interface to ask users who tap through with a booking request to input their details to be contacted later, via text message, with information about relevant local tattoo artists (starting with the U.S. market).

But the team’s hope for the YC program is help to hone their approach.

“While this approach doesn’t scale, it helps us to figure out problems and quickly iterate solutions,” he adds. “We are almost done with this stage, and close to launch an in-app search for tattoo artist into selected locations, listing only licensed artists with the large portfolio.”

InkHunter says close to half (45 percent) its users have expressed a desire to get a tattoo within the next few months, while it got more than 500 booking requests in the first week of the concierge feature.

Though you do have to wonder whether users’ desire to experiment with ink on their skin will also extend to a desire to experiment with different tattoo artists too — or whether many regular inkers might not prefer to stick with a tattooist they already know and trust, and whose style they like. (A scenario which may not require an app to sit in the middle to take repeat bookings.)

“We want to help them do this with as little regret as possible,” says CEO Oleksandra Rohachova of InkHunter’s tattoo-hungry users — so presumably the team will also be carefully vetting the tattoo artists they list on their marketplace.

The main function of the app lets users browse thousands of tattoo designs and virtually try them on using its core AR feature — which requires people spill a little real-world ink to anchor the virtual design by making a few pen marks on their skin where they want the tattoo to live. As use-cases for AR go it’s a pretty pleasing one.

InkHunter also supports taking and sharing photos — to loop friends’ opinions into your skin-augmenting decision, and help the app’s fame spread.

The team’s hope for the next stage of building an app business is once an InkHunter user has settled on the design and placement of their next tat, they’ll get comfortable about relying on the app to find and book an artist. And the next time, for their next tattoo too.

Comic book and graphic novel sales fell 6.5% in 2017 from a 2016 high of $1.015 billion. Graphic novels brought in $570 million while comic books brought in about $350 million.

A report posted to Comichron notes that comic stores are still the biggest source for revenue while $90 million is attributable to digital downloads.

“After a multiyear growth run, the comics shop market gave back some of its gains in 2017, with lackluster response to new periodical offerings and, consequently, graphic novel sales,” wrote Comichron’s John Jackson Miller. “The third quarter of 2017 saw the worst of the year-over-year declines, leading into what has turned out to be a stronger spring for stores in 2018.”

In a pattern that is now familiar in publishing, kids comics and graphic novels helped buoy the market. The same thing is happening regularly in the book market with kids titles selling briskly in print while adults abandon softcovers and hardcovers for digital downloads. While the “floppy” comic book is still clearly popular, the digital download is outpacing subscription sales but it still minuscule in comparison to print.

Interestingly, Comichron breaks up sales into comics, graphics novels, and digital downloads and it would be enlightening to compare digital sales broken up by book style. That said, it’s fascinating to see the medium change as consumption models shift to devices.

Sramana Mitra: For a B2B business, getting to hundred customers is not an easy thing to do. Gaurav Jain: For B2B, if they’re paying you $10 a month, getting 5000 customers is not hard. If you’re...

___

The startup financing game has changed. Seed funding used to be the harder round to get. But right now there are 500 to 600 micro-VCs in the market who are funding tons and tons of companies at the...

___

Sramana Mitra: The only danger I’m seeing in what you’re saying is there are a lot of artificially-bloated billion-dollar valuation companies out there. Your point is well-taken that showing that you...

___

After four consecutive quarters of surprising the market with stellar results, Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) delivered rather weak results recently. The market was disappointed with its lack luster growth,...

___

Sramana Mitra: What are the broad trends that you see in your network? Ross Elliott: The biggest single trend is, we see people beginning to recognize that they need to distribute their product both...

___

Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, who discussed his investment principles. It was an excellent discussion!

___

Zoox, a once-secretive self-driving car startup, is closing a $500 million raise at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Prior to the deal, Zoox was valued at $2.7 billion, Zoox confirmed to TechCrunch. The round, led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, brings its total amount of funding to $800 million.

