Excited to announce that this year’s The Europas Unconference & Awards is shaping up! Our half day Unconference kicks off on 3 July, 2018 at The Brewery in the heart of London’s “Tech City” area, followed by our startup awards dinner and fantastic party and celebration of European startups!

The event is run in partnership with TechCrunch, the official media partner. Attendees, nominees and winners will get deep discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.
The Europas Awards are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to the daytime is all the speakers and invited guests. There’s no “off-limits speaker room” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs and speakers.

What exactly is an Unconference? We’re dispensing with the lectures and going straight to the deep-dives, where you’ll get a front row seat with Europe’s leading investors, founders and thought leaders to discuss and debate the most urgent issues, challenges and opportunities. Up close and personal! And, crucially, a few feet away from handing over a business card. The Unconference is focused into zones including AI, Fintech, Mobility, Startups, Society, and Enterprise and Crypto / Blockchain.

We’ve confirmed 10 new speakers including:

Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital

Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp

Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures

Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures

Nancy Fechnay, Blockchain Technologist + Angel

George McDonaugh, KR1

Candice Lo, Blossom Capital

Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners

Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel

Tina Baker, Jag Shaw Baker

How To Get Your Ticket For FREE

We’d love for you to ask your friends to join us at The Europas – and we’ve got a special way to thank you for sharing.

Your friend will enjoy a 15% discount off the price of their ticket with your code, and you’ll get 15% off the price of YOUR ticket.

That’s right, we will refund you 15% off the cost of your ticket automatically when your friend purchases a Europas ticket.

So you can grab tickets here.

Vote for your Favourite Startups

Public Voting is still humming along. Please remember to vote for your favourite startups!

Awards by category:

Hottest Media/Entertainment Startup

Hottest E-commerce/Retail Startup

Hottest Education Startup

Hottest Startup Accelerator

Hottest Marketing/AdTech Startup

Hottest Games Startup

Hottest Mobile Startup

Hottest FinTech Startup

Hottest Enterprise, SaaS or B2B Startup

Hottest Hardware Startup

Hottest Platform Economy / Marketplace

Hottest Health Startup

Hottest Cyber Security Startup

Hottest Travel Startup

Hottest Internet of Things Startup

Hottest Technology Innovation

Hottest FashionTech Startup

Hottest Tech For Good

Hottest A.I. Startup

Fastest Rising Startup Of The Year

Hottest GreenTech Startup of The Year

Hottest Startup Founders

Hottest CEO of the Year

Best Angel/Seed Investor of the Year

Hottest VC Investor of the Year

Hottest Blockchain/Crypto Startup Founder(s)

Hottest Blockchain Protocol Project

Hottest Blockchain DApp

Hottest Corporate Blockchain Project

Hottest Blockchain Investor

Hottest Blockchain ICO (Europe)

Hottest Financial Crypto Project

Hottest Blockchain for Good Project

Hottest Blockchain Identity Project

Hall Of Fame Award – Awarded to a long-term player in Europe

The Europas Grand Prix Award (to be decided from winners)

The Awards celebrates the most forward thinking and innovative tech & blockchain startups across over some 30+ categories.

Startups can apply for an award or be nominated by anyone, including our judges. It is free to enter or be nominated.

What is The Europas?

Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with 1,000 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.

• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers

• Key Founders and investors speaking; featured attendees invited to just network

• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A directly from the main stage

• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics

• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking

• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters

• A parallel Founders-only track geared towards fund-raising and hyper-networking

• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene

• All on one day to maximise your time in London. And it’s PROBABLY sunny!

That’s just the beginning. There’s more to come…

Interested in sponsoring the Europas or hosting a table at the awards? Or purchasing a table for 10 or 12 guest or a half table for 5 guests? Get in touch with:
Petra Johansson
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone: +44 (0) 20 3239 9325

Brian Jacobs: As we learned more and more about how the cloud changes everything, we have evolved our investment thesis. We found some new areas where the cloud really does provide a new opportunity....

