I am very bullish about market opportunities that are large enough to build sizable businesses but not large enough such that VCs end up funding numerous competing companies. This case study shows...

___

Jay-Z is behind a new venture fund called Marcy Venture Partners that is being launched with Walden Venture Capital managing director Larry Marcus and longtime business partner Roc Nation president Jay Brown, according to California regulatory filings.

The fund was first reported by Axios. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter is no stranger to the venture world. The rap artist, producer and entrepreneur invested in Uber’s Series B round in 2011 when the company had a pre-money valuation of $300 million. Jay-Z has also invested in JetSmarter and Julep. Roc Nation backed Promise, a decarceration startup.

Jay-Z and Jay Brown were looking for a Silicon Valley partner for their fund last year. And at one time, it appeared they had landed on Sherpa Capital, a VC firm created by some of Uber’s other early investors. But that deal fell apart.

Now Walden Venture Capital’s Marcus will lead Marcy Venture Partners. Marcus has deep experience as an investor as an early backer of Pandora and Netflix. Marcus has also invested in sound and voice search startup SoundHound, retail tech company Skip and Terayon, which was acquired by Motorola.

Sramana Mitra: I think the Indian startup ecosystem is much larger than Europe right now. Hussain Kanji: It is, but when you look at the global unicorns and where they’re coming from, about 50% of...

___

Getting mental health services can be burdensome. And if you’re already going through a tough time, you’re probably looking for help sooner than later. But based on the current landscape, it can take months to find the right therapist who also takes your insurance.

This is where Meru Health hopes to come in. By providing its service as a benefit for employers to offer to their employees, Meru Health can operate as a first line of treatment where people can get help in a matter of weeks, Meru Health co-founder and CEO Kristian Ranta told TechCrunch.

Ranta, who lost his brother to suicide a few years ago, said there are “unfortunately lots of people suffering from depression and who are vulnerable to burnout.”

It’s true. Worldwide, more than 300 million people suffer from depression and 260 million suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the World Health Organization.

Meru Health offers an eight-week treatment program for depression, burnout and anxiety. The program, currently led by five licensed therapists, utilizes both cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation and mindfulness-based intervention. Provided as an employee benefit, Meru Health only charges companies if the patients report feeling any better.

Meru Health’s current customers include WeWork and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. To date, Meru Health says 75 percent of the people who go through its program report symptom reduction.

Other startups working in the mental health space include Pacifica and Lantern, a mental health startup that offers tools to deal with stress, anxiety and body image. To date, Lantern has raised more than $20 million in funding. Another one is Talkspace, which aims to be an alternative to traditional therapy.

Down the road, Meru Health may make its service available to everyday consumers, but right now, Ranta said the focus is on selling to larger employers and doing clinical research. Meru Health is also looking to bring on board a doctor to help with medication management and, possibly, even providing prescriptions, Ranta said. Meru Health, which is currently participating in Y Combinator, envisions bringing on a medical doctor post-YC.

Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju, Co-Heads of Wipro Ventures.

___

What is the difference between pre-seed, post-seed and pre-Series A? This is not so simple anymore to understand. For entrepreneurs who are seeking financing for the first time, it’s not easy to...

___

Sramana Mitra: The domain that I feel very bullish about is healthcare. There are vast swaths of the world that have no access to good healthcare. I think AI can turn that around. John Roese:...

___

An app that has the needs of modern-day parents in mind, Winnie, has now raised $4 million in additional seed funding in a round led by Reach Capital. Other investors in the new round include Rethink Impact, Homebrew, Ludlow Ventures, Afore Capital, and BBG Ventures, among others. With the new funds, Winnie has raised $6.5 million to date.

The San Francisco-based startup, which begun its life as a directory of kid-friendly places largely serving the needs of newer parents, has since expanded to become a larger platform for parents.

Winnie was founded by Bay Area technologists, Sara Mauskopf, who spent time at Postmates, Twitter, YouTube and Google, and Anne Halsall, also from Postmates and Google, as well as Quora and Inkling.

As new parents themselves, they built Winnie out a personal need to find the sort of information parents crave – details you can’t easily dig up in Google Maps or Yelp.

For example, you can use Winnie to find nearby kid-friendly destinations like museums or parks, as well as those that welcome children with features like changing tables in restrooms, wide aisles in stores for stroller access, areas for nursing, and other things.

