This has been quite a week.

Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened:

Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats.A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% more effective.Bianca Smith will become the first Black woman to coach a professional baseball team.

Despite many distractions in our first full week of the new year, we published a full slate of stories exploring different aspects of entrepreneurship, fundraising and investing.

We’ve already gotten feedback on this overview of subscription pricing models, and a look back at 2020 funding rounds and exits among Israel’s security startups was aimed at our new members who live and work there, along with international investors who are seeking new opportunities.

Plus, don’t miss our first investor surveys of 2021: one by Lucas Matney on social gaming, and another by Mike Butcher that gathered responses from Portugal-based investors on a wide variety of topics.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. I hope we can all look forward to a nice, boring weekend with no breaking news alerts.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription

The Roblox Gambit

In February 2020, gaming platform Roblox was valued at $4 billion, but after announcing a $520 million Series H this week, it’s now worth $29.5 billion.

“Sure, you could argue that Roblox enjoyed an epic 2020, thanks in part to COVID-19,” writes Alex Wilhelm this morning. “That helped its valuation. But there’s a lot of space between $4 billion and $29.5 billion.”

Alex suggests that Roblox’s decision to delay its IPO and raise an enormous Series H was a grandmaster move that could influence how other unicorns will take themselves to market. “A big thanks to the gaming company for running this experiment for us.”

I asked him what inspired the headline; like most good ideas, it came to him while he was trying to get to sleep.

“I think that I had ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ somewhere in my head, so that formed the root of a little joke with myself. Roblox is making a strategic wager on method of going public. So, ‘gambit’ seems to fit!”

8 investors discuss social gaming’s biggest opportunities

For our first investor survey of the year, Lucas Matney interviewed eight VCs who invest in massively multiplayer online games to discuss 2021 trends and opportunities:

Hope Cochran, Madrona Venture GroupDaniel Li, Madrona Venture GroupNiko Bonatsos, General CatalystEthan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture PartnersSakib Dadi, Bessemer Venture PartnersJacob Mullins, Shasta VenturesAlice Lloyd George, RogueGigi Levy-Weiss, NFX

Having moved far beyond shooters and sims, platforms like Twitch, Discord and Fortnite are “where culture is created,” said Daniel Li of Madrona.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses Twitch to explain policy positions, major musicians regularly perform in-game concerts on Fortnite and in-game purchases generated tens of billions last year.

“Gaming is a unique combination of science and art, left and right brain,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss of NFX. “It’s never just science (i.e., software and data), which is why many investors find it hard.”

How to convert customers with subscription pricing

Startups that lack insight into their sales funnel have high churn, low conversion rates and an inability to adapt or leverage changes in customer behavior.

If you’re hoping to convert and retain customers, “reinforcing your value proposition should play a big part in every level of your customer funnel,” says Joe Procopio, founder of Teaching Startup.

What is up with Tesla’s value?

Alex Wilhelm followed up his regular Friday column with another story that tries to find a well-grounded rationale for Tesla’s sky-high valuation of approximately $822 billion.

Meanwhile, GM just unveiled a new logo and tagline.

As ever, I learned something new while editing: A “melt up” occurs when investors start clamoring for a particular company because of acute FOMO (the fear of missing out).

Delivering 500,000 cars in 2020 was “impressive,” says Alex, who also acknowledged the company’s ability to turn GAAP profits, but “pride cometh before the fall, as does a melt up, I think.”

Note: This story has Alex’s original headline, but I told him I would replace the featured image with a photo of someone who had very “richest man in the world” face.

How Segment redesigned its core systems to solve an existential scaling crisis

On Tuesday, enterprise reporter Ron Miller covered a major engineering project at customer data platform Segment called “Centrifuge.”

“Its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost,” but as Ron reports, it was also meant to solve “an existential crisis for the young business,” which needed a more resilient platform.

Dear Sophie: Banging my head against the wall understanding the US immigration system

Dear Sophie:

Now that the U.S. has a new president coming in whose policies are more welcoming to immigrants, I am considering coming to the U.S. to expand my company after COVID-19. However, I’m struggling with the morass of information online that has bits and pieces of visa types and processes.

Can you please share an overview of the U.S. immigration system and how it works so I can get the big picture and understand what I’m navigating?

— Resilient in Romania

The first “Dear Sophie” column of each month is available on TechCrunch without a paywall.

Revenue-based financing: The next step for private equity and early-stage investment

For founders who aren’t interested in angel investment or seeking validation from a VC, revenue-based investing is growing in popularity.

To gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. RBI landscape, we published an industry report on Wednesday that studied data from 134 companies, 57 funds and 32 investment firms before breaking out “specific verticals and business models … and the typical profile of companies that access this form of capital.”

