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As the insurance industry adjusts to life in the 21st century (heh), an AI startup that has built computer vision tools to enable remote damage appraisals is announcing a significant round of growth funding.

Tractable, which works with automotive insurance companies to let users take and submit photos of damaged cars that are then “read” to make appraisals, has raised $60 million, a Series D that values Tractable at $1 billion, the company said.

Tractable says it works with more than 20 of the top 100 auto insurers in the world, and it has seen sales grow 600% in the last 24 months, which CEO Alex Dalyac told me translates as “well into eight figures of annual revenue.” He also told me that “we would have grown even faster if it weren’t for COVID.” People staying at home meant far fewer people on the roads, and fewer accidents.

Its business today is based mostly around car accident recovery — where users can take pictures using ordinary smartphone cameras, uploading pictures via a mobile web site (not typically an app).

But Tractable’s plan is to use some of the funding to expand deeper into areas adjacent to that: natural disaster recovery (specifically for appraising property damage), and used car appraisals. It will also use the investment to continue building out its technology, specifically to help build out better, AI-based techniques of processing and parsing pictures that are taken on smartphones — by their nature small in size.

Insight Partners and Georgian Partners co-led the round and it brings the total raised by the company to $115 million.

Dalyac, a deep learning researcher by training who co-founded the company with Razvan Ranca and Adrien Cohen, said that the “opportunity” (if you could call an accident that) Tractable has identified and built to fix is that it’s generally time-consuming and stressful to deal with an insurance company when you are also coping with a problem with your car.

And while a new generation of “insurtech” startups have emerged in recent years that are bringing more modern processes into the equation, typically the incumbent major insurance companies — the ones that Tractable targets — have lacked the technology to improve that process.

It’s not unlike the tension between fintech-fuelled neobanks and the incumbent banks, which are now scrambling to invest in more technology to catch up with the times.

“Getting into an accident can be anything from a hassle to trauma,” Dalyac said. “It can be devastating, and then the process for recovery is pretty damn slow. You’re dealing with so many touch points with your insurance, so many people that need to come and check things out again. It’s hard to keep track and know when things will truly be back to normal. Our belief is that that whole process can be 10 times faster, thanks to the breakthroughs in image classification.”

That process currently also extends not just to taking pictures for claims, but also to help figure out when a car is beyond repair, in which case which parts can be recycled and reused elsewhere, also using Tractable’s computer vision technology. Dalyac noted that this was a popular enough service in the last year that the company helped recycle as many cars “as Tesla sold in 2019.”

Customers that have integrated with Tractable to date include Geico in the U.S., as well as a large swathe of insurers in Japan, specifically Tokio Marine Nichido, Mitsui Sumitomo, Aioi Nissay Dowa and Sompo. Covéa, the largest auto insurer in France, is also a customer, as is Admiral Seguros, the Spanish entity of U.K.’s Admiral Group, as well as Ageas, a top U.K. insurer.

Japan is the company’s biggest market today Dalyac said — the reason being that it has an aging population, but one that is also very strong on mobile usage: combining those two, “automation is more than a value add; it’s a must have,” Dalyac said. He also added that he thinks the U.S. will overtake Japan as Tractable’s biggest market soon.

The new directions into property and other car applications will also open the door to a wider set of use cases beyond working with insurance providers over time. It will also bring Tractable potentially into new competitive environments. There are other companies that have also identified this opportunity.

For example, Hover, which has built a way to create 3D imagery of homes using ordinary smartphone cameras, is also eyeing ways of selling its tech (originally developed to help make estimates on home repairs) to insurance companies.

For now, however, it sounds like the opportunity is a big enough one that the race is more to meet demand than it is to beat competitors to do so.

“Tractable’s accelerating growth at scale is a testament to the power and differentiation of their applied machine learning system, which continues to improve as more businesses adopt it,” said Lonne Jaffe, MD at Insight Partners and Tractable board member, in a statement. “We’re excited to double down on our partnership with Tractable as they work to help the world recover faster from accidents and disasters that affect hundreds of millions of lives.”

Emily Walsh, partner at Georgian Partners added: “Tractable’s industry-leading computer vision capabilities are continuing to fuel incredible customer ROI and growth for the firm. We’re excited to continue to partner with Tractable as they apply their artificial intelligence capabilities to new, multi-billion dollar market opportunities in the used vehicle and natural disaster recovery industries.”