Zoox’s plan, according to Bloomberg, is to publicly deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous. Meanwhile, ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft are also working on autonomous vehicles, as well as a number of other large players in the space.

Zoox, which turned four years old this month, is a 500-person company founded by Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson. In the meantime, head over to Bloomberg for the full rundown.

Sramana Mitra: When you say early, can you put a bit more color around that? Are you willing to do concept financing? Gaurav Jain: The short answer is yes. These days, it has gotten so cheap to build...

___

Scott Heiferman, Meetup CEO and co-founder, is today moving into the chairman role at the community-building startup.

Meetup launched in 2003 with a simple goal: to give communities an easy way to meet up in real life. The company has since grown to 40 million members, with 320,000 Meetup groups and around 12,000 Meetups per day around the world.

Late last year, WeWork acquired Meetup for a reported $200 million. According to WeWork, thousands of Meetups were already happening in WeWork locations. Plus, WeWork has been holding its own events focused on community building, so the acquisition seemed like a natural fit.

That said, Heiferman has spent 16 years running Meetup on a day-to-day basis, and is ready to move into a visionary role and appoint someone else to take over leading the team and scaling the company out further. Meetup co-founder Brendan McGovern is moving on from the company, but didn’t share with TechCrunch his future plans.

In the meantime, Meetup is looking for a new CEO.

Here’s what Heiferman had to say in an email to the company:

Team,

Here’s a little summary…

Today I announced I’ll be moving into the role of Chairman at Meetup, and we’re starting the search for a new CEO. Brendan will move on from Meetup at that point.

We hired 100 people so far this year, so we want to add to Meetup’s leadership team. I’ll become Chairman to make room for a new CEO who loves the day-to-day of leading a big team to serve millions of people.

Meanwhile, I’m most obsessed with Meetup reinventing itself to help a billion people create real community in the 2020’s.

The ultimate goal of these changes is for Meetup to have much more positive impact in the world. To be great at the here-and-now. And great at the around-the-corner.

This is a big deal, I know. I care deeply about finding a CEO who will add to this team, grow us, expand us, and make us better than before; a bold move and a fresh generation of leadership.

Scott

FAQs

What’s happening?

We’re looking for a new CEO of Meetup. After we find a new CEO, I’ll move into the role of Chairman. Brendan will move on (when the new CEO comes) to pursue new adventures.

What’s Chairman; what’s CEO?

CEO leads the team and is ultimately responsible for decisions and results. Chairman is involved in strategy and vision.

Why are we looking for a new CEO?

I’ve always been open to the boldest moves to serve our mission — that’s why we joined WeWork last fall. WeWork believes in our potential and they see the incredible opportunity we have to grow and innovate to serve the next 100 million — or billion — members. But to get there, we need more attention and clarity on operational excellence. By stepping into the role of Chairman, where my primary job will be focusing on the vision of serving 10X more people, we can bring in a leader whose primary talent is larger-scale operations and methodical growth processes to complement my skills and accelerate Meetup’s growth.

When is this happening?

The search is kicking off now. It’s a top priority but it could take time to find the right person to join our team. I’m highly involved in the search – as are Shiva Rajaraman and Adam Neumann. I will remain CEO until our new CEO starts, keeping us moving toward our goals.

What are we looking for in a CEO?

It’s a very high bar. Thankfully it’s one of the best jobs in the world. A few of the key criteria:

–Huge belief in our mission and potential
–Success leading a 250+ team to significantly grow a technology product (ideally consumer marketplace/platform/network) by methodically and strategically focusing on key levers
–Operates with the integrity and authenticity that’s always been a part of Meetup

What will the process be for interviewing and selecting a new CEO?

Shiva, Adam and I are primarily involved in the search and decision. All 12 Meetup Leadteamers will interview final candidates. The new CEO will report to Shiva.

Will there be more changes the leadership team?

