This feature from Geekwire brings together the main highlights of the second edition of Geekwire Cloud Tech Summit held in Washington last week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links....

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Sramana Mitra: Just to double-click on what you said, would you fund a company that has a good level of technology and a good understanding of the business, but still needs another half a million to...

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Meet OpenPhone, a startup in the current Y Combinator batch. The company has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams.

“Both my cofounder and I grew up in families were all of our income was dependent on the businesses our parents were running. Later, I joined a software company building back office tools for home improvement contractors,” co-founder and CEO Mahyar Raissi told me.

“There I noticed two important things. First, most of our users were using their personal phone numbers for business and they absolutely hated that. They’d have to put their numbers online or give it out to strangers. This meant getting constant calls when they were spending time with their families or when they were busy doing work. Second, contractors who communicated more professionally and were more responsive had more successful businesses and earned more money.”

OpenPhone is an app for iPhone, iPad and Android. After downloading the app, you can get a second phone number for $9.99 per month. It can be a local or a toll-free number in the U.S. or Canada. You can also port an existing phone number and get rid of your second phone.

After that, you can receive calls and messages in the OpenPhone app. Your professional and personal calls and texts will get a clear separation.

There are many advantages in having a second phone number. You can set up a different voicemail, you can also set your availability to control your business hours. You also get voicemail transcription through the OpenPhone app.

OpenPhone uses VoIP and routes all your calls and texts through your internet connection. You get unlimited calls and texts in the U.S. and Canada as part of your subscription.

Eventually, OpenPhone wants to add new features to make it more collaborative. You could imagine sharing your phone number with other team members in your company. It sounds a bit like Aircall, but OpenPhone wants to focus on small companies with less than 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Since 2013, there have been 50,000 to 70,000 seed investments. By seed, I mean the entire spectrum of pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and pre-Series A. That’s a lot of companies. The number...

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These days, it seems like everyone with extra cash has some kind of pricey drinking habit. It might be fine wine, craft beer or cocktails. Or it could come in the form of coconut water, cold-pressed juice or the latest frothy caffeinated concoction.

No matter what your preference, startups and their backers likely have you covered.

In a follow-up to our story earlier this month about food startups gobbling up venture funding, Crunchbase News is taking a look at beverage companies guzzling capital. We found that while drinkables receive a smaller portion of funding than edibles, it’s still a sector that draws hundreds of millions of dollars in annual investment.

Where are investors pouring all that money? Some unlikely places. For instance, it appears the largest funding recipient so far this year is a China-based chain called Hey Tea that’s well known for a specialty called cheese tea. (An unfortunately named, slightly salty iced drink that a Crunchbase News team sampling determined was actually pretty tasty.)

Besides cheese tea, we found startups are also raising millions to bottle deep ocean water, customize instant coffee and make your party punch more portable.

Bottom line: So long as there are profit margins to squeeze out, the quest continues for new ways to get you drunk, hydrated or caffeinated. Below, we look at what’s trending on all these fronts.

Hydrate

Venture investors and startup entrepreneurs are betting there are highly scalable businesses to be built in doling out more exotic varieties of water, coconut-based beverages and other drinks to hydrate calorie-conscious consumers.

An analysis of Crunchbase data unearthed at least a dozen companies developing new varieties of water and fitness drinks that have raised funding in recent quarters.

Funding data reveals that investors still see the potential for significant returns from coconut water. The largest round in the hydration category went to Harmless Harvest, a seller of fair trade, organic coconut water and probiotic drinks that recently raised $30 million. The funding comes as the sector is on a tear, with the U.S. spending alone on coconut water projected to reach $2 billion next year.

We also saw a couple of deals involving startups offering alternatives to bottled or tap water. The most heavily capitalized one to receive funding in the past couple of years appears to be FloWater, a Denver-based startup that provides pure water refill stations and has raised about $8 million to date. Meanwhile, bottled water is still generating attention, too, as evidenced by the $5.5 million round late last year for Kona Deep, a bottler of deep ocean water.

Intoxicate

You may need water to survive, but if you’re looking to secure venture capital, it helps to throw in a bit of alcohol.

Since last year, venture investors have poured more than $300 million into an assortment of companies providing alcoholic beverages, drinking gadgetry and services to connect consumers with booze. Crunchbase News highlighted about a dozen that raised sizable rounds, along with one hangover cure startup.

