Peloton, the unicorn spin (and now treadmill) business that lets users work out via live-streamed classes, has today announced its first acquisition. The company acquired Neurotic Media, a B2B music aggregation and streaming service.

Atlanta-based Neurotic Media was founded in 2001 by Shachar “Shac” Oren, who will become a VP at Peloton serving under Peloton’s Head of Music Paul DeGooyer. The entire Neurotic Media team and offices will remain in Atlanta, continuing operations as a standalone subsidiary serving third-party clients.

Neurotic Media is a white-label distribution and marketing platform, helping brands influence and engage customers via popular music. Essentially, the company connects a brand with a certain popular song or songs that align with their brand mission.

The idea here is that music is integral to working out. Given Peloton’s focus on bringing a high-quality workout to the comfort of a user’s home (or one of their studios), music plays a big role. But one doesn’t often dabble in the music industry without either 1) experience or 2) loads of money. While Peloton has plenty of cash to go around, Neurotic brings nearly two decades of experience to the Peloton portfolio.

Here’s what DeGooyer had to say in a prepared statement:

Our Members have embraced music as central to the Peloton experience and consistently rank it as one of the top aspects of the brand. The addition of Shac and his amazing team to the Peloton family will help us rapidly deploy new music features we know our Members want, along with some unique innovations we think they’ll love.

Peloton has been making moves as of late. The company launched an expanded iOS app called Peloton Digital, and has announced plans to expand into the U.K. and Canada starting in the Fall. Plus, Peloton opened a new Tread studio in NYC, with plans to open a massive multi-studio space on the West Side of Manhattan next year.

Peloton was founded in 2012 and has raised a total of $444.7 million. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

DevOps — the branch of enterprise IT that involves both products and best-practices for developers to build, test and run apps and other software — is on track to be worth nearly $13 billion by 2025. Now, a startup that is building DevOps tools is announcing a significant funding round to capitalize on that opportunity. Portland, Oregon-based Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs) has raised $42 million in funding in a venture round with a number of strategic and key financial investors.

The funding was led by Cisco, with Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, Singapore’s EDBI and VMware also participating.

The company isn’t readily disclosing its valuation — although we are trying to find out — but according to PitchBook, its last disclosed valuation was in 2014, when it raised $40 million and was valued at $652 million post-money.

But Puppet has grown more than two-fold in the last four years: back then, it had 18,000 customers, including the likes of Google, Twitter, Salesforce and AT&T. Now, it says it has more than 40,000 companies as customers, “including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100” using both its open source and commercial products — and it’s expanded internationally and has made a couple of acquisitions (including the startup Reflect earlier this month).

All this would imply that Puppet, which now has raised $150 million to date, is likely valued at significantly more than $700 million, and may well be approaching the $1 billion-mark.

“Our rapid growth and international expansion is a testament to the rising demand for DevOps transformation, software automation and the pressing need for enterprises to navigate the new world of software delivery. That’s why we’ve been so focused on expanding our product portfolio—to empower customers to discover, deliver and operate software across their cloud and containerized environments,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO, Puppet, in a statement. “I’m thrilled by the momentum we’re experiencing. It helps us better support our customers’ journey to pervasive automation.”

The growth of cloud services, and the ubiquity of digitization, have led to a wide slate of functions in a business falling under the category of developer-led operations.

This has, in turn, driven a bigger demand for better processes to run these operations and the infrastructure that they touch. Puppet is not the only company in this area: in addition to large players like Cisco and CA Technologies and EMC, there are startups like Docker, Chef and more.

Puppet’s solutions cover applications, cloud services, containerized services and networking devices, and that mix is part of what is attractive about the company, as many businesses today are not all-in on modern architectures, but are grappling with hybrids of old and new, cloud and on-premises, and so on. (Indeed, the “Puppet” name is a reference to how it works: developers can control the actions of the their applications over the network as puppeteers control puppets, without being seen).

“ServiceChannel has an aggressive technology roadmap. One that not only takes advantage of cloud native capabilities and containerized applications, but also requires modernization of existing, critical systems. Automation is necessary to help us deliver on that roadmap within the constraints of business—safely and at scale,” said Mark Trumpbour, VP of DevOps at ServiceChannel, in a statement.