Vianai Systems, an AI startup founded by Vishal Sikka, former chief executive of Indian IT services giant Infosys, said on Wednesday it has raised $140 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

The two-year-old startup said a number of industry luminaries also participated in the new round, which brings its total to-date raise to at least $190 million. The startup raised $50 million in its seed financing round, but there’s no word on the size of its Series A round.

Details about what exactly the Palo Alto-headquartered startup does is unclear. In a press statement, Dr. Vishal Sikka said the startup is building a “better AI platform, one that puts human judgment at the center of systems that bring vast AI capabilities to amplify human potential.” Sikka, 54, resigned from the top role at Infosys in 2017 after months of acrimony between the board and a cohort of founders.

“Vianai helps its customers amplify the transformation potential within their organizations using a variety of advanced AI and ML tools with a distinct approach in how it thoughtfully brings together humans with technology. This human-centered approach differentiates Vianai from other platform and product companies and enables its customers to fulfill AI’s true promise,” the startup said.

The startup claims it has already amassed as its customers many of the world’s largest and most respected businesses, including insurance giant Munich Re.

Its investors include Jim Davidson (co-founder of Silver Lake), Henry Kravis and George Roberts (co-founders of KKR), and Jerry Yang (founding partner of AME and co-founder of Yahoo). Dr. Fei-Fei Li (co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI) has joined Vianai Systems’ advisory board.

“With the AI revolution underway, we believe Vianai’s human-centered AI platform and products provide global enterprises with operational and customer intelligence to make better business decisions,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “We are pleased to partner with Dr. Sikka and the Vianai team to support their ambition to fulfill AI’s promise to drive fundamental digital transformations.”

Growth leaders used to build key relationships across a company while working together in a real-life office. Those relationships could carry over through the pandemic, but let’s say you’re a new company and you’re remote-first.

How do you build this complex collaboration from scratch?

Growth marketer and investor Susan Su tells us that the solution is not just more software tools. In the interview below, she says that after the pandemic, startup founders will need to develop a mentality that places growth at the center of company strategy.

Consultants and agencies can be great additions to this effort, especially if they have previously solved the types of problems you face. (In fact, TechCrunch is asking founders who have worked with growth marketers to share a recommendation in this survey. We’ll use your answers to find more experts to interview.)

Su is currently the head of portfolio strategy for Sound Ventures, previously a growth leader at Stripe and the first hire at Reforge. She also shared a few thoughts on market opportunities after the pandemic in the full interview below. E-commerce is mainstream for good, she says, even as we all try to step away from screens more often. However, many social and mobile sectors are mature, and it’s going to be even harder for startups to compete as real-world activities absorb more time.

Don’t forget: Susan Su will also appear at our Early Stage virtual event on July 8 (and answer questions directly).

How are you seeing startups manage changes in user engagement as more people exit pandemic lockdowns and adjust their daily lives?

As we exit the pandemic, I expect that we’ll see a natural and obvious spike in some consumer activity that will roll up to midsized businesses and enterprises. Just like with the onset of the pandemic, we’ll see uneven results across sectors:

E-commerce boomed during the pandemic but was really an augmentation of an already-accelerating trend toward digital commerce and streamlined logistics. I don’t think we backtrack from e-commerce because habit formation around online shopping has been building for years; we would be backtracking to an age long before 2020, and that’s not going to happen.

New social-mobile experiences also boomed during the pandemic, but there’s still a valid question around whether 15 months or so is enough time to become part of the ingrained infrastructure of daily life. We are living in an age of mature platforms, so every new service is stealing time away from an existing service. As with pre-pandemic growth, their success rests upon fast-accumulating network effects and great, sticky core product experience. Now that we have parks, friends and dinners out calling to us again, it’s a real test of how compelling some of these new value propositions really are, and whether they can continue to demonstrate their relevance in a more hybridized online-offline world.

That said, the pandemic was an enormous constraint on human society and [the] economy, and these kinds of constraints often breed innovation that doesn’t go away. We will evolve, but we can never go back. It sounds cheesy but it’s true.

Some aspects of the pandemic, like remote work, appear to have radically changed certain industries. How will these societal changes impact how the typical startup thinks about growth?

Growth will always be growth — that is, a process of iterative experimentation to identify and solve customer problems, and then scale those solutions in order to reach and convert bigger and bigger audiences. Platform changes like iOS 14 or Facebook’s periodic algorithm adjustments will have a bigger impact in the near term on the technical functioning of growth, and these aren’t specifically pandemic-related.