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Right on the heels of launching its concierge service Hooch Black, Hooch announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding.

The company’s basic subscription of $9.99 gets you one free drink per day from a variety of partner bars and restaurants. Hooch Black (which you have to apply for, and which costs $295 per year) adds hotel deals, concierge service and other perks on top.

Even though Hooch had already raised $2.75 million in two pre-seed rounds, co-founder and CEO Lin Dai said it was more important to bring on strategic investors than it was to raise a lot of money: “We feel like the most important thing for our business is really the relationships.”

After all, he said the hospitality industry is controlled by “a few key companies,” so success is determined by working with those companies — it’s not a situation where someone can just beat you by outspending you.

The funding was led by Revelis Capital Group and Blue Scorpion Investments, with participation from Access Industries Holdings, Warner Music Group (Dai said that Hooch will be working with Warner Music on content, events and promotions), FJ Labs, Diesel CEO Stefano Rosso, former Comcast CTO Sree Kotay and others.

At the same time, the company is expanding its advisory board to include Bob Hurst (previously vice chairman of Goldman Sachs), Bonin Bough (former chief media and ecommerce officer at Mondelez) and Teymour Farman-Farmaian (previously CMO and CRO at Spotify and now managing director of Bitcoin wallet company Xapo).

Dai also said Hooch is preparing to launch its blockchain initiative this summer. What does blockchain have to do with free drinks? Well, Dai didn’t go into detail, but he suggested that by launching its own cryptocurrency token, Hooch could work with partners to create a “decentralized model for consumer rewards.”

Looking ahead, Dai said that Hooch might raise a “proper” Series A in 12 to 18 months, though he expects to reach profitability before then.

“At that point, we will have already built the moat around us with exclusive deals with all the top hospitality and experiential players,” he said. “That would be the appropriate time for us, if needed, to go back to a traditional round of funding.”

As Slack tries to graduate beyond a Silicon Valley darling to the go-to communications platform within a company, it’s had to find ways to increasingly pitch itself as an intelligent Swiss Army knife for companies — and not just a simple chat app — and it is trying to continue that today once again with a new feature called Actions.

Companies can now bake in a user experience of their own directly into the Slack application that isn’t yet another chatbot that’s tied into their services. Developers can essentially create a customized prompt for any kind of action, like submitting a support ticket, within the Slack core chat experience through a drop-down window called an Action. While Slackbots may have been an early incarnation of this, Slack’s platform has grown to include more than 200,000 developers, and there’s still constant need for robust tools internally. This offers partners and developers a little more flexibility when it comes to figuring out what experience makes the most sense for people that sit in Slack all day, but have to keep porting information to and from their own tools.

“There’s such a demand for specialized software, and for great tools that are easy to use and interoperable with all applications you use,” Slack chief product officer April Underwood said. “We think this is good, and we think more tools means customers have more choice. Ultimately there’s more competition in the marketplace, that means the best tools, the ones that truly help companies do their best work, rise to the top. But your work experience becomes increasingly siloed. Slack needs to be highly configurable, but in doing so we believe Slack is the collaboration hub that brings all this together.”

Each company that wants to build in an integration — like Asana for task management or Zendesk for ticket management — works to create a new flow within the core Slack experience, which includes a new dropdown inside a message and a prompt to bake something into the chat flow. Once that happens, all that information is then ported over to the integration and created in the same way an employee would create it within that environment. If someone creates a Zendesk ticket through an action in Slack, Zendesk automatically generates the ticket on their side.

Slack has sprawled out over time, and especially as companies using it get larger and larger, the company has to figure out a way to show that it can remain a dead-simple app without turning into a bloated window filled with thousands of instant messages. Actions is one potential approach to that, where users can know from the get-go where to coordinate certain activities like equipment procurement or managing some customer information — and not have to go anywhere else.