Winnie serves as a good example of what investing in women can achieve. Somehow, the young, 20-something men that receive the lion’s share of VC funding had never thought up the idea of app that helps new parents navigate the world. (I know, shocking, right?) And yet, the kind of questions that Winnie tries to answer are those that all parents, at some point, are curious about.

The data on Winnie is crowd-sourced, with details, ratings and reviews coming from other real parents. Listings in San Francisco may be more fleshed out than elsewhere, as that’s where Winnie got its start. However, the app is now available in 10,000 cities across the U.S., and has just surpassed over a million users.

In more recent months, Winnie has been working to expand beyond being a sort of “Yelp for parents,” and now features an online community where parents can ask questions and participate in discussions.

“The crowdsourced directory of family-friendly businesses is still a huge component of what we do…and this has grown to over 2 million places across the United States,” notes Winnie co-founder and CEO Sara Mauskopf. “But we also have these real-time answers to any parenting question from this authentic, supportive community,” she says, referring to Winnie’s online discussions.

The idea is that parents will be searching the web for answers to questions about toddler sleep issues or good local preschools or breastfeeding help, and Winnie’s answers will come up in search results, similar to other Q&A sites like Quora or Yahoo Answers.

“A lot of younger millennial parents are turning to Google to find answers to these questions,” adds Winnie co-founder and CPO Anne Halsall. “So we want to have the answer to these questions at the ready, and we want to have the best page. That’s an example of something that’s yield a lot of traffic for us, just because no one else had that data before Winnie,” she says.

Related to this expansion, Winnie is also serving this data across platforms, including – obviously – the web, in addition to its native app on iOS and Android. The hope is that, with the growth, business owners will come in to claim their pages on Winnie.com, too, and update their information.

In the near-term, the founders say they’ll put the funding to use building out more personalization features.

“As a technology company, we have a unique opportunity to give you this really tailored experience that grows with your family over time – so as your children are getting older, and you’re entering new phases of development, our product’s adapting and putting relevant information in front of you,” Halsall says. 

Data on businesses serving the needs of parents with older kids – like summer camps or driver’s ed classes, for example – are the kind of things Winnie will focus on as it grows to include information for more parents, instead of just those with younger children and babies.

Winnie will also use the funds to hire additional engineers to help it scale its platform.

Esteban Sosnik from Reach Capital joined Hunter Walk from Homebrew on Winnie’s board as a result of the funding.

The app is a free download for iOS and Android, and is available on the web at Winnie.com.

Seniors over 65 are one of the fastest growing age groups in the United States, but they are still an underserved market. Many don’t need assisted living or in-home care, but they do need help with transportation and errands. Most of all, however, the elderly want companionship. Papa, a service that bills itself as “grandkids on-demand,” wants to fill the gap by connecting college students, called Papa Pals, with seniors.

Named in honor of founder and chief executive officer Andrew Parker’s grandfather, the Miami-headquartered startup is currently participating in Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Seniors can use Papa’s app (or a customer service line for those who don’t own a mobile device) to book a Papa Pal. Papa Pals might take seniors to the grocery store or doctor’s appointments, help with chores or teach them how to set up a new smartphone or tablet. They also provide company for seniors, many of whose own adult children or grandchildren are busy working or live far away. Papa is currently available in Florida and will began expanding into other states next year.

“What’s interesting is that people don’t always want to say they want companionship, even though their families say they do,” says Parker. “But when a visit ends up being six hours, that’s evident what it’s for.”

Before launching Papa, Parker was vice president of health systems at telehealth company MDLIVE. He lived near his grandfather, who had early onset dementia, and would often go over to help him with errands. One day, however, Parker was unable to go on a grocery run. Since his workload was increasing, Parker posted on Facebook for a helper. A woman named Andrea responded and after his family interviewed her and did a background check, she began assisting his grandfather regularly.

The experience made Parker realize there was a gap in the market for seniors who, like his grandfather, were mostly independent and don’t require a caregiver, but still needed occasional help from a trustworthy person. He decided to leave MDLIVE and began working on Papa to provide what he describes as “pre-care.”

Papa Pals are college students, many of whom are studying nursing, social work or hospitality. Before they are matched with seniors, Papa Pals undergo a background check and a motor vehicle records check and inspection. The company also asks them to complete a personality test. Parker describes the ideal Papa Pal as not only interested in working with seniors for career experience, but also outgoing, empathetic and patient.

