As startups and venture capital grow in tandem, fundraising has gone from a formal affair on Sand Hill Road to a process that can happen anywhere from Twitter to Zoom.

While fundraising may no longer require a trip to California, it might depend on whether you got an invite to a private audio app. And while you may not need to be an insider, second-time founders — largely male and white — still have a competitive advantage.

The growing complexity of fundraising has the opportunity to make tech either inclusive or exclusive. For new founders looking to raise money, let’s dismantle the myths about raising your first check and instead focus on how investors and other successful founders describe the nuance needed to secure money.

What makes my business venture-worthy?

This question is existential, but it should be at the forefront throughout your journey as a founder. Elizabeth Yin, founding partner of Hustle Fund, says startups should be able to hit one of two goals: Reach $100 million ARR by its fifth year or get to $1 billion in valuation in the same time period.

“This is hard to do. And most businesses will never get there — not for a lack of trying — but there’s a lot of luck whether your idea has that much demand that quickly,” she added.

“I think you will know in the first year or two how ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ it is to get customers and whether you think on that trajectory you can get to $100 million a year in a few years,” Yin said. “And if it’s really hard, it doesn’t mean you throw in the towel. … There are many great companies that are not VC-backable where the founders will make a lot of money, but it just means you need to think through where to get your financing. Perhaps it’s from angels. Perhaps it’s from revenue-based financing funds. Perhaps it’s from customer crowdfunding.”

While VC is the flashy gold medal, the rapid growth of emerging fund managers means that a first check can be piecemealed together from a variety of different sources. The options for financing are seemingly endless: syndicates, public crowdfunding, VC firms, accelerators, debt financing, rolling funds, and, for the profitable few, bootstrapping.

“When people go around saying, ‘Do you want to run a VC-backable company?’ that feels weird — you don’t necessarily get to pick how fast you can grow — the market just may or may not be there,” Yin said. “There’s a lot of luck with that.”

Leslie Feinzaig, founder of Female Founders Collective, said that beyond economics, the hardest part of knowing whether your startup makes sense as a VC-backed business is understanding your own goals as an entrepreneur.

On-demand grocery startups like Gorillas are invading Europe right now, but although on-demand-everything is kinda old-hat in the Bay Area, a new startup thinks it might just be able to do something new.

Food Rocket says it has raised a $2 million investment round from AltaIR Capital, Baring Vostok fund and the Angelsdeck group of business angels, including Philipp Bashyan, of Russia’s Yonder, who has joined as an investor and advisor.

Yes, admittedly, this tiny startup is competing with DoorDash, GoPuff, InstaCart and Amazon Fresh. Maybe let’s not get into that…

Using the company’s mobile app, users can order fresh groceries, ready-to-eat meals and household goods that will be delivered within 10-15 minutes, says the startup, which will be servicing SoMa, South Park, Mission Bay, Japantown, Hayes Valley and other areas. The company hopes to open 150 “dark stores” on the West Coast as part of its infrastructure.

Vitaly Aleksandrov, CEO, and co-founder of Food Rocket, said: “The level of competition in this market in the U.S. is still manageable, which is why we have the opportunity to become leaders in the sphere of fast delivery of basic products and household goods. We aim to replace brick-and-mortar supermarkets and to change consumers’ current habits in regards to grocery shopping.”

What can we say? Good luck?

Orbiit, a startup that automates the interactions within an online community, has raised a $2.7 million round led by Bread and Butter Ventures, with participation from new investors High Alpha Capital, LAUNCHub Ventures and Company Ventures. Existing investors Founders Fund, which led Orbiit’s $1 million pre-seed round, Acceleprise and other angels also participated. The capital will be used to build out the Orbiit product and engineering team.

Orbiit says its platform handles the communications, matching, scheduling, feedback collection and analytics for people connecting with each other in an online community. The idea is that the communities therefore learn and network better, engage more and share more knowledge.

CEO and co-founder Bilyana Freye said: “Tailored 1:1 connections allow members to discuss difficult topics, be vulnerable and share learnings with one another. Those 1:1 connections are the hardest to execute, but when you start investing in them, with the help of Orbiit, you see engagement feeding into all other initiatives and a vibrant, active community that truly delivers on the promise to its members.”

