Time is critical for healthcare providers, especially in the middle of the pandemic. Singapore-based Bot MD helps save time with an AI-based chatbot that lets doctors look up important information from their smartphones, instead of needing to call a hospital operator or access its intranet. The startup announced today it has raised a $5 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.

Other backers include SeaX, XA Network and SG Innovate, and angel investors Yoh-Chie Lu, Jean-Luc Butel and Steve Blank. Bot MD was also part of Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch.

The funding will be used to expand in the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, and to add new features in response to demand from hospitals and healthcare organizations during COVID-19. Bot MD’s AI assistant currently supports English, with plans to release Bahasa Indonesian and Spanish later this year. It is currently used by about 13,000 doctors at organizations including Changi General Hospital, National University Health System, National University Cancer Institute of Singapore, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore General Hospital, Parkway Radiology and the National Kidney Transplant Institute.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Dorothea Koh told TechCrunch that Bot MD integrates hospital information usually stored in multiple systems and makes it easier to access.

Image Credits: Bot MDWithout Bot MD, doctors may need to dial a hospital operator to find which staffers are on call and get their contact information. If they want drug information, that means another call to the pharmacy. If they need to see updated guidelines and clinical protocols, that often entails finding a computer that is connected to the hospital’s intranet.

“A lot of what Bot MD does is to integrate the content that they need into a single interface that is searchable 24/7,” said Koh.

For example, during COVID-19, Bot MD introduced a new feature that takes healthcare providers to a form pre-filled with their information when they type “record temperature” into the chatbot. Many were accessing their organization’s intranet twice a day to log their temperature and Koh said being able to use the form through Bot MD has significantly improved compliance.

The time it takes to onboard Bot MD varies depending on the information systems and amount of content it needs to integrate, but Koh said its proprietary natural language processing chat engine makes training its AI relatively quick. For example, Changi General Hospital, a recent client, was onboarded in less than 10 days.

Bot MD plans to add new clinical apps to its platform, including ones for electronic medical records (EMR), billing and scheduling integrations, clinical alerts and chronic disease monitoring.

When you want to buy a refrigerator or a television, you can walk to the nearby electronics store or visit an e-commerce website like Amazon. But where do you go when you’re looking for parts of a crane, a door or chassis of different machines?

For several businesses globally, the answer to that question is increasingly Zetwerk, a Bangalore-based startup.

The three-year-old startup runs a business-to-business marketplace for manufacturing items that connects OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and EPC (engineering procurement construction) customers with manufacturing small-businesses and enterprises.

All the products it sells today are custom-made. “Nobody has a stock of such inventories. You get the order, you find manufacturers and workshops that make them,” explained Amrit Acharya, co-founder and chief executive of Zetwerk, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Its customers — there are over 250 of them, up from 100 a year ago — operate across two-dozen industries (including process plants, oil & gas, steel, aerospace, medical devices, apparel and luxury goods) in the infrastructure space, and approach Zetwerk with digital designs they wish to be translated into physical products.

Customers aren’t alone in seeing value in Zetwerk. On Wednesday, the Indian startup said it has raised $120 million in a Series D financing round led by existing investors Greenoaks Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Kae Capital also participated in the Series D round.

The new round, which brings Zetwerk’s to-date raise to $193 million, gives the firm a post-money valuation of somewhere between $600 million to $700 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. (A quick side note: Zetwerk announced a $21 million Series C round last year, but ended up raising $31 million in that round.)

Zetwerk was co-founded by Acharya, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Rahul Sharma and Vishal Chaudhary. Long before Acharya and Ramakkrushnan joined forces to tackle this space, they had been contemplating this idea.

Both of them studied at IIT Madras, went to the same exchange program in Singapore, and were colleagues at Kolkata-headquartered conglomerate ITC. While working there, they realized that part of a product manager’s job at the firm was dealing with gazillions of suppliers and the manufacturing items they offered.

