This year has been a rough one for Sphero. The Colorado-based toy robotics startup kicked off the year with dozens of layoffs, a result of tepid interest in its line of Disney-branded consumer products.

Here’s a little good news, however. The company has raised another $12 million, bringing its total up to around $119 million, according to Crunchbase. The latest round will go into helping shape the BB-8 maker into an education-first company.

“The recent round of funding has currently raised $12 million, and we anticipate at the time of final closing up to $20 million may be raised in total,” Sphero said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. Funding has/will come from existing and new investors and will be used for working capital as we engage in a larger strategy that focuses on the intersection of play and learning.”

It’s a tricky play, given how overcrowded the world of coding toys is at the moment, but Sphero has long been building out its play in the space, in tandem with its more consumer-focused offerings.

Following the success of its The Force Awakens BB-8 tie in, the company quadrupled down on its involvement with Disney’s accelerator, releasing high-tech toys based on Spider-Man and Lightning McQueen from Cars.

“[Education] is something we can actually own,” the company told me after the layoffs were revealed. “Where we do well are those experiences we can 100 percent own, from inception to go-to-market.”

Indiecade always offers a nice respite from the wall of undulating human flesh and heat that is the rest of the E3 show floor. The loose confederation of independent developers often produces compelling and bizarre gaming experiences outside of the big studio system.

TendAR is the most compelling example of this out of this year’s batch. It is, simply put, a pet fish that feeds on human emotions through augmented reality. I can’t really explain why this is a thing, but it is. It’s a video game, so just accept it and move on.

The app is produced by Tender Claws, a small studio out of Los Angeles best known for Virtual Virtual Reality, an Oculus title that boasts among its “key features”: 50-plus unique virtual virtual realities and an artichoke screams at you.

TendAR fits comfortably within that manner of absurdist framework, though the title has more in common with virtual pets like Tamagotchi and the belovedly bizarre Dreamcast cult hit, Seaman. There’s also a bit of Douglas Adams wrapped up in there, in that your pet guppy feeds on human emotions detected through face detection.

The app is designed for two players, both holding onto the same phone, feigning different emotions when prompted by a chatty talking fish. If you fail to give it what it wants, your fish will suffer. I tried the game and my guppy died almost immediately. Apparently my ability to approximate sadness is severely lacking. Tell it to my therapist, am I right?

The app is due out this year for Android.

I’m a huge proponent of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Having worked within the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem for all these years, I’ve observed with interest the development of different...

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Creating a salad-making robot is pretty good, as far as tech company hooks go, but Chowbotics is looking to expand. The Bay Area company just raised $11 million in a “Series A-1” led by the Foundry Group and Techstars.

The big plan for the money largely involves extending the company’s selection of foodstuffs beyond leafy greens, where Sally the Salad Robot has made its mint. At the top of the list are grain bowls, breakfast bowls, poke bowls, açai bowls and yogurt bowls. If it’s food served in a bowl, Chowbotics seems interested.

Seems pretty straightforward, really. After all, at its core, Sally is a kind of vending machine, dropping different ingredients into the same bowl. Apparently it’s a bit more complicated than that, especially when you start mixing in things like yogurts and berry purees. “The major challenges are finding special technical solutions for dispensing different shapes and sizes of ingredients,” founder/CEO Deepak Sekar told TechCrunch.

The company is also using the funding to add a whole bunch of senior roles. Per the press release:

Warren Manzer, who was President of Foodservice at Clipper and Senior Vice President at Crown Brands, joined Chowbotics as Vice President of Foodservice Sales. Rory Bevins, who was Senior Vice President at La Bottega Americas and Global Vice President at Molton Brown, joined Chowbotics as Vice President of Hospitality. Lee Greer, who was Chief Marketing Officer at Jason’s Deli, joined Chowbotics as Vice President of its Off-Premise Kitchen Business Unit. Shelley Janes, who was Head of Partnerships at CarDash and CEO of SideDoor, joined Chowbotics as Director of Sales, responsible for the western region of the United States. Nolan Schachter, who was Director of Sales and Marketing at TeaBot, joined Chowbotics as Director of Sales, responsible for Canada.

The funding follows a $5 million Series A in March of last year.

While many celebrities try to invest in the world of tech, very few do so successfully. And no one has proved their worth as celebrity-turned-VC more than Ashton Kutcher .

