It’s become a common complaint that social media allows everyone to limit their news consumption to stories that reinforce what they already believe. But the team at Knowhere says it’s found a solution: News stories written by machines.

The idea is that Knowhere’s technology can eliminate some of the in-built human bias, and also pull from a wide variety of sources and write stories with enormous speed. For controversial and political news, it doesn’t limit itself to one story. Instead, it allows you to jump between versions of the story that are written from a left, right or “impartial” perspective.

“I want to establish a source of record that’s indisputably trustworthy for everyone from across all aisles,” said CEO and Editor-in-Chief Nathaniel Barling. “As a Knowhere reader what you are signing up for is the truth and the full context around it.”

At first, I wondered whether Knowhere might simply deepen the same divisions that it claims to fight. Might this approach just reinforce the idea that every piece of news should be interpreted according to our ideological leanings? Or that we can dismiss an accurate piece of reporting by, say, The New York Times because The Times has been painted as a liberal paper?

When I brought this up, Barling said Knowhere is focused on facts, even if those facts (say, the scientific consensus around climate change) are sometimes disputed for political reasons.

Barling’s father Kurt was a longtime reporter at the BBC, and Barling recalled a conversation between the two of them on this topic: “The truth doesn’t care for your politics. What we must do is evaluate all of the evidence that we possibly have available to us, then come to the most accurate conclusion regardless of political stripe.”

So the Knowhere stories that I’ve read tend to be very straightforward and focus on facts that have been corroborated by reputable publications. The left-leaning version of the article might be written so those facts add up to one narrative, while the right-leaning version might tell a different story, but they still agree on the core facts. (And some stories — including most of the ones I read in the Technology section — don’t include multiple spins, just the impartial version.)

And while Knowhere articles are created by machine learning technology (Barling’s co-founders Alexandre Elkrief and Dylan Rhodes are both data scientists), they’re all reviewed by human journalists. In fact, he said there are already eight journalists on his team, making up for half of Knowhere’s headcount — a ratio that he hopes to maintain as the company grows.

Facebook has also been making efforts to show different perspectives on a story, particularly if the story’s accuracy is disputed. When I pointed this out, Barling said, “They do recognize the scale of the issue, but they’re not well-placed to execute on it because of their philosophical stand. As you said, they don’t want to be the arbiters of truth.”

In addition to launching today, Knowhere announced that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from investors, including CrunchFund, Danhua Capital, Day One Ventures, Struck Capital and Abstract Ventures. (Like TechCrunch, CrunchFund was founded by Michael Arrington, and it’s backed by our parent company, Oath.)

And while it’s way too early to declare that Knowhere is succeeding at breaking down partisan bias, I’ll say that I’m pretty left-leaning myself and that I get a lot of my news and commentary from left-leaning sources — but the site’s approach and tone made me way more willing to click on the right-wing version of the story.

Digital media company Fullscreen announced this morning that it has acquired Reelio .

The startup has described itself as “the Match.com of brands and creators on YouTube,” collecting data about video creators and connecting them with marketers who want to use their skills and reach their audience.

In the announcement, Fullscreen suggests that Reelio’s technology will allow the company to offer a more complete set of services around influencer marketing.

“The integration of Reelio’s platform into our network brings us one step closer to building a complete solution for the future of brand marketing, which we believe will be social-first and content-driven,” said Fullscreen general manager Pete Stein in a statement. “The strength of Reelio’s data, technology, and team will be a huge asset to our company, and we’re excited to work alongside them as we continue to enhance our influencer marketing offerings.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Variety reports that the entire 50-person Reelio team (including co-founder and CEO Pete Borum) will be joining Fullscreen.

Reelio had raised $8 million in funding from investors including e.ventures, Tremor Video co-founders Jason Glickman and Andrew Reis and former Bertelsmann president Thomas Hesse. Fullscreen, meanwhile, is owned by Otter Media, the joint venture between AT&T and the Chernin Group.

Former Twitter product lead April Underwood is getting another promotion this morning, now rising to the role of chief product officer of what aims to be the dead-simple employee communications platform Slack, according to Fortune.

Underwood previously served as director of product at Twitter, where she worked for five years before joining Slack as its head of platform. Shortly after that Underwood was promoted to the company’s VP of product, and will now serve as the company’s first chief product officer. These kinds of promotions imply some additional responsibility — especially as Slack looks to diversify and pitch itself as a more robust product than just a messenger — but also another point of maturation for Slack. The company hired its first chief financial officer, Allen Shim, in February this year.

Slack is one of those companies that faces a tense push-and-pull as it looks to get into larger and larger enterprises, which all have niche needs. The company is a darling in Silicon Valley thanks to its very simple interface, but with companies with thousands (or, eventually, tens of thousands of employees) just a tool with groups and direct messages could easily become unwieldy. That’s why Slack has invested in a variety of tools, including rolling out threaded messaging a little more than a year ago. Slack is likely one of those companies that gets hundreds of feature requests a year for larger businesses that have niche use cases, but it still has to demonstrate that it’s a simple product without hitting feature creep status.

Underwood getting more authority over that evolution (of which she was already a huge part, including the development of threaded messages) is another signal that the company is looking to tap her consumer background at Twitter to create some kind of middle ground between feeling like a satisfying consumer product while still operating as an enterprise tool. Slack is increasingly looking to apply machine learning to help employees get to answers right away, and it still has to take the same kind of care in rolling out new features that satisfy the needs of larger organizations without sacrificing that simplicity that made it a darling in the first place.