The process was archaic: There were no databases, and people couldn’t track shipments.

The early version of Zetwerk, which was a database of suppliers, was a direct response to this. But after listening to requests from customers, the startup saw a bigger opportunity and transformed itself into a full-fledged marketplace with integrations with third-party vendors. Once a firm has placed an order, Zetwerk allows them to keep tabs on the progress of manufacturing and then the shipping. There are also quality checks in place.

Zetwerk operates in such a unique space today — Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at Sequoia India, says the startup has defined a new category of marketplace — that by and large it’s not competing with any other firm in India — or South Asia. (The startup competes with domain project consultants in the offline world.)

The opportunity in India itself is gigantic. According to industry reports, manufacturing today accounts for 14% of India’s GDP. Vaibhav Agarwal, a partner at Lightspeed, estimates that the market is as large as $40 billion to $60 billion in India and global trade-tailwinds that creates opportunity to serve international demand.

As more and more companies expand or shift their manufacturing to India — in part due to import duties imposed by India and geo-political tension with China, the global hub for manufacturing — this opportunity has only grown bigger in recent years.

“India has a lot of depth in manufacturing, but much of it has not been tapped well,” said Acharya.

Zetwerk — which grew 3X last year and reported revenue of $43.9 million in the financial year that ended in March, a 20X growth from the year prior — plans to deploy the new capital to expand to more areas of categories, and broaden its technology stack. Consumer goods (which covers items such as mixer grinders and TVs) is an area Zetwerk expanded to last year, and said it accounts for 15% of the revenue it generated in the last six months.

Currently 25 of its customers are in the U.S., Canada, Europe and other international markets. Acharya said the startup plans to open offices overseas this year as it scouts for more international customers. 

“We are excited to partner with Zetwerk on the next leg of their journey, as they expand their value proposition globally. Zetwerk’s operating system for manufacturing has digitized multiple supply chains end-to-end, ensuring on-time delivery and high quality standards. This has led to rapid growth in India and internationally, with the potential to quickly become one of the most important manufacturing platforms globally,” said Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks Capital, in a statement.

BukuWarung, an Indonesian startup focused on digitizing the country’s 60 million small businesses, announced today it has raised new funding from Rocketship.vc and an Indonesian retail conglomerate.

The amount was undisclosed, but sources say it brings BukuWarung’s total funding so far to $20 million. The company’s last round, announced in September 2020, was between $10 million to $15 million. Launched in 2019, BukuWarung was founded by Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty and took part in Y Combinator last year.

Rocketship.vc is also an investor in Indian startup Khatabook, which reached a valuation between $275 million to $300 million in its last funding round. Like Khatabook, BukuWarung helps small businesses, like neighborhood stores called warung, that previously relied on paper ledgers, transition to digital bookkeeping and online payments. BukuWarung recently launched Tokoko, a Shopify-like tool that lets merchants create online stores through an app, and says Tokoko has been used by 500,000 merchants so far.

Chauhan, BukuWarung’s president, said it has started making revenue through its payments solution. In total, BukuWarung now claims more than 3.5 million registered merchants in 750 Indonesian towns and cities, and says it is recording over $15 billion worth of transactions across its platform and processing over $500 million in terms of volume.

SMEs contribute about 60% to Indonesia’s gross domestic product and employ 97% of its domestic workforce, but many have difficulty accessing financial services that can help them grow. By digitizing their financial records, companies like BukuWarung can make it easier for them to access lines of credit, working capital loans and other services. Other companies serving SMEs in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, include BukuKas and CrediBook.

BukuWarung will use its new funding to grow its tech and product teams in Indonesia, India and Singapore. It plans to launch more monetization products, including credit and grow its payments solution this year.

The wave of venture capital interest in geographies other than Silicon Valley has been building momentum over the past 5+ years. If you measure capital flow by Twitter chatter alone, you may assume the tidal wave is about to break and checks are being doled out via T-shirt launchers repurposed from hockey games.