There aren’t any changes planned right now. But we’re always open to Changing the Company, and Meetup is going to continue evolving to have the impact we want to have in the world.

Public company Ultimate Software is acquiring French startup PeopleDoc for $300 million in cash and stock. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. These two companies both make HR solutions.

Ultimate Software has been around for a while. It went public in 1998 and switched to a software-as-a-service solution in 2002 — this solution is called UltiPro. It lets you manage all things HR, from payroll to benefits, time management, onboarding, performance management and more.

PeopleDoc is a younger French startup that has raised over $50 million. As the name suggests, PeopleDoc lets you centralized all HR documents related to you in a single location. They can come from multiple sources and systems, they’ll all be there.

The startup has also worked on an onboarding solution and other tools to automate HR processes as much as possible. For instance, you can use PeopleDoc to communicate with the HR team and notify them of a change.

Ultimate Software has around 4,100 customers, which represent around 38 million employees. So it’s clear that the company is going after big clients. Each customer employs 9,200 people on average.

PeopleDoc has a thousand customers and serves 4 million employees. While PeopleDoc is significantly smaller than Ultimate Software, it’s a notable acquisition for the startup.

Ultimate Software says that it plans to spend $75 million in cash when the acquisition closes. PeopleDoc shareholders will receive another $50 million a year later.

Finally, Ultimate Software is spending around $175 million in stock for the rest of the acquisition. The company has been doing incredibly well on the stock market, consistently going up over the past ten years.

There are two reasons behind the acquisition. First, Ultimate Software has been mostly focused on American customers. With today’s acquisition, Ultimate Software will be able to convince new international customers, particularly in Europe.

Second, PeopleDoc will continue to operate as a subsidiary as these two companies don’t exactly do the same thing. In fact, Ultimate Software will start distributing PeopleDoc’s services to its own customers next year.

Early this year the Sustainable Oceans Alliance announced it would be starting its own accelerator with a focus on conservation. The nonprofit has just announced the Ocean Solutions Accelerator’s first wave of startups: a particularly varied and international lineup that’s easy to root for.

You may also remember that the SOA was one of the beneficiaries of the mysterious Pineapple Fund, administered by a mysterious cryptocurrency multimillionaire. No doubt that has helped get the accelerator on its feet in good time.

The startups — which I’m getting to, be patient — will receive an initial investment to cover the cost of relocating to the Bay Area for eight weeks this summer. There they will receive the loving care of the collection of academics, founders, officials and others in or around the Alliance, plus some important “personal development and executive training” intended to keep your company alive long enough to ship a product.

Interestingly, applications were only open to founders 35 years and under, presumably to get that young blood into the conservation game. Here are the five companies selected to take part:

SafetyNet, from London, makes light-emitting devices that attach to fishing nets and can be programmed to attract or discourage certain kinds of fish. This prevents a boat from catching — and subsequently throwing away — thousands of the wrong fish, a huge waste.

CalWave came out of Berkeley a couple of years ago and has been testing and refining its wave-harvesting renewable energy system, and in fact won a big Department of Energy grant just last year. Now presumably the team is looking to go from prototype to product and do some big installs.

Loliware has created seaweed-based straws and cups that are so compostable you can do it yourself — like, in your mouth. The items last for a day in a drink (or with a drink in them) but when you throw it away it’ll totally dissolve in about two months — or you could literally eat it. The New Yorkers were on Shark Tank and I’m guessing they ate one on camera. You can already order them on Amazon and people say they’re actually pretty tasty.

Etac, a Mexican company from Culiacan, has few details on its site, but SOA’s press release says the company “designs and produces functional nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications, such as oil spill and wastewater cleanup.” I believe them.

And because there can’t be an accelerator without a blockchain startup in it, there’s Blockcycle, based in Sydney, which aims to create a marketplace around waste materials that would normally go to the landfill but could also be valuable to recyclers, reusers and so on. (Turns out there was an uptick in blockchain applications after the Pineapple Fund thing.)