Slack most recently hit a $5.1 billion valuation in a recent investment round, and said it had around 6 million daily active users in September last year. That might be small-ish compared to the size and scale of Twitter, but as something geared toward internal communications at companies, that level of engagement in the workplace is going to increasingly be a selling point for the company as it looks to grow into that valuation.

Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. E&C Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) made this announcement this morning, clarifying that Zuckerberg will speak on the company’s use and protection of user data.

Here’s what the Congressmen had to say in a prepared statement:

This hearing will be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online. We appreciate Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to testify before the committee, and we look forward to him answering our questions on April 11th.

This all comes amidst the greatest existential threat to Facebook we’ve yet to see.

In 2014, a third-party quiz app developed by Aleksandr Kogan collected the data of around 50 million raw profiles. Only 270,000 some people who downloaded the app and participated in the survey, but at the time, Facebook allowed third parties to collect information around friends of friends.

Facebook no longer allows this data sharing, and had asked for certification in 2015 that this data had been deleted.

Kogan harvested and sold that data to Cambridge Analytica, a political firm that would use information on identity, social networks and likes to target demographics and influence voters. In 2016, the Trump Campaign hired Cambridge Analytica.

Following these revelations, a movement to #deletefacebook sprang up across the internet. But it wasn’t just users who reacted.

On March 21, Zuck issued his first response to the scandal, adding: “If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.”

Two short days later, the House and Senate put Zuckerberg on notice, saying that he is the right person to testify. CNN reported on March 27 that Zuck had come to terms with the fact that he’d have to testify and the Facebook team began preparing for his day on the Hill.

That day now has a precise date: April 11.

Duo Security is opening a new office in Downtown Detroit, expanding from its headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan . The company will immediately relocate 30 team members to a shared space in Bamboo Detroit in the Madison Building and by the end of the year, and plans on moving into a 9,000 square foot space to accommodate additional employees.

This is a big win for Detroit.

Duo Security is one of the hottest security startups in the space and arguably one of the largest in the state of Michigan. The company raised a $70 million Series D in late October 2017, placing its valuation north of a billion. Duo employees 350 people in Ann Arbor and an additional 250 in other offices around the world. Through it all Duo has remained loyal to Ann Arbor but the talent and excitement in Detroit is impossible to ignore.

“Metro Detroit has more engineers per capita than any region in the US next to Silicon Valley,” CEO and co-founder Dug Song tells TechCrunch. “And while our college town of Ann Arbor is a cornerstone of innovation in the region, the urban area of Detroit is nearly 4 million people strong. Jon Oberheide and I have been eager for Duo to help play a role in the city’s growing momentum and support ongoing efforts to bolster the region’s technology profile.”

Dug tells me that the company picked Bamboo to house the first Duo employees as a move back to the company’s roots. Duo was founded in a coworking space and the company is ready to help build the platform for the city.

Sarah Lacy, founder of media site Pando, has unveiled her newest company, Chairman Mom. The subscription-based startup aims to provide resources to working mothers, and ultimately set them up to succeed in all areas of their lives.

“One of the things that’s actually pretty distinct for us is we focus really on the woman, not the children,” Lacy told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of sites where you can get a lot of answers of what’s a great pre-school or where’s a restaurant that is kid-friendly. and a lot of things are always very kid-centric. We’re really woman centric.”

At launch, Chairman Mom is focused on one key functionality: a question and answer platform. Every day, Chairman Mom’s team of three curates two questions — one about life and one about work — from the community to feature on the site for answers and discussion. These questions can range from “How much do you get paid?” to “What’s the best way to handle harassment at work?” to “What should I do if I think my spouse is cheating on me?”

“The goal of each thread is to get that mom the best answer,” Lacy said. “It’s really not to have an open discussion board of everyone’s views on that topic.”

What makes Chairman Mom different from the likes of other social media sites is its emphasis on using real names while also offering anonymity. Real names are required to sign up but community members can ask and respond to questions anonymously. There is also no up-voting or direct messaging.

“We don’t have things that have created tribalism and fights on other mom networks,” Lacy said.

The goal with Chairman Mom is to rebrand what working mothers and what working motherhood represents, Lacy said. Before Lacy first became a mother, she heard horror stories about what to expect, she said. Some people, for example, told her to expect to feel like a failure at home and at work. But that’s not what it was like for her, Lacy said.

“I was shocked at the disconnect between that and what happened when I actually had kids,” Lacy said. What happened when I had kids was I became better at everything. I became more ambitious, I wrote more quickly, I was so much better as a manager. I was so much more productive. You really have this amazing ability to prioritize what’s important.”

Lacy went with the name Chairman Mom to “telegraph in charge and maternal,” she said. It was important to her, she said, for the name not to conjure up any connotations of shame around pregnancy and motherhood.

“It’s even a step beyond ‘I’m not ashamed,’ but like ‘No, this is our source of power,'” she said. “Something that just sounds so declaratively in charge but also maternal. And it’s still called the chairman of the board. And it’s this idea of we’re overthrowing a patriarchy. This is a man’s world that we’re overthrowing and we don’t have any illusion about that fact.”

Chairman Mom costs $5 per month for access to its community of honest answers to questions about working motherhood. By having people pay to access the platform, one hope is that trolls won’t pay actual money to troll, Lacy said. The platform is also free of advertisers and intends to remain that way, Lacy said.

Chairman Mom is not the only startup targeting mothers. There’s Peanut, which is a Tinder-like experience for finding other moms to hang out. There’s also Winnie, which helps parents find kid-friendly places and access other resources that may be helpful to parents.

Lacy said she recognizes Chairman Mom has competitors, but also recognizes that “it’s such a massive market no one’s building for,” she said. It’s so massive, Lacy said, that she envisions seeing “a handful of billion-dollar consumer internet companies that are geared toward women.

