M12, Microsoft’s venture fund which was previously known as Microsoft Ventures, has been making a series of investments in the last few weeks. Today, it’s leading a $5 million Series A round into Cerebri AI, a startup that uses machine learning to help companies track, analyze and predict their customers’ behavior.

The University of Texas Horizon Fund, WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital also participated in this round for the Austin-based startup, which brings Cerebri’s total funding to date to $10 million. The company plans to use the fresh cash to expand its operations.

Microsoft’s involvement here is maybe no major surprise, given the company’s interest in machine learning and that the Cerebri platform sits on top of Microsoft Azure.

“Cerebri has created a product that is fundamentally changing how customer-facing sales and success professionals can analyze the customer journey,”  said Elliott Robinson, a partner at M12. “By enabling companies to follow an individual customer across the various touchpoints within the enterprise, Cerebri has proven they’re able to improve customer experiences and generate revenue lift.”

In addition to today’s funding announcement, Cerebri also today officially launched its Cerebri Values product, which it describes as “this industry’s first universal measure of customer success.” The idea here is to quantify a customer’s commitment to a brand or product and then predict the “next best action” for each of these customers to seal the deal. Like similar products, Cerebri Values also allows marketers to create cohorts of similar customers for marketing campaigns. The focus here is on grouping customers by behavior, not demographics, which is a bit different from how similar tools often work.

To do all of this, Cerebri allows its users to combine data from a variety of sources and then uses its machine learning models to predict what will work best for this customer. In an age where customers are increasingly wary of companies that harvest their data, all of this may sound a bit dystopian. Cerebri says it has already ingested more than two billion customer touchpoints and events across 12 million consumers and that all of this data sits securely behind its corporate firewall, “ensuring the highest level of security and safeguarding personally identifiable information.”

We asked the company whether consumers can access this data or opt out of being tracked and have not received an answer yet, but it looks like the company’s privacy policy argues that it’s up to its corporate customers to comply with local laws, including the likes of the European Union’s GDPR. (Update: And here is the official answer: “Cerebri Values has these capabilities and can comply with any request direct from its business customers to provide both opt-out as well as deliver personal data. Cerebri AI does not directly hold customer data, as it provides a SaaS-based platform that sits behind its customers’ corporate firewalls.”)

Sequoia Capital has been at the top of its game in the U.S. for decades, thanks to early investments in Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal, as well as, more recently, its stakes in the messaging startup WhatsApp, the payments company Stripe and the video conferencing unicorn company Zoom.

Yet unlike a lot of top-tier firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia is far from reliant on the Bay Area companies for huge returns. Instead, a dozen years ago, anticipating that the most impactful tech ideas could come from anywhere and be built around the world, the firm founded Sequoia China and Sequoia India, assembling local teams to invest in startups and help founders build their companies.

That strategy is now paying off, big time. As we reported earlier this week, Sequoia currently makes more than 50 cents from every dollar returned to its investors from its overseas bets.

Among the many companies Sequoia Capital China alone has funded: Meituan-Dianping, the group-discount service that sells locally found products and retail services and just filed to go public in Hong Kong; Ele.me, the food ordering company that sold a controlling stake in its business to Alibaba in April for $9.5 billion; DJI, the drone company, which was reported to be raising $1 billion in new funding this spring at a $15 billion valuation; VIP.com, the commerce platform that went public in 2012 and currently boasts a $7.2 billion market cap; and Didi, the mobile transportation giant that’s in a race against its U.S. rival Uber to conquer the global ride-hailing market.

To learn more about the new reality facing Silicon Valley startups — that competition is no longer next door, it’s global — we’re thrilled to announce that Sequoia Managing Partner Doug Leone is coming to Disrupt for a fireside chat. Leone oversees the firm’s global operations with Roelof Botha, who runs Sequoia’s U.S. business, and Neil Shen, the founder and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China, and he knows better than nearly anyone in Silicon Valley how the investing and technology landscapes are evolving — and what founders globally should be mindful of as they build the next legendary company.

Leone also knows the value of grit. Leone immigrated to the U.S. from Italy and was reportedly called “Pasta” in high school before rising to the top of one of the most admired venture firms in history. It’s no wonder Leone is particularly passionate about founders from humble backgrounds like his own.

If you care about the global shifts that are majorly reshaping the tech industry right now, and the stuff that great founders are made of, you’re going to want to catch this conversation.

You can buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, right here.

Sramana Mitra: Our philosophy in One Million by One Million is entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Financing and exit are optional. We make sure that customers are willing to...