One area to watch is how growth teams are built and operated. Growth is a horizontal function that touches many different parts of the org, including product, engineering, marketing, comms and design. Many startup teams have already been working with collaboration tools even while they sat in the same office, but growth is about more than just using tools. The most effective growth leaders succeed by building relationships across the organization; it’s like the fable of Stone Soup — you’re creating this meal that will feed everyone, but you also need each person to bring a pinch of salt, or a dash of pepper, or one carrot, and that requires socialization and relationship-building. I’ll be very interested to see how new growth leaders onboard remote-only teams and what approaches they take to this “networking” need within the function.

From the days of growth hacking on social platforms, growth marketing is now an established part of the world. But it’s not necessarily the main expertise of a startup founder, even if it needs to be. So, how should they think about addressing growth marketing in 2021? What are the essentials they should do in their roles?

Every founder needs to have a growth mentality. They don’t need to memorize all the right buttons to push in an ads dashboard, but they need to be familiar and comfortable with the core work of gap-finding. That said, founders are by definition entrepreneurial — their company exists because they saw an opportunity that no one else did, and this is the fundamental work of growth as well.

Founders will fail if they adopt a mentality that someone else can or should do it for them. The founder’s job is to supply ambition and opinions, and then magnetize high-quality talent to come and pull the levers and bring their creative vision to life. There are many people who can do growth marketing — that is, they know how the platforms work, they understand the rules and the playbooks. But there are very few who can come up with truly visionary strategies that change the game altogether — those people become founders, and those companies become household names. So for a founder, I’d say the most important growth work is to continue to know your market and customer better than anyone else in the whole world, have an opinion about what’s missing, and work to bring the best talent to come in alongside you and be a thought partner, not just a button pusher.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?
Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

With limited resources, how should early-stage companies think about what to focus on?

This is going to depend on the goals of your company. Are you planning to raise money and need to demonstrate certain KPIs? Are you bootstrapping and need to keep the lights on? Resources should always be allocated to the most strategic purposes, with the longest-term view you can afford. For some companies, this could mean forgoing revenue to focus on viral or word-of-mouth-driven user acquisition to demonstrate to future investors that there’s something special here. For other companies, perhaps in lower volume categories like enterprise, it’s about bringing a few strategic logos into the family as a signal to later customers and other stakeholders, including future employees and investors.

One thing that early-stage companies should always be focused on is building a top-shelf employer brand. You will only ever be as good as the talent you attract to your company, and interestingly growth can actually play a role in this. The best designers, engineers and product people are often flowing toward the companies that have the best growth. In that way, it’s a highly strategic role and function.

What do startups continue to get wrong?

You can’t truly outsource growth or any other core function; you can’t tack on customer acquisition after product development. At the end of the day, if you really think about it, all a company is, is a customer-acquisition engine. This needs to be core; wake up every day and think about growth, not just to hit revenue or user KPIs, but to build the company that the best people are clamoring to work at. It’s not about finding someone sufficient to solve your near-term problems; it’s about framing problems in a way that’s so compelling to the most creative, hardest-working people so that they can’t get it out of their heads. Go for talent moonshots, and figure out how to close them. The rest will fall in line from there.

When should a founder feel comfortable getting help from an outside expert or agency?

Anytime. Agencies are great. They are an extension of your talent, and the best agencies aren’t selling you — they have to be sold on your problem because they have their pick of companies just like yours. That’s the agency or outside expert you want to work with, because they’ll have a priceless perspective from the other best-in-class founders and teams they’ve worked with that they can bring to your challenge. Any agency can run Facebook ads (it’s not rocket science), but you want to find the team that’s solved the gnarliest problems for your hero companies. Then you’ll get not just an ads manager, but a teacher.

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Joining us onstage as a judge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021‘s Startup Battlefield will be Yasmin Razavi, general partner at Spark Capital. Her engineering background and fintech chops should make for incisive questions for the founders presenting.

Razavi invests in growth-stage enterprise, fintech and developer companies, but her background is until fairly recently an engineering-focused one. She grew up in Tehran, studied engineering at the University of Toronto and got her MBA at Harvard Business School.

A stint at McKinsey eventually led to being a product manager at Snap, where she built the tech behind the app’s monetization stack. In 2017 she joined Spark, and since then has led investments in Marqueta, Deel, Rapyd, Niantic, Capitolis and Earnin.