Meanwhile, VCs will approach founders saying, “We are now looking into markets beyond Silicon Valley.”

When Mucker launched back in 2011, our founding partners, who had left Silicon Valley for LA, set out to prove that high-growth companies can be built anywhere. Our portfolio from this past decade is a testament to this very narrative. With offices in LA, Austin and Nashville — and investments all over North America, we are seeing a marked increase in receptivity to an idea we had over a decade ago to invest across the U.S. and into Canada.

As of late, I’m receiving more and more outreach from VCs based in San Francisco, New York and beyond interested in deal flow here in Nashville and the Southeast.

In reality, there will be some lag time before the checks being written by these same VCs are consistent with both the outward hype and existing market opportunity. The broadened geographic focus of VCs for marketing purposes and FOMO is not adequately capturing the real narrative.

In short: When we think about the opportunity beyond Silicon Valley, we are really speaking of America.

America is the opportunity and we are worthy of investment, aren’t we?

“We” is a loaded declaration. I write this as a venture capitalist and also as the biracial daughter of a first-generation immigrant, with both of my parents growing up poor by most people’s standards. One branch of my family immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, the other harkens back to rural Oklahoma. The founders I meet day in and day out in the Southeast oftentimes tell a similar story.

My story is that of the average American, and yet feels light years apart from what people perceive as the “innovation economy.” Many of the people I’ve met in venture capital this past decade come from prestigious lineages with parents and grandparents who may have never associated with mine. And yet, here we are. This is America.

While Silicon Valley’s origins and climb to international stardom center around a collection of innovators, attracting more innovators and capital as the decades passed, one critical element arguably fell by the wayside — America as an expansive and diverse collection of states and people. Annual reporting on where venture capital dollars flow supports this discrepancy, with the majority of funds being funneled into companies based in and around Silicon Valley.

We find ourselves at the threshold of a decade where America will be rightfully recast as the land of opportunity for VC dollars to flow into the products and services fueling America’s future. And, at the helm of such innovations needs to be the people closest to these market opportunities, in full alignment with their customers and the nuances to best serve them.

In a post-COVID world, customers have never demanded more transparency into supply chains, workplace culture and equity ownership. Customers are more informed than ever before, with a 24/7 info line on brands and a growing scrutiny on where to place their hard-earned dollars. In short, they demand to be seen, and the founders who recognize this are the ones thriving in this new climate.

Follow the money

Where do the customers live? I’ll give you a hint: They are largely not in Silicon Valley.

I wrote about the unfair advantage of Nashville back in 2018 when I announced the launch of Build In SE, a community I co-founded to support founders choosing to build their companies in the Southeast. Nashville is at the center of over half of the United States population within a radius of 650 miles, and within a two-hour flight of 75% of the U.S. market.

Customers come in all shapes and sizes, and founders with boots on the ground in these markets, wearing the same brand of proverbial boots as these customers, carry an unfair advantage. These same founders historically bootstrapped their companies out of need, as access to early-stage, high-risk capital can be scarce and vary widely city by city, state by state, industry by industry.

These same founders still built household name companies in the tech and innovation economy, including the likes of Mailchimp, Calendly, Lynda.com, and GoFundMe (their Series A valued them at $600 million pre-money). All of these companies have another thing in common — they were founded “beyond Silicon Valley.”

Talent as the stronger magnet

Another macrotrend at play is that of the increasing distribution of talent beyond traditional metropolitan strongholds like San Francisco and New York. Entrepreneurs, technologists and operational talent are lifestyle-seeking at a time in history when life feels all the more precious. Moving to cities like Nashville, Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Durham, Miami, et. al. means proximity to aging family members, affordable childcare and outdoor activities.