Some of the larger funding rounds are for companies that don’t make alcohol; instead, these startups offer easier ways to select and buy it. These include Vivino, a popular wine rating app, as well as Drizly and Saucey, two ordering and delivery services.

There are emerging brands in the mix, too, including BeatBox Beverages, a purveyor of party punch in portable packages; Milestone Brands, a producer of organic tequilas and other spirits; and Plum, which has a gadget for dispensing good wine by the glass.

Caffeinate

If too much drinking makes you sleepy, let caffeine come to the rescue. Venture investors, known to be heavy consumers of caffeine, also seem to like investing in the stuff.

Using Crunchbase data, we highlighted more than a dozen companies in the coffee and tea space that have secured good-sized rounds in roughly the past year. They range from fast-growing chains, like China’s Hey Tea, to packaged drinks, like non-dairy blended drink maker Willow Cup, to instant beverage innovators, like Sudden Coffee. We even found a blockchain company in the mix, Crypto N Kafe, which aims to connect coffee farmers and consumers directly.

It’s not a bad area for exits, either. The most recent significant exit was Blue Bottle Coffee, a venture-backed brand known for really, really strong brews that sold a majority stake to Nestlé last September at a valuation of over $700 million.

Nourish

One additional beverage category in which we saw a high level of activity was in meal-replacement and nutrition drinks. Overall, we found at least a half-dozen companies developing nutritional drinks that have raised funding in recent quarters.

In this sector, probably the best-known startup name is Soylent, which has raised over $70 million for a line of drinks marketed to consumers who don’t have the time or inclination to sit down for a traditional meal. We also found a potential rival, meal-replacement beverage maker Ample, which secured angel funding last month.

The biggest round in the past couple of months for the space, however, went to REBBL, a startup that raised $20 million in May for its line of bottled drinks featuring health-promoting herbs, protein and coconut.

Mix it all up: Caffeinated, full and buzzed

Beverage investments, like everything else, aren’t always a home run for VCs. The demise of juicer startup Juicero last year offers a cautionary tale that large rounds don’t always translate into compelling business models.

That said, beverage purveyors don’t have to worry much about demand drying up. People will always be thirsty. And while we typically quench our thirst with simple tap or filtered water, where’s the fun (or the massive exit potential) in that?

Methodology

Our analysis focused primarily on companies that have secured funding in the past year; however, we also included some rounds outside those parameters that were exceptionally large or noteworthy in other ways.

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

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TechCrunch is excited to announce that the Startup Battlefield Latin America is coming to São Paulo on November 8 this year. This is the first event TechCrunch has ever held in Latin America, and we are all in to make it a memorable one to support the fast-emerging startup ecosystem in the region.

The Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, which over the past 12 years has placed 750 companies on stage to pitch top VCs and TechCrunch editors. Those founders have gone on to raise more than $8 billion and produce more than 100 exits. Startup Battlefield Latin America aims to add 15 great founders from Latin America to those elite ranks.

Here’s how the competition works. Founders may apply now to participate in Startup Battlefield. Any early stage (pre-A round) company with a working product headquartered in an eligible Latin American country (see list below) may apply. Applications close August 6. TechCrunch editors will review the applications and, based on which applicants have the strongest potential for a big exit of major societal impact, pick 15 to compete on November 8. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team will work intensively with each founding team to hone their six-minute pitch to perfection.

Then it’s game day. The 15 companies will take the stage at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute in front of a live audience of 500 people to pitch top-tier VC judges. The judges and TechCrunch editors will pick five for a finals round. Those lucky finalists will face a fresh team of judges, and one will emerge as the winner of the first-ever Startup Battlefield Latin America. The winner takes home $25,000 and a trip for two to the next Disrupt, where they can exhibit free of charge in the Startup Alley and may also qualify to participate in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt. Sweet deal. All Startup Battlefield sessions will be captured on video and posted on TechCrunch.com.

It’s an experience no founder would want to miss, considering the opportunity to join the ranks of Battlefield greats from years past, including Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, CloudFlare, Vurb and many more.

Get that application started now.

Here’s the need-to-know about qualifying to apply:

Have an early-stage company in “launch” stageHeadquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama (Caribbean – including dependencies and constituent entities), Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, productionHave received limited press or publicity to dateHave no known intellectual property conflictsApply by Aug. 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Tickets to attend Startup Battlefield Latin America will go on sale soon. Interested in sponsoring the event, contact us here

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions. In terms of university strategies, at what point did the universities start coming on board? At what point did you start closing university deals? David Lloyd:...