Investors Cisco and VMware are themselves already key players in the area of DevOps (and Cisco and VMWare, both previous investors, already work with Puppet), while another backer, EDBI, holds investments in a number of companies that are potential customers for the startup.

“Businesses put increasingly massive pressure on enterprise IT—so, it’s important that those IT organizations partner with technology providers with compelling innovation, world-class support and a global community of experts. Puppet has a track record of empowering its customers with all of these critical elements,” said Rob Salvagno, VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, in a statement. “We look forward to working even more with Puppet as the global demand for automation technology and innovation continues to accelerate.”

“In today’s digital age, companies face increasing complex IT challenges dealing with their dynamic and diverse IT infrastructure. Puppet’s automation and management platform transforms how companies manage and improve the efficiency of their IT assets and can help companies in Singapore realize productivity gains while ensuring compliance,” said Swee-Yeok CHU, CEO and president EDBI, in an additional statement. “Leveraging our network, we look forward to helping Puppet scale up its local talent pool to address the region’s opportunities through its APAC Regional HQ in Singapore and to augment Singapore’s digital transformation strategy.”

Codefresh, a continuous integration and delivery platform built for the Kubernetes container ecosystem, today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series B round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Viola Ventures, Hillsven and CEIF also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $15.1 million.

In a market where there are seemingly more CI/CD platforms every day, Codefresh sets itself apart thanks to its focus on Kubernetes, which is now essentially the de facto standard for container orchestration services and which is seeing a rapid growth in adoption. The service promises it can help developers automate their application deployments to Kubernetes and that teams will see “up to 24X faster development times.” That number seems a bit optimistic, but the whole point of adopting Kubernetes and CI/CD is obviously to speed up the development and deployment process.

“The meteoric rise of Kubernetes is happening so fast that most toolchains haven’t kept up, and M12 knows it,” said Raziel Tabib, Codefresh co-founder and CEO. “With this latest round of funding we’re going to aggressively accelerate our roadmap and expand our customer base.”

The Codefresh platform hit general availability in 2017 and the company currently claims about 20,000 users, including the likes Giphy.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, there were nearly $1.38 trillion of consumer loans at all commercial banks in the US as of July 2017. The global consumer lending balances at the beginning of...

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Sramana Mitra: 2011 was when you started? David Lloyd: January 2011. Sramana Mitra: What were the circumstances? What was going on in the industry? What was going on in your own personal life? What...

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Rocket Lab, the New Zealand-based rocket company that is looking to further amplify the commercial space frenzy, is launching its first fully paid payload atop an Electron rocket tonight — technically tomorrow morning at the launch site. If successful, it will mark a significant new development in the highly competitive world of commercial launches.

Update: Sorry folks but not today. The company said it will announce a new target soon, while the launch window remains July 6.

Liftoff is planned for 2:10 in the morning local time in New Zealand, or 7:10 Pacific time in the U.S.; the live stream will start about 20 minutes before that.

The Electron rocket is a far smaller one than the Falcon 9s we see so frequently these days, with a nominal payload of 150 kilograms, just a fraction of the many tons that we see sent up by SpaceX. But that’s the whole point, Rocket Lab’s founder, CEO and chief engineer Peter Beck told me recently.

“You can go buy a spot on a big launch vehicle, but they’re not very frequent. With a small rocket you can choose your orbit and choose your schedule,” he said. “That’s what we’re driving at here: regular and reliable access to space.”

Just like not every car on the road has to be a big rig, not every rocket needs to be a Saturn V; 150 kilos is more than enough to fill with paying customers and cover the cost of launch. And Beck told me there is no shortage whatsoever of paying customers.

“The most important part of the mission is the timing in which we manifested it,” he explained (manifesting meaning having a payload added to the manifest). “We went from nothing manifested to a full payload in about 12 weeks.”

For comparison, some missions or payloads will wait literally years before there’s an opportunity to get to the orbit they need. Loading up just a few weeks ahead of time is unusual, to say the least.