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For the past 12 years I’ve followed the rise of the startup — defined as a small business with global ambitions — from my perch at TechCrunch. During that period I watched business reporting change from a sleepy backwater on the back of the Sports section into a juggernaut, a force that controls the global conversation. Why? Because business reporting became war reporting, and the battles fought were between VCs, businesses and ideas that changed the world.

In that period, VCs rose from glorified bank tellers to rock stars. Incubators popped up to socialize nervous founders and turn them into capital F Founders and the path for startups became a codified journey from failure to success.

Now we’re seeing the same thing happen in ICOs. But something is wrong. The startups coming out of the ICO craze aren’t being judged on the character of their founders, on their technologies or their probability for success. They are being judged, quite simply, on quantitative metrics that interrogate a token with one question: “When Lambo?”

This is the wrong approach. Token-based startups must receive the same level of socialization and scrutiny as the old VC-based startup vetting process. But something is different, and it’s an important difference.

In the old VC model a group of men — and it was mostly men for a long time — would stand in judgement over an idea. If any number of arbitrary points of risk appeared they would smile and say “No” to the founder, sending them down the road for another “No.” Unless you were plugged in professionally, went to Stanford, or had your own cash, seed to even late-stage investment wasn’t available and the resulting “valley of death” of undercapitalization sunk countless startups.

Now, however, something new is afoot. While it’s always nice to look at tokens in comparison with other tokens, this sort of quantitative masturbation can easily hide a multitude of sins. Due diligence on token-based companies must be done, but it must be done through the wisdom of crowds. Instead of trying to impress one dude in a fleece vest and chinos on Sand Hill Road a founder must impress the world. They must tell a true, human story of actual value and explain their product without mumbling and hand waving. And they have to do it again and again.

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to bring us an egalitarian age of decentralized decision-making and a mathematical certainty. But the founders forgot one thing: humans offer no mathematical certainty. Instead of looking at numbers, these startups must be assessed on the basis of their value to humanity, on their technical ability to solve a real problem and on their understanding of human-to-human interaction. The future isn’t a number. Instead, the future is a many-to-one investigation of a startup and the decision — by the decentralized crowd — whether or not to continue funding.

Again, if your primary driver is greed, then by all means check out a chart that compares TRON to TRON. It’s your right. But if your goal is to make startups that will drive us deep into the future, then the old ways are best. A lot of things are about to change.

A few years ago I spoke to Deepak Chopra about his vision for a global voting system. In short, he was working on a way to take the global temperature. If a politician wanted to spend money on a road or, god forbid, go to war, they could put the question to the crowd via their cellphones. One vote per person, defined by biometric controls. This pie-in-the-sky idea is slowly coming to fruition and I think it’s going to be very exciting. And it will find its perfect home in the future of startup funding.

The age of centralized decision-making, in which analytics were used to help make seat-of-the-pants decisions, is over. Now we enter a new world and the folks used to the old ways should probably watch out. After all, when the crowd speaks, even VCs listen.

Today’s 404th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, June 28, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 404th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, June 28, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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If there’s still any doubt that esports is coming into the mainstream, just look to the world’s biggest sporting event: The Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) have announced they will host an esports forum, looking to gauge whether or not esports has a place in the Olympics.

According to the release, the IOC and GAISF will host esports players, game publishers, teams, media, sponsors and event organizers, as well as National Olympic Committees, International Sports Federations, athletes and the IOC. The group as a whole is looking to “explore synergies, build joint understanding, and set a platform for future engagement between esports and gaming industries and the Olympic Movement.”

In the release, GAISF President Patrick Baumann said:

Along with the IOC, the GAISF looks forward to welcoming the esports and gaming community to Lausanne. We understand that sport never stands still and the phenomenal growth of esports and gaming is part of its continuing evolution. The Esports Forum provides an important and extremely valuable opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding of esports, their impact and likely future development, so that we can jointly consider the ways in which we may collaborate to the mutual benefit of all of sport in the years ahead.

Some of the panels at the forum include an interview on “The Key to Twitch’s Success,” “Future Opportunities for Collaboration,” an interview on “A Day in the Life of an Elite Player” and a panel on “Gender Equality in All Sports.”

Esports have continued to grow at an impressive clip. The Overwatch League has introduced city-based teams into the mix, while Fortnite had a huge Pro-Am tournament at e3, not to mention Epic’s introduction of a $100 million tournament prize pool for competitive play.