Bread and Butter Ventures Managing Partner Mary Grove added: “This age-old question of how to leverage technology at scale to drive meaningful connections across communities both internal to an organization and across the globe is a problem we’ve been actively seeking a solution to for a decade. Orbiit brings the perfect blend of tech-enabled software with human curation to create strong connections and provide insights back to community managers.”

The platform is being used by startup communities at True Ventures, GGV and Lerer Hippeau; private networking groups such as Dreamers & Doers; and customer communities, like the CFO community run by fintech leader Spendesk.

Founders Fund Principal Delian Asparouhov said: “We see Orbiit as a key platform for peer learning within companies and communities, unlocking untapped knowledge through curated matchmaking.”

LAUNCHub Ventures participated in the round, following the recent first close of its new $70 million fund.

CorrActions, a noninvasive neuroscience startup that uses sensor data to evaluate a user’s cognitive state due to drowsiness, alcohol, fatigue and other issues, today announced that it has raised a $2.7 million seed round. Early-stage fund VentureIsrael, seed fund Operator Partners and the Israeli Innovation Authority are backing the company, which is based out of OurCrowd’s Labs/02 incubator.

The idea here is to use touch sensors wherever humans may interact with machines, be that in a fighter jet’s cockpit, a car or anywhere else where knowing a user’s cognitive state could prevent potentially catastrophic errors. CorrActions promises that its proprietary algorithms can identify the user’s cognitive state and detect errors 150 milliseconds before they occur by “decoding unconscious brain signals through body motion monitoring.” For the most part, the system is use-case agnostic since it’s basically a generic platform that is independent of where it is implemented.

“Using sensors that already exist in nearly every electronic device like smartwatches, smartphones and even steering wheels and joysticks, CorrActions is the first in the world to be able to read a person’s cognitive state at any given moment by analyzing micro changes in their muscular activity,” explained Eldad Hochman, the company’s co-founder and CSO. “It is enough for the person to come in contact with an electronic device for two minutes and we can accurately quantify cognitive state and even predict a rapid deterioration, which may lead to failure or accidents. We can see this coming seconds before it occurs. This means that we can quantify the level of fatigue, intoxication, exhaustion or lack of concentration at any given moment.”

A lot of modern cars already feature sensors that can monitor your alertness, of course, and so it’s maybe no surprise that CorrActions is already working on proofs of concept with a few players in the automotive industry. In addition, it is also working on projects with the defense industry to show that its systems can assess a pilot’s performance, for example. But Hochman also believes that the company’s algorithms may be able to alert athletes or the elderly when they may be at risk of injury and falls.

The company says it will use the new funding to further develop its algorithms and support its current deployment partners, especially in the automotive industry.

“We are developing, and already seeing significant results for a technology which has the potential to save companies man-hours and money by preventing basic operational errors,” said CorrActions co-founder and CEO Zvi Ginosar. “Moreover, the application of our platform can be used to save lives, and prevent thousands of accidents and errors. In the next months we hope to be able to report more ground-breaking results and proof of concept trials, and this funding will greatly help us reach this goal.”

Augmented reality and non-fungible tokens, need I say more? Yes? Oh, well NFTs have certainly had their moment in 2021, but the question of what they do or what can be done with them has certainly been getting voiced more frequently as the speculative gold rush begins to cool off and people start to think more about how digital goods can evolve in the future.

Anima, a small creative crypto startup built by the founders of photo/video app Ultravisual, which Flipboard acquired back in 2014, is looking to use AR to shift how NFT art and collectibles can be viewed and shared. Their latest venture is an effort to help artists bring their digital creations to a bigger digital stage and help find what the future of NFTs looks like in augmented reality.

The startup has put together a small $500K pre-seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Lyle Owerko and Andrew Unger.

“As NFTs move away from being a more speculative market where it’s all about returns on your purchases, I think that’s healthy and it’s good for us specifically because we want to make things that are more approachable,” co-founder Alex Herrity says.