Today’s launch will carry satellites from Spire, Tyvak/GeoOptics, students at UC Irvine and High Performance Space Structure Systems; you can see the specifics of these on the manifest (PDF). It’s not the first time an Electron has taken a paid payload to orbit, but it is the first fully commercialized launch.

Rocket Lab has no ambitions for interplanetary travel, sending people to space or anything like that. It just wants to take 150 kilograms to orbit as often as it can, as inexpensively as it can.

“We’re not interested in building a bigger rocket, we’re interested in building more of this one,” Beck said. “The vehicle is fully dialed in; we started from day one with this vehicle designed from a production approach. We’re fully vertically integrated, we don’t have any contractors, we do everything in-house. We’ve been scaling up the factories enormously.”

“We’re looking for a one-a-month cadence this year, then next year one every two weeks,” he continued. “Frequency is the key — it’s the choke point in space right now.”

Ultimately the plan is to get a rocket lifting off every few days. And if you think that will be enough to meet demand, just wait a couple years.

Honk Technologies, a marketplace for towing services for consumers and insurance companies, has raised $18 million in a new round of funding a little over a year after inking a massive contract with the insurance company, Farmers.

The investment was led by Altpoint Ventures, with participation from existing investors Structure Capital and Venture 51.

The company said it would use the funds to build on its network of 75,000 tow truckers and roadside assisters, as well as add new services for insurers, fleet managers and manufacturers. 

Company chief executive Corey Brundage declined to comment on the company’s revenue, path to profitability or valuation in an interview.

Honk basically applies to the towing business the same technology ride-hailing uses, making trucks more responsive and slashing the time that a customer waits to get help when they need it, according to Brundage.

As we wrote last year, roadside assistance is a huge, fragmented market. According to the market research firm, IBISWorld, customers spend roughly $6 billion on roadside assistance services.

Customers call for a tow directly from Honk via mobile web or the company’s app to find a nearby professional and track the location and estimated time of arrival of their tow truck in real time. Insurance companies, auto OEMs and fleets use the company’s transparent platform to reduce wait times by over 50 percent, improve customer satisfaction, harness their roadside assistance data and receive industry leading net promoter scores, according to a statement.

Sramana Mitra: India is getting back into the more fundamentals-driven model which I thought was always going to be the case. There was just a period where people got sidetracked. I think India is...

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Silicon Valley, for better and oftentimes worse, provides an uncanny valley view of the ups and downs of IRL Silicon Valley.

The HBO series has shown what it’s like to deal with an incumbent who steals an idea or IP, the humiliation of saving the day, only to be fired as CEO by your VC, or the fear and exhilaration of competing on the Startup Battlefield stage — a familiar spot for those who have been to Disrupt.

TechCrunch is helping create another Silicon Valley meta moment. Silicon Valley co-creator Mike Judge will join us on stage at TC Disrupt SF.

Interestingly, Judge joined a team from HBO at Disrupt well before Silicon Valley ever aired, doing research for the then-forthcoming series. And, of course, Season 1 ended with the Startup Battlefield stage.

The cycle continued in 2016, when Judge came on stage to discuss what it’s like to parody Silicon Valley culture.

And round and round we go.

Judge has been in the entertainment industry for a long time, creating Beavis and Butt-head, co-creating King of the Hill, and serving as writer and director for classic films like Office Space and Idiocracy.

As Silicon Valley heads into its sixth season, we’re excited to chat with Judge about the direction of the show and the evolution of the media industry as a whole.

And hey, maybe we’ll hear a few spoilers for the upcoming season.

Tickets to the Disrupt SF 2018 are available right here.

b8ta, the retail-as-a-service startup, has closed a $19 million Series B round led by Macy’s, with participation from Sound Ventures, Palm Drive Capital, Capitaland, Graphene Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Plug and Play Ventures. This round brings b8ta’s total funding to $39 million.

