Founded in 2010 as an online loyalty card service, Punchh has since grown into a marketing platform serving more than 115 restaurant chains, including Pizza Hut and Quiznos. Now it’s raised a $20 million Series B to expand into more retail verticals and increase the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in its cloud software. The funding was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from returning investor Cervin Ventures.

Along with its angel and Series A financing, this brings Punchh’s total funding so far to about $31 million. The startup says its goal is to give brick-and-mortar stores the same level of data analytics as e-commerce giants like Amazon.

Punchh’s platform enables restaurants to digitize their customer loyalty programs and complements that with tools like Punchh Acquire, which is designed to help businesses turn casual customers into regulars by promoting offers through multiple channels, including email, SMS, social media, Apple Pay and eClub.

The company currently has 145 employees and is based in San Mateo, California, with offices in Austin, Texas and Delhi. This is Punchh’s first funding announcement in three years and the startup’s largest round of financing by far (it raised $9.5 million Series A in 2015).

Co-founder and chief executive officer Shyam Rao says the time was right for Punchh to raise again because it already serves many of the biggest restaurant chains, with 34,000 locations between them, and wanted to tap into demand from retailers in other verticals.

Punchh is now focusing on convenience stores, gas stations and health and beauty brands (clients already include Fantastic Sams hair salons and TruFusion, a chain of fitness studios). The company competes with other digital loyalty and marketing platforms like Stamp Me, LoyalZoo and Stocard. Rao says Punchh’s ability to create campaigns that target a very specific audience sets it apart from rivals. Punchh’s algorithms pulls together data from several sources, including event calendars, weather, local demographics and the purchasing history of individual customers, for what it describes as “micro-moment marketing.”

For example, if cold weather is expected over a holiday weekend, it might send offers for a discounted hot soup and tea set to mothers between the ages of 30 to 55. Punchh claims it increases spending at its customers’ restaurants by 10% to 20%.

“Imagine trying to manage that process of using mountains of data to build customer relationships and tailor every experience, at scale across hundreds of locations. That’s what Punchh does,” says Rao.

In a statement, Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures managing director said “Punchh is already a global leader in digital marketing solutions for restaurants, which alone would be a fantastic reason to invest in the company, but the scope of their technology goes far beyond just restaurants and encompasses all brick-and-mortar stores with a POS.”

HelpSelf is a AI-assisted legal app that helps you deal with simple issues. Need protection against debt collectors? Need an expungement? Want to deal with domestic violence? This robot can help.

The project is an “automated legal technology company” that automates simple legal procedures. They currently work in the above areas but are moving into housing, family law, certain immigration tasks, and employment law, said Dorna Moini, co-founder of the project.

“We self-funded from the start and are completely bootstrapped. We are making a profit through licensing fees for our document automation platform,” she said. “We use this document automation platform to create all of our new products and license it to lawyers to fund the tools we create. We just brought on another engineer and may be looking for funding in the next few months so we can expand more quickly.”

Moini has a background in trial litigation and worked for BigLaw and Sheppard Mullin. She also worked on civil rights issues in Africa including drafting legislation. Co-founder Michael Joseph has a background in engineering and information security.

The company sells its services to consumers and other lawyers.

“We built this all on our Document Automation Bot, which is available to any lawyer who wants to create similar ‘Turbo-Tax-like’ workflows, either just to streamline their internal work or to contribute to the library of legal tools available to the public,” she said.

“Honestly, there aren’t enough people in this field, especially those creating doc automation tools for access to justice. Apps like DoNotPay have gotten a lot of press in this area for their parking ticket app. Our services are more extensive and we provide lawyers with the tools to create their own version of DoNotPay for any area of law.”

The pair see their niche is vitally important. Because they focus on issues that other services ignore, they can solve real problems and get real justice for people. Competitors, said Moini, “serve small businesses and higher net worth individuals with needs like wills, trusts, and employment agreements.”

“I started HelpSelf because I saw the disparity between the technology available to my legal clients at my law firm and that available to my pro bono clients,” she said. “At the same time, the Trump administration had proposed cutting funding to legal aid to zero from about $400 million. I worked with domestic violence victims and asylum applicants, and set out to build tools that would streamline the process, allowing one lawyer to serve more clients pro bono and allowing individuals to take control of their own legal needs through tech.”