These simple pleasures were the tradeoffs people made when “pursuing their dreams” in coastal cities, picking up to move in pursuit of money (sometimes better weather). Seemingly overnight, capital abounds in the private markets just as talent becomes increasingly scarce and therefore valuable. The pendulum swung, and capital became the weaker of the two magnets; Wall Street began moving up Manhattan island toward coffee shops and dog parks when talent began to pose the question, “How long do I want my commute to be?” and “How much time do I want to reclaim for my family, and myself?”

2020 was the match to ignite this dry hillside. People trapped inside of cramped quarters with resources left to invest in a new life (or in other cases, left with nothing to lose) packed their bags for a new, up-and-coming metro.

For some, this comes with a newfound sense of community and belonging, as I experienced in 2017 when I moved from my lifelong home of Los Angeles to Nashville. In LA, my local neighborhood hardly knew one another due to the transient nature of the town. In Nashville, I became part of something greater than myself.

Opportunities abound everywhere

One of the big frustrations expressed by founders I know in markets like Nashville, Atlanta, the Research Triangle, Cincinnati and Toronto, is, “I keep hearing there is more capital available, but I’m not seeing it.” They will meet with investors, then be told they are too early, raising too little money, or too much, or not going after a “big enough market.”

Sometimes, one or more of these may be true. However, there are instances where these investor responses may be thinly veiled criticism of the perceived ability of the founders who might not sound, look or behave like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Closing this gap of understanding between pattern-matching VCs of varying skill and startup CEOs across the country will require hard work in the coming decade. A big piece of this will require breaking bread as neighbors, with kids in the same schools, a shared affinity for the local greasy spoon and a mutual trust. This will be step one. Though really, it will require much more alignment and rigor around the very definition of America.

It is up to investors to capture this opportunity in the next decade. In fact, it is our job.

Landed, a startup aiming to improve the hiring process for hourly employers and job applicants, is officially launching its mobile app today. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding.

Founder and CEO Vivian Wang said that the app works by asking applicants to fill out a profile with information like work experience and shift availability, as well as recording videos that answer basic common interview questions. It then uses artificial intelligence to analyze those responses across 50 traits such as communication skills and body language, then matches them up with job listings from employers.

Landed has been in beta testing since March of last year — yes, right as COVID-19 was hitting the United States. Wang acknowledged that this was bad news for some of the startup’s potential customers, but she said businesses like grocery stores and fast food restaurants needed the product more than ever.

“That’s why we continuously grew through 2020,” she said.

After all, Landed allowed those businesses to continue hiring without having to conduct large group interviews in person. Even beyond health concerns, she said managers struggle with rapid turnover in these positions (something Wang saw herself during her time on the corporate team at Gap, Inc.) and with a hiring process that’s usually “only a small part of their job.” So Landed saves time and automates a large part of the product.

Meanwhile, Wang said job applicants benefit because they can find jobs more easily and quickly, often within a week of creating a profile. She also argued that Landed can improve on existing diversity and inclusion efforts by allowing managers to see a broader pool of candidates, and because its AI matching isn’t subject to the same unconscious biases that employers might have.

Of course, bias can also be inadvertently built into AI, but when I raised this issue, Wang pointed to Landed’s partnerships with local nonprofits to bring in underrepresented candidates, and she added, “AI can be scary when there are no human checks in place. We partner directly with our employers to ensure the matches that we’re sending them are the right matches, and there are calibration periods.”

Landed is free for job applicants, while it charges a monthly fee to employers, with customers already including Wendy’s, Chick-fil-A and Grocery Outlet franchisees. In fact, Grocery Outlet Ventura owner Eric Sawyer said that by using the app, he’s gone from hiring one person for every 10 interviews to hiring one person for every three interviews.

“My time spent on scheduling and performing interviews has been cut in half by utilizing the Landed app for most of my communications,” he said in a statement.

The new funding was led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital and various angel investors. Wang said this will allow Landed to continue expanding — the service is currently available in seven metro areas (Northern California; Southern California; Virginia Beach/Chesapeake, Virginia; Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; Reno, Nevada and Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas), with a goal of tripling that number by the end of the year.