Lisbon’s startup scene rises as Portugal gears up to be a European tech tiger

Mike Butcher continues his series of European investor surveys with his latest dispatch from Lisbon, where a nascent startup ecosystem may get a Brexit boost.

Here are the Portugal-based VCs he interviewed:

Cristina Fonseca, partner, Indico Capital PartnersPedro Ribeiro Santos, partner, Armilar Venture PartnersTocha, partner, Olisipo WayAdão Oliveira, investment manager, Portugal VenturesAlexandre Barbosa, partner, FaberAntónio Miguel, partner, Mustard Seed MAZEJaime Parodi Bardón, partner, impACT NOW CapitalStephan Morais, partner, Indico Capital PartnersGavin Goldblatt, managing partner, Portugal Gateway

How late-stage edtech companies are thinking about tutoring marketplaces

How do you scale online tutoring, particularly when demand exceeds the supply of human instructors?

This month, Chegg is replacing its seven-year-old marketplace that paired students with tutors with a live chatbot.

A spokesperson said the move will “dramatically differentiate our offerings from our competitors and better service students,” but Natasha Mascarenhas identified two challenges to edtech automation.

“A chatbot won’t work for a student with special needs or someone who needs to be handheld a bit more,” she says. “Second, speed tutoring can only work for a specific set of subjects.”

Decrypted: How bad was the US Capitol breach for cybersecurity?

While I watched insurrectionists invade and vandalize the U.S. Capitol on live TV, I noticed that staffers evacuated so quickly, some hadn’t had time to shut down their computers.

Looters even made off with a laptop from Senator Jeff Merkley’s office, but according to security reporter Zack Whittaker, the damages to infosec wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Even so, “the breach will likely present a major task for Congress’ IT departments, which will have to figure out what’s been stolen and what security risks could still pose a threat to the Capitol’s network.”

Extra Crunch’s top 10 stories of 2020

On New Year’s Eve, I made a list of the 10 “best” Extra Crunch stories from the previous 12 months.

My methodology was personal: From hundreds of posts, these were the 10 I found most useful, which is my key metric for business journalism.

Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know, we’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter. But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look smart in meetings — and that’s worth something.

The last year taught us that the connection between the stock market and the economy is imprecise at best.

Despite some useful commentary underscoring the two are at least somewhat linked, it’s clear that many Americans can lose their jobs and financial security at the same time that stocks can keep on rising like the boom times will never end.

That’s the macro picture; 2021 is teaching us its microcorollary — smaller groups of stocks can keep rising regardless of what is going on with their fundamentals.

And in the micro-micro case, that Tesla’s value is unlimited, because [fill in your reasons here].

To avoid all useless Twitter whining, yes, Tesla’s ability to turn GAAP profits — albeit at times by selling regulatory credits — is a win, and joining the S&P 500 is great. Delivering 500,000 cars in 2020, a full 75% of GM’s third-quarter deliveries, is impressive as well.

I am certainly not arguing that Tesla is worthless, or that the group of companies like those that comprise the ARK Innovation ETF, are all overpriced. Instead, it seems that today’s market is willing to value stocks not on their past performance, current performance or analyst-expected future performance but on the rosiest future that investors have imagined for their favorite companies.

You can see elements of this logic at work if you ever talk about stocks on the internet. Don’t call Tesla a car company, for example — this despite automotive revenues making up nearly 87% of the company’s Q3 top line. Tesla is a battery company, its religious fans will tell you.

That’s why it’s fine to pay 31x sales for Tesla, while GM is worth 0.5348x sales today. Amazon, for comparison, is worth 4.6x sales. Tesla shares are valued like Twilio’s own in terms of their price-sales ratio, but the difference is that the car company had gross margins of 23.5% in Q3 2020, while the software company managed twice that. And Twilio is growing more quickly.

Jumbotail, an online wholesale marketplace for grocery and food items, said on Friday it has raised an additional $14.2 million as the Bangalore-based startup chases the opportunity to digitize neighborhood stores in the world’s second-largest internet market.

The five-year-old startup said the new tranche of its Series B financing round was led by VII Ventures, with participation from Nutresa, Veronorte, Jumbofund, Klinkert Investment Trust, Peter Crosby Trust, Nexus Venture Partners and Discovery Ventures.

The startup told TechCrunch that the new tranche concludes its Series B round, which it kickstarted in 2019 with a tranche of $12.7 million. It ended up raising about $44 million in the Series B round (including Friday’s tranche), and to date has amassed about $54 million in equity investment, the startup told the publication.

Jumbotail said it serves more than 30,000 neighborhood stores (popularly known in India as kiranas) in the country. In addition to its business-to-business marketplace, the startup also provides working capital to neighborhood stores through partnerships with financial institutions.