The other advantage here is that it makes the destination for completing a task not necessarily a “what,” but also a “who.” Slack is leaning on its machine learning tool to make it easier and easier to find the right people with the right answers, whether those questions are already answered somewhere or they know who can get you the information right away. Actions is another extension here, as well, as users can get accustomed to going to certain coworkers with the intent of completing tasks — such as their IT head in their office that they walk by every morning on the way to grabbing coffee.

The company says it’s also working on what it’s calling the Block Kit, which integrates those tasks and other elements directly into the Slack chat flow in a way that looks a little more user friendly from a kind of visual sense. The idea here is, again, to create an intuitive flow for people that goes beyond just a simple chat app, but also offers some additional way of interactivity that turns Slack into a more sensible feed rather than just a window with people talking to each other. Actions are available from Jira, Bitbucket, Asana, Zendesk, HubSpot, and several others.

Actions is a tool that Slack is unveiling at its own developer conference, Spec, this morning. That in of itself is yet another example of Slack looking to graduate beyond just a simpler information feed that works well with smaller companies. Developers are often the ones that figure out the best niche use cases for any platform, as it means Slack can focus on trying to figure out how all these integrations fit into its design ethos. The company has to figure out how to convince larger companies that they need a tool like this and it won’t get out of hand, and also ensure that smaller companies don’t graduate into something a little more flexible that can serve those niche cases as they get larger.

To be sure, Slack is growing. The company said it hit 8 million daily active users with 3 million paid users earlier this month. That’s helped it quickly jump to a $5.1 billion valuation (as of its most recent funding round), and the company has been carefully rolling out tools that might make communication within larger companies a little easier — including the long-awaited launch of threads a little more than a year ago.

But Slack also faces increasing competition as time goes on, not only from the traditional companies looking to build more robust but simpler tools, but also from companies that have spent a lot of time working on collaboration tools and are now exploring communication. Atlassian’s opened up its communications platform Stride to developers in February this year. Microsoft, too continues to update its Teams product. Slack was able to expose pent-up demand for this kind of an approach, but it also has to defend that approach — and making it a little more flexible without feature-creeping is going to be its biggest challenge going forward.

Real Vision is entering the crowded business and financial new space with a bang. The company, which recently raised a $10 million Series B after a $5 million A round, is working on a number of new initiatives including distribution on Apple TV, a content distribution partnership with Thomson Reuters and an upcoming documentary on PBS.

The documentary, “A World on the Brink,” will focus on threats to the global economy. The team is aiming at viewers ages 36-45 instead of the older Boomers who prefer cable financial news far.

“Unlike most video-based media businesses where short-form video is deemed to have the highest user engagement, Real Vision have found that almost 70% of their customers who start a half, or an hour-long, video will watch all of it. This engagement in long-form content is breaking boundaries within the industry,” said co-founder and CEO Raoul Pal. “Sensationalism and clickbait is at an all-time high. Traditional financial news has continued to degenerate into attention-seeking sound bites that are at best of little value and at worst, downright dangerous.”

Pal worked at Goldman Sachs before moving into media.

“I lamented on the state of financial media – how it had let the ordinary person down repeatedly in 2000 and 2008 and was busy treating finance as entertainment and not taking into account that this was people’s life savings they were dealing with. I also noted how far financial programming had become versus the fast-changing world of on line video. Viewing habits and content types were changing but the financial TV incumbents hadn’t changed,” he said “I decided that it was time for someone to disrupt the way in which television worked – particularly with regard to financial and business information.”

The team will use the cash to create programming aimed at “those who want to create new business opportunities and startups, manage new enterprises and leverage new technology.” The videos can run as long as 90 minutes but usually hit the five to thirty-minute mark. They are also distributing their content to Thomson Reuters . It uses a subscription-based model and costs $180 annually.