Chairman Mom has been in private beta for the last month or so, with “several hundred” people using it. Chairman Mom has raised a $1.4 million seed round led by Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate Ventures and Tim Connors from PivotNorth Capital, with participation from Greylock Discovery and Precursor Ventures.

JUMP Bikes, the on-demand biking service that integrates with Uber, has been weighing both acquisition and investment offers.

A decision has not yet been reached, but right now possible options include a sale to Uber at a price that exceeds $100 million, or a venture investment round, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. One of the possible investor names that has been floated is Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, but we are told that JUMP has several options.

We are also told that various parties have been upping their offers over the past week, as they fiercely compete to get ownership of JUMP.

“E-bikes” are expected to become more popular, where users are able to find and rent bikes quickly via apps. They are part regular bike and part electric, which makes it easier to go up hills.

JUMP launched as Social Bicycles nearly a decade ago, but the startup recently rebranded as JUMP when it announced its $10 million Series A investment round a few months back. Menlo Ventures and Sinewave Ventures invested.

Since then, JUMP has launched a partnership with Uber, available in select cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Users are able to identify a nearby bike via the Uber app and are given a PIN to unlock it. They do not require bike docks, meaning they can be picked up and dropped off everywhere. It costs $2 for every 30 minutes.

JUMP also has its own separate app.

We’ve reached out to JUMP and Sequoia for comment. Uber declined to comment.

TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey recently wrote about JUMP’s expansion:

It “plans to launch in Sacramento and Providence, Rhode Island later this year. Through its software and hardware offerings, it operates via third-parties, like cities, campuses and corporations, in 40 markets including Portland, New Orleans and Atlanta.”

The company also competes with GoBike and Spin. On-demand scooters like Bird and Limebike are also emerging businesses in the urban transportation space.

Streaming royalties are too expensive for Spotify to thrive as a public company just playing us songs. Spotify’s shares closed down 10 percent today during its NYSE trading debut. Luckily it controls much of the relationship between musicians and their fans on its app, poising it to build a powerful revenue and artist loyalty generator by connecting the two through native advertising and messaging that doesn’t stop the music.

Spotify already has a wide range of ad experiences built for traditional brands, from audio ads to display units to sponsored sessions where users get ad-free playback in exchange for watching a commercial. But none of these ad units are designed to help musicians grow their audience within Spotify, even if they can be bent to that purpose.

Spotify could win big by following Facebook’s roadmap.

Back in 2007, Facebook already had ads that led offsite. Think of these as Spotify’s existing audio and display ads. But when Facebook built Pages that let businesses reach you through the News Feed, it also launched ads that let them promote and grow their Pages within Facebook. Unlike the stock banner ads you see all over the web, these ads were native to Facebook, targeted with its profile data, and they used social referrals about Pages your friends interacted with to rope you in. These gave entities on Facebook a paid way to grow their popularity inside the platform.

This is Spotify’s opportunity.

A few years ago, Spotify’s user base was too small for artists to focus on spending money there to get popular. But Spotify has grown to the size where it’s replacing top 40 radio, and over 30 percent of listening now comes from its recommendations and algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly. The record labels now need Spotify to have a hit. Between that influence and it’s stature as the biggest on-demand music streaming service, Spotify has the leverage to offer artists the best tool to boost their fan base. Whether artists want to build a following on Spotify, sell collectors’ items, or fill premium front-row seats at their shows, Spotify could hook them up.

The no-longer-a-startup has already built the groundwork for this with the launch of its Spotify For Artists analytics dashboard app last year that shows a musician’s top songs, and the demographics of their fans including their location, gender, age, and what else they listen to. Spotify’s proven the power of this data with its Fans First email campaigns that let artists reach their most frequent listeners with access to concert ticket pre-sales and exclusive merchandise. It claims the emails see a 40 percent open rate, and 17 percent click-through rate — way higher than the industry standard.

But if Spotify built new surfaces for artists to reach out directly to fans within its apps, it could become the destination for record label marketing money. Since these artist ads and messages would all drive users deeper into the app rather than away from it like brand ads, Spotify could charge less than traditional ads and make them affordable to labels on a budget or musicians paying out-of-pocket.

Here are some ways Spotify could create native artist-to-fan marketing channels:

Sponsored songs on its algorithmic playlists could expose fans to artists in the most natural way possible, or turn one-time listeners into loyalists. Wherever there’s recommendations, there’s room for paid discovery. Listeners could easily skip the track or switch to a different playlist, but might end up falling in love with the band, and diving into their catalogue. It’s the equivalent of Facebook’s in-News Feed native ads, but with a musician promoted instead of a business’ Page. Spotify was actually spotted testing what was effectively a sponsored song in mid-2017 above the start of some playlists. While there was an opt-out option within the app’s Settings that’s since disappeared, Spotify has at least considered this idea.

Promoted Artists could use a similar model to Google’s AdWords sponsored search results. When users search for an artist, they could be shown similar artists who’ve paid to be promoted in the search typeahead or results page. Spotify could also insert a box within the profile of another artist you’re browsing below their top tracks. Spotify already lists a slew of related artists in text, but could highlight one that pays, perhaps showing one of their songs that could be instantly played.

Featured Artists could give artists that pay a special slot on Spotify’s browse page. With so many recommendations here, it’d be easy to insert a sponsored section without feeling interruptive.