The startup, which has built its own supply chain network to enable last-mile delivery, also supplies these stores with point-of-sale devices so they can easily get access to a much wider selection of catalog and have the new inventory shipped to them within two days. It also integrates these stores with hyperlocal delivery startups such as Dunzo and Swiggy to help mom and pop shops further expand their customer base.

Ashish Jhina, co-founder of Jumbotail, said he believes the startup has reached an inflection point in its growth and is now ready for its next chapter, which includes hiring top talent and expanding to more regions in the country, especially in several cities in South India.

“We are seeing tremendous interest from investors across the globe who are drawn to our highly scalable and operationally profitable business model, built on the industry’s best technology and customer NPS,” said Jhina.

At a recent virtual conference, Jhina said that the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted New Delhi to order a nationwide lockdown and put restrictions on e-commerce firms, has illustrated just how crucial neighborhood stores are in people’s lives. And for all the ills that the virus has wrought, it did help accelerate the adoption of technology among these stores.

A number of food brands whose products neighborhood stores sell today are not standardized, which poses a question about their quality. To fill this gap, Jumbotail runs its own private label portfolio and Jhina said the startup will deploy part of the fresh fund to broaden this catalog. Having a private label also allows Jumbotail to ensure that its retail partners can get the supply of items throughout the year — and of course, it also helps the startup, which has been operationally profitable for nearly three quarters, improve its margin.

There are more than 30 million neighborhood stores in India located across the thousands of cities and towns in the country. These small businesses have been around for decades and survived — and even thrived — despite e-commerce giants pouring billions of dollars in India to change how people shop. In recent years, scores of startups — and giants — in India have begun to explore ways to work with these neighborhood stores.

One of them is India’s largest retail chain Reliance Retail, which serves more than 3.5 million customers each week through its nearly 10,000 physical stores in more than 6,500 cities and towns in the country. In late 2019, it entered the e-commerce space with JioMart through a joint venture with sister subsidiary telecom giant Jio Platforms. By mid last year, JioMart had expanded to over 200 Indian cities and towns — though currently its reach within those cities and customer service leave a lot to be desired.

Reliance Retail also maintains a partnership with Facebook for WhatsApp integration. Facebook, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms last year, has said that it will explore various ways to work with Reliance to digitize the nation’s mom and pop stores, as well as other small and medium-sized businesses.

For JioMart, Reliance Retail is working with neighborhood shops, giving them a digital point-of-sale machine to make it easier for them to accept money electronically. It is also allowing these shops to buy their inventory from Reliance Retail, and then use their physical presence as delivery points. At present, the platform is largely focused on grocery delivery. In a recent report to clients, Goldman Sachs analysts estimated that Reliance could become the largest player in online grocery within three years.

Taiwan is known for being a tech powerhouse, the headquarter of companies like Foxconn, Pegatron, TSMC, Acer and Asus. But while Taiwan’s tech industry is defined by well-established players, it is also home to a growing startup scene. Ahead of the official start of CES, the Taiwan Excellence awards were announced by nonprofit trade promotion group Taiwan External Trade Development Council (known as TAITRA) and ShowStoppers, giving a preview of what its startups offer. Awards went to seven startups, while 11 other companies also presented. They cover a wide range of sectors, ranging from fitness and health to industrial monitoring.

More startups will showcase their tech next week at CES’ Taiwan Pavilion, organized by Taiwan Tech Arena.

The seven Taiwan Excellence Award winners are:

Advantech‘s LoRaWAN solutions are designed to control applications across wide distances and have been used for a diverse array of scenarios, including monitoring floods, critical care patients in hospitals and transportation infrastructure. Two of its latest devices include the WISE-6610, a gateway for connecting up to 500 sensors and sending their data to cloud platforms using 3G/LTE or wired Ethernet connections. The other one is the WISE-2410, a vibration sensor for monitoring motor-powered mechanical equipment and identifying potential issues so manufacturers can schedule maintenance before machines malfunction, resulting in expensive downtime.

CyberLink is the developer of the machine learning-based FaceMe Facial Recognition Engine, which is used in AIoT applications, including security, smart retail and surveillance. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, CyberLink’s new product FaceMe Health can identify faces even with masks on, and send alerts if someone isn’t wearing a mask or has a high temperature. It is meant to assist in pandemic control measures at places like hospitals, airports, retail stores and factories.

Dyaco‘s workout equipment line, called SOLE Fitness, includes its new SOLE CC81 Cardio Climber, which combines features from steppers and climbers into one machine. The SOLE CC81 is designed to be ergonomic, so users can get high-intensity cardio workouts while reducing wear on their joints.

Green Jacket Sports is showcasing its Golface smart system, which helps golf courses monitor and collect data on their operations in real time, while allowing golfers to track their performance. The smart system’s other features include includes aerial videos and real-time scoring functions.

