There is perhaps no firm that has done as much to promote the adoption of Ethereum as the dominant cryptocurrency platform for actual product development as Consensys.

Founded by Ethereum Foundation co-founder Joe Lubin, Consensys has emerged as an investor, accelerator, educator and product developer in its own right in little more than three years that it has been in existence.

A Princeton-educated roboticist and autonomous vehicle researcher, Lubin has become a billionaire through his bet on Ethereum as the cryptocurrency that would win the hearts and minds of developers.

And with Consensys he’s built an empire that spans the globe. From its headquarters in Brooklyn, Consensys now has operations, offices and partnerships in Ireland, Israel, and Singapore, and the global expansion shows no sign of slowing down.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Joe Lubin, Chief Marketing Officer Amanda Gutterman, and Chief Strategy Officer Sam Cassatt join us on the Disrupt SF stage.

Nothing summarizes Lubin’s ambitions for Ethereum better than this comment on the transformative power that he sees in the cryptocurrency.

Lubin, Gutterman and Cassatt join a world-class agenda, with speakers like Brian Armstrong, Kirsten Green, Reid Hoffman, and Marty Chavez. Tickets to the show, which runs September 5-7, are available here.

Sramana Mitra: Last question on trends, what do you make of unicorn mania? How do you parse it? How do you strategize given that it is a factor in the market right now? Bruce Cleveland: One of the...

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Today’s 405th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, July 5, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Sramana Mitra: Can you give an example? Steve Scott: If you think about deep neural networks in particular, there’s training and there’s inference. Training is the learning part where you take a...

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When Mitra Raman went off to college, all she wanted was a bowl of her mother’s homemade rasam. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Raman grew up eating traditional South Indian cuisine almost every day, but didn’t quite know how to make it just like mom when she left home.

On her next visit back home, she told her mom she missed her cooking. And, being a mom, Mrs. Raman simply packed all the ingredients for rasam in a plastic bag and told her daughter to heat up some water and add it in. It’s that simple.

That’s how Buttermilk was born.

The YC-backed company offers a variety of Indian dishes at a low price that can be cooked up by simply adding hot water.

Based in Seattle, Buttermilk launched in 2017 to the local market and has since expanded to serve their products across the country.

Buttermilk dishes include Sambar, Daal, Khichdi, Rasam, and Upma, all of which cost $6 each. Buttermilk also sells Basmati Rice for $1.50.

While users can buy Buttermilk meals individually, they can also purchase one of Buttermilk’s “suites,” which pack a handful of meals into one shipment. The suites, including the High Protein Pack, Buttermilk Suite, North Indian Favorites and South Indian Favorites, cost $39.

Last week, Buttermilk introduced an option called Subscribe and Save, which offers the chance to buy monthly subscriptions of pre-set packs for 10 percent off. The company is also launching new meals, including Chana Masala, Coconut Chutney, and Quina and Brown Rice options, starting on July 12. Pre-orders for the new meals start tomorrow.

Buttermilk has plans to add other cuisines to the platform eventually, with the same idea of bringing mom’s home cooking to people who don’t have the money or time to recreate those meals from scratch. The company is also interested in potentially selling their products in grocery stores or coffee shops beyond the existing online channel.

Tinder Loops, the recently announced video feature from Tinder, is today rolling out globally.

Tinder has been testing this feature in Canada and Sweden since April, when it was first announced, and has rolled out to a few other markets since then.

Today, Loops are available to Tinder users across the following markets: Japan, United Kingdom, United States, France, Korea, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Kuwait, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand and United Arab Emirates.

Loops are two-second, looping videos that can be posted to users’ profiles. Users can’t shoot Tinder Loops from within the app, but rather have to upload and edit existing videos in their camera roll or upload a Live Photo from an iOS device.

Tinder is also expanding the number of images you can post to your profile to nine, in order to make room for Loops without displacing existing photos.

Given that Tinder has been testing the feature since early April, the company now has more data around how Tinder Loops have been working out for users. For example, users who added a Loop to their profile saw that their average conversation length went up by 20 percent. The feature seems to be particularly effective in Japan — Loops launched there in June — with users receiving an average of 10 percent more right swipes if they had a Loop in their profile.