Sponsored Visualizations could make better use of your screen while you listen. Rather than just staring at the album art and playback controls, Spotify could let artists pitch fans their other music, tickets, gear, or social media channels. Spotify could also fill this space with entertaining silent video clips, photo slideshows, and biographical info as I suggested as a differentiator in 2016, and similar to how lyrics site Genius started doing with its Stories this week. Given users are currently listening to the artist, they might be primed for these experiences. Spotify has already tested letting artists show GIFs during playback, and has partnered with Genius to show Behind The Music factoids, but this is real estate that could help artists earn more money as well as entertain fans.

Direct Messaging

The most ambitious and audacious way to let artists reach fans would be a special artist-to-fan messaging channel. Spotify got rid of its in-app inbox and messaging feature for sending friends songs a few years ago, instead pushing users to share music via their chat app of choice. But similar to the Fans First email campaigns, Spotify could create a special artist-to-fan messaging section in its app that could alert users to new releases and playlists as brand advertising, or even push tours and merchandise as more direct performance advertising.

Spotify could give all artists a certain volume of messages they could send for free or let them reach out just to the top 1% of fans a certain number of times per month or year. Then artists could pay to send more messages beyond the limits. Alternatively, it could just charge for any use of messaging.

Done wrong, the above options could feel like Spotify gouging artists to reach their own fans. But done right, users might actually enjoy it. These connections wouldn’t be too far off from following an artist on other social media, but where people are already listening. Finding out about one of your favorite band’s new albums, tours, or t-shirts might feel less like an ad and more like an inside tip from the fan club.

Spotify might be able to get away with showing some of these different experiences to users who’ve subscribed if they don’t get in the way of music listening. Swinging to the other end of the opportunity spectrum, the company could just give away all these experiences to artists, boosting their loyalty to Spotify and getting them to promote their presence there instead of on competing streaming services like Apple Music.

If Spotify doesn’t figure out a way to improve its margins with additional revenue drivers, it may have a tough time surviving as a public company. If it becomes too profitable from just music streaming, the labels can always try to increase their royalty rates. Spotify might hope that more artists work with it directly, cutting out the middlemen, but the record labels still provide some important marketing, radio promotion, and distribution services that artists need. Meanwhile, startups including United Masters (which raised a $70 million Series A from Google parent Alphabet and Andreessen Horowitz) adnd subscription crowdfunding platforms like Patreon want to usurp the record labels and become the way artists earn more before Spotify can.

Creating ways to connect with listeners could offer Spotify a way to combat the enduring narrative that it’s screwing over musicians. If Spotify can prove these artist-to-fan messaging options earn them more than they cost, it could be seen as the streaming service that’s actually trying to help musicians make a living.

Recorded music has become primarily a promotional tool for all of a musician’s other revenue monetization methods since the dawn of the MP3. Streaming’s on-demand structure and no-extra-cost-per-play nature turns the curious listener who’s only heard of an artist or just likes one single into a diehard fan who shells out the big bucks every time their favorite act is in town.

As we shift to an experiential culture where our possessions are digitized and its our interests that define us, people want to feel closer to the creators they love. Artist-to-fan messaging could bring the whole life-cycle from discovery to affinity to real monetization beyond the royalties all within one green and black app.

For more on Spotify going public, read our feature stories:

MIT is disassociating itself from Nectome, the Y Combinator-backed startup promising to preserve customers’ brains for the possibility of future digital upload.

Co-founder Robert McIntyre described the procedure as “100 percent fatal” — it involves connecting terminally ill patients to a machine that pumps embalming fluids into their arteries.

The company has collected (refundable) $10,000 payments for a wait list, but its website now carries a note in “Response to recent press,” suggesting that the company would only carry the procedure out after further research:

We believe that clinical human brain preservation has immense potential to benefit humanity, but only if it is developed in the light, with input from medical and neuroscience experts. We believe that rushing to apply vitrification today would be extremely irresponsible and hurt eventual adoption of a validated protocol.

As noted in the MIT Technology Review, MIT has been criticized for potentially giving the company credibility by association — MIT Media Lab professor Edward Boyden was receiving money through a federal grant won by Nectome. (McIntyre and his co-founder Michael McCanna are both MIT graduates.)

Now the Media Lab has released a statement saying that after reviewing “the scientific premises underlying the company’s commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made,” it will “terminate the subcontract between MIT and Nectome in accordance with the terms of their agreement.”

The Media Lab says that the grant involved a research project to “combine aspects of Nectome’s chemistry with the Boyden group’s invention, expansion microscopy, to better visualize mouse brain circuits for basic science and research purposes.” Apparently Prof. Boyden has “no personal affiliation — financial, operational, or contractual — with the company Nectome.”

The statement concludes with a discussion of the science behind Nectome. The Media Lab doesn’t completely rule out the possibility of brain preservation and uploading in the future, but it suggests that the science isn’t solid yet:

Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness.

McIntyre told the MIT Technology Review, “We appreciate the help MIT has given us, understand their choice, and wish them the best.”

With 2018 midterms around the corner, the Democrats are looking for their answer to Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer-backed political data firm that either won the 2016 election or tricked everyone into believing that it did, depending on who’s talking.

To that end, a prominent left-leaning accelerator is out with a new graduating class, just in time to gear up for November. Higher Ground Labs seeks to “supercharge” political startups with progressive causes at heart. The incubator and accelerator’s main cause is notching Democratic wins, from local to federal elections.

The group just announced a class of 13 politics-minded companies offering “innovative solutions” to get Democrats elected. The 13 new companies join 10 companies from Higher Ground’s 2017 class. The chosen startups will each receive around $100,000 each in seed funding, an invitation to Higher Ground’s accelerator bootcamp and proximity to the group’s star-studded advisory board, which boasts a former COO of the Obama Foundation, a former Clinton campaign CTO and current Strava chief product officer, a former FCC chairman, the guys at Crooked Media and the chief technology officer of the DNC, among many other high-profile names. The political accelerator’s investor list features notable names like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Silicon Valley super angel investor Ron Conway.