We recently had Razavi at Disrupt as a panelist, and of course if you’re an Extra Crunch subscriber you can watch the whole thing here.

“Ultimately anyone who wants to be a shareholder or investor in your business wants to understand the unit economics of your business,” she said during the  panel. “For me, there’s all sorts of fancy metrics being thrown around; ultimately they all come down to what is the unit economics, and what is the payback I can expect when I invest in growth?”

Razavi’s philosophy is go to market and out-execute the competition, then capitalize on that success. Why anyone would want to do the opposite is hard to say, but the point is to move quickly and decisively as early as possible so that making money later is a natural consequence rather than a scramble.

Catch her on the Disrupt stage and grab your ticket to Disrupt 2021 now!

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Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

My co-founders and I launched a software startup in Iran a few years ago, and I’m happy to say it’s now thriving. We’d like to expand our company in California.

Now that President Joe Biden has eliminated the Muslim ban, is it possible to do that? Is the pandemic still standing in the way? Do you have any suggestions?

— Talented in Tehran

Dear Talented,

Yes, it’s possible! Unfortunately, yes, the COVID-19 pandemic is still making the immigration process a bit challenging, but remember, where there’s a will, there’s most often, in immigration law, a way.

On his first day in office in January, Biden rescinded the ban on visas for many majority-Muslim countries, including Iran. The ban had been in place since 2017 and nearly 42,000 visa applications were denied, according to the U.S. Department of State.

Biden also allowed the bans on the issuance of H-1B, L-1, and J-1 visas and green cards at U.S. embassies and consulates that the previous administration put in place last year to lapse.

That means international startup founders like you and other international talent living outside the United States can start thinking about obtaining these visas and green cards without necessarily requiring exceptions to do so. In a recent podcast episode, I talked about these and other immigration-related changes, as well as those promised by the Biden administration. Take a listen to find out more!

As you probably know, most travelers from Iran are currently not allowed entry into the U.S. because of the COVID-19 travel ban, and most U.S. embassies and consulates are not open for routine visa and green card application processing. Because the United States has not had an embassy or consulate in Iran since the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, you and your co-founders should find out which U.S. embassies or consulates are currently processing routine visa and green card applications — and are in countries that are not on the suspended entry list — and apply there. We’re still waiting for detailed information from the State Department on the equivalent of reparations for individuals who were affected by the Muslim ban.

In addition, I recommend that you consult with an experienced immigration attorney who can help you devise an immigration strategy for yourself, your co-founders and your families based on your personal and professional goals. Now, here are a few options for you to consider.

L-1A visa to open a U.S. office for your startup

By its nature, sales is one of the most social faces of a business, so it’s no surprise that there are tools being built for sales teams that are tapping into some of the most interesting dynamics of the world of social networking, and that the startups that are doing this most successfully are making a killing.

In the latest example, a startup out of Canada called Introhive — which has built an AI engine that ingests huge amounts of data from across disparate applications to help companies (and specifically anyone in their organization that is selling to someone) to build better “relationship graphs” for target organizations — is announcing $100 million in funding.

Growth equity firm PSG is leading the round, with The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Evergreen Capital and Mavan Capital Partners also participating.

The company is not disclosing valuation but CEO and co-founder Jody Glidden tells me the company is doing well. It has raised about $150 million to date and is doubling revenues every year for the last several with a platform used by large enterprises — PwC, Colliers International, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Plante Moran and Clark Nexsen are a few of them. Typical deployments range between 10,000 and 100,000 seats — it’s not just people with “sales” in their job titles using Introhive — and customer retention is currently at 95%.

The idea for Introhive came as many do to enterprise startup founders: they identify something that doesn’t quite work as they want it to, and then start a new company to try to fix it. In the case of Glidden, he and Stewart Walchli were at RIM (the old parent of BlackBerry), which had acquired a previous startup of theirs called Chalk Media.

Although they had just joined a much bigger company (it was 2008, and BlackBerry was still far from being completely killed off by Google and Apple) Glidden said he was surprised to see how hard it was to tap its vast troves of information to find prospective sales leads.

“We realized there were a whole lot of problems with sales people at RIM not able to hit their revenue numbers,” he recalled, and so they started asking themselves some questions. “Are they bringing in right lead data? Are they able to be as intelligent as they can be?” It took some years — four, exactly — and perhaps the rise of Facebook and its focus on the “social graph,” for them to land on how to articulate the problem. They needed to “unlock relationship graph in CRM,” Glidden said.