In the age of Instagram and Tinder, people have used photos to represent themselves online. But, with all the editing tools out there, that also means that photos aren’t always the most accurate portrayal of personality or appearance. Videos on Tinder offer a new way to get to know someone for who they are.

Mobike made a roster of announcements about its bikesharing program today, including the end of customer deposits in China and full integration into Meituan Diaping’s app. The developments, its first since its acquisition by Meituan for $2.7 billion in April, are meant to help Mobike become a stronger competitor against Ofo, its biggest rival, and a slew of smaller startups in China’s heated bikesharing wars.

Mobike, which claims 200 million users, will have the chance to reach more customers thanks to its integration into Meituan’s platform. Meituan has ambitious growth plans (filed for an IPO in Hong Kong last month) and describes itself as a “one-stop super app” because of the large range of services, including dining, salon, entertainment and travel bookings, it offers. Meituan’s 310 million users were already able to pay for Mobike on the platform and will now also be able to rent a bike through the app.

Mobike also upped the ante for competitors by announcing that it will stop requiring users in China to pay 299 RMB (about $45) deposits and will refund all deposits already paid. Mobike says it is getting rid of deposits to “establish a no-threshold, zero-burden and zero-condition deposit-free standard for the entire bikesharing industry.” (Since the new policy only applies to users in China, instead of all 200 million Mobike users, TechCrunch has contacted the company for more information about how much money it is refunding).

Deposits are a contentious issue among bikesharing users. Though Mobike and Ofo claim they do not use customer deposits to fund operations, some bikesharing startups have been accused of spending deposits on operational expenses, with users complaining that it is very difficult to get their money back, even if they stop using a service or it goes out of business. The issue has resulted in Chinese lawmakers drafting regulations that require bikesharing companies to store deposits in a separate bank account so the funds are still available to return to customers even if a company goes out of business.

Another controversial issue is the large number of trashed or abandoned bikes created by bikesharing companies, with photos of “bikesharing graveyards” becoming symbolic of the sector’s excesses and unsustainable growth. To address environmental concerns, Mobike says it is launching a bike components recycling program in partnership with several companies, including Dow, China Recycling Resources and Tianjin Xinneng Recycling Resources. Called Mobike Life Cycle, the program will recycle bike components into new parts or raw materials. Mobike says it has already recycled and reused over 300,000 Mobike tires.

Mobike will also add a new e-bike that can reach a top speed of 20 km/hour and travel up to 70 km on a single charge. The company hopes that the e-bike, which will be available in China and Mobike’s international markets, will increase trip lengths. In its press statement, Mobike says most of its bikes are used for trips up to 3 km, but the e-bikes will hopefully increase that to 5 km.

Food delivery startup Deliveroo opened its first shared kitchen in Paris earlier today. Deliveroo first launched this concept of shared kitchens called Deliveroo Editions in London last year.

As the AFP reports, the company is starting with 12 kitchens in a warehouse in Saint-Ouen, right next to the north-western part of Paris. So far, 8 restaurants have agreed to make a deal with Deliveroo.

You’ll find top restaurants on Deliveroo, such as Blend, Petit Cambodge, Tripletta and Santosha. Restaurants can choose to pay a rent or get started for free and pay higher fees.

Deliveroo customers currently pay €2.50 per order for the delivery in Paris. But the company also gets a cut of the total order amount — customers don’t realize that Deliveroo gets a cut from both sides. It can be as much as 25 or 30 percent of what you order. It’s unclear how much Deliveroo is asking for those new kitchens.

But it makes sense for restaurants that can’t expand indefinitely. Deliveroo lets you accept orders without any additional table.

While there are multiple Blend or Petit Cambodge restaurants in Paris, they can’t deliver everywhere around the city. But opening a new restaurant also represents a huge investment.

That’s why those Deliveroo kitchens can be a good compromise. You can hire a handful of people and see if there’s enough demand in the area. It’s also a good way to differentiate Deliveroo from UberEats and other compatitors.