Macy’s decision to lead this round comes in light of its recent partnership with b8ta to enhance the retailer’s experiential-based concept called The Market. Macy’s is also expanding its partnership with b8ta to launch The Market in a larger space, entirely powered by Built by b8ta, which functions as a retail-as-a-service platform for brands that want a physical presence. b8ta’s software solution includes checkout, inventory, point of sale, inventory management, staff scheduling services and more.

“Testing a shop with them in their store and having really good success made us feel bullish that this model would work well for them,” b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby told TechCrunch.

To the outsider, there’s this idea that Macy’s is struggling — in light of a bunch of store closures. That was a conversation b8ta had internally, Norby said.

“As an example, our board was initially not certain we should do something with them, but I felt like it was worth a shot,” Norby told me. “For us to get comfortable, we spent a lot of time trying to understand their business. What we found was that perception in the media didn’t really meet the reality for us. The reality is Macy’s is one of the most important companies in the country.”

Macy’s, Norby said, is also one of the largest real estate companies in the world and owns “so much real estate in all of the best places.”

He added, “it’s not that retail itself is dying, it’s just that it’s changing. The way people want to shop is changing and we have a shared alignment on bringing that next generation of a company into the space.”

In addition to the expanded partnership with Macy’s, b8ta is opening new flagship stores in Chicago and Tysons Corner, Va. b8ta currently has more than 78 flagship stores across the country to let consumers experience tech gadgets in real life.

While everybody is focused on self-driving cars, Shone is working on autonomous technologies for container ships. The startup doesn’t want to turn those giant ships into unmanned vehicles, but it wants to help seafarers and make ships more efficient.

After attending Y Combinator, Shone recently raised a $4 million round from Alven, Liquid 2, Paul Graham, David Marcus and D. Scott Phoenix.

“The basic idea is that autonomous ships are coming. Overall, it seems unavoidable,” co-founder and CEO Ugo Vollmer told me. “And yet, there are still 25 people on the boat and it runs on Windows.”

The team spent a lot of time talking with people working in the shipping industry to understand their needs. After traveling on container ships and buying a tiny boat for prototyping, Shone is already working with a shipping company to retrofit their ships with their technology.

“Our vision is that it’s going to happen progressively,” Vollmer said. “There will be a lot of navigation assistance systems first.”

At first, it could lead to fewer people on the boat. There are around 15 people maintaining the engine and the machinery. These people won’t go away any time soon. But there are also around ten people who are keeping an eye on the radar, on the different tools and also on the sea itself. They rotate as they need to have a small team in the cabin 24/7.

This second team could need some help, and this is where Shone shines. The startup adds a few sensors but mostly hooks their system to existing sensors. While there are a ton of sensors already, none of them communicate together.

Shone can combine all this data and analyze it to give some insights. Eventually, the startup plans to recommend different courses to save some fuel and time. Existing autopilot solutions on ships is more like cruise control in cars. You can follow a predetermined path, but you can’t say “let’s go from A to B”.

And saving fuel is key when it comes to global warming. Each ship carries a mountain of goods, so it’s quite efficient when you think about the impact of one ton of goods. But if you can make a container ship slightly more efficient, it would have a huge impact on the environment.

“If you can make a 1 percent optimization, you have a bigger impact than Tesla today,” Vollmer said. It’s hard to compare those two things as cars and ships are different beasts though.

For now, Shone is only focusing on deep sea. The crew doesn’t handle the first and last mile anyway as someone from the harbor usually comes on board to guide you to the dock.

Shone has signed a partnership with CMA CGM to collect data and add some hardware devices. It’s still early days for Shone as the company is first focusing on situational awareness before moving further into recommendations.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with William Hsu of Mucker Capital was recorded in...

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On the busiest nights, a restaurant can’t afford to even lose a dishwasher to getting sick or not being around — or simply ghosting on the company — and end up frustrating the whole experience for the rest of the staff and restaurant goers.