Considering how bizarre some of the Olympic sports are — I’m looking at you, Biathlon — the potential introduction of esports to the Olympic slate almost seems ordinary.

For a long time, it has been hard to buy a cloud-first security platform that delivers full-stack security in a single data path. Current market solutions offer a “one-trick pony,” leaving companies with overly complex routing setups or abnormal latency of traffic to get a solution that fulfills their needs.

Swedish cybersecurity startup Baffin Bay Networks thinks it has the answer, with distributed “threat protection centers” which interfere with the traffic before it reaches its customers’ services and removes any potential threats.

It has today announced the closing of a $6.4 million Series A round. The investment was led by European VC EQT Ventures and the capital will be used for further international expansion.

“We’re passionate about building a world-class threat protection platform – one that is easy to use for any company or service provider to protect their key assets and services,” said Joakim Sundberg, CEO at Baffin Bay Networks .

Competitors include Incapsula, Cloudflare, Akamai, Arbor and the like.

Via the customer portal Riverview, users can configure their own security settings and level of protection. The user interface allows for real-time tracking of traffic and delivers real-time results from threat analysis, providing current and complete information on the activity in their online environment.

Should users wish not to configure settings on their own, they can rely on preset, sensible defaults, which are calculated using sophisticated algorithms.

Unblockable is tackling a new area for blockchain technology — sports fandom, specifically collectibles and fantasy sports.

CEO Jeb Terry (a former Fox Sports executive, and before that a former offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) said the goal is to connect pro sports and pro athletes with the technology, and to “create new means of access and really empower the fans to celebrate their fandom, to show off who they’re fans of and create new relationships.”

Terry founded Unblockable with Eben Smith, a former derivatives trader, as well as Greg Dean and Kedric Van de Carr, entrepreneurs who have founded multiple crypto projects in the past.

The startup is announcing it has raised $5 million from Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Shasta’s Jacob Mullins joining the board of directors. (Mullins and I have been friends since we worked together at VentureBeat a decade ago.)

“Taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the emerging blockchain platform, UNBLOCKABLE is defining a new category of fun, engaging and approachable experiences and games for consumers as well as new ways for stars, athletes and leagues to build new relationships with fans,” Mullins said in the announcement.

Unblockable isn’t launching its consumer product yet — Terry told me that will probably happen later this year. But the basic idea is to release collectible crypto tokens tied to pro athletes. The goal is to have tokens representing every player (including their likeness), not just the big stars, and to create “true, authentic scarcity.”

Terry argued that the tokens will function as a kind of virtual collectible, with “a limited volume ever minted.” The value of each token should also fluctuate depending on the player’s performance on the field, especially since there will be a fantasy sports component of the platform — you’ll need to own a player’s token in order to include them on your team.

“There will be market dynamics in play,” Terry said. “With the value of the performance of the athletes in the field, it will be basic supply-demand behavior.”

When asked about reaching the (presumably) huge swath of sports fans that have no real familiarity with cryptocurrencies, Terry said, “It’s the core crypto enthusiasts that are going to get this right away.” At the same time, he’s hoping to “bridge that gap” to all those other fans, partly by making sure the buying and selling process is as “frictionless” as possible.

Unblockable hasn’t announced any partnerships with specific leagues or athletes, aside from naming NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott as the head of its advisory panel. But it sounds like Terry’s working on that.

“There are a lot of opportunities for players to get involved,” he said. “As a former player, as a guy that’s worked with players in the past, it’s something that we really know and live. We want to make sure [they] trust us to take care of their brands. That’s important here. You can’t just take that lightly in this space.”

Zagster, the bike-share company behind the Pace brand, is launching what it’s calling Pace Parking. The idea is for it to serve as a parking platform for bikes, electric bikes and electric scooters. Pace is first launching these in Chicago, Austin and Bloomington, Ind., with the plan to launch in additional cities this year.

This parking platform is designed to support dockless lock-to vehicles, like JUMP bikes and Skip scooters. In partnership with cities, private landowners and local businesses, the idea is to make sure communities have proper parking infrastructure.

“With the meteoric rise of dockless bikes, ebikes and scooters in the U.S., our cities are now in the early stages of a massive transformation in how people get around — one as significant as the personal automobile in 20th century,” Zagster CEO Tim Ericson said in a statement. “Imagine a city with tens of thousands of cars and nowhere to park them — this is the huge challenge faced by every major U.S. city right now. Without mobility parking infrastructure, cities have no solution to secure the flood of new vehicles descending upon their streets and sidewalks, and we are the first company to do something about it. As the pioneer of lock-to dockless bike sharing, we’re proud to deliver the first ever universal, secure, smart parking platform for parking not just Pace bikes, but other shared bikes, personal bikes, electric scooters, and future mobility vehicles.”