And Introhive was the company that they formed in 2012 to address that. The company not only provides a way to better leverage CRM-related data to find the best targets for particular products or services, but it also provides analytics to the team to measure how people are doing, and over time also helps predict “winnability”.

But that was not immediate: It took several years to build out its AI platform, Glidden said, with a lot of trial and error to ensure that the data that Introhive ingested was structured correctly to match up with other information to yield productive information.

“We ran into big problems in the first years because there were so many potential systems to tap into, homegrown or otherwise, for certain info. We effectively spent a lot of time building our own version of MuleSoft to fix that,” he said with a laugh. “But since it’s also something we use for our customers we ended up employing hundreds of engineers to build this underpinning layer to understand it all.”

As a result, it took between four and five years for Introhive to make its own first sale, and in the process the whole company almost went under, he recalled. “It took a long time to get that engine running because if you are automating data that is wrong 35% of the time, you won’t keep your customers.”

The machine is more well-oiled today, of course, and is on a roll to bring in more functions to work off the data trove that it has built.

There is something about the service that reminds me a bit of LinkedIn or ZoomInfo — which you may use in your own work, or come across when Googling someone online for some reason (hey — I’m not asking why here) — for providing some kind of data base/org chart of people connected to a business. But to be very clear, the data that Introhive builds for a customer stays with that customer, and doesn’t go anywhere else.

Glidden says that there are no plans to build any kind of “freemium” version of the service, or one that anyone can tap as a SaaS, but rather to remain focused on helping larger enterprises make better sense of their data and how it can better inform the wider concept of sales.

That in itself raises an interesting point about Introhive and business in general. When you consider a company like PwC, there are likely many people who specifically might hold a job title with the word “sales” in it, but just as many whose jobs are predicated on closing deals, consultants and partners for example, who do not, but might just as easily benefit from having better visibility of a “relationship graph” of people connected to buying products at a business they are working with, or want to work with. Sales is more than just about salespeople for many organizations.

And for that reason, you can guess that one interesting aspect of Introhive is if it might evolve these tools over time to tackle other parts of an organization and how it works. Similar to the social graphs of social media, which map out how people can be connected to one another, relationship graphs in the workplace potentially resonate well beyond signing a deal, too. Business intelligence and marketing automation are already in the mix for the company.

“Introhive is on the forefront of helping grow sales and customers through its visionary, AI-powered revenue acceleration platform built for companies of all sizes and complexity. It seamlessly improves business operations across multiple departments by helping teams reduce time on manual inputs and giving them advanced insights on where they can generate more revenue, build more relationships and easily identify what great sales reps are doing that average reps aren’t,” said PSG managing director, Rick Essex. “The team’s acumen and highly capital-efficient model has set the company on a clear path for growth, and we’re proud to partner with them on this journey.”

Tire-making giant Bridgestone has taken a minority stake in Kodiak Robotics, the Silicon Valley-based startup developing autonomous trucks, as part of a broader partnership to test and develop smart tire technology.

While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Kodiak Robotics co-founder and CEO Don Burnette told TechCrunch that this is a direct financial investment. Bridgestone CTO Nizar Trigui has also joined the Kodiak board as an observer.

The deal involves more than capital. The two companies have also formed a strategic partnership focused on advancing Bridgestone’s tire tech and fleet management system. Kodiak will use Bridgestone’s sensor-laden tires and fleet management system on its self-driving trucks, which are used to carry freight between Dallas and Houston as part of its testing program. The company recently said it is expanding its freight carrying pilots to San Antonio. Kodiak also tests its self-driving trucks — always with a safety operator behind the wheel — in and around Mountain View, California.

Semi-trucks travel 100,000 to 150,000 miles a year, Burnette said, adding that tire integrity and tire monitoring are integral to the safety of trucking, whether they’re driven by a human or computer.

“Safety of an autonomy system ultimately comes down to our ability to manipulate the tires that touch the road when you are accelerating or braking or steering,” Burnette said. “You need to be able to rely on your tires to actually perform the way they are expected to perform, otherwise your safety envelope is not necessarily guaranteed.”

Kodiak will use these smart tires to monitor pressure, temperature and even measure the loads on the wheels, which plays a role in vehicle dynamics and maneuverability. Kodiak will share the data it collects with Bridgestone, which the company can use to improve the chemistry of its tires.