“If you want to be a Papa Pal to make a couple extra dollars, then it’s probably not a good fit,” he says.

One of the most requested services is transportation. Many seniors need more than a Uber. They also want someone to help them shop and unload bags or sit with them in a doctor’s waiting room. Papa Pals also help with technology, like teaching seniors how to set up Netflix or video chat with their grandkids. The service starts at $15 an hour and a premium membership option allows seniors to interview Papa Pals, pick a team of helpers and request same-day appointments.

Parker says Papa has plans to expand into at least five states next year. The startup also wants to build an ecosystem of senior services, so when customers start to need more intensive services like in-home care, Papa can refer them to its partners.

While there are apps like Honor that help seniors find in-home caregivers, Papa’s on-demand service is unique. Parker says one of the things that will help it maintain an advantage against any future startup competitors is its backend, which enables it to match seniors with available Papa Pals quickly, whether they use its app or phone number. Papa Pals see an in-app dashboard that lets them accept appointments, then provides them with requests made by seniors or their families. The system also manages traffic and logistics and algorithmically calculates compensation for Papa Pals (on average, Parker says they make $20 to $30 per visit, which typically last about three hours).

Papa is currently gearing up for the introduction of new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits that will cover some of the services it offers, like transportation to medical appointments. The ruling will go into effect next year and Papa has begun initial discussions with providers of Medicare Advantage, which has about 20 million beneficiaries.

Papa is also expanding its business-to-business model by working with partners, including senior living facilities, to offer Papa Pal services to their residents.

“Papa’s mission for the long run is to support seniors and their families,” Parker says. “We see ourselves at the beginning of the process.”

Data analytics company Domo has recently filed to go public on the NASDAQ under the ticker DOMO. As a private company it had raised close to $700 million and was valued at over $2 billion, qualifying...

___

BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It’s been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.

BigID has a product that helps companies inventory their data, even extremely large data stores, and identify the most sensitive information, a convenient feature at a time where GDPR data privacy rules, which went into effect at the end of May, require that companies doing business in the EU have a grip on their customer data.

That’s certainly something that caught the eye of Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners. “We talked to a lot of companies, how they feel more specifically about GDPR, and more broadly about how they think about data within in their organizations, and we got a very strong signal that there is a lot of concern around the regulation and how to prepare for that, but also more fundamentally, that CIOs and chief data officers don’t have a good sense of where data resides within their organizations,” he explained.

Dimitri Sirota, CEO and co-founder, says that GDPR is a nice business driver, but he sees the potential to grow the data security market much more broadly than simply as a way to comply with one regulatory ruling or another. He says that American companies are calling, even some without operations in Europe because they see getting a grip on their customer data as a fundamental business imperative.

The company plans to expand their partner go-to market strategy in the coming the months, another approach that could translate to increased sales. That will include global systems integrators. Sirota says to expect announcements involving the usual suspects in the coming months. “You’ll see over the next little bit, several announcements with many of the names that you’re familiar with in terms of go-to market and global relationships,” he said.

Finally there are the strategic investors in this deal, including Comcast and SAP, which Sirota thinks will also ultimately help them get enterprise deals they might not have landed up until now. The $30 million runway also gives customers who might have been skittish about dealing with a young-ish startup, more confidence to make the deal.

BigID seems to have the right product at the right time. Scale’s Tseitlin, who will join the board as part of the deal, certainly sees the potential of this company to scale far beyond its current state.

“The area where we tend to spend a lot of time, and I think is what attracted Dimitri to having us as an investor, is that we really help with the scaling phase of company growth,” he said. True to their name, Scale tries to get the company to that next level beyond product/market fit to where they can deliver consistently and continually grow revenue. They have done this with Box and DocuSign and others and hope that BigID is next.

RRE Ventures has raised $265 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded back in 1994, and this is its seventh fund (eighth if you include a separate “opportunity” fund for making follow-on investments). Exits in the last few years include Bitly (acquired by Spectrum Equity), Business Insider (acquired by Axel Springer) and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter).

General Partner Raju Rishi said that RRE will continue to follow its current investment strategy. That means putting about 60 percent of its money into Series A investments, 5 to 10 percent into seed deals and the rest in B or C rounds.