The team met at a bar in Jesus Pobre, Spain. Pal and his co-founder Damian Horner found each other during their travels and had drinks at a place called Rosita’s where Horner, a former ad exec, learned of Pal’s experience in finance and they both mapped out a new type of online news channel with some real energy. Thus was born a model that mixes on-demand with high-impact news, something that few cable stations can manage.

“Almost all traditional media outlets rely on an ever-dwindling advertising revenue model. Real Vision is subscription-based and built that way from the ground up,” said Pal. “Most media business are still trying to figure out a subscription model to diversify away from advertising. In a highly competitive digital world, the pressure ‘to get clicks’ has a massive impact on the tone, direction and quality of the editorial content itself. Real Vision’s subscriber model means there is no need to sensationalize, no dumbing down of ideas, no incessant ‘breaking news’ headlines, no clickbait soundbites and no cutting things short for commercial breaks.”

Po.et is an open source, not-for-profit publishing network built on the blockchain with the broad ambition of changing how we distribute, license and monetize content on the internet. Today, it announced it was opening the Po.et Development Labs, a place for developers to experiment with new ideas on the po.et platform.

It also announced the first company to launch an app out of the lab called Inkrypt. It’s an application designed to provide a way to publish content in a distributed fashion, meaning the article doesn’t live on any particular server. That makes it nearly impossible for sensors to block it.

“The first project to build on Po.et is Inkrypt, a global decentralized system providing a censorship-resistant solution for journalism hosting and delivery that will render journalism content permanent and immutable,” Po.et CEO Jarrod Dicker wrote in a blog post announcing the launch of Po.et Development Labs.

Dicker, who formerly ran the innovation team at the Washington Post, says the company wants developers to see po.et in a similar manner to Ethereum, a place where they can build applications making use of the underlying blockchain technology.

“Think of what Ethereum did for the spawn of new applications on the blockchain. We want to do the same for media applications on the blockchain by allowing them to leverage the protocol to build and push the media industry in the right direction,” Dicker told TechCrunch.

Po.et Development Labs offers a mechanism for developers to work with the po.et blockchain protocol. “With Po.et Development Labs, we’re introducing an innovation marketplace for all creators to build products on the blockchain. Companies can leverage Po.et and build vertically to introduce new innovations or solve problems in the space on top of that foundation,” Dicker explained.

Dicker says Inkrypt is just a starting point. “Inkrypt is an example and many more will come, especially as we invest and push more features that others can leverage and build [upon].”

Dicker points out that po.et is not just a platform for developers though. It’s also for media companies to define how they want to share and license their content, giving them a platform outside of advertising to monetize it. “Where it gets real interesting is that media companies can start taking advantage of it as well,” he said.

If you think about Creative Commons licensing, it provides a way for publishers to decide how they want to share their content, but it doesn’t give the content producers any way to enforce that license beyond the good will of users. Po.et takes that licensing concept one step further, giving content owners a marketplace to sell their content on the blockchain, creating an enforceable and immutable way to license the content.

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Instagram today introduced a way to mute accounts, giving users a way to continue following accounts without seeing their posts all the time.

Muted accounts will not be made aware that they’ve been muted, and users can unmute accounts at any time. Users can still see posts on the muted account’s profile page and get notified about comments or posts they’re tagged in.

Users can mute accounts by tapping the “…” in the corner of the post and choosing between muting posts, stories, or posts and stories.

First and foremost, this continues Instagram’s effort to block bullying and harassment on the social network. While users have had the ability to block accounts for a long time, muting is a next step in blocking out someone without any of the consequences that might come from blocking them.

This could also come in handy for folks going through a break-up or some other social split, as they don’t necessarily want to see every single post from their ex but don’t want to be seen unfollowing them either.

Of course, the broader demographic will simply have more control over Instagram’s algorithmic feed, which prioritizes accounts and posts it thinks you will like (read: promotes engagement at all costs).