Tire companies like Bridgestone already collect basic information from telematics providers that helps determine where trucks are driven, what types of roads they use as well as tire pressure and temperature. Predictive models are then developed based on that data. Autonomous vehicle companies bring an added value to tire companies, Burnette noted. Kodiak’s self-driving trucks are loaded with sensors of their own, which allows the company to collect massive amounts of driving data that can help Bridgestone understand exactly how its tires are being used.

“Autonomy providers like Kodiak have all of the raw data specifically on how the trucks are being driven,” he said. “We know what the forces are, we know what the steering is, we know what the braking pressures that were being commanded in real time. And so we can gather a wealth of data that has never been previously possible to collect for companies like Bridgestone.”

This allows Bridgestone to build predictive models that will more accurately be able to predict the eventual lifetime and also possibly give warnings to when tires may fail out of field. “And that’s ultimately what Kodiak is really interested in,” Burnette added.

The news follows Kodiak’s announcement in May that it was partnering with South Korean conglomerate SK to explore the possibility of deploying its autonomous vehicle technology in Asia. The ultimate aim of the SK partnership is to sell and distribute Kodiak’s self-driving technology in the region. Kodiak will examine how it can use SK’s products, components and technology for its autonomous system, including artificial intelligence microprocessors and advanced emergency braking systems. Both companies have also agreed to work together to provide fleet management services for customers in Asia.

When Richard Joffe moved his family to Australia in 2019, he said applying for home insurance “was like traveling back in time 30 years.”

“I found the sign-up process painful, the fine print was confusing and the insurance company was totally reactive, not proactive. They never contacted me aside from my renewal,” he told TechCrunch. Joffe, who founded parking sensor platform Park Assist and jobs platform Stella.ai in the United States, began researching and found many people in Australia shared the same frustrations. This was the impetus for him to found Honey Insurance, which launches today with $15.5 million AUD (about $11.9 million USD), the largest seed round ever raised by a tech startup in Australia, according to Crunchbase data.

The funding was led by institutional investors RACQ (the insurer that also underwrites Honey Insurance), PEXA, Metricon, ABN Group, Mirvac, AGL, SFG and Apex Capital. Individual investors include Zip founder and global CEO Larry Diamond; Afterpay co-founder and CEO Anthony Eisen; former MEBank CEO Jamie McPhee; former Corelogic CEO Graham Mirabito; Airtasker co-founder and CEO Tim Fung; and former News Corp Australia and Foxtel CEO Peter Tonagh.

The capital will be used on hiring, with plans to fill 80 positions over the next 12 months, and research and development.

Honey Insurance is underwritten by RACQ, one of Australia’s largest insurance providers, and offers home, contents and landlord coverage. Customers get $250 AUD worth of smart sensors to monitor for the top three risks to homes: flooding, fire and theft. For example, the sensors look for things like leaky water pipes, smoke and open garage doors. Joffe said half of insurance claims are avoidable and the sensors help prevent incidents. As an incentive, Honey Insurance customers get 8% off their premiums if their sensors are switched on.

The sign-up process for Honey Insurance is also designed to be simple. Joffe said customers can purchase insurance in as little as three minutes and the company avoids using confusing jargon. Over the long-term, Honey Insurance will also use publicly available information and satellite data to automatically update policies if a customer makes changes to their home, like a new extension or pool.

Joffe said another problem in Australia is underinsurance, which affects about four out of five Australians. Last year, 183,000 home claims were declined or withdrawn, and the average claim size was $8,400, up 16% from the year before. As a result, each year customers need to pay a total of $1.5 billion out of pocket.

To address underinsurance, Honey Insurance has taken steps like a 30% safety margin for a customer’s sum insured and four times the usual home office coverage, to the value of $20,000.

“We have far more electronics in our houses than 20 years ago, and we work far more from home than before COVID — it makes sense your insurance policy should take this into account,” Joffe said.

In a statement, David Carter, CEO of RACQ, said, “Investing in Honey Insurance is an opportunity to share in the innovation and increase the scale of our insurance portfolio to benefit our 1.8 million members and their communities.”

Hybrid event platform Brella has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Connected Capital. Normally used as an offline networking app, Brella pivoted from live events into a virtual event platform after the pandemic hit. The company counts Informa, Marcus Evans, Questex and IQPC as customers

Markus Kauppinen, CEO and founder of Brella, said the company is moving toward “immersive hybrid events that contain both live and virtual components” as the world opens up post-COVID.