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Shak Lakhani, the  21-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Avro Life Science, started researching biomaterials when he was 15 years old.

Every summer and after school the teenager would travel nearly two hours by bus and train from the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Toronto where he lived to the tissue engineering lab at the University of Toronto and develop three-dimensional, in-vitro models of tumors using biomaterials.

For three years, Lakhani worked in the lab, before going on to study nanotechnology engineering at the University of Waterloo a short 73 miles away. It was there, in his first year, that Lakhani met another Richmond Hill resident, Keean Sarani, and launched Avro Life Science.

Sarani, also 21, had his own history in life sciences. A former epidemiologist who worked as a research assistant at the aptly named Hospital for Sick Children, Sarani spent his high school years working in community pharmacies before going on to graduate from the University of Waterloo with both an Honours Science degree and a doctorate in pharmacy directly from high school.

Sarani and Lakhani, who’re related by marriage, first met in the Village 1 dormitory complex at the university. Within months of their first meeting the two decided to start working on the company that would become Avro.

They formally launched the business in January 2016, a time when Lakhani said the two college students would hold “startup Sundays” where they would pitch ideas to each other in one dorm room or another on Sunday evenings, until they found an idea that seemed viable.

Given their experience — Sarani in pharmacies and treating patients and Lakhani in chemistry and material science, the two hit on the idea of drug delivery and patches.

The two initially toyed with a multivitamin patch for daily health, but through the sniffles, watery eyes and sneezes of perennial allergy sufferers the two hit on the idea of an antihistamine patch to cure their own ailments.

The two won their first pitch competition three months after hitting on the initial idea in March 2016, and formally incorporated their business in November 2016.

Fast-forward two years and the two co-founders are just about ready to make the final preparations for the first product with help from an initial seed round from investors led by Fifty Years, with participation from Susa Ventures, Garage Capital, Heuristic Capital, Embark Ventures, Uphonest Capital and Buckley Endeavours. Individual angel investors also participated in the round. In all, Avro has about $2.2 million in the bank.

According to Lakhani, the company has already developed a polymer that allows Avro to make patches that can deliver hundreds of different drugs. Now it’s just a matter of gearing up for clinical trials that the company will run before the end of the year.

The first product, Lakhani says, is “a medicated sticker for seasonal allergies.” The company’s plan to get to market involves revitalizing drugs that pharma companies haven’t been able to bring to market because oral delivery is difficult, Lakhani says.

“Really the breakthrough is the [proprietary] combination of materials that can hold all of these different drugs,” he said. “The method of drug delivery is the same as in nicotine patches. In our case as a result of the polymer and manufacturing method…. [the drugs] don’t bond with the polymer. They are micro-adhesives in the patch. Heat from the skin dissolves the polymer and allows the drugs to enter the blood stream.”

Basically, there are tiny bubbles on the patch and contact with (and heat from) the skin causes the bubbles to break and deliver any drugs in an unadulterated form to the bloodstream, Lakhani explained.

Because the company is using generic drugs for its first tests, it’s hoping to have an easier path to market to prove the viability of its delivery system.

Down the road, the company also has some pretty impressive pharmaceutical partners that it could tap. Avro is already working with Bayer as part of their accelerator program in Toronto, and that may lead to a deeper relationship down the road, according to Lakhani.

The first drug that the company is testing is Loratadine (a common antihistamine).

“In the coming years, we envision bringing a number of other patches to market for drugs addressing neurodegenerative diseases, cardiac health, analgesics and many more to improve drug delivery and compliance while revitalizing pharma pipelines,” Lakhani wrote in an email. “One day we hope to allow large pharmaceutical companies to ‘rescue’ drugs that they spent billions of dollars developing, but failed trials due to low bioavailability, high liver toxicity from an entire pill being metabolized at once.”

For Fifty Years co-founder Seth Bannon, Avro’s technology is a “Holy Grail” for drug delivery that can save pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars.

“The market for this is absolutely massive. Initially, Avro can manufacture and sell patches carrying generics direct to consumer to address issues like compliance with children and the elderly,” wrote Bannon, in an email. “Because Avro can deliver many drugs transdermally… When you deliver drugs transdermally, you significantly reduce liver toxicity and boost bioavailability. This means pharma can rescue drugs that just barely failed in Phase III. Pharma will pay a lot for this.”

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you the TAM question. We are in January 2018. Lots of stuff have already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t as many wide open opportunities to build these multi-billion...