Maktar is the maker of a smartphone backup device called Qubii. Shaped like a small cube, Qubii automatically backs up phones while they are charging and doesn’t need internet or Wi-Fi connections. Instead, users insert a microSD card into Qubii and connect it to their smartphones with their usual power adapters or chargers. Every time the smartphone is charged, Qubii backs up their photos, videos and contacts. The device also has a patented SD card lock feature to protect data.

Image Credits: MioMiTAC Digital Technology’s Mio dashcam range produces clear videos even in dark spaces like parking lots. The latest Mio dashcam, called the MiVue 798, uses Sony’s lowlight STARVISTM sensor and an all-glass lens, and produces wide-angle videos with quality of up to 2.8K. The MiVue 798 also has embedded WiFi connectivity for video backups and online sharing through the MiVue Pro App. Other features include GPS tracking, a patented smart alert system with fixed-distance warnings and speed limit alerts, and a driver assistance system that warns of lane departures, driver fatigue and forward collisions.

Winmate will present its M133WK Ultra Rugged Tablet PC, created for vehicle diagnostics. Powered by 8th-gen Intel Core i5-8265U Whiskey Lake processor, for high-performance with low power consumption, the M133WK features a 1920 X 1080 PCAP touchscreen that is viewable even in heavy sunlight.

Here are the other 11 startups that TAITRA and ShowStoppers are presenting:

ATrack‘s AK11 Fleet Hub is a 4G LTE device for the real-time management of fleets across different verticals.

ELECLEAN 360 uses what it describes as the “world’s first nano-catalysis electrochemical technology” to turn water into hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals, for cleaning and disinfection.

In Win Development is introducing the SR Pro CPU Cooler, which uses patented twin-turbine pumps running in parallel to optimize water flow and ensure thermal performance. It comes with high-airflow AJF120 fans to cool PCs more quickly.

Innolux makes full range of LCD panels for televisions, monitors, notebooks, industrial, medical, mobile and other applications.

Planet Technology is building a secure network called PLANET Powerful Enterprise VPN Cybersecurity and Firewall Solutions for the “post-COVID-19 era.”

Rice Air makes LUFT Cube, a small filterless nanotech personal air purifier.

Systems & Technology Corp. (Systech)‘s fleet management platform uses intelligent telematics so organizations can track where vehicles are and more efficiently manage their fleets.

Tokuyu Biotech creates smart massage chairs and health care-related products that are connected to apps and sensor technologies.

Winnoz is the maker of Haiim, a portable vacuum-assisted device for collecting blood samples from fingertips.

WiseChip develops transparent OLEDs with touch functions for use in home appliance control panels, automotive, transportation applications (like passenger information display systems) and wearable devices.

Yztek‘s E+ Autoff is an IoT device created to stop people from forgetting to turn off their stoves. In addition to auto turn-off, it also has cooking time adjustment and energy saving features.

So it turns out that Roblox is worth $29.5 billion.

That’s the lesson the market learned this week when the gaming platform company announced that it had raised $520 million in an epic Series H.

For a company valued at just $4 billion last February when it raised $150 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, that new valuation could be considered a victory. But is it?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

For all the griping amongst private-market capitalists that public-market capitalists are ripping off their investments as they look to cross the private-public divide through an IPO, it’s hard to square a company’s valuation going from $4 billion to nearly $30 billion in just 11 months.

Sure, you could argue that Roblox enjoyed an epic 2020, thanks in part to COVID-19. That helped its valuation. But there’s a lot of space between $4 billion and $29.5 billion, and recall that its February Series B valued Roblox at around 7.3x its Q4 2019 revenue run rate.

The same company at its new $29.5 billion valuation is now priced at just over 30x its Q3 2020 run rate (the most recent quarter for which we have data today).

Perhaps Roblox was right to hold off on its IPO, raise a huge block of cash at a new valuation and pursue a direct listing. But it’s hard to fret heavily about private-market complaints concerning startup value when the IPO facilitators are hardly the only folks making trips to the bank with a wheelbarrow.

All that is preamble. This morning, let’s talk about Roblox’s flotation strategy. Why is the company raising private market money and then floating instead of raising public market money on its path to trading as a public company? And does its strategy solve the major flaws that the IPO process appears to have? Let’s get into it.

The ol’ raise-and-float

One way to go public is to file an S-1, prepare a presentation, go on a roadshow, drive interest in your shares and work with bankers to price the shares you want to sell at a dollar amount all parties can agree to. The next morning, your shares begin to trade, and you count the money you raised.

That is a traditional IPO, admittedly simplified.

There are issues in there, namely that the price discovery mechanism has proved to be uncertain, especially when it comes to the public offerings of companies considered attractive investments by the active retail trading market. Why? The hotter the company, the fewer shares that are available for trade at the start of its life as a public firm — the very opposite of that which is happening on the demand side.