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to host Ashton Kutcher and Sound Ventures partner Effie Epstein at TC Disrupt SF in September.

Kutcher first got into investing in 2011 with the launch of A-Grade Investments. The firm invested in big-name companies like DuoLingo, FlexPort, ProductHunt, Airbnb, and Uber. In 2014, Kutcher, alongside his longtime friend and partner Guy Oseary, started a new VC firm called Sound Ventures.

Since launch, Sound Ventures has made 53 investments and led six rounds of financing, with portfolio companies including Gusto, Vicarious, Robinhood, Lemonade, and Acorns.

And in 2017, Sound made another investment in the form of Effie Epstein. The firm brought on Epstein as managing partner, with Kutcher telling TechCrunch: “Effie has a deep understanding of business and fiduciary responsibilities. She also has a multidisciplinary background which makes her a home run for venture. The bottom line is she is someone I want to work for.”

Before joining Sound, Epstein led global strategy at Marsh & McLennan subsidiary Marsh. Prior to Marsh, she served as SVP of planning and head of Investor Relations at iHeartMedia, and before that she worked in business development at Clear. Epstein also worked in investment banking in the energy sector and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

In other words, Epstein brings a multi-disciplinary approach to Sound, which is venturing beyond consumer tech into financial services, insurance tech, enterprise, govtech and medtech sectors.

This won’t be Kutcher’s first go-around at Disrupt. He spoke at Disrupt NY in 2013, right as the world was first hearing about Bitcoin. We’re excited to revisit the topic of cryptocurrencies and so much more with Kutcher and Epstein, and discuss their investment thesis moving forward.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are available here.

Fintech startup N26 is updating its N26 Metal product and launching it tomorrow. You might remember that the company first announced its premium card at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December 2017. Shortly after the conference, the card was available in early access for existing N26 Black customers.

But the company had to go back to the drawing board and update the card design. N26 Metal customers had some complaints about the design of the card in particular.

While the original metal card was primarily made of a sheet of tungsten, the metallic part was still surrounded by plastic. Customers complained about scratches and the overall feel of the card.

It didn’t really feel like a metal card. It was more or less a heavy plastic card with a metal core. You could easily get scratches and the MasterCard logo was just a sticker.

Even more surprising, some customers had some issues going through airport security because tungsten was an uncommon material.

At an event in Berlin, the company announced a revised version of N26 Metal. The front of the card is going to be made out of actual metal. The MasterCard logo will be engraved. And the name of the customer is moving to the back of the card.

You can join the waiting list now and customers will start getting the new metal card tomorrow. Everybody will be able to sign up next Tuesday.

But N26 Metal isn’t just a fancy card. For around €15 per month, you get all the advantages of N26 Black as well as partner offerings.

These offerings include the basic $45 per month WeWork subscription so that you can access a WeWork office for free for one day per month and pay for extra days. You also get 10 percent off hotel bookings on Hotels.com, promo codes for Drivy, Babbel and other services. The company says that there will be new offerings in the coming months.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners was...

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Index Ventures — a firm with investments in companies like recent IPO Dropbox, a series of successful gaming companies like King, and others including Slack and coming IPO Zuora — has seen a lot of moves in the past few months.

There was the departure of partner Ilya Fushman earlier this year, but the firm also brought on Sarah Cannon from CapitalG as one of their recent big hires. Index has also promoted former Dropboxer Mark Goldberg to partner. Prior to joining Index, Cannon led investments in companies like Looker, MultiPlan, Oscar and Care.com. Cannon will primarily be focusing on growth stage, and is also now a board observer for Slack. Goldberg has been at the firm for around three years and worked on deals like Nova Credit and CoverWallet.

We sat down with the two new partners to discuss some of their plans, as well as some broader parts of the venture ecosystem. Here’s the interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

TC: What does the investment committee decision process look like these days?

Mark Goldberg: In the last stage, we have a partner presentation, where the entrepreneur presents and we debrief. Then it’s a vote at the partner level. Everyone votes 1-10, and if it’s over 7 it’s approved. If it’s between 5 and 7, it’s the sponsor discretion. On average it’s around in the seven range. Some partners always rank lower, their most enthusiastic is at 8. It ends up being a pretty intellectually honest discussion, every vote is the same. I’ve worked at other funds before, and it seems like  it becomes more of horse trading. This feels like a constructive debate, we operate as one team. It’s also 6:30 a.m. pacific on Mondays, so there’s that.