It’s a problem that Will Pacio was acutely familiar with during his time at Spice Kit, and it’s why he and Dave Lu — who didn’t really have much experience other than delivering Chinese food in high school, but wanted to get into the industry — started Pared. It essentially serves as an on-demand tool for restaurant workers, who might find themselves already working across multiple different jobs or multiple different restaurants and are looking for a lifestyle over which they have some more control. The company said it has raised a $10 million financing round led by CRV, with existing investors Uncork Capital and True Ventures also participating. CRV partner Saar Gur is joining the company’s board of directors.

“Even if youI go [to Craigslist], it’ll take four to six weeks to get someone to show up,” Lu said. “You hire them, you train them, and then they don’t show up to work the very first day. Even if I paid overtime, I don’t have enough employees to cover the shifts. For [Pacio] it was a nightmare, and I just want to be able to tap an app to get that kid from Subway across the street who knows how to make sandwiches and make them for me.”

The app largely focuses on back-of-the-house operations like line cooks, prep cooks, and dishwashers, though it could theoretically extend to any part of the restaurant experience. Restaurants go to the app and say they are looking for what the app calls a ‘Pro’ in whatever role they need, and are able to book the employee right away for the slot they have in their schedule. It might come at a slight premium over the typical hire, but restaurants are already willing to pay overtime in order to cover those gaps and keep things moving smoothly, Lu said.

For employees, it’s a pretty similar experience — they see a job posted on the app, with a time slot, and they make themselves available for an hourly wage. The second benefit, Lu said, is that they can start to slowly make a name for themselves if they are able to prove out their skills and move up the ranks at any of those restaurants. The culinary community is a small one, he said, and it offers a lot of room to start building up a reputation as an exceptional chef or just finally get a first shot at a sauté position in the kitchen after working at the back of the house. That, too, might be part of the appeal of jumping on a service like Pared rather than just driving for Uber.

“On our platform, every shift and rating you get, every connection you get in the industry — and it’s a very tight network — you build up your own reputation or identity,” Lu said. “We’re helping them build up, it’s more like a race to the top than a race to the bottom. They start off as a prep cook, and they start getting offers for line cook positions. We might have videos for learning to do this or that. They can work their way up to build that reputation. It’s all about reputation, it’s about people you trust.”

And like Uber, that flexibility is one of the more critical selling points of the application. A line cook might want to spend some time in New York to learn the scene there, and with an app like Pared, they can get access to some potential openings at restaurants in the area. As their experience — and their reputation — builds up over time, Lu hopes Pared gets known as a launching point for many careers, in addition to just offering restaurant workers a more flexible lifestyle.

There are certainly larger platforms that aren’t just targeting the restaurant ecosystem, and look to be a more global hub for hourly workers. Shiftgig, which raised $20 million last year, is one interpretation of that idea. But by offering a more curated and focused experience — one for which a kind of aspirational chef might keep gravitating back toward because they hope to one day end up running their own kitchen — can help build up that reputation for having a reliable workforce that any restaurant can use.

ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.

Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.

The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the user’s own CRM tools — typically Salesforce. Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.

Apollo CEO and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture. He was working at a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined. When they couldn’t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. That eventually reached a million users.  As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.

The company launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their tenure. In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.

Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn’t have a great sales process. Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to close deals.

The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. It’s worth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform. It just integrates with it.

They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge sales teams. So far it’s been working. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.

If a coffee fanatic decides they want to open up a coffee shop somewhere, odds are they’ll have to end up Googling “liability insurance” at some point — and trying to navigate the complex legal web to get all of that nailed down before they even sell their first iced latte.

Inaki Berenguer instead hopes they’ll stumble upon CoverWallet in that Google search, which streamlines the process of setting up commercial insurance for a small business. The company is trying to take another step now by saying it will create an open-ended tool that allows third parties to plug directly into its services, giving small businesses a way to pick up commercial insurance while they are going through the flow of another set of SMB management software. All of this is geared toward ensuring that more and more users are able to start tapping the service, which allows it to pick up additional business — and data — even if it means partially handing off the branding and user experience to another service.