Photo by Ian Roseboro on Unsplash

Dutch startup Revue, which is now positioning itself as an “editorial newsletter platform,” is adding the option to charge subscribers. This means that newsletters can be monetized directly, rather than relying on sponsorship or ads.

The new feature requires signing up for a Stripe account, which you connect to Revue . You then write a description of why people should become a paying member and set a monthly fee.

Initially, Revue is encouraging its newsletter publishers to run both a free and paid version simultaneously so that subscribers can choose to become a paying member or stay at just the free version of the newsletter.

“Over the last three years we’ve been building Revue to help people create their editorial newsletters and reach their audience in a meaningful way,” explains co-founder and CEO Martijn de Kuijper.

“In those three years we’ve seen writers and publishers moving away from purely ad-based business models, so we wanted to help them monetize their newsletters. Since there’s no all-in-one solution out there, we believed it was the right time to introduce this”.

Kuijper gave me a heads-up on the paid subscriptions feature a few months before it was released, since I run my own newsletter called ‘Steve’s ITK’ on the Revue platform, but for the time being I’ve declined to begin charging for access. That’s partly because my subscriber count is still quite modest but also my publishing schedule is a little erratic to warrant monetization, even if writing a decent newsletter takes quite a lot of time.

However, the ability to charge subscribers is definitely an option that will appeal to other journalists and editorial publishers more generally who are increasingly being targeted by the startup.

“We see more and more journalists on our platform, and their publishers are increasingly interested in getting on our new Publisher plan,” adds de Kuijper. “[It] allows publishers to manage multiple newsletters, team members, and roles. It also has a built-in approval workflow that lets editorial teams work together on those newsletters”.

Criminal records, driving records, employment verifications. Companies that use on-demand employees need to know that all the boxes have been checked before they send workers into the world on their behalf, and they often need those boxes checked quickly.

A growing number of them use Checkr, a San Francisco-based company that says it currently runs one million background checks per month for more than 10,000 customers, including, most newly, the car-share company Lyft, the services marketplace Thumbtack, and eyewear seller Warby Parker.

Investors are betting many more customers will come aboard, too. This morning, Checkr is announcing $100 million in Series C funding led by T. Rowe Price, which was joined by earlier backers Accel and Y Combinator.

The round brings the company’s total funding to roughly $150 million altogether, which is a lot of capital in not a lot of time. Yet Checkr is very well-positioned considering the changing nature of work. The company was born when software engineers Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon worked together at same-day delivery service startup Deliv and together eyed the chance to build a faster, more efficient background check. The number of flexible workers has only exploded in the four years since.

So-called alternative employment arrangements, in the parlance of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including gig economy jobs, have grown from representing 10.1 percent of U.S. employees in 2005 to 15.8 percent of employees in 2015. And that percentage looks to rise further still as more digital platforms provide direct connections between people needing a service and workers willing to provide it.

Meanwhile, Checkr, which has been capitalizing on this race for talent, has its sights on much more than the on-demand workforce, says Yanisse, who is Checkr’s CEO. While the 180-person company counts Uber, Instacart, and GrubHub among its base of customers, Checkr is also actively expanding outside of the tech and gig economy, he says. It recently began working with the staffing giant Adecco, for example, as well as the major insurer Allstate.

At present, all of these customers pay Checkr per background check. That may change over time, however, particularly if the company plans to go public eventually, which Yanisse suggests is the case. (Public shareholders, like private shareholders, love recurring revenue.)

“Right now, our pricing model for customers is pay-per-applicant,” says Yanisse. “But we have a whole suite of SaaS products and tools” — including an interesting new tool designed to help hiring managers eradicate their unwitting hiring biases — “so we’re becoming more like a SaaS” business.

While things are ticking along nicely, every startup has its challenges. In Checkr’s case, one of these would seem to be those high-profile cases where background checks are painted as far from foolproof. One situation that springs to mind is the individual who began driving for Uber last year, six months before intentionally plowing into a busy bike path in New York. Indeed, though Checkr claims that it can tear through a lot of information within 24 hours — including education verification, reference checks, drug screening — we wonder if it isn’t so fast that it misses red flags.