This is the first site in France. Let’s see if it gets out of control like in the U.K. The Guardian reported that Deliveroo Editions are now tiny containers with no window on car parks. It gets hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and you can hear a ton of mopeds getting orders from those metal boxes.

Deliveroo first started with the idea of helping regular restaurants accept online orders — not just pizza places with existing delivery persons. But containers on a car park don’t sound as attractive.

Update: A Deliveroo spokesperson has sent me the following statement:

“The new Deliveroo Editions site in Paris is a permanent bricks and mortar site, as are the majority of our Editions sites across the UK and Europe. All Editions sites are good for the local economy, work closely with local communities and host kitchens with high standards. They are popular with local people, chefs, and restaurants who use them to expand in to new areas.

The delivery-only super kitchens on are state of the art and bring together amazing chefs from independent restaurants and high street chains all into one location, dramatically expanding consumer choice in the area. This is good for the local economy, good for restaurants looking to expand and good for anyone who wants amazing meals delivered direct to their door.”

French venture capital firm ISAI just raised a new $175 million fund (€150 million) called ISAI Expansion II. This fund is designed for later stage investments.

The firm says that it managed to raise this fund in less than three months. This is a growth fund and the team plans to invest between $6 million and $35 million per deal (between €5 million and €30 million).

ISAI first started with a seed fund back in 2010. The company raised a $41 million fund (€35 million) and invested in BlaBlaCar shortly after that. The firm has raised a growth fund and another seed fund since then.

If you include today’s new fund, ISAI has raised over $350 million in total (€300 million). So ISAI Expansion II is by far the biggest fund to date.

Limited partners include dozens of successful tech entrepreneurs as well as institutional partners. Many existing investors invested once again in ISAI’s new fund. Some entrepreneurs joined the list for the first time.

With the previous ISAI Expansion fund, the firm invested in nine companies over five years. And ISAI already sold its shares in two companies, Hospimedia and Labelium.

ISAI also says that it can help entrepreneurs using owner buy-out transactions. By creating a holding company, this type of operations lets entrepreneurs cash out, buy shares from existing minor investors and work with a new investor.

More interestingly, ISAI doesn’t necessarily want to focus on Paris-based tech startups. The firm is also looking for investments in more traditional companies that aren’t yet taking advantage of digital opportunities.

The European fintech wave can’t stop and won’t stop. That’s why I’m excited to announce that the founder and CEO of Starling Bank Anne Boden is joining us at Disrupt Berlin.

While it feels like everybody is talking about challenger banks, Boden started thinking about building a new bank back in 2014. She ditched a carrer in traditional banks to start her own thing.

Starling provides a current account specifically designed for your phone. You can open an account in just a few minutes using the company’s mobile app.

Whenever you use your card or send money, you can instantly see the transaction in the app — there’s no delay. You can also receive push notifications instantly. When it comes to your card, you can lock it when you can’t find it, and there’s no exchange fee when you use your card abroad. Starling supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Fitbit Pay and, yes, even Garmin Pay.

Starling is even better with multiple people. For instance, if your roommate or significant other also has a Starling account, you can create a joint account for shared bills. You can also send money instantly to other Starling accounts.

The startup has been building a marketplace to become the only banking app you need. There are already a handful of fintech companies leveraging the Starling API. You’ll find savings, investment and mortgage products. You can centralize your paper receipts and more from the Starling app.

The startup already has its own banking license and has been raising a funding round of more than $100 million.

Starling operates in a very competitive market, with well-funded startups such as Monzo, Revolut and N26 all iterating quite quickly. That’s why it’s going to be interesting to hear Boden’s take on challenger banks, the fintech industry and her experience with Starling.

TechCrunch is coming back to Berlin to talk with the best and brightest people in tech from Europe and the rest of the world. In addition to fireside chats and panels, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the coveted cup.

Tickets to the show, which runs November 29-30, are available here.

Sramana Mitra: Our community’s work is with the very early stages. When you say you’re willing to do seed, can you elaborate? What’s happened in the seed ecosystem is that there are 500 to 600 micro...