Kauppinen said: “Unlike many of our competitors, Brella is squarely focused on capturing the essence of live business events and translating them into an intuitive digital format. We aren’t in the business of impressing event organizers with needlessly long feature-lists: Instead, we provide them with a lean, beautifully designed platform that supercharges the attendee experience using fantastic UX and AI-smart networking.”

The new Brella product is about community building, attendee grouping and unified analytics for virtual and live audiences, he said.

Mathijs Robbens, co-founder and managing partner at Connected Capital, commented: “Brella’s approach to tackling the problems surrounding the event experience has been a breath of fresh air, especially during these uncertain times. The growth of the company, their agility and ability to turn the most insurmountable challenges into new opportunities is truly exceptional — we are thrilled to be a part of their next act as they strive to help the event industry embrace technology in the long-term.”

With many consumers making the switch to online shopping in the last year due to COVID-19 and largely staying active on those platforms even after physical shops and the freedom to move about them have been restored, companies that are enabling those services are continuing to see a lot of business and attention. In the latest development, Bringg, which has built software to help retailers with last-mile logistics — specifically to manage, and in some cases even tap, people fulfilling deliveries — has raised $100 million in a Series E round of funding.

The money is coming about a year after its last round — a $30 million Series D — and Bringg has confirmed that the funding values the company at $1 billion — representing a hike of about 4x on its previous valuation. Part of the reason for that has been the company’s strong growth of 180% in new customers over the last year, a high watermark for delivery services, given the pandemic.

Insight Partners is leading this round, and Salesforce Ventures, Viola Growth, Next 47, Pereg Ventures, Harlap, GLP and Cambridge Capital — all previous backers — are also investing.

Guy Bloch, Bringg’s CEO, said in an interview that the funding will be used both to continue growing Bringg’s customer base, but also the company’s capabilities, and also likely for acquisitions to consolidate some of the links that go into the logistics and fulfillment chain.

Bringg has to date focused on the last mile — a critical area for retailers, commonly accounting for 30-40% of the total cost of delivering an item — but Bloch believes there are other parts of the system that it could tackle alongside that.

“The aim is to perfect the customer experience,” he said of the company’s strategy. “It’s not just the last mile but the middle mile. We have so many examples of that.” It’s also building out more options for its customers, including wider flexibility around delivery in-store, “greener” deliveries bundling several orders in one area and more.

The company counts a number of huge companies among its list of current customers. They include Walmart, Albertsons, Co-Op in the U.K., Coca-Cola and Panera.

With them and others, Bringg’s opportunity is a wide one. While some retailers, particularly larger ones, are “insourcing” in Bloch’s words, and building large operations to fulfill their own and third-party orders themselves, others — especially smaller companies — are looking for options of clicking into existing infrastructure, with not just logistics software, but perhaps even networks of delivery people to move their products. But in addition to that are the types of companies that Bringg is helping, a swathe of retailers that include not just groceries and goods, but ready-made food from restaurants and much more.

“We have amassed a large connected network over the years, millions of drivers,” said Bloch. “Every time we take on a new brand, it looks into our delivery hub and can see different variations depending on locations.” This enables customers to take blended offerings, too, to fill in gaps where they may lack their own people.

In that regard, Salesforce is a strategic backer here: As the CRM giant has grown, it’s extended its reach into providing a lot of different tools to its business customers, including e-commerce tools and management systems. Bringg is being integrated into that as part of its efforts to help businesses run their businesses.

Bringg is not the only company looking to build services to help other retailers jump into the new world of commerce. Others include the likes of Ocado, and of course Amazon and its vast network targeting businesses, and more. It’s an interesting company in the mix, however, simply for being completely neutral in the equation, with no direct to consumer services of its own.

“It’s clear to us that Bringg is building something special and we’re excited to partner with them as they continue to introduce transformative change for retailers and logistics partners,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners, in a statement. “With Guy’s experience and leadership and a growing list of marquee customers, we’re confident that Bringg will continue to pave the way as the clear leader in the space.”

Looking forward, although Bringg will be looking to make acquisitions, Bloch said that the startup is “not entertaining” acquisition offers itself.

“My goal is to build a lasting company,” he said. “Companies need our urgent help to do a job.”

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