“Last year, Higher Ground Labs invested in companies and entrepreneurs that provided game-changing technologies in Virginia’s state elections and the Alabama Senate race,” said Ron Klain, chair of the Higher Ground board and former White House aide. “Now, we are more than doubling the size of our portfolio, and will be backing two dozen companies that aim to have a major impact on the 2018 election, up and down the ballot.”

The 2018 class startups include:

5 Calls, an affordable phone-banking platform for everything from school board elections to federal campaigns.

Avalanche, a cognitive science-driven communications company.

CallTime, which aggregates data into comprehensive donor profiles using AI to optimize donor outreach.

Change Research, quick, accurate public opinion polling that cuts costs by as much as 90 percent.

Civic Eagle, a SaaS platform for policy advocacy campaigns.

Factba.se, a “transparency engine” that collects “every word spoken” by a political opponent to allow for discrepancies and shifts to be identified quickly.

GiveMini, a micro-donation tool that lets donors round up to the nearest dollar.

GrowProgress, a tool that predicts audience personality for message targeting.

Humanize, “a platform that democratizes the tools of advertising” to give regular people access to ad strategies that would normally be price prohibitive.

New Mode, engagement tools that highlight supporters’ stories.

Same Side, a platform to activate supporters who are “already doing cool things” in music, art and culture.

Swayable, a data science platform that enables rapid-response digital campaigns and examines “which kinds of people respond to which content.”

Voter Protection Partners, a group that works with campaigns to “manage voter protection teams and track, analyze, and respond to voting incidents and election administration problems.”

Projects like Higher Ground are fueling the kind of political technology operations that Democrats hope can translate into wins in 2018 and beyond. While national post-mortems on the 2016 election remain obsessed with the right’s deep pocketed big data mythos, plenty of folks in tech’s left-leaning epicenters believe that Democrats can do better with the right tools.

More than ten years ago, betaworks launched to foster an ecosystem of startups focused on the intersection of media and consumer behavior. While the mission hasn’t changed, the structure has seen some tweaks. The company has introduced its own venture arm, led by Matt Hartman, as well as the more recent launch of betaworks Studios.

But nestled gently between the two are betaworks Camps program. Camps are a sort of hyper-specific accelerator program, within which a small cohort of early-stage startups build out their products within a certain theme, complete with the full resources of betaworks (marketing, legal, space, etc.) as well as a small investment.

Camps first launched with BotCamp, followed shortly by VoiceCamp, and today the graduates of VisionCamp are showing off their wares for the first time at Demo Day.

Camera IQ

Camera IQ calls itself a camera experience manager. The company works with brands and publishers to develop virtual worlds for customers, with partners including Spotify, Neiman Marcus and Viacom. The technology integrates AR toolkits and mobile OSes with brands native apps to offer different experiences for consumers. Camera IQ was founded by Allison Wood and Sonia Tsao. The founders say that the camera represents the next great consumption experience, as well as the next great transaction experience. The company hopes to sit at that intersection.

Facemoji

Livestreaming and FaceTime are now accessible to everyone, but not everyone wants to show their face on these platforms. Enter Facemoji. The startup offers 3D avatar webcams that streams your facial expressions via the avatar without ever showing your real likeness. The company was originally focused on gamers who stream on Twitch, with plans to expand to video chat. Facemoji was founded by Robin Raszka and Tom Krcha.

Leo

Originally called Surreal, Leo offers a vast marketplace of AR objects, stamps and artwork so that users can change the world around them. Leo has raised $1.5 million in seed and has relationships with upwards of 2,000 artists on the platform. The company, which was founded by Dana Loberg and Sahin Boydas, makes money by sharing revenue with artists who create objects for the platform.

Numina

Nearly half of land area in cities is made up of streets, sidewalks and parks, and cities have no data or insights on these spaces. Numina partners with cities to place computer vision sensors on light poles in these areas and offer anonymous flow data about pedestrians in these spaces. The company offers an API for streets, as well, to give developers access to real-time activity and a backlog of activity for their apps, whether it’s for mobility, insurance, real estate, or logistics. Numina was founded by Tara Pham.

Selerio

Selerio brings together the real world and the virtual world by using computer vision to map the layout and objects in a room and replace them with a virtual world. Imagine putting old-school Victorian furniture inside an existing space. The company uses deep learning and computer vision in its technology, which was spun out of Cambridge University. Selerio offers an SDK to developers and is currently being integrated with Apple’s ARKit. Selerio was founded by Ghislain Tasse.

Streem

Streem supports the professional home services industry by using computer vision, machine learning, and AR to capture vital information (like model, make and serial number) through a simply live video chat. Through Streem’s technology, service pros can capture information, take measurements and save notes without ever stepping foot in the client’s home, letting them offer quotes much faster and solve the problem in one try. Streem was founded by Ryan Fink and Sean Adkinson.

Trash TV

Despite the fact that capturing and editing video is more accessible than ever, video editing remains a time-consuming and tedious process. The Trash TV app uses computer vision and AI to edit consumer videos into something beautiful and usable. The company uses a stock video repository that includes proof of creation to fill in the gaps. Trash TV was founded by Hannah Donovan and Anton Marini.