Their broader vision is finding ways for digital objects to interact with the real world, something that’s been a pretty top-of-mind concern for the AR world over the last few years, though augmented reality development has cooled more recently as creators have sunk into a wait-and-see attitude toward new releases from Apple and Facebook. Both the AR and NFT spaces are incredibly early, something Anima’s co-founders were quick to admit, but they think both spaces have matured enough that the gimmicks are out in the open.

“There’s a context shift that happens when you see AR as a vehicle to have a tactile relationship with something that you collected or that you see is a lifestyle accessory versus the common thing now where it’s a little bit more of an experiential gimmick,” co-founder Neil Voss tells TechCrunch.

The team has worked with a couple artists already as they’ve made early experiments in bringing digital art objects into AR and they’re launching a marketplace late next month based on ConsenSys’s Palm platform, where they hope to showcase more of their future partnerships.

We’ve been urging you to apply to Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 for weeks now, and you have just over 12 hours left before the application window slams shut on May 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Don’t procrastinate — the experience alone, whether you win the $100,000 prize or not, can improve the trajectory of your business.

Case in point: Mollie Breen started out as a mathematician at the National Security Agency before co-founding an IoT/OT security startup called Perygee. She and her team competed in Startup Battlefield last year at Disrupt 2020. Although they didn’t reach the finals, Breen has plenty to say about the experience. Here’s what she shared with us in a quick Q&A.

TC: Why did you apply to Startup Battlefield?                                             

Breen: I admired the leadership and growth of other companies that, at one point, were Startup Battlefield contestants. I noticed they had similar traction to us when they applied, and their products resembled ours in their ability to disrupt the respective industry.

TC: What was the training process like?

Breen: It was incredibly valuable both in the short term and long term. Every team gets a weekly session with the Battlefield editor. Together you rehearse and go over every iteration of the pitch line-by-line and slide-by-slide. After each session, I walked away with constructive feedback on everything — the content, the speaking style and even the font color on a particular slide.

This was a unique opportunity, and we put in extra hours to be ahead of schedule, sent drafts for review in the off hours and even doubled down on additional practice with Q&As. As a result, we couldn’t have been more prepared for pitch day. And the training has stayed with Perygee well past the sessions and the competition.

TC: What did it feel like to pitch at Disrupt?

Breen: Pitching at Disrupt was, in some ways, like other pitches except that you have an international audience. Since, at that point, we had practiced our pitch dozens of times, the real unknown during the competition was the Q&A with the VC judges.

There was additional pressure to answer succinctly and convincingly within a time constraint that you wouldn’t have during a normal one-on-one pitch. But with the prep help from the TechCrunch team, I felt ready to speak in front of such a large audience. I encourage anyone who might be nervous about the big stage to go for it and trust you’ll have more than enough preparation when you get there.

TC: What was the post-pitch impact? Did you meet investors, press or other key partners?

Breen: It helped accelerate our progress. Following Battlefield, we closed an oversubscribed fundraising round. We acquired additional beta users, including our first beta user who messaged us after reading about Perygee on TechCrunch. We also gained numerous press opportunities to share our story.

It’s almost a year since Startup Battlefield, and I’m still impressed by how many people start the conversation saying they watched the pitch while reading our company’s background. It’s a reminder that the opportunities created by being a TechCrunch Battlefield company continue.

TC: Do you have any great news to share since your pitch?

Breen: At TechCrunch Battlefield we were a small team doing MVP testing and just about to start raising. Since the pitch, we have scaled on all fronts. We grew the founding team and the engineering team, and we deployed the product to enterprise networks. Some of those deployments include contacts who reached out because of TechCrunch — and we raised our seed round!

TC: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Breen: I’m grateful for the camaraderie and relationships we developed with the other teams. What you didn’t see on stage during the pitches was all of us cheering one another on from the group chat or social media feed. Even now, we continue to support one another through navigating business questions or promoting product launches. If it weren’t for Startup Battlefield, I would never have met this awesome group of startups.

You have just 24 hours left to channel your inner Mollie Breen. Apply to Startup Battlefield before the deadline expires on May 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Get moving!

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Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to nontechnical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. Today the company announced a funding round totaling $11 million.