The algorithmic feed has added a layer of complexity to Instagram, making users think more cautiously about the way they throw around likes. Posts, and accounts, that you like may very well get top billing in your feed because of it, even if you only liked the post to show friends some love.

Muting gives users a bit more control over what they see regardless of what they’ve liked or what Instagram’s algorithm deems relevant.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a method for growing and connecting single neurons using geometric patterns to route the neurons more precisely, cell by cell.

The article, “Assembly and Connection of Micropatterned Single Neurons for Neuronal Network Formation,” appeared in Micromachines, a journal of molecular machinery.

Thus far researchers have created simple brain matter using “in vitro cultures,” a process that grows neurons haphazardly in a clump. The connections associated with these cultures are random, thereby making the brain tissue difficult to study.

“In vitro culture models are essential tools because they approximate relatively simple neuron networks and are experimentally controllable,” said study author Shotaro Yoshida. “These models have been instrumental to the field for decades. The problem is that they’re very difficult to control, since the neurons tend to make random connections with each other. If we can find methods to synthesize neuron networks in a more controlled fashion, it would likely spur major advances in our understanding of the brain.”

Yoshida and the team looked more closely at how neurons behave and found that they could be trained to connect using microscopic plates made of “synthetic neuron-adhesive material.” They look like little frying pans with extra handles and “when placed onto the microplate, a neuron’s cell body settles onto the circle, while the axon and dendrites – the branches that let neurons communicate with each other – grow lengthwise along the rectangles.”

The researchers then connected the neurons, testing if they would fire simultaneously as predicted.

“What was especially important in this system was to have control over how the neurons connected,” Yoshida said. “We designed the microplates to be movable, so that by pushing them around, we could physically move two neurons right next to each other. Once we placed them together, we could then test whether the neurons were able to transmit a signal.”

It worked.

“This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time a mobile microplate has been used to morphologically influence neurons and form functional connections,” said investigator Shoji Takeuchi. “We believe the technique will eventually allow us to design simple neuron network models with single-cell resolution. It’s an exciting prospect, as it opens many new avenues of research that aren’t possible with our current suite of experimental tools.”

Unfortunately, this is just the first step for this technology, especially considering the millions of neurons necessary to eat, breathe, and sleep (and use the internet). It is, however, a good start.

Amuse, the Swedish startup that offers a free distribution service for artists wanting to get their music on Spotify, Apple Music et al., coupled with what it’s calling a “next generation” record label, has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lakestar, and Raine Ventures, and will be used to expand the company operations globally, including building out a bigger presence in the U.S.

Founded in Stockholm in 2015 by a team of music industry experts including Diego Farias, Christian Wilsson, Jimmy Brodd, Andreas Ahlenius, and Guy Parry — and later joined by music artist and entrepreneur will.i.am — Amuse is aiming to create a new way for musicians to distribute their music globally and, crucially, to be discovered.

As co-founder and CEO Farias explained in a call, it does this via a free music distribution service that makes it easy and cost-free for new and unsigned artists to get their music into all of the major music services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer etc., and in a way that means they keep 100 percent of the royalties. Similar services typically either charge an annual fee or take a cut of any revenue generated or both.

Amuse also provides a dashboard displaying and helping to make sense of data relating to how well your tracks are performing on the streaming apps and download stores you have chosen to distribute on. And its this data — or, rather, the value of it — that underpins the startups unique business model: come for the free distribution, stay for the record deal.

Namely, Amuse uses the data that it has access to via users of its music distribution service to analyze music consumption and listening habits to identify “rising talent”. The company then offers to sign the most promising artists to its own re-imagined record label through a licensing deal whereby they still own their work, rather than a traditional recoding contract. This consists of a 50/50 split of streaming and download revenue and means artists have access to what Amuse claims is large-scale promotion.