Lots of demand, few shares and up goes the price. Then up go the complaints that Wall Street is a bunch of thieves. Hearing this from other capital players is always whimsical to some degree, but let’s stick to our theme.

Quibi is dead, but its shows will live on.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Roku was in talks to acquire the short-form video service’s content. And this morning, Roku announced that it has indeed reached a deal for the exclusive distribution rights to all of Quibi’s programs.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Roku said it will make this content available for free with ads on The Roku Channel. That doesn’t just include the shows that were previously available on Quibi, but also “more than a dozen” programs making “their exclusive debut on The Roku Channel” — in other words, they were created for the service but unreleased due to the app’s shutdown.

“Today’s announcement marks a rare opportunity to acquire compelling original content that features some of the biggest names in entertainment,” said Roku’s vice president of programming Rob Holmes in a statement. “We’re excited to make this content available to our users in The Roku Channel through an ad-supported model. We are also thrilled to welcome the incredible studios and talented individuals who brought these stories to life and showcase them to our tens of millions of users.”

While Roku is best known for its streaming TV devices and software, advertising is a growing part of its business. And it says The Roku Channel (which offers both free content and subscription channels) reached 61.8 million U.S. viewers in the fourth quarter of last year.

Quibi, meanwhile, announced its shutdown in October, just six months after its splashy launch. The service was focused on creating video episodes that lasted 10 minutes or less and were designed for viewing on-the-go — a poor fit for a period of pandemic and lockdowns.

In their farewell note, executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman suggested that the service failed due to a combination of bad timing and the fact that “the idea itself wasn’t strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service.”

“The most creative and imaginative minds in Hollywood created groundbreaking content for Quibi that exceeded our expectations,” Katzenberg said in today’s announcement. “We are thrilled that these stories, from the surreal to the sublime, have found a new home on The Roku Channel.”

It’s also worth noting that the service was initially focused entirely on mobile viewing, with no way to watch the shows on smart TVs. That eventually changed, starting with the addition of AirPlay support. Now, with the Roku acquisition, it seems that shows designed to be watched on your smartphone will instead be viewed primarily on your TV.

Zack Parisa and Max Nova, the co-founders of the carbon offset company SilviaTerra, have spent the last decade working on a way to democratize access to revenue-generating carbon offsets.

As forestry credits become a big, booming business on the back of multibillion-dollar commitments from some of the world’s biggest companies to decarbonize their businesses, the kinds of technologies that the two founders have dedicated 10 years of their lives to building are only going to become more valuable.

That’s why their company, already a profitable business, has raised $4.4 million in outside funding led by Union Square Ventures and Version One Ventures, along with Salesforce founder and the driving force between the One Trillion Trees Initiative, Marc Benioff .

“Key to addressing the climate crisis is changing the balance in the so-called carbon cycle. At present, every year we are adding roughly 5 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. Since atmospheric carbon acts as a greenhouse gas this increases the energy that’s retained rather than radiated back into space which causes the earth to heat up,” writes Union Square Ventures managing partner Albert Wenger in a blog post. “There will be many ways such drawdown occurs and we will write about different approaches in the coming weeks (such as direct air capture and growing kelp in the oceans). One way that we understand well today and can act upon immediately are forests. The world’s forests today absorb a bit more than one gigatons of CO2 per year out of the atmosphere and turn it into biomass. We need to stop cutting and burning down existing forests (including preventing large scale forest fires) and we have to start planting more new trees. If we do that, the total potential for forests is around 4 to 5 gigatons per year (with some estimates as high as 9 gigatons).”

For the two founders, the new funding is the latest step in a long journey that began in the woods of Northern Alabama, where Parisa grew up.

After attending Mississippi State for forestry, Parisa went to graduate school at Yale, where he met Louisville, Kentucky native Max Nova, a computer science student who joined with Parisa to set up the company that would become SilviaTerra.

The two men developed a way to combine satellite imagery with field measurements to determine the size and species of trees in every acre of forest.

While the first step was to create a map of every forest in the U.S., the ultimate goal for both men was to find a way to put a carbon market on equal footing with the timber industry. Instead of cutting trees for cash, potentially landowners could find out how much it would be worth to maintain their forestland. As the company notes, forest management had previously been driven by the economics of timber harvesting, with over $10 billion spent in the U.S. each year.

The founders at SilviaTerra thought that the carbon market could be equally as large, but it’s hard for most landowners to access. Carbon offset projects can cost as much as $200,000 to put together, which is more than the value of the smaller offset projects for landowners like Parisa’s own family and the 40 acres they own in the Alabama forests.

There had to be a better way for smaller landowners to benefit from carbon markets too, Parisa and Nova thought.

To create this carbon economy, there needed to be a single source of record for every tree in the U.S. and while SilviaTerra had the technology to make that map, they lacked the compute power, machine learning capabilities and resources to build the map.