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Waikit Lau, investor and serial entrepreneur, has a refreshingly open attitude towards investing in very early stage companies. Wonderful conversation.

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Facebook announced this morning that the London-based team at Bloomsbury AI will be joining the company.

My colleague Steve O’Hear broke the news about the acquisition, reporting that Facebook would deploy the team and technology to assist in its efforts to fight fake news and address other content issues.

In fact, Bloomsbury AI co-founder and Head of Research Sebastian Riedel also co-founded Factmata, a startup that purports to have developed tools to help brands combat fake news.

Facebook doesn’t quite put it that way in the announcement post. Instead, it says the team’s “expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications” — but it certainly seems possible that those applications could include detecting misinformation and other problematic content.

While financial terms were not disclosed, we reported that Facebook is paying between $23 and $30 million. Bloomsbury AI is an alumnus of Entrepreneur First, and it was also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund and the U.K. taxpayer-funded London Co-investment Fund.

Health insurance startup Alan has launched a new product in France called Alan Map. It’s a dead simple way to find GPs, dentists, ophthalmologists and more around you.

You first type your address and the name of a doctor or the type of doctor you’re looking for. There’s a big map front and center with dots representing doctors around you.

If you click on a dot or a name in the right column, you can learn more about this doctor. Alan Map currently lists the name, address, phone number, opening hours and average price. You also can find out if you can see this doctor without booking an appointment, and if they accept national healthcare cards.

This is already so much better than searching through a directory. But Alan doesn’t plan to stop there. The company will soon launch an integration with MonDocteur so you can book an appointment from Alan Map directly. MonDocteur is one of the leading healthcare scheduling services in France along with Doctolib.

But compared to Doctolib and MonDocteur, Alan Map doesn’t stop at doctors that use their own scheduling systems. Alan has partnered with the official health directory from France’s national healthcare system. You’ll find more than 245,000 health professionals on Alan Map, with pricing information for nearly half of them.

The main advantage compared to Ameli.fr is that it looks much better and it’s much easier to find what you’re looking for. Design can be important, even for health products. It can be the main difference between an obscure directory on an official website and a useful map.

Eventually, Alan plans to add more data to its mapping product. For instance, as Alan is a health insurance startup, the company knows how much users are paying when they visit a specific doctor. You could anonymize and leverage this data to get exact pricing information.

Alan Map is a free product. It’s a good way to promote the company’s health insurance product and get inbound traffic. For instance, it should give an SEO boost and you might see Alan in your Google search results.

As for Alan users, they can find a doctor and know how much they’ll get back from the national healthcare system and from Alan. This way, there’s no surprise when you get reimbursed.

Planck Re, a startup that wants to simplify insurance underwriting with artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A. The funding was led by Arbor Ventures, with participation from Viola FinTech and Eight Roads. Co-founder and CEO Elad Tsur tells TechCrunch that the capital will be used to expand Planck Re’s product line into more segments, including retail, contractors, IT and manufacturing, and grow its research and development team in Israel and North American sales team.

The Tel Aviv and New York-based startup plans to focus first on its business in the United States, where it has already launched pilot programs with several insurance carriers. Tsur says that Planck Re’s clients generally use it to help underwrite insurance for small to medium-sized businesses, including business owner policies, which cover property and liability risks, and workers’ compensation.

Founded in 2016 by Tsur, Amir Cohen and David Schapiro, Planck Re poses its technology as a more efficient and accurate alternative to the lengthy risk assessment questionnaire insurers ask clients to fill out. Its platform crawls the internet for publicly available data, including images, text, videos, social media profiles and public records, to build profiles of SMBs seeking insurance coverage. Then it analyzes that data to help carriers figure out their potential risk.

Before launching Planck Re, Tsur and Cohen founded Bluetail, a data mining startup that was acquired by Salesforce in 2012, where it served as the base technology for Salesforce Einstein. Schapiro was previously CEO of financial analytics company Earnix.