Throughout our conversation Farias was very keen to stress that he sees this as a partnership of equals, where the interests of scaling up the success and reach of an artist signed by Amuse are equally aligned. The type of value-add that the Amuse team will bring will vary depending on artist and what they need most, but will include things like public relations, marketing, branding, and having a more direct line to the online distributors it partners with. Farias didn’t rule out more traditional A&R services either, such as help with recording or preparing an artist for follow-up releases.

Meanwhile, I’m told Amuse’s board of directors includes Edgar Berger, former Chairman and CEO of Sony Music International, and Jörg Mohaupt, former Warner Music Group board member. Gordon Rubenstein, Managing Partner, Raine Ventures, is also joining as a board observer.

Dharmash Mistry, General Partner at Lakestar, says that the Amuse team have “reimagined every step of the A&R process from inverting the commercial model to be artist-friendly and discovering new musicians to changing how individual songs are marketed”. He is also talking up Amuse’s early success in Sweden — I understand the startup has already signed licensing deals with 40 or more artists — and says the investment will help the company roll out the model across the U.S. and Europe. To that end, Farias tells me Amuse is opening an office in L.A.

Quit Genius, the YC-backed app that helps users quit smoking, has today announced the close of an additional $1.1 million, bringing their seed round to a cool $2 million. Village Global VC, Pioneer Fund, Arab Angel VC, Max Mullen of Instacart, Olivia Teich of Dropbox, Paul Rosania of Slack, Ariel Polar of Strava, Eric Reis, David Langley of Zesty, Juha Paananen of NonStop Games, and Junaid Bajwa of Merck & Co participated in the round, among others.

Quit Genius was built by doctors — Yusuf Sherwani (co-founder and CEO), Maroof Ahmed (co-founder and COO), and Sarim Siddiqui (co-founder and head of product) — who met on the first day of medical school. They saw the terrible effects of smoking on patients’ health but didn’t see doctors giving those patients a clear path to quit smoking.

So the team started building out Quit Genius, which uses cognitive behavioral therapy to change a user’s behavior.

“CBT breaks down situations into three areas: your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors,” Ahmed told TechCrunch in February. “What you think and feel can affect how you behave. CBT focuses on replacing any negative thoughts and feelings you may have that trigger you to smoke, with healthier and more positive thoughts that will help you to quit smoking.”

Quit Genius uses CBT to take smokers through stages of quitting, using a number of different types of content, from audio sessions to animated videos to interactive exercises to help people think differently about destructive addictions.

Since launch, the company has introduced new ‘packs’ for other addictive behaviors such as drinking alcohol. Packs aren’t quite as comprehensive as the Quit Genius program around quitting smoking, but they do offer troves of additional content around other addictions.

The company already has packs for alcohol, stress, motivation, and health, giving users extra content around the issue they’re dealing with most. Alcohol felt natural, according to Ahmed, because alcohol is such a trigger for many smokers, and one of the issues they dealt with most in their quest to quit.

Soon, Quit Genius has plans to launch packs around pregnancy (for women who are smoking when they become pregnant and want to quit), weight management, social pressure to smoke, and self esteem.

Since launch Quit Genius has grown to 300,000 registered users, with over 20,000 people officially smoke-free in the app (which Quit Genius defines as having not smoked for over 28 days). The company’s internal goal is to get to 100,000 smoke-free users by the end of the year, and will track their progress publicly on the website.

While consumers are the primary focus of the company, there is also a growing opportunity for Quit Genius to start working with big-name employers around well-being and health. Healthy employees save the company money and are more productive, and Quit Genius thinks it can not only help employees get healthier but give employers a way to track that progress. In fact, Quit Genius has already signed on a tech giant as a customer, but wouldn’t disclose which one.

Given that the company was founded by doctors, it comes as no surprise that the Quit Genius team is participating in scientific research papers around their process. One paper, published by JMIR mHealth, found that Quit Genius outperformed the NHS Smoke-free app. An upcoming paper, which will be published in the next few weeks, found that Quit Genius yielded a 36 percent quit rate among participants, with a 59.6 percent reduction in cigarettes among participants.