That’s where Microsoft’s AI for Earth program came in.

Working with AI for Earth, SilviaTierra created their first product, Basemap, to process terabytes of satellite imagery to determine the sizes and species of trees on every acre of America’s forestland. The company also worked with the U.S. Forestry Service to access their data, which was used in creating this holistic view of the forest assets in the U.S.

With the data from Basemap in hand, the company has created what it calls the Natural Capital Exchange. This program uses SilviaTerra’s unparalleled access to information about local forests, and the knowledge of how those forests are currently used to supply projects that actually represent land that would have been forested were it not for the offset money coming in.

Currently, many forestry projects are being passed off to offset buyers as legitimate offsets on land that would never have been forested in the first place — rendering the project meaningless and useless in any real way as an offset for carbon dioxide emissions. 

“It’s a bloodbath out there,” said Nova of the scale of the problem with fraudulent offsets in the industry. “We’re not repackaging existing forest carbon projects and trying to connect the demand side with projects that already exist. Use technology to unlock a new supply of forest carbon offset.”

The first Natural Capital Exchange project was actually launched and funded by Microsoft back in 2019. In it, 20 Western Pennsylvania land owners originated forest carbon credits through the program, showing that the offsets could work for landowners with 40 acres, or, as the company said, 40,000.

“We’re just trying to get inside every landowners annual economic planning cycle,” said Nova. “There’s a whole field of timber economics… and we’re helping answer the question of given the price of timber, given the price of carbon does it make sense to reduce your planned timber harvests?”

Ultimately, the two founders believe that they’ve found a way to pay for the total land value through the creation of data around the potential carbon offset value of these forests.

It’s more than just carbon markets, as well. The tools that SilviaTerra have created can be used for wildfire mitigation as well. “We’re at the right place at the right time with the right data and the right tools,” said Nova. “It’s about connecting that data to the decision and the economics of all this.”

The launch of the SilviaTerra exchange gives large buyers a vetted source to offset carbon. In some ways it’s an enterprise corollary to the work being done by startups like Wren, another Union Square Ventures investment, that focuses on offsetting the carbon footprint of everyday consumers. It’s also a competitor to companies like Pachama, which are trying to provide similar forest offsets at scale, or 3Degrees Inc. or South Pole.

Under a Biden administration there’s even more of an opportunity for these offset companies, the founders said, given discussions underway to establish a Carbon Bank. Established through the existing Commodity Credit Corp. run by the Department of Agriculture, the Carbon Bank would pay farmers and landowners across the U.S. for forestry and agricultural carbon offset projects.

“Everybody knows that there’s more value in these systems than just the product that we harvest off of it,” said Parisa. “Until we put those benefits in the same footing as the things we cut off and send to market…. As the value of these things goes up… absolutely it is going to influence these decisions and it is a cash crop… It’s a money pump from coastal America into middle America to create these things that they need.” 

Former U.S. cybersecurity official Chris Krebs and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos have founded a new cybersecurity consultancy firm, which already has its first client: SolarWinds .

The two have been hired as consultants to help the Texas-based software maker recover from a devastating breach by suspected Russian hackers, which used the company’s software to set backdoors in thousands of organizations and to infiltrate at least 10 U.S. federal agencies and several Fortune 500 businesses.

At least the Treasury Dept., State Dept. and the Department of Energy have been confirmed breached, in what has been described as likely the most significant espionage campaign against the U.S. government in years. And while the U.S. government has already pinned the blame on Russia, the scale of the intrusions are not likely to be known for some time.

Krebs was one of the most senior cybersecurity officials in the U.S. government, most recently serving as the director of Homeland Security’s CISA cybersecurity advisory agency from 2018, until he was fired by President Trump for his efforts to debunk false election claims — many of which came from the president himself. Stamos, meanwhile, joined the Stanford Internet Observatory after holding senior cybersecurity positions at Facebook and Yahoo. He also consulted for Zoom amid a spate of security problems.

In an interview with the Financial Times, which broke the story, Krebs said it could take years before the hackers are ejected from infiltrated systems.

SolarWinds chief executive Sudhakar Ramakrishna acknowledged in a blog post that it had brought on the consultants to help the embattled company to be “transparent with our customers, our government partners, and the general public in both the near-term and long-term about our security enhancements.”

Madrid-based Jobandtalent, a digital temp staffing agency that operates a dual-sided platform that connects temp workers with employers needing regular casual labor in sectors like transport and logistics, has added €88 million (~$108 million) to its Series C — bringing the total raised following an earlier (2019) closing of the round to €166 million.

The 2009-founded startup has raised more than $290 million to date over its decade+ run but describes itself as just at the beginning of a journey to make a dent in the massive and growing market for temporary work, expecting demand to keep stepping up as more sectors and processes go digital in the coming years.