The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Amino Capital, Startup Capital Ventures and Sterling Road.

Breinify co-founder and CEO Diane Keng says that she and co-founder and CTO Philipp Meisen started the company to bring predictive personalization based on data science to marketers with the goal of helping them improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes.

“We’re big believers that the world, especially consumer brands, really need strong predictive personalization. But when you think about consumer big brands or the retailers that you buy from, most of them aren’t data scientists, nor do they really know how to activate [machine learning] at scale,” Keng told TechCrunch.

She says that she wanted to make this type of technology more accessible by hiding the complexity behind the algorithms powering the platform. “Instead of telling you how powerful the algorithms are, we show you [what that means for the] consumer experience, and in the end what that means for both the consumer and you as a marketer individually,” she said.

That involves the kind of customizations you might expect around website messaging, emails, texts or whatever channel a marketer might be using to communicate with the buyer. “So the AI decides you should be shown these products, this offer, this specific promotion at this time, [whether it’s] the web, email or SMS. So you’re not getting the same content across different channels, and we do all that automatically for you, and that’s [driven by the algorithms],” she said.

Breinify launched in 2016 and participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in San Francisco that year. She said it was early days for the company, but it helped them focus their approach. “I think it gave us a huge stage presence. It gave us a chance to test out the idea just to see where the market was in regards to needing a solution like this. We definitely learned a lot. I think it showed us that people were interested in personalization,” she said. And although the company didn’t win the competition, it ended up walking away with a funding deal.

Today the startup is growing fast and has 24 employees, up from 10 last year. Keng, who is an Asian woman, places a high premium on diversity.

“We partner with about four different kinds of diversity groups right now to source candidates, but at the end of the day, I think if you are someone that’s eager to learn, and you might not have all the skills yet, and you’re [part of an under-represented] group we encourage everyone to apply as much as possible. We put a lot of work into trying to create a really well-rounded group,” she said.

The NFT world is all about reshaping the idea of digital ownership, but art hardware startup Infinite Objects sees a big opportunity in making physical copies of those assets as it looks to reshape digital art and collectibles.

The startup makes screens that show a single video from a single artist and don’t do anything else. You can’t download apps to the screens or upload your own photos to them or check the time or weather. If you even want another piece of art from Infinite Objects, you can’t just download it, you have to actually go to their site and buy another display with that artwork on it. Each screen boasts information about the work, edition numbers and serial numbers etched on the back of it, inextricably tying the physical display to the work that it displays.

Infinite Objects CEO Joe Saavedra tells TechCrunch they’ve raised $6 million in seed funding from a host of backers including Courtside VC, which led the deal, and NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs.

For the longest time, Infinite Objects was an NFT platform without the NFTs. The company has worked with artists since 2018 to make (often limited run) series of physical display frames highlighting a specific digital work of the artist that looped forever. Sure, users could watch that looping video on the Infinite Objects website whenever they wanted, but the value was in owning an official copy of that artist’s work. Sound familiar?

When the wider popularity of NFTs as a speculative asset hit earlier this year, Saavedra saw a huge opportunity as internet users began discussing the future of digital art and digital scarcity. His team had already flirted with NFTs, partnering with artist Beeple back in December — months before he would spring out of relative obscurity in art circles with a $69 million sale at the Christie’s auction house — to release “physical tokens” of NFTs he was selling on the platform Nifty Gateway.

Saavedra sees a bigger opportunity for companies and creators in the NFT world to make their assets more approachable and understandable to a general audience with what his company is building, but he also sees a chance to transform NFTs from blind ownership to something more focused on actually appreciating the digital art that’s been purchased.

“When it comes to ownership, it’s exciting to be buying an NFT for $500 or $5,000, but what’s not exciting is having to open Safari on your phone to show it off,” Saavedra tells TechCrunch. “This physical vessel that we’ve designed is just so understandable for people who maybe don’t even understand what the blockchain at all, but they certainly understand limited edition physical merchandise.”

Saavedra is dismissive of other digital displays that cycle through artwork and says that art owners could also just toss images of their NFTs onto the TV if they wanted to, but that they all only serve up art as “glorified screensavers.”