TC: When working with entrepreneurs, how do you keep them moving forward — especially when some seem allergic to product changes?

Goldberg: I speak more to my background to being an early business hire at Dropbox, but it’s staying focused don the end user and building something people actually want to use. Regardless the paradigm, [we ask], are you building a product where at the end of the day is the end customer happy user.

Sarah Cannon: In the board room so much of where we can help is focus. My role is not making decisions but helping the management team align on priorities and sharing an example from a company they respect. It is often most helpful to connect them to another portfolio company. At CapitalG, we were investors in Lyft and Stripe, and a lot of learning would be between those companies. We would say, let me connect you to the head of product at Lyft. After that coffee, the priorities have been reduced to just a few.

TC: What’s the filter for companies?

Goldberg: First off, the [series] A is where we’re really focused. I think historically Index had really built a brand in Europe. King, SuperCell, Skype, and others. When we set up the team in the U.S., we ended up getting pushed into more series B. We would have loved to see the Series A on many of these companies, but we were new it was harder to proactively get to these great deals at the earlier stage. So we’re pushing earlier into that Series A. Maybe 7 of the last 10 deals have been [series] A for us. The challenge is, how do we find these great founding teams and category winners at that stage. Despite the valuations, we want you to hit those check boxes.

Cannon: As you move later stage, it’s much more on the unit economics. That’s part one — really understanding the unit economics, how big of a business can this actually be. The market could be really large, but what’s the size of the prize. Those are the two things I focus on. It’s easy to look at the unit economics. There are exceptions to the rule, like Amazon, where the margins didn’t look good along the way… Traditionally these companies haven’t made money, and that’s how you miss really exceptional businesses. They are transformative businesses. That’s really how I’ve shifted my way of thinking.

For consumer companies, I think of that has to be massive user traction and if you’re seeing wild adoption or a differentiated technology.

TC: How do you think about the state of how we talk about mental health in Silicon Valley right now? How do you help your founders in this respect?

Goldberg: I think being a founder is an extremely lonely job. I think one of the things that a strong venture partner can do is be a really good sounding board. The emotional fluctuations in these businesses are extreme. A founder has to be, even if they’re resilient and have a lot of grit, they’re absolutely going to feel the highs and lows. If you talk about what makes a venture fund and partner valuable, it’s the ability to damper some of that volatility by being available. If someone calls me on a Saturday night, i’m picking up the phone and being present and having that perspective. If you’re doing this job well, you can help the entrepreneur feel less lonely.

Cannon: [Part of it is] regulating on both the highs and the lows. You’ve had the benefit of working with a lot of companies. You can say, this is a great moment, celebrate, but it’s not like we’re going public tomorrow. In the lows, you remind them of the good times, you’re modulating to the middle and giving some perspective.. It’s important to step in as an investor, and to say, ‘ok, this was a scary moment but this is why I have conviction in your business.’

It’s a topic that’s a lot of shame. It’s very much like an artist, there’s an individual genius creator but there’s a dark side. There’s a very known perspective in the founder world. I hope we have a few brave founders who come out and say, look, I really struggled, here’s how I managed to deal with it.

TC: How have things changed given the shift in the venture landscape, such as with mega-funds like Softbank?

Goldberg: We see it as a good thing, for us it’s additional optionality for a lot of our portfolio companies. Before SoftBank a lot of times your option is [just going public]. Softbank is not the only one, there’s Sequoia growth, there’s a lot of money sloshing around the late stage. It’s been a boon for our companies — we’re generally playing at a stage before we’d be competitive [with that].

Cannon: For the later stage, it’s absolutely changing the return profile. To Softbank’s credit, it’s a brilliant strategy, it’s like an index on the private markets.

TC: How do you differentiate between founders for companies you invest in?

Cannon: For me, the adjustment [to earlier stage] has been a couple things, like adjusting your risk reward. You’re taking a lot greater risk. It’s easier to rely on cohort data, thinking that I’ve seen this for three years. [At earlier stages] it’s less data, and you’re taking more risk, you need to spend more time about thinking about the team. You need to believe that founder is capable of bringing on that high quality team. To move earlier stage, you have to have a lot more conviction. In later stages you have a bunch of investors already at the cap table.

Goldberg: I think it’s absolutely critical that the market is multistage. We’re stage agnostic and expertise driven. We’ll see a company at the series A or series B, and we get to know the founding team. We don’t wait for the round to form, we preempt it, and if we don’t do the deal we have a relationship going forward.