Jobandtalent says more than 80,000 workers have used its platform to secure temp gigs in the last year across the seven markets where it operates in Europe and LatAm (namely: Spain, U.K., Germany, France, Sweden, Mexico and Colombia); while 750+ employers are signed up to “recurrently manage a large part of their workforce”, as it puts it, including XPO, Ocado, Saint Gobain, Santander, Bayer, eBay, Huawei, Ceva Logistics and Carrefour.

It’s focused on competing with traditional staffing agencies such as Adecco and Randstad, though other similar startups are cropping up to cater to an ever more precarious temporary employment market. (Uber, for example, launched a shift-finder app experiment called Works, back in 2019, also targeting demand for on-demand labor — but doing so in partnership with staffing agencies in its case.)

Jobandtalent reports the number of workers looking for temp jobs on its platform doubling every year, while it’s grown revenue to €500 million and says it’s hit positive EBITDA.

The beefed up Series C funding will be put toward expanding into more markets and doubling down on growing its existing footprint, it said today.

“We will keep expanding through Europe and will consider some additional opportunities (the U.S. and some LatAm countries),” co-founder Juan Urdiales told us, noting that its main markets remain Spain and the U.K., while its main sectors are logistics, last mile, warehousing and transport.

The lead investor in the expansion tranche of its C round is new investor InfraVia, a French private equity firm, which is putting in €30 million — investing via a Growth Tech Fund it launched last year that’s focused on European B2B high-growth tech companies.

Existing Jobandtalent investors, including Atomico, Seek, DN Capital and Kibo Ventures also participated in the Series C top-up.

Urdiales said the reason it’s taken in another chunk of funding now is because of increased opportunity for growth as the coronavirus pandemic continues to accelerate demand for temping. “The reason why we are raising more is because we are seeing a high potential now to grow even faster than expected,” he told us. “The pandemic has helped us with both workers and employers in terms of adoption of our platform.”

“Covid has accelerated the transformation of many industries. We have seen more adoption of new technologies in the last nine months than in the last five years. The staffing market is experiencing a huge transformation that will be accelerated in the upcoming years, moving from brick and mortar traditional structures to data driven platforms that will improve the experience of both workers and employers,” Urdiales went on in a statement.

“This market is really big and we are just in the beginning of our journey (even though we have been a lot of years in the market now),” he added via email, discussing whether an IPO is on the business’ roadmap in the next few years. “We think that if we continue growing at the pace that we are growing now, and we add some private investors to help us with our growth plans, we may stay private for longer.”

Jobandtalent has been through a number of pivots since kicking off more than a decade ago with the idea of using technology to streamline the messy and consummately human business of recruitment. It started out testing a number of approaches before settling on a linguistics algorithm to parse job ads and create alerts to loop in passive job seekers.

Then in 2016 it pivoted away from enterprise recruitment to focus on mobilizing hiring for SMEs — zeroing in on the growing opportunity for temp job-matching offered by the rise of gig work fuelled by smartphone apps. From there, it’s been honing tools to cater to the needs of employers that are managing large temporary workforces.

The flip side of the rapid growth of “flexible” platform-based labor — and Jobandtalent says it’s eyeing a pool of some 500 million temp workers globally — is something that gig platforms don’t usually like to talk about: Worker precariousness.

But that’s something this startup says it wants to help with too. A key part of the proposition Jobandtalent offers to workers is increased benefits versus what a temp might otherwise expect to get.

The average gig platform does not offer a full suite of workers’ rights and benefits, just as they don’t provide a contractual guarantee of future shifts, as they classify on-demand labor as “self-employed” — even as, simultaneously, they apply mobile technology to tightly manage this workforce (via data, algorithms and their own devices). 

This disconnect, between the level of gig worker rights and platform control, has led to a number of legal challenges in Europe — including in several of the markets where Jobandtalent operates (such as Spain, where Glovo continues to face legal challenges over its classification of delivery couriers, for example; and France and the U.K., where Uber has lost a number of employment tribunals over driver status).

EU lawmakers are also eyeing conditions for gig workers — considering whether legislation is needed to protect platform workers’ rights. While some platform giants, like Uber, have already felt politically pressured to offer a level of insurance in the region.

Jobandtalent’s promise is it’s pushing for more perks for temps — leveraging the scale of its platform to get workers a better deal, including by making precarious work more steady (by lining up the next gig) and therefore less uncertain.

“All of the workers have access to the same benefits,” said Urdiales via email when we ask about how Jobandtalent’s perks are structured. “There are benefits such as advance payroll, health insurance, training courses, etc (not all the benefits are available in all countries, it depends on the level of maturity of each country).”

“We want to give any worker that starts working through Jobandtalent access to those benefits and offer a high standard employment treatment, so they have a similar status to what a perm employee has,” he added.