Wang added that eventually, she wants to provide other services to job applicants, such as loans (at a lower rate than payday lenders) and job training, turning Landed into a “lifestyle stability platform” that combines job stability, financial stability and educational “upskilling” for blue-collar workers.

Babbel, the Berlin-based language-learning platform, today announced that it is now going well beyond its core app-based learning service and is introducing live classes.

Capped at six students, these conversation-driven classes will be taught by certified teachers, using Babbel’s existing methodology. Learners can add live classes to their existing Babbel subscription for an additional fee, starting at $110 for five classes/month, or subscribe to them as a standalone product (though they’ll also get access to the Babbel app as part of their live subscription).

That’s not all, though; Babbel is also introducing language-learning games in its app for the first time, as well as short stories to help learners use their new vocabulary, short snippets of fun facts about various cultures and a new set of videos about different places and languages.

This launch follows what was a banner year for Babbel. Besides crossing a milestone at 10 million subscriptions sold, the company also realized $150 million in recognized revenue in 2019, Babbel’s U.S. CEO Julie Hansen told me, and that number is significantly higher this year (though Babbel didn’t disclose any revenue numbers for 2020 yet). She also noted that while the company saw growth across markets, the U.S. saw especially strong growth, with revenue and subscriber numbers up 100%.

“In the U.S. […] when we ask people why [they want to learn a language], the ones that say ‘for travel’ are the highest converters normally,” Hansen told me. “So I was in such a panic by mid-March, thinking that our business is going to go to zero. No one’s traveling. And it was just the exact opposite. People found in language learning — as they did in bike riding and sourdough bread baking — a creative outlet, self-improvement or a rewarding investment in themselves.”

As for the live classes, the set of available language combinations is still limited as the company starts to scale the program. For now, English speakers can sign up for Spanish and German classes, while German speakers can get lessons in English and Spanish. The plan is to add additional language pairs over the course of the year.

The overall goal for Babbel, Hansen noted, is to meet the needs of language learners across a wider spectrum, be that videos and podcasts, or these new live lessons. “It’s about embracing a more holistic view of the user’s language-learning experience and meeting their needs at more points along that journey,” Hansen said.

She also noted that providing a live experience is, in many ways, about quality control. “We’ve put a lot of work into teacher recruitment, teacher training, teacher reviews,” she said. “We are giving them the tools to be successful. We’re not just saying: ‘hey, there’s the app, go figure it out.’ There’s materials for every lesson. There’s guidance.”

Currently, Babbel is working with about 100 teachers and, after a quiet beta rollout, the company is now seeing thousands of students in class every week. “The end game for this year should be on a couple hundred teachers and tens of thousands of students in class every week,” Christian Hillemeyer, Babbel’s director of communications, noted.

While there are plenty of language-learning apps as live tutoring services, Babbel may be the first service at its scale that aims to combine both. And beyond the live classes, Babbel is leaning into its overall content production beyond the core app features, with more podcasts and the short stories and culture snippets it is now adding to the app and — maybe even more importantly — as free videos and podcasts on YouTube and elsewhere.

In addition to all of the new features, the team also took a look at its existing lessons, and over the course of the last year, its teachers spent a lot of time making the course content more concise and the overall lesson length shorter, based on feedback from its didactics team. The team also introduced a new onboarding flow that includes a placement test so that learners can start using the app at the right level.

Nearly a year ago, the spread of COVID-19 ended the daily commute for millions of Americans, an abrupt change that sent the ridesharing industry into a free fall.

Hip, which connected commuters with third-party bus and shuttle operators via an app, was just one of the many mobility-as-a-service startups that watched its clientele and revenue dwindle. Instead of cutting costs and waiting out the pandemic and the disruption it delivered, Hip expanded.

Hip added a business-to-business offering to its platform, a move aimed at companies and manufacturers preparing to bring back workers.