There are already a handful of startups, including SoftBank-backed Lemonade, Trōv, Cover, Hippo and Swyfft, that use algorithms to make picking and buying insurance policies easier for consumers, but AI-based underwriting is still a nascent category. One example is Flyreel, which focuses on underwriting property insurance and recently signed a deal with Microsoft to accelerate its go-to-market strategy.

Tsur says Planck Re is developing more dedicated algorithms to meet the evolving needs of insurance providers. For example, many underwriters now want to know if clients in photography use aerial imaging equipment, so Planck Re’s imaging process capabilities automatically check images for that information.

He adds that being able to automate underwriting enables carriers to find new distribution channels, including allowing customers to apply for insurance online without needing to fill out any forms. Planck Re also continues to monitor and underwrite policies, which means if a customer’s risk profile changes, insurers can react quickly.

In a statement, Arbor Ventures vice president and head of Israel Lior Simon said, “We are excited to partner with Planck Re and the driven, entrepreneurial team. Insurance companies are thirsty for actionable data, to assess risk, gain real time insights and enhance customer understanding. Planck Re aims to empower them through a streamlined digital approach, which we believe will truly alter the insurance industry.”

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 405th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, July 5, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to...

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Steve takes up deep into the field of high performance computing and how AI is impacting it. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself a little bit as well as Cray’s activities in...

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Airbnb is testing a new payments feature for hosts, letting them get partially paid out at the time of booking.

This feature isn’t rolling out to everyone just yet, as Airbnb says that this is just a preliminary test to gauge interest. Invited hosts simply opt in to payout splitting to check out the feature.

Here’s how it works:

Normally, Airbnb hosts are paid 24 hours after their guest’s scheduled check-in time. With the new payouts test, hosts who have been invited and opt in will receive 50 percent of their cash three days after the guest has booked their stay, and the other half will be received 24 hours after check-in time.

For their trouble, Airbnb is taking a 1 percent fee of the booking subtotal for early payouts.

As per usual, hosts can opt out of early payouts at any time by making the change in their Payout Preferences.

If a booking is cancelled after an early payout has been received, the amount will be deducted from the host’s next booking.

This comes on the heels of Airbnb’s announcement in February to add new tiers and types of lodging to the platform, including boutique hotels and B&Bs. Airbnb classifies hosts with more than six listings on the platform as Professional Hosts, and early payouts are one way that Airbnb can help these hosts grow their business.

However, in certain housing-constrained markets like NYC, professional hosts aren’t necessarily welcome. In May, NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report saying that Airbnb’s presence in NYC is driving up the cost of rent for full-time residents. The company and the Comptroller’s office went back and forth over the veracity of the report, but NYC isn’t the only market worried about the folks who make Airbnb their full-time job.

In 2017, the WSJ reported on a study surveying 100 of the largest metro areas in the U.S. that found that a 10 percent increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.39 percent increase in rent and a 0.64 percent increase in housing prices. That may sound small, but rental prices typically climbed by 2.2 percent per year without Airbnb, according to one of the survey’s authors. So Airbnb is accelerating the rate at which rental prices rise.

This very argument and the ensuing spats have led Airbnb to cut SF listings (almost in half) following the city’s kick-off of new short-term rental laws. And new, stricter laws may be coming to NYC.

Airbnb says that it works with its communities to stay on the right side of the law, but that professionally managed properties are integral in markets where tourism is a huge part of the economy.

“For decades, vacation rentals and professionally managed properties have been the backbone of the economy in vacation destinations like beach and ski towns and we welcome these types of listings in these types of communities,” said an Airbnb spokesperson. “Trials like these are one way we work to support our community. In some places, usually urban destinations, there can be rules around hosting multiple listings. We always want Airbnb to be a positive force in local communities and we make it clear to hosts that they need to follow these rules.”

The payouts test is geared toward professional hosts, but is being spread via an invite basis to both pro hosts and regular hosts.

According to a recent eMarketer report, the US programmatic advertising industry is expected to reach $46 billion this year. By 2020, 86.2% of all digital display ads are expected to be bought via...

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