“[When I had founded my previous company] when we had three employees and we moved to New York, we were told, if you want to sign a lease you have to buy insurance.” Berenguer said. “I wanted to go to a website, and input my square footage, and my revenue, and get a quote, and do everything else in five to ten minutes — but I was told that didn’t exist for business insurance. I had to go to a general provider, complete a 20-page PDF, which the broker sends it to the insurance company, and then they’ll come back with a quote. This process is analog and time consuming and opaque. I know this process can be reinvented. There are 25m small businesses in the U.S., and they all need to buy insurance.”

CoverWallet is much like what Berenguer explained in his dream scenario when he was moving his last company into an office. The insurance policies are personalized for restaurants, startups, retail stores, contractors, or various other types of commercial insurance products. Users input their business information, and then are able to pay for the policies — up front or in monthly installments — and get their policy set up in short order. If that doesn’t work, CoverWallet also has a team of agents to cover the rest of the questions they have, and users can modify any of those policies whenever they want.

But in the end, it may be that users are looking to keep things simple – especially if it’s a small- to medium-sized business that isn’t the kind of technically savvy ones you’ll often find in a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco. While CoverWallet looks to simplify the whole process of getting commercial insurance, which can be a major roadblock to getting something as simple as a coffee shop off the ground, integrating into other tools and making the whole process more and more seamless ensures that it’ll be able to keep that flow of businesses coming in — and those businesses may eventually start to spread the word on their own.

“Businesses might already be using accounting software or payroll,” Berenguer said. “Those systems have all the company info. Why do they need to come to a platform, and type everything, when that info is somewhere else. It’s like white labeling your solution. But if you want to be customer centric, the less they have to type the better.”

There likely isn’t much stopping the larger insurance carriers from offering a similar sort of plug-and-play API. But Berenguer said building a whole aggregation across all of those insurance providers, and then giving that pipeline to customers as they look to pick up insurance through another SMB tool like Gusto (though Gusto isn’t one of the clients, Berenguer said), gives them enough of a compelling argument for those employment suites to bring them in. Certain providers may only offer certain kinds of policies, or cover certain geographic regions, and CoverWallet hopes it will make a good enough case that it can cover all those gaps.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 404th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 28, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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August Lock is getting into the homesharing industry, making the process of checking in an Airbnb guest a bit easier.

Airbnb has done what it can over the past few months to make checking in plain and simple. For example, the company built out a new tool that lets hosts spell out check-in instructions within the app, all in a simple flow, to make sure guests have all the info they need at their fingertips.

But that hasn’t solved the biggest problem of all: the key.

For one, people don’t often have a lot of interest in meeting strangers, especially when they’re fresh off a plane or road trip. Secondly, it’s annoying to block out that time (sometimes getting off work) to go hand off a key to an Airbnb guest. And then there’s the matter of getting keys copied or re-tooling your smart lock to temporarily offer a stranger access.

That’s where August comes in to play.

August lets Airbnb and Homeaway hosts link their accounts to August. When a guest books at their home, August will generate a smart code that lasts for the duration of the stay and no longer, letting the guest easily check-in and come and go without the host having to babysit the process.

Guests will receive their pin code and instructions via email.

Hosts simply need an August Smart Lock and Smart Keypad to start letting technology do the heavy lifting. And, in fact, August is running a deal right now for 25 percent off the Smarter Hosting Bundle, which includes an August Smart Lock, August Connect Wi-Fi Bridge and August Smart Keypad.

This, coupled with other startup services like Handy, should make becoming an Airbnb host as simple as tapping a few buttons.

Insurance-focused platform Guidewire Software (NYSE: GWRE) recently announced its third quarter results that outpaced market expectations. The company provides web-based tools to insurance companies...

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In the age of digital transformation, it’s important to understand your business processes and find improvements quickly, but it’s not always easy to do without bringing in expensive consultants to help. Celonis, a New York City enterprise startup, created a sophisticated software solution to help solve this problem, and today it announced a $50 million Series B investment from Accel and 83North on a $1 billion valuation.

It’s not typical for an enterprise startup to have such a lofty valuation so early in its funding cycle, but Celonis is not a typical enterprise startup. It launched in 2011 in Munich with this idea of helping companies understand their processes, which they call process mining.