Cannon: [I also think it’s] very specific to the business. If it’s an IT infrastructure startup, the person needs to be highly technical people. It maps to the business. Do they know their own strengths and weaknesses, do they know the strengths and weaknesses of their existing members.

TC: How do you think about diversity going forward?

Cannon: The major focus is how do I address this challenge. The numbers speak for themselves in terms of diversity of all types. A lot of founders aren’t happy with where they are, we think about what specifically can we do about it. That’s where we’ve been having a lot of discussions — how are you giving fair reviews, how do you make sure your compensation is the same. There’s always the question about funnel and how do I see different candidates. My view on that is we should do a much better job in venture and companies in screening for the specific attributes you need in the job. We want to push people, rather than going to pools that are easy, such as just to banking, and say the attributes important to an investor is high emotional intelligence, analytical thinking, and such. They don’t necessarily come from the same people.

Goldberg: What’s changed is it is now a board-level conversation. At the last 4-5 meetings, this is now a topic on par with the KPIs of the business. That didn’t used to exist. I agree with the tactical points, we can do a better job with diversity, we’re having those conversations..

TC: What about applications of ideas like the Rooney Rule?

Cannon: I think that’s exactly the tactical thing. People are just begging for an idea, something I can commit to changing my funnel. Changing my process to be more fair, founders I think are very more open to it.

TC: How do you manage expectations with your base of LPs, especially as the time threshold between an IPO and the founding stretches? 

Goldberg: I think we’re fortunate that as a fund culture and with the LP base, we’re afforded the ability to make a long term view. While the timeline is stretching, we don’t feel pressure. To the extent the companies continue to build value, the returns are gonna look good enough. We have not felt the urgency to try and realize gains faster, and part of that is our broader philosophy and ethos around investing. We’re here to support the entrepreneurs, and I don’t want to be prescriptive in an exit.

I think we need to be thoughtful when we take a secondary investment. Doing large secondaries in early companies can be detrimental. When we’re looking at rounds where secondaries are available we ask about proceeds being distributed, we want to know [if it’s just certain executives or for the whole team].

Cannon: You do want to think about the employees who have made significant contributions. In a market where companies are staying private much longer, for the employees, I do want us to find a way to have some liquidity. The key is how you structure it. You could buy a house, but you don’t need a mansion.

Goldberg: What I don’t like is when founders or a select set of executives are able to take money. As long as it’s equitably done in a way, like 10% to 15% liquidity being offered for employees.

TC: What are some learnings you’ve picked up from what’s happening in China?

Cannon: We are not currently investing in China, but I want to learn form China and see what insights we can get from businesses there and how they will be different in the US. If you look at live video, a lot fo companies have taken off there. The social e-commerce business, mid-messaging, how does that change with transactions.

Goldberg: On the fintech side, it’s almost like the world has inverted, I used to do a lot of cleantech where we were worried China would copy the IP. In fintech, the most innovative companies are coming out of China. If you look at digital payments in China versus the west, they were already way ahead of the curve, and now it’s even more so. It really is, for us, about learning what’s around the future. We’re pushing ourselves.

TC: The majority of that is owned by a few platforms like WeChat or Alipay. Is that a good thing?

Goldberg: Some of these platforms are becoming monolithic conglomerates at this point. My broader thesis in this point is, we’re gonna see a new set of companies and winners from the last few years that are gonna re-bundle the rest of the feature rich companies into larger platforms. They’re building massive user bases with extreme engagements. You imagine what else can you cross-sell once you have that engagement and brand affinity. We’re gonna see massive category winners of the next digital bank in the US.

TC: How are you thinking about ICOs?

Goldberg: We’re watching them opportunistically. I think crypto and blockchain have gotten a huge amount of airtime in the press, to me it’s distracting for financial services. The incumbents are absolutely vulnerable in a way they’ve never been before. We’re seeing huge success..

Cannon: We’re very expertise driven. The two areas are really around blockchain and AI. We just had a presentation we call Monday musings — we’ve had them on gaming, bitcoin, and crypto in general — that’s an area where we’re actively trying to build our knowledge set. I think there’s a lot of interest and the timing is of vigorous debate.