“Instead of holding back we actually doubled down and increased our platform,” CEO Amiad Solomon said in a recent interview, adding that the decision was prompted by discussions they had with large corporations that were struggling with how to safely bring employees back to the office.

The bet has paid off, Solomon said. The company, which employs 20 people at offices in New York City and Tel Aviv, has not only landed new customers, it has also raised $12 million. The funding round was led by NFX and Magenta Venture Partners, with participation by AltaIR Capital and former Uber, Booking.com and Google executives. The funding will be to hire more workers and expand its engineering, sales and operations.

Hip works with companies, in any location, to determine their needs. The company developed an internal tool that companies can use to upload thousands employees and their home addresses. That information is then used to help companies determine their needs and control costs.

On the most basic level, the Hip platform connects companies to the bus and shuttle providers. It offers route planning and has a contact-tracing tool to help companies track COVID-19 infections. Companies can also use the platform to set vehicle capacity controls and add customized features within the app, such as health and consent forms. Employees can use the app to book tickets, reserve seats and track their transportation in real time.

Employee shuttles are not new. The difference, Solomon said, is the flexibility that this platform provides.

“It’s not the same route, it’s not the same people and it’s not the same frequency,” Solomon said. We built out the entire infrastructure, both in terms of technology, but also in terms of our distribution. We now support over 200 cities with our partners in the U.S.”

Hip locked in its first corporation in late October and now has a handful of active customers. There are dozens more companies that are ready to use the platform once they decide to bring workers back, Solomon said.

“Now that we’re working on the corporate side, we see how much opportunity there is,” Solomon said. “I think that we’ll move more and more into this direction of providing modern software systems and the connection between that software and the transportation providers — to be that glue that connects corporations and their ground transportation needs to the world of our vetted partners and providers.”

Alloy Automation, a startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced today that it has closed $5 million across two rounds, the most recent of which brought $4 million to the company in October of 2020.

The new funds were raised at a $16 million pre-money, $20 million post-money valuation, Alloy told TechCrunch.

The company’s latest fundraising was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Abstract, with participation from Color Capital, BoxGroup and a collection of individual investors, including Shippo’s Laura Behrens Wu.

TechCrunch spoke with co-founders Sara Du, CEO, and Gregg Mojica, CTO, about the round, their market and their experience in Y Combinator.

Du, a Harvard dropout, and Mojicam, who skipped college altogether, met after the former emailed the latter about speaking at an open-source conference. The event didn’t end up happening, but the pair stayed in touch. Du wound up running a small streetwear store, interested in automation and app-connecting tools like Zapier, which she found to be too simple, and MuleSoft, which she described as very expensive. Out of a desire for something in between that would let her connect apps, Alloy Automation was eventually born.

After a launch on Product Hunt in 2019 offering “complex automation made easy, and with no code,” Bryant Chou, a founder at WebFlow, put money into the company. Alloy was looking to build prosumer automation tooling and now it had material backing.

The startup then went through Y Combinator the next year, sharpened its focus to the e-commerce market and, as it has just announced, attracted millions more from a cadre of investors.

The shift to focus on e-commerce from a broader toolset came from customer pull, the co-founders said. After starting out with a number of integrations for Twilio, HubSpot and other services, the team, toward the end of their time in Y Combinator, noticed places in the e-commerce world into which their product fit neatly. Alloy’s tech was being used by Shopify and BigCommerce customers, helping make e-commerce a fertile area for the company, its co-founders said.

Alloy’s tech helps e-commerce players link services to help automate their shipping, marketing, analytics and other tasks. One example that Du provided TechCrunch was customers using Alloy to connect SMS functionality to fulfillment tools. Doing so might allow small e-commerce companies to automatically text customers when their order ships, for example.

During Y Combinator, the pair said that they might have been the youngest set of founders in their batch. But despite being what they described as not the hottest company in the batch, they skipped the accelerator’s well-known demo day, having already raised capital.