This is the third of betaworks’ Camps. The next one, according to Camps General Manager Danika Laszuk, is focused on the intersection of live streaming and participatory audiences. Dubbed LiveCamp, betaworks hopes to find startups evolving the space as Twitch streaming and apps like HQ continue to pull in large viewerships and the lines between performer and audience are blurred.

When Stackery’s founders were still at New Relic in 2014, they recognized there was an opportunity to provide instrumentation for the emerging serverless tech market. They left the company after New Relic’s IPO and founded Stackery with the goal of providing a governance and management layer for serverless architecture.

The company had a couple of big announcements today starting with their $5.5 million round, which they are calling a “seed plus” — and a new tool for tracking serverless performance called the Health Metrics Dashboard.

Let’s start with the funding round. Why the Seed Plus designation? Company co-founder and CEO Nathan Taggart says they could have done an A round, but the designation was a reflection of the reality of where their potential market is today. “From our perspective, there was an appetite for an A, but the Seed Plus represents the current stage of the market,” he said. That stage is still emerging as companies begin to see the benefits of the serverless approach.

HWVP led the round. Voyager Capital, Pipeline Capital Partners, and Founders’ Co-op also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $7.3 million since the company was founded in 2016.

Serverless computing like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions is a bit of a misnomer. There is a server underlying the program, but instead of maintaining a dedicated server for your particular application, you only pay when there is a trigger event. Like cloud computing that came before, developers love it because it saves them a ton of time configuring (or begging) for resources for their applications.

But as with traditional cloud computing — serverless is actually a cloud service — developers can easily access it. If you think back to the Consumerization of IT phenomenon that began around 2011, it was this ability to procure cloud services so easily that resulted in a loss of control inside organizations.

As back then, companies want the advantages of serverless technology, but they also want to know how much they are paying, who’s using it and that it’s secure and in compliance with all the rules of the organization. That’s where Stackery comes in.

As for the new Health Metrics Dashboard, that’s an extension of this vision, one that fits in quite well with the monitoring roots of the founders. Serverless often involves containers, which can encompass many functions. When something goes wrong it’s hard to trace what the root cause was.

“We are showing architecture-wide throughput and performance at each resource point and [developers] can figure out where there are bottlenecks, performance problems or failure.

The company launched in 2016. It is based in Portland, Oregon and currently has 9 employees, of which five are engineers. They plan to bring on three more by the end of the year.

Snapchat has today introduced a new group video chat feature, letting users chat with up to 16 of their closest friends. If users need more people in the chat (which, for those of us who have large conference calls, sounds awful!), Snap is also offering group voice calls with up to 32 participants.

The feature is relatively simple. Just tap the video icon in a group chat to get started, or start up a call with a few people and invite new friends to join.

As one might expect, Snapchat’s crown jewel filters will also be available to use within a group video chat.

Folks that aren’t camera ready can easily toggle between voice and video to just voice.

Snap first introduced group chat and video chat in 2016, looking to give people new ways to communicate on the image-first platform. Snap says that the community is making millions of calls a day since launch.

That said, it’s worth wondering about the timing of this new feature, which comes almost two years after the company announced video chat. It’s possible that Snap wants to take advantage of the #deletefacebook movement offering people as much functionality as possible to connect on their platform instead of the incumbent’s.

It’s also worth noting that Snap’s 16-person group video chat is strikingly similar to Houseparty, the video chat app launched by the founders of live streaming app Meerkat.

Alongside the introduction of group video calls, Snap is also bringing @mentions to the platform. Users can now tag each other in their snaps and Stories by simply typing @ before their user name. Users who have been tagged will be notified when they appear in their friends’ Stories.

SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based startup that helps companies manage the contact phase of the sales process, announced a $50 million Series C today.

Insight Venture Partners was lead investor with participation from LinkedIn and Emergence Capital, which also participated in the company’s A and B rounds. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $75 million, so this was a significant capital infusion.

What attracted investors was that SalesLoft has concentrated on an area of the sales pipeline called ‘sales engagement.’ It provides a framework for sales people around how to contact potential customers, how often and with what language. It is significant enough that it caught the attention of Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Venture Partners, who was willing to write a big check.

He sees sales engagement an emerging and fast-growing area of the sales stack. “SalesLoft consistently helps customers increase their pipelines, but also strengthen their relationships with buyers — that’s a huge differentiator,” Horing said in a statement.

Kyle Porter, co-founder and CEO at SalesLoft says that what his company does is essentially create a contact workflow for the sales team. It provides a framework or blueprint, while applying a measurable structure to the process for management. Whether the sale is successful or not, there is an audit trail of all the interactions and what the software recommended for actions and what actions the sales person took.

That involves providing the sales team with the next best actions, which could be an email, a phone call or even a handwritten note.”The suggested email content and phone scripts come from experience with buyers. Here’s the right way to communicate,” Porter said. “At the end of the day, we are enabling our customers to deliver better sales experience,” he added.

Machine learning will play an increasing role in building that workflow, as the system learns what types of interactions work best for certain types of customers, it will learn from that, and the system’s recommendations should improve over time.

It appears to be working. The company, which launched in 2011, currently has 230 employees and over 2000 customers including Square, Cisco, Alteryx, Dell and MuleSoft (which Salesforce bought last month for $6.5 billion.) The company reported that they have increased revenue over the last two years by 800 percent (yes, 800 percent).

Porter says this money sets them up to really scale the company with plans to reach 350 employees by the end of the year. In fact, they have more than 40 openings at the moment.

InVision, the NY-based design platform focused on collaboration, has today announced the acquisition of Wake.