One of the challenges is to be an effective unit of economic transaction without the regulatory infrastructure like know your customer. As long as we have nation states we certainly will not see all transactions on blockchain. Regulators will have a way to regulate these transactions since at some point you are going to have to transfer your bitcoin into dollars or some other currency at some point.

Goldberg: I have had a challenge to find a [high-potential] Dapp. (Dapp is short for decentralized app)

TC: Where are you finding these new areas of talent?

Goldberg: I haven’t found a magic bullet. It’s an aggressive push to reach a diverse set of channels of sourcing.

Cannon: [Companies have big pools of strong candidates], the challenge early stage is it’s harder to find out about those companies. At the beginning it’s hard for people that aren’t as well networked. What’s a role that a large company has a big pool, how can they help them connect. I think about how to do that in a scalable way. The innovation that Google really did have is doing interviews. Rather than saying we’re gonna get people from top schools, we’re gonna have a test that tests for the engineering skills for this job. If you can prove you have these specific skills, I think that’s a great way. You get people who have the skillsets.

TC: What are you looking for in startups that say they specifically focus on machine learning?

Sarah: The way I thought about investing in AI is three buckets. One was on the generalized AI, and what would replace a human. That’s a lot of science and a lot of risk in the very early stage.The second bucket is vertical AI where I think health care and financial services are most interesting. The third bucket is what I call machine learning for everybody else or democratizing access to ML. Google and Facebook can afford to hire data scientists of incredible caliber, but most companies can’t. There’s an interesting company to be built sharing standard ‘algorithms as a service’ with those companies.

On the vertical side, a lot of is is tech constraints. I’d love to get into contracts, but [you have to] think about what’s possible — what you can do with a camera, where we are with machine vision and the applications of that with an immediate business context. [We look at] how many engineers and data scientists you have, what are the top 5 applications of your technology. You’ll very quickly find they’re doing something that could be automated quickly.

Goldberg: 99% of the pitches that I hear across industries talk about machine lerning. It’s become so ubiquitous as it’s almost meaningless, or it’s as horizontal as big data. What I look for is proprietary data. What is really critical is it’s not just algorithms but your ability to train a model faster than anyone else and in a way that’s more unique. You have access to some data pool, and the data is ultimately what sets it apart. For the vast majority, it’s a buzzword that they think will increase the valuation. A way to test that is to look at the technical DNA in the team. To me that’s a lot of suss out is this really machine learning, or is this empty words on a page.

TC: What are the verticals you focus on right now?

Goldberg: There are massive segments of the economy coming online right now. Agriculture, construction, logistics, we look at where the data has been locked up in offline form like on paper or excel. As software brings it online, a lot of those industries are ripe for machine learning.

Cannon: I am focused on consumer and the consumerization of the enterprise. On the consumer side I cover marketplaces, millennial purchasing behaviors and what we can learn from China. On the consumerization of enterprise side I’m focused on productivity, particularly tools used across business units.

TC: What signals are you looking for in consumer startups?

Cannon: I always think chance favors the prepared mind. I do want to do thesis work in consumer, and think about areas where I see patterns. When I see the monthly active users data, [I ask], does it conform to the world. Millenials have contrarian thinking, one thing that stood out when the Robinhood founders talk, was that millenials didn’t want to pay an upfront fee. I wonder if there are other models they’re resistant to. Maybe they don’t want to be monetized by ads, and are there businesses that could evolve based on that view.

Update: Cannon reached out to clarify a few things from the interview, which we’ve sprinkled some updates throughout.

If you’ve tried selling your old smartphone on a refurbishment website, chances are you ended up with a dozen browser tabs comparing prices. French startup Back Market is taking advantage of this fragmented industry to create a marketplace and aggregate all refurbishers on a single online platform.

The startup just raised $48 million (€41 million). Groupe Arnault, Eurazeo, Aglaé Ventures and Daphni participated in today’s funding round.

Back in May, the company told me that it was working with over 270 factories. Back Market has generated over $110 million in gross merchandise volume over the past three years. The service is now live in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Italy. The company just expanded to the U.S.

“Before, refurbishment was just a thing for tech savvy people and tech bloggers,” co-founder and chief creative officer Vianney Vaute told me. “With Back Market, it becomes a mainstream alternative.”

Working with multiple factories is also a competitive advantage when it comes to pricing, fail rate and quality assurance. Back Market has an overview on the industry and can choose to work with some partners and leave underperforming ones behind. The startup needs to build a brand that consumers can trust.