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In March, the female-led media company and newsletter provider theSkimm reported it was raising a $12 million Series C from Google Ventures and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, along with several existing investors. Today, the company is confirming its Series C round has closed with a number of new, mostly female investors joining — including big names like Shonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks.

Variety was the first to report the news of the new investors.

The Series C’s additional investors include former TV journalist Willow Bay, now dean at the USC Anneberg School for Communication and Journalism; Jesse Draper of Halogen Ventures; Shonda Rhimes; founder and CEO of GingerBread Capital, Linnea Roberts; CEO of ELY Capital, Hope Taitz; as well as the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.; and Michael Karsch of Juice Press.

Earlier Series C investors included GV (formerly Google Ventures); Spanx founder Sara Blakely; plus former lead investors 21st Century Fox, RRE Ventures and Homebrew Ventures.

TheSkimm began its life as an email newsletter, founded by former TV news producers Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg. The newsletter targets millennial women who want an easy way to keep up with the key news of the day. What makes the product so appealing is how it’s written in a conversational tone, making it accessible to a wide audience who often finds reading the news a dreary but necessary chore. Mixed in with its highlights from key U.S., political and international news are samplings of stories from pop culture and the entertainment industry, which gives the newsletter a bit of a palate cleanser — something that’s much appreciated these days.

That newsletter has now grown to around 7 million subscribers, the company says. (This is the same number it reported in March.)

The company has also expanded to other products since its launch, including a $2.99 per month subscription-based app for keeping up with upcoming news and televised events, a podcast, as well as original videos for YouTube and Facebook Watch via its production arm, Skimm Studios.

Its video offerings include Skimm’d with…” and “Get Off the Couch” for Facebook, and digital series “Sip n’ Skimm,” which landed an interview with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, followed by a discussion with House Speaker Paul Ryan assessing the proposed GOP tax plan.

Meanwhile, theSkimm’s podcast, “Skimm’d from The Couch,” reached No. 1 on Apple Podcasts hours after its launch.

The company generates revenue from a variety of sources, including its app subscriptions, native ads, affiliate, content licensing and distribution, theSkimm notes in an announcement. The company is not offering revenue details, however.

“As a female led and founded company, we are excited to have the opportunity to bring such an impressive and dynamic group of female investors into theSkimm fold,” co-founders and co-CEOs Zakin and Weisberg, said in a statement. “With a majority of our audience being female, it’s vital to the success of our business to involve women at every single level, and that includes our investors. With their added perspective and resources, we look forward to this next chapter in our company’s history.”

Banks added she had a personal appreciation for the product, in addition to her desire to support female entrepreneurs.

“Going from one business meeting, to the next studio set, and as a new mama, it’s more difficult than ever to stay up to date on the day’s headlines,” the media mogul said. “theSkimm created a media platform that works seamlessly with on-the-go lifestyles. As a fervent supporter of trailblazing female-led businesses, I am thrilled to be a part of the next phase of theSkimm’s development,” Banks said.

The company didn’t offer many specifics in terms of how it plans to utilize the additional capital, but told us that it plans to “continue evolving the brand” and grow its product offerings — both premium and free. One of its plans involves expanding its No Excuses political-engagement campaign, reports Variety, which registered 110,000 U.S. voters.

New York-based theSkimm has 72 full-time employees and has raised $29 million to date.

Fueled by last year’s greed-inducing visions of a cryptocurrency boom and a stock market largely untethered from classical economics, TradingView, a developer of social networking and data analysis tools for financial markets, has raised millions in new venture funding.

The New York-based company just scored $37 million in funding led by the growth-stage investment firm Insight Venture Partners .

TradingView has developed a proprietary, JavaScript-based programming language called PineScript, which lets anyone develop their own customized financial analysis tools. The company “freemium” software as a service model that lets most users connect and exchange trading tips and tricks for free, but begins charging when customers want access to more charts, data and real-time server-side alerts.