In a press release trumpeting its investment in Jobandtalent, new investor, InfraVia also suggests the platform makes “temporary work a fulfilling professional step” — by defining “career plans” for temporary workers so they can “progress towards permanent and rewarding positions”.

However, when we asked Urdiales what data it has on temp-to-permanent switches that have been enabled by its platform he said this is “not a common thing”.

“Employers are not looking to add workers to their perm workforces, and Jobandtalent is precisely trying to solve that for the workers, trying to give constant employment in different work assignments at different companies so they can find more stability,” he told us, adding: “The market is moving even more into a more precarious temporary employment market, and we believe that in this context a platform like the one that we are offering makes even more sense”.

The other big carrot for workers to plug into Jobandtalent’s temp work marketplace is convenience: It takes a mobile app-based approach — offering a one-stop-shop for giggers to find their next shift, apply for the temp job (via in-app video interview), sign the contract and get paid, as well as access the touted benefits.

Its streamlining of admin around recruitment and payroll is also of course a key carrot for employers to get on board with Jobandtalent’s “workforce as a service” proposition — which claims an upgraded offer (such as a CRM that bakes in analytics for tracking workforce performance in real time) versus traditional temping agency processes, as well as lower costs and increased numbers of job offers.

Its worker-to-temp job matching tech is designed to take the (temp) recruitment strain for employer customers via a proprietary quality worker scoring algorithm which it calls a Worker Quality Score (WQS).

Urdiales told us the criteria that feeds this score include attrition rate, absenteeism rate — and “some productivity metrics of the workers that we place” — when we asked for details, having found no information about the WQS on its website.

Algorithmic scoring of workers can have obvious implications for worker agency.

Nor is it without legal risk in Europe where EU citizens have rights attached to their personal data, such as access rights, and also (under the GDPR) a right to human review of any purely automated decisions that have a legal or similarly substantial impact on them (and decisions impacting access to work would be likely to qualify).

In a recent judgement, for example, a court in Italy ruled that a reputation-ranking algorithm used by on-demand delivery platform Deliveroo had discriminated against workers because the code failed to distinguish between legally protected reasons for being absent from work (such as sickness or being on strike) and more trivial reasons for not turning up for a previously booked shift. (Deliveroo no longer uses the algorithm in question.)

Uber is also facing legal challenges in the Netherlands to its use of algorithms to automatically terminate drivers and to its use of data and algorithms to profile and manage drivers. While ride-hailing company Ola is facing a similar suit over its algorithmic management of gig workers. So EU courts are certainly going to be busy interrogating the intersection of app-driven algorithmic management and regional data and labor rights for the foreseeable future.

The European Commission has also proposed a sweeping reform of the regional rulebook for digital services, which includes a requirement for regulatory oversight of key decision-making algorithms with the aim of shrinking the risk of negative impacts such as bias and discrimination — although any new laws are likely still years out.

Asked whether Jobandtalent’s worker users are provided with their own WQS and given the chance to appeal substantial decreases in the score — including the opportunity to request a human review of any automated decisions — Urdiales said: “The platform gives them constant feedback based on the main metrics that they can affect (voluntary attrition, absenteeism, etc) with the aim to make them improve at work and consequently improve their ability to get more jobs in the future.”

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Bibit, a robo-advisor app that wants to make investing more accessible in Indonesia, has raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital India. Returning investors East Ventures, EV Growth, AC Ventures and 500 Startups also participated.

This funding is a growth round and comes after Bibit’s May 2019 Series A. It brings the company’s total funding so far to $45 million, chief executive officer Sigit Kouwagam told TechCrunch.

Part of Stockbit Group, about 90% of Bibit’s users are millennials and first-time investors. Like other robo-advisors, the aim of Bibit is to make it easier to create a portfolio tailored to each person’s risk profile and investment goals. Other investment apps in Indonesia tapping into growing demand for retail investment producgts include Bareksa and SoftBank Ventures-backed Ajaib.

Bibit claims that over the past year, it has registered more than one million first-time investors. As an example of market potential, the company cites data from the Indonesian Stock Exchange and Indonesia Central Securities Depository that showed the number of retail investors in the country grew 56% year-over-year in 2020, with about 92% of new investors aged between 21 to 40. But only about 2% of Indonesians have participated in the stock market.

Kouwagam said most Indonesians invest their money in term deposit bank accounts or leave it in low-yield checking accounts.

“Traditionally, they also invest real estate or physical godl bars,” he added, but millennial and Gen Z investors are shifting toward “higher-yielding liquid investments that are also convenient to manage and can be started with a lower ticket size.”

The pandemic has also prompted more users build an emergency fund, with more Indonesians looking at the capital market for higher-yielding assets as an alternative to low-interest bank accounts.