While smartphones and laptops are the most prominent products on the homepage, Back Market also accepts game consoles, TVs, headphones, coffee machines and more. Back Market also sells Apple products refurbished by Apple itself.

Now that smartphones have become a mature market, many customers aren’t looking for new and shiny devices. Some customers can be perfectly happy with a phone that was released last year or two years ago. It represents an opportunity for Back Market and the refurbishment industry as a whole.

After a hiatus last year, several Billion Dollar Unicorn players finally appear to be listing on the public markets. Recently, enterprise collaboration software player Smartsheet (Nasdaq: SMAR) went...

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

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with John Frankel of ff Venture Capital was recorded in...

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Even as AI assistants delve deeper into consumer hardware, companies still seem a bit reticent to bring them deep into their office software workflows.

Jane.ai is aiming to bring natural language processing and intelligence into an employee-facing solution that lets people query a digital assistant to give them information about documents, meetings and general company knowledge.

The St. Louis startup announced today that it is raising an $8.4 million Series A from private investors to power this vision.

Jane lives inside apps like Slack and Skype for Business (in addition to its own web app) where users are already chatting with co-workers and may need to surface information quickly that they don’t have ready access to. With Jane, employees can just message the assistant directly and the system will comb through information and apps that were uploaded and connected to the system in order to find answers. You can ask for a file by name and quickly get a link. You can ask for a specific department’s phone number and Jane will slack it to you.

The startup currently supports integrations with Office 365, Slack, Salesforce and Zenefits, and has more partnerships “on the horizon.”

The big focus will be outsourcing some of the more basic questions that you would ordinarily ask HR or IT so you don’t have to bombard the same person’s email to get the latest phone number for the workaround for a particular problem.

The basic goal of the system is to learn over time and give appointed admins the ability to be called on to answer certain questions when Jane doesn’t have an answer so that Jane will learn from the company experts and get more informed over time.

“Pitting humans against machines is one of the big design flaws of a lot of AI systems,” Jane.ai CEO David Karandish told TechCrunch.

The startup will also have a general knowledge base where users can call on some quickly available info that will also grow over time. It takes time for these solutions to gather the information to be accessible enough to turn to, but Jane.ai is hoping that by ensuring that data is cleaned up for every customer, a lot of employees’ frequent questions are answered on day 1.

Macy’s has partnered with b8ta, the retail-as-a-service startup that originally started as a way to let people try out new tech products. Macy’s has acquired a minority stake in b8ta and will use the startup to enhance The Market, an experiential-based retail concept at Macy’s. By partnering with b8ta, Macy’s envisions being able to scale its Market concept faster, Macy’s president Hal Lawton said in a statement. For b8ta, this is an additional source of revenue.

“At b8ta, we believe physical retail will thrive as a platform for discovering new products and brands,” b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby said in a statement. “Macy’s was the best partner for b8ta to scale our pioneering retail-as-a-service model to a breadth of categories like apparel, beauty, home, and more. With b8ta’s software platform and business model, product makers can go from solely selling online to launching their products with Macy’s in a few clicks. Our platform makes it easy for makers to deploy, manage, analyze, and scale amazing offline retail experiences.”

Earlier this year, b8ta unveiled a Shopify-like solution for retail stores. Called “Built by b8ta,” the solution functions as a retail-as-a-service platform for brands that want a physical presence. b8ta’s software solution includes checkout, inventory, point of sale, inventory management, staff scheduling services and more. Netgear was the first customer to launch a Built by b8ta store this June in Silicon Valley’s Santana Row, and b8ta has plans to deploy additional stores for other brands in that area.

In April, Norby told me there were a handful of other brands that b8ta would announce soon. This year, b8ta expects anywhere from 10 to 15 companies to launch stores built by b8ta across cosmetics, apparel and furniture. It seems that Macy’s was one of those companies.

b8ta initially launched as a store that showcased products like the Gi Flybike, a folding electric bicycle, and Thync, a wearable for achieving mindfulness and boosting energy, into physical stores to enable customers to have real, tactile experiences with them.

In 2014, it seemed like pretty much anyone with a pulse and pitch deck was capable of raising huge amounts of capital from prestigious venture capital firms at sky-high valuations. Here we are four years later and times have changed. VCs inked a little more than 3,100 deals in the last quarter of 2017, according to Crunchbase — about 500 fewer than the previous quarter.