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Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins, have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams, and include BRIG, a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium, a project that ended in an SEC investigation.

Obviously any new set of institutions must create their own sets of rules and that is exactly what is happening in the blockchain world. But when faced with the potential for massive token fundraising, bigger problems arise. While everyone expects startups to fail, the sheer amount of cash flooding these projects is a big problem. When a startup has too much fuel too quickly the resulting conflagration ends up consuming both the company and the founders, and there is little help for the investors.

These conflagrations happen everywhere and are a global phenomenon. Scam and dead ICOs raised $1 billion in 2017 with 297 questionable startups in the mix.

There are dubious organizations dedicated to “repairing” broken ICOs, including CoinJanitor from Cape Town, but the fly-by-night nature of many of these organizations does not bode well for the industry.

ICO-funded startups currently use multi-level marketing tactics to build their business. Instead they should take a page from the the Kickstarter and Indiegogo framework. These crowd-funding platforms have made trust an art. By creating collateral that defines the team, the project, the risks and the future of the idea, you can easily build businesses even without much funding. Unfortunately, the lock-ups and pricing scams the current ICO market uses to incite greed rather than rational thinking are hurting the industry more than helping.

The bottom line? Invest only what you can afford to lose and expect any token you invest in to fail. Ultimately, the best you can hope for is to be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t. Otherwise, you’re in for a world of disappointment.

Say you have a job with a large company and you want to know how much vacation time you have left, or how to add your new baby to your healthcare. This usually involves emailing or calling HR and waiting for an answer, or it could even involve crossing multiple systems to get what you need.

Leena AI, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class, wants to change that by building HR bots to answer questions for employees instantly.

The bots can be integrated into Slack or Workplace by Facebook and they are built and trained using information in policy documents and by pulling data from various back-end systems like Oracle and SAP.

Adit Jain, co-founder at Leena AI, says the company has its roots in another startup called Chatteron, which the founders started after they got out of college in India in 2015. That product helped people build their own chatbots. Jain says along the way, they discovered while doing their market research a particularly strong need in HR. They started Leena AI last year to address that specific requirement.

Jain says when building bots, the team learned through its experience with Chatteron that it’s better to concentrate on a single subject because the underlying machine learning model gets better the more it’s used. “Once you create a bot, for it to really add value and be [extremely] accurate, and for it to really go deep, it takes a lot of time and effort and that can only happen through verticalization,” Jain explained.

What’s more, as the founders have become more knowledgeable about the needs of HR, they have learned that 80 percent of the questions cover similar topics, like vacation, sick time and expense reporting. They have also seen companies using similar back-end systems, so they can now build standard integrators for common applications like SAP, Oracle and NetSuite.

Of course, even though people may ask similar questions, the company may have unique terminology or people may ask the question in an unusual way. Jain says that’s where the natural language processing (NLP) comes in. The system can learn these variations over time as they build a larger database of possible queries.

The company just launched in 2017 and already has a dozen paying customers. They hope to double that number in just 60 days. Jain believes being part of Y Combinator should help in that regard. The partners are helping the team refine its pitch and making introductions to companies that could make use of this tool.

Their ultimate goal is nothing less than to be ubiquitous, to help bridge multiple legacy systems to provide answers seamlessly for employees to all their questions. If they can achieve that, they should be a successful company.

It’s been more than four years since “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” was published, and it remains — including to minds of many of us at TechCrunch — one of the best, most authentic, most instructive business books ever written. It’s partly for this reason that we’re so excited to announce its author, Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, is coming to Disrupt this September.

Why do people care about Horowitz’s management advice, as opposed to many other venture capitalists? Much of it boils down his operating experiences and his candid descriptions of his ups and downs on the job. Horowitz, for example, was the co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly LoudCloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.6 billion. But as Horowitz has very publicly elucidated, Opsware looked like a goner more than once, including when one of its biggest clients shut down in the aftermath of the dot.com bubble’s implosion.

Horowitz also ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications when the company was still very young, yet was already publicly traded. (It IPO’d an astonishing 16 months after it was founded.) While a thrilling ride, Horowitz has been frank about pissing off Netscape’s young co-founder, Marc Andreessen, after complaining that Andreessen gave away too much of Netscape’s strategy to a reporter ahead of a public launch that Horowitz and others were planning. (Andreessen’s reply: “Next time do the f*cking interview yourself.”)

It’s funny now, but at the time, Horowitz — already married with three children — thought he might have to find another job.