Earlier this year, Zagster raised a $15 million round led by Edison Partners. The startup has also unveiled its new bike parking system for both shared and personal bikes.

“Bikes have always locked to things,” Ericson said in a press release. “Cities have been willing to experiment with dockless bikes that don’t lock to anything because they lack sufficient bike parking and, until Pace, lacked a partner willing to install this infrastructure at no cost.”

Zagster’s Pace is one of the newer entrants to the dockless bike-share space, which consists of a number of startups and larger companies battling for contracts with cities all over the world.

Pace, which launched in December, currently operates in nine markets, including Austin, Chicago, Tallahassee, Fla. and Knoxville, Tenn. With the funding, Zagster plans to launch Pace in additional cities this year. Zagster also operates a bike-share solution for municipalities looking to offer their own city-specific services. Zagster, which launched in 2007, operates more than 200 bike-shares across 35 states in the U.S. This move to support multi-modal transportation options likely signals the entrance of yet another electric scooter service.

Nuro, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on local deliveries, has partnered with 135-year-old grocery retailer Kroger to offer same-day deliveries. The two have yet to announce which market this will be live in, but the plan is to launch the several-month-long pilot this fall.

Nuro’s intent is to use its self-driving technology in the last mile for the delivery of local goods and services. That could be things like groceries, dry cleaning, an item you left at a friend’s house or really anything within city limits that can fit inside one of Nuro’s vehicles. Nuro has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

When it came to going to market, Nuro co-founder and President Dave Ferguson told me groceries were most exciting to him. And Kroger particularly stood out because of its smart shelf technology and partnership with Ocado around automated fulfillment centers.

“With the pilot, we’re excited about getting more experience interacting with real customers and understanding exactly what they want,” Ferguson said. “The things they love about it, the things they don’t love as much. As an organization for us, it’s also very valuable for us to have to exercise our operational muscle.”

Throughout the pilot program, Nuro will be looking to see how accurate its estimated delivery times are, how the public reacts to the vehicles and how regular, basic cars interact with self-driving ones.

The pilot will be live in just one market, but Kroger has 2,800 stores nationwide, so Nuro sees the partnership as an opportunity to reach the vast majority of America. Kroger already offers same-day delivery to 75 percent of its customers. With Nuro on board, the idea is to deploy the self-driving cars in areas where Kroger has yet to offer delivery services.

“We want to be available to every single customer of ours,” Kroger Chief Digital Officer Yael Cosset told TechCrunch.

On the customer side, the experience will surely be different from what they’re used to. Currently, Kroger customers expect the grocery delivery drivers to bring their items to their front door. With Nuro’s vehicles, they’ll only go as far as curbside.

“This is an area where we’re going to learn a lot from the pilot,” Cosset said. “We have theories and assumptions about high density and low density and we want to see how that plays out.”

Cosset went on to describe how he doesn’t see the current model for delivery and autonomous vehicle-powered delivery as mutually exclusive.

“We believe they’re complementary,” Cosset said. “We may realize the optimal time to use autonomous vehicles is between 10 – 11 in the morning and the rest of the day have a fully staffed model.”

Down the road, Nuro will continue looking at additional partners for its local delivery ambitions. Although Nuro is excited about the partnership with Kroger, it’s not an exclusive one.

“Given we’re a startup, we can’t afford to put our eggs in one basket,” Ferguson said. “But we do have the full intention of going big with Kroger and trying to do as much as we can together.”

Other potential partners for Nuro may include those like local dry cleaners, bakeries and florists.

“I think the only way realistically to do that is to provide a way for customers to access all of these local services through one spot,” Ferguson said. “That way, we’ll be able to collectively provide this local community delivery service and have some way to get all these local businesses within the same experience.”

According to a recent market report, the global cloud-based contact center market is projected to grow 25% annually from $6.80 billion in 2017 to $20.93 billion by 2022. Billion Dollar Unicorn Five9...

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Sramana Mitra: The under-21 World Cup became a client of yours and they were offering internships on your platform. You started finding those interns through your platform. David Lloyd: Exactly....

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Marc Andreessen, co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz this week launched a $300 million crypto specialist fund.REUTERS/Fred Prouser

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Oh BiBi founders Martial Valery (left) and Stanislas Dewavrin (right). Oh BiBi