For aspiring startup founders, it’s a “confusing time in the so-called Unicorn story,” as Erin Griffith put it in a column last May — an asset bubble that never really popped, but which at the very least is deflating. In the confirmation hearing for new SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, lawmakers lamented the dearth of initial public offerings as companies that thrived in private markets — from Snap to Blue Apron — have struggled to deliver meaningful returns to investors.

This all creates a number of dilemmas for founders looking to raise capital and scale businesses in 2018. VCs remain an integral part of the innovation ecosystem. But what happens when the changing dynamics of financial markets collide with VCs’ expectations regarding growth? VCs may not always be aligned with founders and companies in this new environment. A recent study commissioned by Eric Paley at Founder Collective found that by pressuring companies to scale prematurely, venture capitalists are indirectly responsible for more startup deaths than founder infighting, technical debt and slow customer adoption — combined.

The new landscape requires that founders in particular be judicious in the way they seek out new sources of capital, structure cap tables and ownership and the types of concessions made to their new backers in exchange for that much-needed cash. Here are three ways founders can ensure they’re looking out for what’s best for their companies — and themselves — in the long run.

Take time to backchannel

Venture capitalists are arguably in the business of due diligence. Before they sign the dotted line, they can be expected to call your competitors, your customers, your former employers, your business school classmates — they will ask everyone and their mother about you.

A first-time founder is also new to the pressures of entrepreneurship, of having employees rely on you for their livelihoods. Whether you are desperate for cash because you need to make payroll, or you’re anxious for the validation of a headline-worthy investment, few founders take the time to properly backchannel their investors. Until you can say you’ve done due diligence of your own, your opinion of your VCs is going to be based on the size of their fund, the deals they’ve done or the press they’ve gotten. In short, it will likely be based on what they’ve done right.

On the other hand, you likely don’t know anything about the actual partner that will join your board. Are they intelligent in your space? Do they have a meaningful network? Or do they just know a few headhunters? Are they value creators? What is their political standing in their firm? Before you sign a term sheet, you need to take the time to contextualize the profile of the person who is taking a board seat. It gives you foresight on the actions your investment partner will likely take down the road.

Think beyond your first raise

If you do decide to raise capital, make sure you are in alignment with your board regarding your business plan, the pursuit of profit at the expense of revenue growth, or vice versa, and how it will steer your decision making as the market changes. It goes without saying that differences of opinion regarding your business strategy can lead to big conflict down the road.

As you think about these trade-offs, remember that as an entrepreneur, your obligation is to the existing shareholders: the employees and you. As the pack of potential unicorns has thinned, VCs in particular have turned to unconventional deal structures, like the use of common and preferred shares. For the founder who needs to raise cash, a dual ownership structure seems like a fair compromise to make, but remember that it may be at the expense of your employees’ option pool. The interests of preferred and common shareholders are not perfectly aligned, particularly when it comes time to make difficult decisions in the future.

Is VC money right for you?

VCs frequently share information, board decks and investor presentations with members of the press and the tech community, sometimes in support of their own personal agendas or to get perspective on whether to invest or not. That’s why it’s particularly important to backchannel, and more importantly, that you have allies that you can call on and people who can ensure some measure of goodwill. A good company board cannot be made up of just the investors and you: You need advocates that are balanced and on your side.

These prescriptions can sound paranoid, particularly to the founder whose business is growing nicely. But anything can cause a sea change and put you at odds with the people funding your company — who now own a piece of the company that you’re trying to build. When disagreements arise, it can get tense. They might say that you are a first-time founder, and therefore a novice. They will make your weaknesses known and say you’ll never be able to raise again if you ignore their invaluable advice. It’s important that you don’t fall into the fear trap. If you create a product or service that solves an undeniable problem, the money will come — and you will get funded again.

The term founder-friendly VC was always perhaps a bit of a misnomer. The people building the business and the people planning on cashing in on your efforts are imperfect allies. As a founder and business owner, your primary responsibilities are to your clients, to the company you’re building and, most importantly, to the employees who are helping you do it. As founders we like to think that we have all the answers, especially in bad times. Making sure you have alignment with your investors in challenging and unpredictable situations is critical. It’s important to anticipate how your investors will problem-solve before you give up control.