Wake is a design tool focused squarely on supporting design visibility throughout a particular organization. Wake allows companies to share design assets and view work in progress as designers build out their screens, logos, or other designs. Design team leaders, or other higher-ups at the company, can upvote certain design projects or give feedback on specific tweaks.

InVision CEO Clark Valberg said that one of the most attractive features of Wake is that sharing on the Wake platform was implicit, rather than on InVision where designers have to take an extra step to upload their prototypes on InVision.

Wake will continue to operate independently within InVision, and Valberg has plans to integrate some of the Wake tools into the InVision core product. Moreover, as part of the deal, Wake will be introducing a free tier.

“We’re in the midst of a shift,” said CEO Clark Valberg. “The screen is the most important place in the world. Every company is now a digital product company. The world of design is growing and the Wake product represents a very interesting philosophical vector of that market.”

The entire Wake team will join InVision. Wake was founded in 2013 by Chris Kalani and Johan Bakken, with a customer list that includes Capital One, Spotify, Palantir, Stripe, and Airbnb. In fact, InVision’s Valberg said that Wake’s customer overlap with InVision was one of the first things that alerted InVision to Wake.

Wake has raised a total of $3.8 million, with investments from First Round and Designer Fund.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Shine, an early arrival in a market now teeming with self-care apps and services, has closed on $5 million in Series A funding, the company announced today, alongside the milestone of hitting 2 million active users. The round was led by existing investor by Comcast Ventures with betaworks, Felix Capital, The New York Times, Eniac Ventures, Female Founders Fund
and BBG Ventures also participating.

The investment comes roughly two years after Shine launched its free service, a messaging bot aimed at younger users that doles out life advice and positive reinforcement on a daily basis through SMS texts or Facebook’s Messenger.

At the time, the idea that self-help could be put into an app or bot-like format was still a relatively novel concept. But today, digital wellness has become far more common with apps for everything from meditation to self-help to talk therapy.

“We’re proud that we were part of the catalyst to make well-being as an industry something that is so much more top-of-mind. We really sensed where the world was going and we were ahead of it,” says co-founder Naomi Hirabayashi, who built Shine along with her former DoSomething.org co-worker Marah Lidey. The founders had wanted to offer others something akin to the personal support system they had with each other, as close friends.

“Marah and I are both women of color, and we created this company from a very non-traditional background from an entrepreneurship standpoint – we didn’t go to business school,” Hirabayashi explains. “We saw there was something missing in the market because wellbeing companies didn’t really reach us – they didn’t speak to us. We didn’t see people that looked like us. We didn’t feel like the way they shared content sounded like how we spoke about the different wellbeing issues in our lives,” she says.

The company’s free messaging product, Shine Text, was the result of their frustrations with existing products. It tackles a timely theme every day in areas like confidence, productivity, mental health, happiness and more. And it isn’t just some sort of life-affirming text – Shine converses with you on the topic at hand using research-backed materials to help you better understand the information. It’s also presented in a style that makes Shine feel more like a friend chatting with you.

The service has grown to 2 million users across 189 countries, despite not being localized in other languages. 88 percent of users are under the age of 35, and 70 percent are female.

Shine attempted to generate revenue in the past with a life-coaching subscription, but users wanted to talk to a real person and the subscription was fairly steep at $15.99 per week. That product never emerged from testing, and the founders now refer to it as an “experiment.”

The company gave subscriptions another shot this past December, with the launch of a freemium (free with paid upgrades) app on iOS. The new app offers meditations, affirmations, and something called “Shine Stories.”

The meditations are short audio tracks voiced by influencers that help you with various challenges. There are quick hit meditations for recentering and relaxing, those where you can focus on handling a specific situation – like toxic friendships or online dating – and seven-day challenges that deal with a particular issue like burnout or productivity.

Affirmations are quick pep talks and Shine Stories are slightly longer – around five minutes-long, and also voiced by influencers.

“The biggest thing is that we want to meet the user where they are – and we know people are on the go,” says Hirabayashi. “You can expect a lot more to come in the future around how we combine this really exciting time that’s happening for audio consumption and the hunger that there is for audio content that’s motivational and makes you feel better.”

Asked specifically if the company was considering a voice-first app, like an Alexa skill, or perhaps a more traditional podcast, Lidey said they weren’t yet sure, but didn’t plan on limiting the Shine Stories to a single platform indefinitely. But one thing they weren’t interested in doing in the near-term was introducing ads into Shine’s audio content.

The Shine app for iOS is a free download with some selection of its audio available to free users. Users can unlock the full library for $4.99 per month, billed as an annual subscription of $59.99, or $7.99 per month if paid monthly.

The founders declined to offer specifics on their conversions from free to paid members, but said it was “on par with industry standards.”

With the Series A now under its belt, Shine plans to double its 8-person team this year, launch the app on Android, continue to grow the business, including potentially launching new products.

Now the question is whether the millennials are actually so into self-care that they’ll pay. There are some signs that could be true – the top ten self-care apps pulled in $15 million last quarter, with meditation apps leading the way.

“We’re dominating the self-care routine of millennial women right now and we want to keep doing that,” Lidey says.

Digital music giant Spotify is joining the stock market on Tuesday, making it the biggest consumer tech company to go public since Snap debuted early last year.

But unlike Snap, Spotify isn’t doing an IPO. The “o” part of IPO stands for offering and Spotify isn’t raising any money.

Instead, existing Spotify shareholders will be selling shares directly onto the stock market. This means that employees, venture capitalists or anyone else who managed to buy Spotify shares on the  “secondary markets” can make money right away. But Spotify doesn’t know yet how many will want to sell their shares.