Du said that it’s not generally encouraged to skip demo day. But as Alloy has gone on to raise even more capital, the decision seems to have worked out for the company. The founders also cited a desire to stay in stealth as part of their reasoning for skipping the investor confab, telling TechCrunch that they wanted to stay quiet and build until they “really [had] something.”

Alloy’s $4 million round came from a relationship that started when the startup had shown off its tech on Product Hunt. Bain had contacted the startup then, stayed in touch, and later did due diligence on it by talking about Alloy with e-commerce startups in its own portfolio.

Why $4 million? Per its founders, Alloy had barely dug into its original $1 million round when it raised more, but as the pair want to build out their go-to-market efforts, the capital made sense.

The founders said they intend to raise a Series A for Alloy, but that their current capital could float them for two or three years; their startup is a COVID baby, they joked, and after having some investors pull out of their pre-seed round, Alloy is conservative with its capital.

Finally, let’s talk growth. Per the pair, Q4 2020 was good for Alloy. That’s not surprising, as they serve e-commerce companies, firms that love holiday-boosted fourth-quarters. The founders told TechCrunch that during the fourth quarter, their in-house Slack channel set up to note payments, signups and other positive occurrences went off chronically.

The team today is the co-founders, three engineers, a designer and a marketer, spread across four time zones, with workers in America, India and the Philippines. Alloy intends to hire sales staff, new engineers and a customer success denizen.

Alloy’s software costs from $200 to $1,000 per month or more, depending on need. Let’s see how far it can scale on its new capital base.

TrustLayer, which provides insurance brokers with risk management services via a SaaS platform, has raised $6.6 million in a seed round.

Abstract Ventures led the financing, which also included participation from Propel Venture Partners, NFP Ventures, BoxGroup and Precursor Ventures. Interestingly, the startup also got some industry validation in the way of investors. Twenty of the top 100 insurance agencies in the U.S. (as well as some of their C-suite execs) put money in the round. Those agencies include Holmes Murphy, Heffernan and M3, among others.

BrokerTech Ventures (BTV), a group consisting of 13 tech-focused insurance agencies in the U.S. and 11 “top-tier” insurance companies, also invested in TrustLayer. The funding actually marked BTV’s first investment in a cohort member of its inaugural accelerator program. 

TrustLayer co-founder and CEO John Fohr said the company was founded on the premise that verification of insurance and business credentials is a major pain point for millions of businesses. The process takes time and is not always trustworthy, which can lead to money lost in the long run.

To help solve the problem, San Francisco-based TrustLayer has used robotic process automation (RPA) to build out what it describes as an automated and secure way for companies to verify insurance. It sells its software-as-a-service either through insurance brokers or directly to the companies themselves.

TrustLayer says that companies that use its platform can automate the verification of insurance, licenses and compliance documents of business partners such as vendors, subcontractors, suppliers, borrowers, tenants, ridesharing and franchisees. (By verification of insurance, we mean confirming that a company is actually insured and not just pretending to be.)

Recent traction includes companies working in the construction, property management, sports and hospitality industries. Insurance fraud is a real and expensive concern for companies working in those spaces, according to Fohr, who noted that the seed round was “heavily oversubscribed.”

TrustLayer’s long-term goal is to work with dozens of the largest brokers and carriers in the U.S. to build out a digital, real-time proof of insurance solution for businesses of all sizes, across all industries. 

“The best analogy to describe what we do is calling us the Carta for insurance,” Fohr told TechCrunch. “We’re automating a process that is hugely painful and manual to help our carrier and broker partners provide better services to their customers and help companies reduce risk and make sure their business partners have the right coverage.”

David Mort, partner at Propel Venture Partners, said that nearly every business relationship requires one or both parties to prove they have the insurance required for engagement. 

TrustLayer comes in by “attacking a messy, data-rich and unstructured problem within the insurance industry that is a major friction source for commerce.”