Yanisse doesn’t think so. “Overall background checks aren’t a silver bullet,” he says. “Our job is to make the process faster, more efficient, more accurate, and more fair. But past information doesn’t guarantee future performance,” he adds. “This isn’t ‘Minority Report.'”

We also ask Yanisse about Checkr’s revenue. Often, a financing round of the size that Checkr is announcing today suggests a revenue run rate of $100 million or so. Yanisse declines to say, telling us Checkr doesn’t share revenue or its valuation publicly. “It’s still a bit early,” he says. “There’s this obsession with metrics in Silicon Valley, and we just want to make sure we’re focused on the right things.”

But, he adds, “you’re in the ballpark.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Visa as a customer.

Zaius, a customer data company working with consumer brands like Tea Forte and Burt’s Bees Baby, has raised $30 million in Series B funding.

CEO Mark Gally said that while business-to-business marketing revolves around the CRM, there’s a “hodgepodge” on the consumer marketing side. More specifically, he said consumer marketers have a “swivel chair problem” where they have might have a customer data platform that doesn’t actually allow marketers to do the necessary personalization across channels, or a marketing automation product that isn’t as “robust” when it comes to customer data.

“We’ve literally smashed these two systems together,” Gally said. (I might quibble with his use of “literally” if it wasn’t such a fun image.)

So for example, with Zaius (which is named after the Planet of the Apes character, who was the keeper of truth for the apes), a clothing brand would have access to key data about a customer, like the fact that they’re more interested in early access than discounts, across devices and communications channels. They could then tailor their messages accordingly.

Gally said that for some customers, Zaius can deliver a 33 percent improvement in revenue per message and, by allowing them to coordinate campaigns across channels, grow their reach by up to 50 percent.

Jurgen Nebelung, vice president of e-commerce and digital at Tea Forte, made a similar point in the funding announcement, saying that using other marketing software resulted in “siloed data and a disconnected customer experience”: “Zaius brought our data into one place, delivering a complete view of how shoppers are engaging with our brand whether it’s on web, mobile or email.”

Zaius has now raised $50.8 million in total funding. The new round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from previous investors Matrix Partners, Underscore VC and Leaders Fund. Insight Managing Director Nikitas Koutoupes is joining the company’s board of directors.

“It’s no secret that B2C marketers are under increased pressure as their role in business continues to evolve, and they need tools of their own to help drive results,” said Insight principal Teddie Wardi in an emailed statement. “Through a single platform, Zaius provides B2C marketers a complete view of their customers as they move through the purchase process, paired with campaign execution tools to engage those customers with personalized communications across channels.”

Among other things, Gally said the new funding will allow the company expand its developer ecosystem and integrate with other marketing tools.

“What’s key is not forcing a rip-and-replace,” he said. “We’re upgrading their overall systems … Not only unifying the ecosystem, but now powering the ecosystem, is a huge opportunity where we will continue to put a focus.”

When Luminar came out of stealth last year with its built-from-scratch lidar system, it seemed to beat established players like Velodyne at their own game — but at great expense and with no capability to build at scale. After the tech proved itself on the road, however, Luminar got to work making its device better, cheaper, and able to be assembled in minutes rather than hours.

“This year for us is all about scale. Last year it took a whole day to build each unit — they were being hand assembled by optics PhDs,” said Luminar’s wunderkind founder Austin Russell. “Now we’ve got a 136,000 square foot manufacturing center and we’re down to 8 minutes a unit.”

Lest you think the company has sacrificed quality for quantity, be it known that the production unit is about 30 percent lighter and more power efficient, can see a bit further (250 meters vs 200), and detect objects with lower reflectivity (think people wearing black clothes in the dark).

The secret — to just about the whole operation, really — is the sensor. Luminar’s lidar systems, like all others, fire out a beam of light and essentially time its return. That means you need a photosensitive surface that can discern just a handful of photons.