All five companies will present their ideas on September 11 at an event (specifically, a gala) timed to coincide with California Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. And then in October they’ll present again in Bali at the Our Ocean Youth Summit.

“These ocean entrepreneurs are a beacon of hope at a time when new, bold approaches are needed to fast-track innovation and sustain the health of our planet,” said SOA founder and CEO Daniela Fernandez. “By supporting these incredible startups, we are encouraging young people to take ownership of the environmental threats facing their communities, bet against consensus and re-invent existing markets to benefit, instead of harm, our climate, and ocean.”

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 407th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, July 19, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

___

Gero Decker is Co-founder and CEO at Signavio, an enterprise software company that has successfully scaled to $20 million in ARR from Europe. They have also made a successful entry into the US market...

___

Sramana Mitra: How do you process unicorn mania? Andrew Romans: If you look at how many companies achieve a billion-dollar valuation and how many venture financers there are in this region, it’s...

___

San Mateo-based spend management firm Coupa (Nasdaq: COUP) went public more than two years ago. Its IPO has performed well as it continues to surpass market expectations and receive accolades for its...

___

As Amazon looks to increasingly expand its cashier-less grocery stories — called Amazon Go – across different regions, there’s at least one startup hoping to end up everywhere else beyond Amazon’s empire.

Standard Cognition aims to help businesses create that kind of checkout experience based on machine vision, using image recognition to figure out that a specific person is picking up and walking out the door with a bag of Cheetos. The company said it’s raised an additional $5.5 million in a round in what the company is calling a seed round extension from CRV. The play here is, like many startups, to create something that a massive company is going after — like image recognition for cashier-less checkouts — for the long tail businesses rather than locking them into a single ecosystem.

Standard Cognition works with security cameras that have a bit more power than typical cameras to identify people that walk into a store. Those customers use an app, and the camera identifies everything they are carrying and bills them as they exit the store. The company has said it works to anonymize that data, so there isn’t any kind of product tracking that might chase you around the Internet that you might find on other platforms.

“The platform is built at this point – we are now focused on releasing the platform to each retail partner that signs on with us,” Michael Suswal, Co-founder and COO said. “Most of the surprises coming our way come from learning about how each retailer prefers to run their operations and store experiences. They are all a little different and require us to be flexible with how we deploy.”

It’s a toolkit that makes sense for both larger and smaller retailers, especially as the actual technology to install cameras or other devices that can get high-quality video or have more processing power goes down over time. Baking that into smaller retailers or mom-and-pop stores could help them get more foot traffic or make it easier to keep tabs on what kind of inventory is most popular or selling out more quickly. It offers an opportunity to have an added layer of data about how their store works, which could be increasingly important over time as something like Amazon looks to start taking over the grocery experience with stores like Amazon Go or its massive acquisition of Whole Foods.

“While we save no personal data in the cloud, and the system is built for privacy (no facial recognition among other safety features that come with being a non-cloud solution), we do use the internet for a couple of things,” Suswal said. “One of those things is to update our models and push them fleet wide. This is not a data push. It is light and allows us to make updates to models and add new features. We refer to it as the Tesla model, inspired by the way a driver can have a new feature when they wake up in the morning. We are also able to offer cross-store analytics to the retailer using the cloud, but no personal data is ever stored there.”

It’s thanks to advances in machine learning — and the frameworks and hardware that support it — that have made this kind of technology easier to build for smaller companies. Already there are other companies that look to be third-party providers for popular applications like voice recognition (think SoundHound) or machine vision (think Clarifai). All of those aim to be an option outside of whatever options larger companies might have like Alexa. It also means there is probably going to be a land grab and that there will be other interpretations of what the cashier-less checkout experience looks like, but Standard Cognition is hoping it’ll be able to get into enough stores to be an actual challenger to Amazon Go.