The team at Infinite Objects sees broader opportunities in the NFT world but they’ve been tight-lipped on exactly what these efforts will look like. You can see some potential hints in the list of backers in this round, including most interestingly NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs. The startup has been building out its own blockchain called Flow and Saavedra was quick to sing its praises in our conversation, noting that it’s more scalable and sustainable than the Ethereum network. Dapper Labs recently announced its first major third-party NFT platform, partnering with avatar startup Genies — another investor in this round — for a digital accessories storefront that’s being launched this summer.

Serena Ventures, Betaworks, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, GFR Fund, Kevin Durant & Rich Kleiman, Genies and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures also participated in the round.

The world of hybrid work is here, and the usual 10-minute intro call, swag bag and first-day team lunch are just not enough to make your new employee feel welcome.

While many companies have found a way to interview and select candidates in a fully remote environment, fewer have spent time and resources on aligning the “pre-boarding” and onboarding process for the new hybrid world of work. Many employers still rely on old ways of welcoming new hires, despite our totally changed work environment.

In our experience at Greenhouse, where we help companies as diverse as BuzzFeed, HubSpot and Intercom hire talent across their organization, first impressions can make or break a candidate’s chances of staying at a company.

In fact, 69% of employees will stay for more than three years if their onboarding experience is good, while 20% will leave within 45 days if it’s bad. That difference is costly, as it takes, on average, around $4,129 and 42 days to fill a position.

Replacing someone can cost up to 50%-60% of their annual salary. At the same time, 58% of organizations said they were guilty of centering their onboarding processes on administrative and paperwork requirements alone.

Here is how we advise our clients to set up every new hire for success right from the start.

The company’s Day One comes long before the candidate’s Day One

Most of us can remember the excitement (and anxiety) of receiving and signing an offer for a new job. It’s important to capitalize on candidates’ enthusiasm and eagerness from the moment the offer is signed, instead of when they log in on Day One.

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Along with the stock market, cryptocurrency is also seeing an uptick among retail investors in Indonesia. Pintu, a platform focused on first-time cryptocurrency buyers, announced today it has raised a $6 million Series A, led by Pantera Capital, Intudo Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.

Other participants in the round included Blockchain.com Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and Alameda Ventures.

The Indonesian Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency (also known as Bappepti) began regulating Bitcoin and other cryptoassets as commodities two years ago, paving the way for licensed brokers like Pintu. Founded last year by Jeth Soetoyo to make it easier for first-time investors to purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, Pintu is registered under Bappebti and the Ministry of Communication and Informatics as a licensed cryptoassets broker.

A wave of interest in capital investing during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among millennials who want alternatives to keeping their money in low-yield savings accounts, spurred interest in investment apps like Ajaib, Bibit and Pluang, which have all recently raised funding.

Many first-time investors are also looking at cryptocurrencies. According to Pintu’s internal estimates, last year Indonesia processed $10 billion USD in cryptoassets transactions, mostly through retail investors.

Pintu chief operating officer Andrew Adjiputro told TechCrunch in an email that many Indonesian retail traders see crypto as an alternative investment asset class, and that the majority of retail investors are aged 20 to 35 years old. But the company is starting to see more older investors as crypto gains popularity.

“Based on our internal survey, in terms of public’s top of mind asset classes, we see crypto as a top three asset class in Indonesia, alongside gold and mutual funds,” he said.

Other Indonesian cryptocurrency exchanges include Indodax and Tokocrypto. When asked how Pintu differentiates, Adjiputro said it focuses on the mass market to reach mainly first-time crypto users, and its value proposition lies in its mobile-first app, easy user experience and educational materials developed by the company.

“For most Indonesians, the concept of investing and trading is new, because historically penetration in these categories have been so low,” he explained. “So what we’re seeing is also the opportunity to help Indonesians understand the concept of investing/trading and along the way leapfrog investments into other asset classes. What this means is that there is a large base of underserved first time investors that demand a simple and intuitive trading platform where they are handheld from the start to finish and also educated on the fundamentals of investing/trading on top of that of crypto.”

Pintu’s new funding will be used on marketing, hiring and product development.