Venture capital is far from the only way to finance an early-stage business. Founders looking to jump-start their business have a number of alternatives, from debt financing and bootstrapping to crowdfunding, angel investors and ICOs. There are indeed still many advantages to having experienced investors on your side, not simply the cash but also the access to hiring and industry knowledge. But the relationship can only benefit both parties when founders go in eyes wide open.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s flip to the consumer side where the mobile penetration has been tremendous. Everybody believes that India is going the the next big e-commerce market. Even Amazon believes that....

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French startup Exotec Solutions raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million) from Iris Capital with existing investors 360 Capital Partners and Breega also participating.

The startup has built an automated robot called the Skypods to optimize e-commerce warehouses. It’s easy to forget about it when you click on “buy now”, but there are a ton of people walking through endless aisles of products every day to pick up your next order.

Exotec is selling a complete solution to replace part of your warehouse with a robot-managed area. France’s second biggest e-commerce website Cdiscount has been experimenting with Exotec and now plans to buy more robots, racks and stations in the coming months.

Skypods are low-profile robots that can carry a standardized box and bring it back to a human operator. But the Skypods don’t just move on flat grounds. They can move up and down a rack and grab a box from the shelves.

This is the most visual part of Exotec, but designing efficient logistics software for automated warehouse solutions is arguably even harder. The startup promises few errors and the ability to add more racks and robots without having to stop your fulfillment center.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to build and sell a thousand robots by 2019. It’s clear that e-commerce companies won’t switch to Exotec overnight. Many companies face huge spikes of demand during the holiday season for instance. So they need to make sure that it can handle a lot of pickups during the most demanding times.

Other companies, such as CommonSense Robotics focus on smaller warehouses and groceries with a warehouse-as-a-service approach. Overall, automated fulfillment centers seem like the future. Warehouses are constrained and predictable environments. And this is perfect for automated systems. Now let’s see who is going to grab more market share in this space.

When it comes to scaling startups, few people are as accomplished or consistently successful as Reid Hoffman .

While the rest of us consider scaling a startup to market domination a daunting task, Hoffman has continued to make it look easy.

In September, Hoffman will join us at TC Disrupt SF to share his strategies on “blitzscaling,” which also happens to be the title of his forthcoming book.

Hoffman started out his Silicon Valley career at PayPal, serving as EVP and a founding board member. In 2003, Hoffman founded LinkedIn from his living room. LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members across 200 countries and territories across the world, effectively becoming a necessity to the professional marketplace.

Hoffman left LinkedIn in 2007, but his contributions to the company certainly helped turn it into the behemoth it is today, going public in 2011 and selling to Microsoft for a whopping $26.2 billion in 2016.

At Disrupt, he’ll outline some of the methodology behind going from startup to scale up that is outlined in his new book, Blitzscaling, co-authored with Chris Yeh:

Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup’s life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace that captures the market.

Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.

Today, Hoffman leads Greylock Partners’ Discovery Fund, where he invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo and Microsoft. Hoffman’s place in the VC world is a natural continuation of his angel investing. His angel portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga.

Hoffman has also invested in tech that affects positive change, serving on the non-profit boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org.

Blitzscaling marks Hoffman’s third book (others include The Startup of You and The Alliance) and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him teach us a thing or two at Disrupt SF.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are available now right here.

More financing is coming in for Bird, this time potentially valuing the company at $2 billion, according to a new report by Axios.

There’s not a ton to add here compared to the last round (which happened just weeks ago), as the same dynamics are probably in play here. While Uber was a bet on car rides and generally getting around, Bird is that but at a dramatically more granular level — thinking short hops of a few miles in congested areas. Startups that are exceedingly hot can sometimes pull off these rolling rounds where investors are coming in at various points, especially as the model further proves out over time.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, you’ve probably seen Bird (and Lime) scooters hanging out on the sidewalks — potentially knocked over in a spot where someone might trip over them while checking his or her phone. That’s been a point of tension in areas like San Francisco, where Bird has had to temporarily come off the sidewalks as a permit system rolls out. Bird isn’t the first mobility-focused service that has faced regulatory challenges before, but it is one that’s become very popular very quickly.

This too, as Axios notes, could be an easy play to get into a hot market that a major ridesharing company could want to buy its way into. Uber acquired Jump, an on-demand bike service, in the midst of its own financing round. While bikes don’t seem to be getting quite the hype that scooters are, Lyft is also planning to acquire Motivate, an on-demand biking network.

Bird just weeks ago raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, while Lime raised an additional $250 million. Bird was valued at $300 million in a financing round earlier this year.