There are three payment plans beginning at $15, with a mid-tier at $30 and a high-end $60 per-month premium option.

The company had previously boosted its growth by offering its charting software for free to partner websites like SeekingAlpha, Bitfinex and the Nasdaq. That strategy helped it grow to 8 million monthly active users with around 61 percent coming from direct traffic as of March of this year.

These days the company derives nearly 75 percent of its revenue from those monthly subscription plans to individual traders. TradingView’s executives think the company still has an opportunity to expand its footprint among those retail investors, but it’s also planning to make a push to serve more institutional clients with its toolkit.

For the past seven years the company has enjoyed consistent growth, according to TradingView co-founder and chief operations officer, Stan Bokov.

For Paul Szurek, a vice-president at Insight Venture Partners, the investment in TradingView is building off of broad consumer interest in amateur speculative trading. Looking at RobinHood, Bux and eToro as gateways for new investors who eventually move on to more sophisticated tools, Szurek said that TradingView was often their next step into market investing.

“The rise of cryptocurrencies… and trading those assets… has flywheeled into a broader interest in investing across asset classes,” Szurek said.

While TradingView was never crypto-focused, according to Bokov, the company was supportive from the beginning and it’s been a boon to the broader business. “They came for crypto. They stayed for the other stuff,” Bokov said.

And crypto might just be the gateway drug for younger speculative traders to start investing in financial markets more broadly, according to Szurek. “October to January, during the real core of the crypto boom here, there were a lot of users coming in starting out researching that asset class broadly. Eighty percent move on to research other asset classes,” he said. “As TradingView kind of pushed through the [first quarter], trends in growth really diverged from what we were seeing in purely crypto-focused business and that’s a testament to users leveraging this one-stop-shop component of the platform.”

Additional investors in the new TradingView include DRW Venture Capital and Jump Capital. The company was a graduate of the 2013 Techstars Chicago batch and was seeded by Irish Angels, Techstars, iTech Capital and undisclosed angel investors.

“TradingView was built for non-professional traders, but its accessible trading tools and powerful-yet-intuitive charting capabilities have attracted the attention of institutional investors,” said Kimberly Trautmann, head of DRW Venture Capital, in a statement. “As an investor, we are excited about the diverse cross section of the industry that TradingView has reached and its rapid growth. As a proprietary trading firm on an institutional level, we’re looking forward to leveraging the platform and contributing to its further development.”

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

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U.K.-based security researcher Robert Wiggins has found two exposed TeenSafe servers, leaking the passwords and information of some users of the monitoring service.

TeenSafe is meant to protect teenagers by letting their parents monitor their texts, phone calls, web history, location and app downloads. The breach was first reported by ZDNet.

According to the report, TeenSafe left two of their servers, which were hosted on AWS, exposed and viewable by anyone. Moreover, the database included information such as the parent’s email address, child’s Apple ID email address, device name, device unique identifier and plaintext passwords for the teenager’s Apple ID.

So… just about everything.

TeenSafe requires that teenagers abstain from using two-factor authentication so parents can keep an eye on their activity, making those teenagers even more vulnerable to malicious actors now that their personal information has been exposed.

TeenSafe claims on its website that it encrypts data so that it wouldn’t be accessible in the case of the breach.

According to ZDNet, the server held at least 10,200 records from the past three months containing customer data. The publication also included that some of those records were duplicates and that one of the servers appeared to store test data.

That said, it’s unclear if there are other leaky servers with exposed data yet to be discovered.

TeenSafe says it has more than 1 million parents using the platform.

“We have taken action to close one of our servers to the public and begun alerting customers that could potentially be impacted,” a TeenSafe spokesperson told ZDNet on Sunday.

We reached out directly to TeenSafe and will update the post if/when we hear back.