Indeed, a big part of Horowitz’s appeal to founders is that, given his career, he knows about that which he speaks. Horowitz doesn’t sugarcoat anything, either. Whereas many management coaches and books can be abstract and theoretical — even squishy — Horowitz gets straight to the point. He knows what CEOs mess up most commonly, how to think about demoting versus firing people and when and how to give out raises. All tie to a concept that Horowitz advises that entrepreneurs learn: that they need to take every point of view into consideration when making a decision, so they can see the decision through the eyes of the company and not just the person who may be most directly impacted by it.

It isn’t easy to do, particularly given that leaders are often making decisions under a great deal of pressure, as Horowitz readily admits when offering management advice. But it’s also crucial to running a healthy organization.

It is because of Horowitz’s acumen and more that we’re very eager to sit down with him this fall to talk about entrepreneurship, including how it has evolved in the nine years since Andreessen Horowitz was founded, as well as how the firm is evolving alongside it.

If you’re a founder, or you’re thinking about becoming one, you won’t want to miss this conversation. To buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, you can click right over here.

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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Sramana Mitra: Can you put some quantitative parameters around that $200 million exit? For a good, healthy $200 million exit where everybody makes money, what is the optimum amount of capital...

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TrendKite is making its first two acquisitions — according to CEO Erik Huddleston, they give the company “the last two components” needed for a complete PR analytics platform.

Until now, TrendKite’s main selling point was the ability to look at the articles written about a company and measure things like the audience reached and the impact on brand awareness.

But while that kind of journalistic coverage remains important, Huddleston said, “The world now is more complicated in terms of who has influence on the public.” That’s where Insightpool and its database of social media influencers comes in, allowing PR teams to find and pitch influencers who can help spread the company’s story.

Union Metrics, meanwhile, provides social media analytics. As Huddleston put it, “they do the same analytics about the conversation around the story as we do around the media coverage.”

With these acquisitions, he said TrendKite can build deeper integrations with products that were already being used together. In fact, he noted that the company had an existing partnership with Union Metrics, and he started thinking about Insightpool in the same context when a customer showed him how they were using TrendKite and Insightpool side-by-side, literally open in adjacent tabs.

The details of how Insightpool and Union Metrics will be packaged and priced as part of the TrendKite platform have yet to been determined. In the meantime, Huddleston said TrendKite will continue to support them as standalone products.

In addition, he said the entire teams of both companies (including Insightpool CEO Devon Wijesinghe and Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis) will be joining TrendKite, with Insightpool giving Austin-based TrendKite a footprint in Atlanta.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Insightpool had raised $7.5 million from investors, including TDF Ventures and Silicon Valley bank.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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SimpliSafe, the company behind the well-received SimpliSafe home security service, today announced that Hellman & Friedman, the massive venture fund and private equity firm, has taken a controlling interest in the company. While the two companies didn’t disclose the terms of the transaction, sources close to SimpliSafe tell us that the deal valued the company at about $1 billion.

Hellman & Friedman also currently own a number of other brands, ranging from Grocery Outlet to insurance software specialist Applied Systems (and which owned companies like Getty Images, Scout24 and others in the past).

Ahead of today’s announcement, SimpliSafe had raised about $57 million, mostly thanks to a funding round led by Sequoia Capital in 2014. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018, “subject to the waiting period under the HSR Act and other customary closing conditions.” There will be no changes in the company’s leadership due to this acquisition.

Hellman & Friedman have made a number of deals in the past that involved investments, acquisition and acquiring the controlling interest (sometimes as part of a syndicate) in companies like DoubleClick, Nielsen, Nasdaq, OpenLink and others. Today’s deal fits the group’s overall pattern of acquiring similar companies and then selling them for a profit at a later time — or guiding them to an IPO.

For SimpliSafe, the news comes on the heels of the launch of its updated hardware platform in February. But it also comes shortly after Amazon closed its acquisition of Ring, which also offers its own security system, and the launch of Nest’s home security system. SimpliSafe says it currently protects more than two million people, but while there are now more players in the market, this is also still a market with plenty of growth potential. “Home security is at an inflection point. Despite the market’s growth, today still only 20% of homes are protected,” notes SimpliSafe CEO Chad Laurans in today’s announcement.

Life sciences-focused cloud computing solutions provider Veeva (NYSE: VEEV) recently announced its first quarter results. The company continued to outpace market expectations during the quarter....

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