It also means investing making about half its investments on the East Coast — mostly New York City, where RRE is based. Rishi suggested that with the growth of “a very virtualized tech community of developer from around the world,” New York makes more sense for startups, thanks to the density of industries like media and fashion: “The ecosystem question has become, ‘Where can I be closest to my customer?'”

RRE invests beyond New York too. In those cases, Rishi said it’s usually based on specific sectors that the investment team has researched deeply. Currently, those sectors include healthcare IT, space technology, blockchain, robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality. In contrast, there are some other sectors that RRE sees as “a little bit waning.”

“A great example is, we made the initial investment in 3D printing — we were the original investors in MakerBot,” Rishi said. “Now, we don’t see a striking amount of innovation in that space. That doesn’t mean we cut it off at the knees and not invest in it, but it’s not something we’re actively looking at.”

Vice President of Business Development Maria Palma added that the firm has also been growing its platform strategy to support portfolio companies in the last couple years.

“You can’t pick a platform strategy that’s unique, but you can pick a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute,” she said.

For RRE, that means helping startups connect with larger companies for potential partnerships, and also working with founders to better understand things like leadership and hiring. In some cases, she said the firm doesn’t have “the capabilities to deliver that type of support at scale, such as in recruiting” so instead it focuses on “talent and leadership development and something we call community learning — gathering peer groups across the portfolio so they can more easily get answers to their questions.”

Rishi said RRE has had fairly consistent fund sizes (it raised a $280 million sixth fund about four years ago), because its “sweet spot is Series As,” and raising a larger fund would mean investing in more late-stage deals.

“We usually target $250 million, and frankly they always sort of creep up because of existing LPs who want to continue to bet on us,” he said.

And while the fundraising announcement is only happening today, RRE has already backed several startups with the new fund — Bend Financial (health savings accounts), Gem (cryptocurrency), Hypr (decentralized authentication), Ladder (life insurance), Latch (smart locks) and TheWaveVR (VR experiences for music).

Update: The story has been updated with a little more detail about RRE’s community learning.

It’s not often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce to agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.ai, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice.

Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as strategic investors in the company this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures also participated. Tact has now raised over $53 million, according to Crunchbase.

Amazon is of course deeply invested in voice interfaces and has recognized what Tact is trying to do in an enterprise setting with this investment. In fact, Tact was one of the first services to launch as part of Alexa for Business last fall. “Just as people were quick to adopt voice technology in the home, we see an enormous opportunity for voice services in the enterprise,” Paul Bernard, Director of the Amazon Alexa Fund said. He sees Tact on the forefront of that movement.

As though to prove Amazon’s point, the company also announced a product enhancement to improve the voice experience in the car. The feature dubbed ‘Voice Intelligence’ acts like a car-based virtual assistant. Sales people spend much of their time in the car, and the tool can not only give them the basics about the next meeting, it can also provide details about the deal and other relevant information, such as recently filed service tickets. All of this info can arm the salesperson for a potentially more effective meeting, Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi explained.

“We want sales professionals who are on the road, keeping their eyes on the road ahead, so we are pushing information to them and initiating a conversation, which is exactly what a human assistant would do,” he said.

Ganapathi understands the limitations of CRM tools perhaps better than anyone. That’s because before he started Tact, he had been helping build them for more than 20 years — first custom systems with Ernst and Young, then on prem with Siebel Systems and finally with Salesforce in the cloud.

CRM’s value proposition has always been that it provides companies with a central place for storing customer data, an electronic rolodex of sorts, but entering and retrieving data has mostly been a chore for busy sales people. Ganapathi launched Tact in 2012 with the vision of using voice to help make it easier to interact with these tools. He was clearly ahead of his time, but the technology has finally caught up with his idea, and the strategic investors in this deal certainly recognize the value of a voice interface for sales people.

Ganapathi says the idea behind Tact is to reduce the friction involved in adding and retrieving information from the database, and making life easier for sales to do their job. If sales pros can get the information they need, they can potentially make more sales and that’s a fairly compelling argument for any company.

Sramana Mitra: I love this keeping all your innovation process tied to customers. That may yield slightly less glamorous innovation, but it keeps a good solid innovation process running. The thing...

___

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put emphasis on "meaningful" interactions on Facebook. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Getty

This feature from CNet  covers the highlights of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 held in Las Vegas this month. This was only the second time that the premier video game industry event...

___

Mark Zuckerberg jogged through Tiananmen Square during a trip to Beijing in March 2016. Facebook