“Celonis is an intelligent system using logs created by IT systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and Netsuite, and automatically understands how these processes work and then recommends intelligently how they can be improved,” Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke explained.

The software isn’t magic, but helps customers visualize each business process, and then looks at different ways of shifting how and where humans interact with the process or bringing in technology like robotics process automation (RPA) when it makes sense.

Rinke says the software doesn’t simply find a solution and that’s the end of the story. It’s a continuous process loop of searching for ways to help customers operate more efficiently. This doesn’t have to be a big change, but often involves lots incremental ones.

“We tell them there are lots of answers. We don’t think there is one solution. All these little things don’t execute well. We point out these things. Typically we find it’s easy to implement, ” he said.

It seems to be working. Customers include the likes of Exxon-Mobile, 3M, Merck, Lockheed-Martin and Uber. Rinke reports deals are often seven figures. The company has grown an astonishing 5,000 percent in the past 4 years and 300 percent in the past year alone. What’s more, it has been profitable every year since it started. (How many enterprise startups can say that?)

The company currently has 400 employees, but unlike most Series B investments, they aren’t looking at this money to grow operationally. They wanted to have the money for strategic purposes, so if the opportunity came along to make an acquisition or expand into a new market, they would be in a position to do that.

“I see the funding as a confirmation and commitment, a sign from our investors and an indicator about what we’ve built and the traction we have. But for us it’s more important, and our investors share this, what they really invested in was the future of the company,” Rinke said. He’s sees an on-going commitment to help his customers as far more important than a billion valuation.

But that doesn’t hurt either as it moves rapidly forward.

TourRadar, the online travel agency (OTA) that targets the multi-day touring market, continues to be on a roll. The Vienna, Austria-headquartered company, which also has offices in Brisbane and Toronto, has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

Consisting mostly of primary funding, the round is led by the Silicon Valley growth VC firm TCV, with participation from existing investors Cherry Ventures, Endeit Capital, Hoxton Ventures, and Speedinvest. Notably, TCV previously backed Expedia and Airbnb and so has a very decent track record in travel.

Erik Blachford, a venture partner at TCV and already an angel investor in TourRadar, has joined the company’s supervisory board. Blachford was previously President and CEO of IAC Travel, managing all of IAC’s travel assets including Expedia and Hotels.com. Again, a very good fit for TourRadar as it looks to scale up going forward.

In a call, TourRadar co-founder and CEO Travis Pittman — who founded the company with his brother — told me he was glad to have finally got Blachford on his board. The pair first met at a conference a few years back when Pittman heard the ex-Expedia CEO wax lyrical about the need for an OTA that serviced the group multi-day tour industry. He approached him afterwards to say that TourRadar wanted to be that company.

Not to be confused with something like GetYourGuide, which focuses more on travel experiences that take up part or all of a single day, TourRadar is a place to book a multi-day tour in the same way you might book a package holiday. To deliver this, the company works with more than 600 large and small local tour operators across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. These include well-known operators such as G Adventures, Contiki, and Collette, and hundreds of specialty operators that otherwise would rely purely on local agents and word of mouth. In total, TourRadar offers more than 25,000 tours in 200 countries.

In fact, Pittman says TourRadar’s main competitor is large incumbent tour package companies, and that multi-day tours are one of the last areas of the travel industry that has not fully moved online. Another interesting tidbit regards TourRadar’s potential for growth: the company so far only targets english speaking consumers. Next on the roadmap is a lot more localisation, says the TourRadar CEO, with Germany, for example, a huge travel market.

To that end, TourRadar says it intends to use the funding to expand its team globally and to invest in the technology platform “to provide a personalized user experience for customers in new and existing source markets across the globe”. One area of focus will be developing a proper TourRadar mobile app — yes, really! — as Pittman reckons mobile, thus so far neglected, is a great platform for inspiration and discovery when deciding where to book your next tour.

More broadly, the platform supports operator partners in various ways, including offering instant bookings and tour review functionality, but there is room to go a lot further. This could include re-introducing community features to enable people who are planning to be in the same tour cohort to get in touch with one another before, during and after a tour.