Mort appreciates that TrustLayer is tackling the problem not by becoming the insurance broker, but by working with the incumbents as a software solution.

Propel is no stranger to investing in fintech, having backed the likes of Coinbase, DocuSign, Guideline and Hippo. Mort acknowledges that much of the innovation in fintech has historically focused on the banking industry while the insurance industry has been slower to innovate.

“The most interesting opportunities we see are around modernizing legacy infrastructure, reducing friction, and improving the customer experience,” he told TechCrunch. “More generally, insurtech companies are well-positioned for this market environment, where recurring revenue (or policies in this case) is valued, and more people are at home shopping for digital financial services. The need for insurance is only increasing.”

Meanwhile, Ellen Willadsen, chief innovation officer at Holmes Murphy and executive sponsor of BrokerTech Ventures, noted that TrustLayer’s expanded digital proof of coverage software “is seeing high adoption” among member agencies.

TrustLayer will use its new capital for (naturally) some hiring of sales, marketing and engineering staff. It also plans to team up with The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative (considered to be one of the largest blockchain insurance consortiums in the U.S.) and insurance carriers to build out its digital proof of insurance offering.

Per a recent TechCrunch data analysis and some external data work on the insurtech venture capital market, it appears that private insurtech investment is matching the attention public investors are also giving the sector.

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Speaking is one of the hardest parts of learning a new language, especially if you don’t have someone to practice with regularly. ELSA is an app that helps by using speech recognition technology to correct pronunciation. Based in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City, ELSA announced today it has raised a $15 million Series B, led by VI (Vietnam Investments) Group and SIG. Other participants included returning investors Google’s AI-focused fund Gradient Ventures, SOSV and Monk’s Hill Ventures, along with Endeavor Catalyst and Globant Ventures.

The capital will be used to expand ELSA’s operations in Latin America and build a scalable B2B platform, allowing companies and educational organizations to offers the app’s coaching services to employees or students. Founded in 2015, ELSA, which stands for English Language Speech Assistant, now claims more than 13 million users. Its last round of funding was a $7 million Series A announced in 2019.

In addition to Latin America, ELSA will also focus on expanding in Vietnam, India and Japan, where it saw high demand last year. The company recently formed a partnership with IDP and British Council, which owns the widely-used IELTS English language test and now recommends ELSA to for test preparation. ELSA is also working with language schools in Vietnam like IMAP and Speak Up, online learning platform YOLA and corporate clients including Kimberly Clark, Intel and ATAD.

ELSA co-founder and chief executive officer Vu Van told TechCrunch that many users want to improve their English speaking proficiency for job opportunities and to increase their earning potential. In Vietnam, India and Brazil, people with higher English speaking proficiency can earn about two to three times more than their colleagues, she said.

“This motivation drives a lot of demand for our English learner community in Vietnam, India and Brazil, especially during COVID-19 when we’ve seen enormous interest from the LatAm region as well,” Van added.

In Vietnam, where Van is from, English learners spend a lot of their disposable income on online or offline English training. “However, the majority of English learners still struggle to improve their speaking skill because other people don’t understand them or they’re afraid to speak it,” she said. ELSA was designed to give them an accessible resource to help improve their pronunciation and confidence when speaking English.

Other apps focused on English pronunciation include FluentU and Say It. Van said one of ELSA’s main advantages is its proprietary voice recognition AI tech.

“What’s unique about our AI is that we’ve collected the largest amount of accented English voice data from millions of users that we have used to train our AI model over the last few years, which gives us a higher accuracy in recognizing and understanding non-native English speakers around the world,” she said. “The other existing voice recognition technologies available, by comparison, might understand native speakers well but have a hard time understanding non-native accented English learner communities.”

Instead of providing feedback about individual words, ELSA’s app also corrects individual sounds and gives users detailed information on how to improve their pronunciation, including “very advanced prosodic speaking features like intonation, rhythm and fluency to help them speak English more naturally, something that our competitors don’t offer,” Van added.