In fact, no one really knows how this “direct listing” is going to go. Even in Spotify’s prospectus, the company acknowledged that what it’s doing is “risky.” Smaller companies have listed without an IPO, but for a company of Spotify’s size, this is unprecedented.

Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek claims that they are doing things differently because “Spotify has never been a normal kind of company.” In a release today, he wrote that “our focus isn’t on the initial splash. Instead, we will be working on trying to build, plan, and imagine for the long term.”

In a recent investor presentation, Ek said Spotify is doing this because of “our desire to become more transparent and more accessible.” Unlike a traditional IPO where employees don’t sell shares for months, known as a “lock-up,” Spotify insiders can sell on day one.

But like a typical IPO, Spotify will still be working with “market makers” to help determine the price that the company should begin trading. I’m told that this could anytime during the trading day on Tuesday.

Spotify doesn’t know how many people will be selling shares. If few people opt to sell, it will drive the share price up, because of limited supply. If a lot of people sell, the reverse could happen, if investor demand doesn’t match it. It’s likely that this process will lead to increased volatility in the first few days or weeks of trading.

But in the long-run, Spotify’s performance in the stock market will largely depend on investor philosophies about the company and its business model.

Some are concerned that Spotify will run the course of competitor Pandora, which has struggled on the stock market, partly due to hefty artist fees. Others argue that Spotify could be viewed as a Netflix, which has been successful at its entertainment licensing agreements.

But regardless of what happens Tuesday, Ek said that listing day is not time to celebrate. “You won’t see us ringing any bells or throwing any parties.”

Walmart is in discussions to acquire medication delivery service PillPack for “under $1 billion,” reports CNBC. CNBC’s sources said the deal isn’t final yet, but talks have been going on for months and Amazon was also a potential suitor for the startup, which delivers medications to tens of thousands of customers in the United States.

Launched in 2013, PillPack has raised $118 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and CRV. PillPack doesn’t just fill prescriptions: it also helps patients manage their medications by sorting pills into packets for individual doses, automatically delivering refills to homes and providing 24/7 customer service, all major selling points for seniors and people with multiple conditions. Last year, PillPack also unveiled prescription management software called PharmacyOS, which it described as “the first backend pharmacy system designed specifically for customers with complex medication regimes.”

Last November, co-founder and chief executive officer T.J. Parker, who trained as a pharmacist, said PillPack would do over $100 million revenue in 2017. It has a loyal customer base, who helped PillPack win a public relations battle in 2016 with Express Scripts, the country’s largest pharmacy-benefits manager. After Express Scripts cut off its partnership with PillPack, claiming that the company needed to be licensed as a mail-order operation instead of a retail pharmacy, PillPack said this would force it stop delivering to a third of its customers. It also accused Express Scripts, which runs its own home delivery service, of trying to block competition. Online outcry by customers, driven by a PillPack campaign, forced Express Scripts to back down.

Both Walmart and PillPack declined to comment on a potential acquisition to CNBC.

Amazon is said to be working on its own prescription delivery service, after launching a line of over-the-counter health products like allergy treatments. If its pharmacy business comes to fruition, that means Amazon will compete even more closely with Walmart, putting increasing pressure on the big-box store chain.

Walmart is also reportedly in talks to acquire health insurer Humana.

Robinhood is rolling out its Coinbase-killer that’s already helped the fintech startup’s valuation grow 4X in a year. Zero-fee trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum is now available to all investors in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. Everyone else is still on the waitlist. Robinhood users everywhere can already track 16 crypto coins including BTC, ETH, Litecoin, and Ripple, as well as trade traditional stocks with no transaction commission.

Announced in January, Robinhood Crypto vastly undercuts Coinbase’s U.S. fees that range from 1.5 to 4 percent. One million users waitlisted for Robinhood Crypto in the first 5 days after it was announced, and the app now has four million total registered users. Its lack of fees is proving to be a way to lure both veteran and rookie crypto investors to Robinhood, though it lacks support for trading as wide of a range of coins as Coinbase. Rather than charging per trade, Robinhood earns money from interest on money in users’ accounts and its Robinhood Gold subscription service. For for $6 to $200 a month in subscription fees, users can borrow between $1,000 and $50,000 to trade with.

Robinhood Gold’s success, adding options and web trading, and the new Robinhood Crypto helped the startup attract a $350 million Series D round led by Russian fund DST Global, which a source confirms will value it at $5.6 billion and bring it to $526 million in total funding. That’s up from the $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation it raised last year.

That massive valuation will put a ton of pressure on Robinhood’s co-CEOs Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt to keep it growing, build out its subscription and interest revenue, and invade the space of competitors. [Disclosure: I know the founders from college] Those include traditional brokers like Scottrade and E*Trade that can charge $7 or more per trade, crypto-specific exchanges like Coinbase, and news sources like CoinDesk.

Robinhood risks a down round if the heightened societal and regulatory skepticism about cryptocurrencies curtail investments from the public. Robinhood’s historical focus on younger, less wealthy investors who aren’t “accredited” could make it especially vulnerable to crypto backlash if users see the space as too volatile or scammy for amateur investors to join. There are also heightened cybersecurity concerns, as users might bail on the app if they fear their cryptocurrency could be stolen.

Robinhood might do well to get more serious about how it offers crypto education. It’s promised to provide a feed of crypto news to keep people informed about why markets are moving, though it’s still in testing with a small number of users right now. The problem is that the crypto journalism space is rife with integrity violations and reporters with questionable expertise. If Robinhood bought or built a truly neutral crypto news source, it could use that to attract investors to its crypto trading platform.

[Disclosre: The author of this article owns small positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum but does not day trade. Detailed disclosures can be found here.]