Most photosensors, like those found in digital cameras and in other lidar systems, use a silicon-based photodetector. Silicon is well-understood, cheap, and the fabrication processes are mature.

Luminar, however, decided to start from the ground up with its system, using an alloy called indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs. An InGaAs-based photodetector works at a different frequency of light (1,550nm rather than ~900) and is far more efficient at capturing it. (Some physics here.)

The more light you’ve got, the better your sensor — that’s usually the rule. And so it is here; Luminar’s InGaAs sensor and a single laser emitter produced images tangibly superior to devices of a similar size and power draw, but with fewer moving parts.

The problem is that indium gallium arsenide is like the Dom Perignon of sensor substrates. It’s expensive as hell and designing for it is a highly specialized field. Luminar only got away with it by minimizing the amount of InGaAs used: only a tiny sliver of it is used where it’s needed, and they engineered around that rather than use the arrays of photodetectors found in many other lidar products. (This restriction goes hand in glove with the “fewer moving parts” and single laser method.)

Last year Luminar was working with a company called Black Forest Engineering to design these chips, and finding their paths inextricably linked (unless someone in the office wanted to volunteer to build InGaAs ASICs), Luminar bought them. The 30 employees at Black Forest, combined with the 200 hired since coming out of stealth, brings the company to 350 total.

By bringing the designers in house and building their own custom versions of not just the photodetector but also the various chips needed to parse and pass on the signals, they brought the cost of the receiver down from tens of thousands of dollars to… three dollars.

“We’ve been able to get rid of these expensive processing chips for timing and stuff,” said Russell. “We build our own ASIC. We only take like a speck of InGaAs and put it onto the chip. And we custom fab the chips.”

“This is something people have assumed there was no way you could ever scale it for production fleets,” he continued. “Well, it turns out it doesn’t actually have to be expensive!”

Sure — all it took was a bunch of geniuses, five years, and a seven-figure budget (and I’d be surprised if the $36M in seed funding was all they had to work with). But let’s not quibble.

It’s all being done with a view to the long road ahead, though. Last year the company demonstrated that its systems not only worked, but worked well, even if there were only a few dozen of them at first. And they could get away with it, since as Russell put it, “What everyone has been building out so far has been essentially an autonomous test fleet. But now everyone is looking into building an actual, solidified hardware platform that can scale to real world deployment.”

Some companies took a leap of faith, like Toyota and a couple other unnamed companies, even though it might have meant temporary setbacks.

“It’s a very high barrier to entry, but also a very high barrier to exit,” Russell pointed out. “Some of our partners, they’ve had to throw out tens of thousands of miles of data and redo a huge portion of their software stack to move over to our sensor. But they knew they had to do it eventually. It’s like ripping off the band-aid.”

We’ll soon see how the industry progresses — with steady improvement but also intense anxiety and scrutiny following the fatal crash of an Uber autonomous car, it’s difficult to speculate on the near future. But Luminar seems to be looking further down the road.

Billie, a New York-based startup that wants to fight the “pink tax” on goods marketed to women, announced today that it has closed a $6 million seed round. The funding was led by Silverton Partners, with participation from returning investors including Female Founders Fund and Lakehouse Ventures, and will be used to grow Billie’s team and increase inventory.

Launched in November by co-founders Georgina Gooley and Jason Bravman, Billie currently offers subscriptions for razors and other body products like shaving cream, body wash and lotion. The two told TechCrunch in an email that Billie was created because “shaving companies have traditionally been created for men and women have largely been an afterthought in this category.”

While many services and products aimed at women, including clothing, haircuts and essential toiletries, are often more expensive than similar (or even near-identical) goods marketed to men, razors and dry cleaning are “the two worst offenders,” said Gooley and Bravman. The price difference between razors is especially egregious because most use blades made by the same types of machines.

But many women already save money by buying “men’s” razors or using the Dollar Shave Club, the popular low-priced razor subscription service acquired by Unilever in 2016 for a reported $1 billion, so what does Billie offer them?

The startup’s founders say its razors, which were designed specifically for the company, shave larger areas more comfortably then razors designed just for facial hair, but still cost about the same as men’s razor subscriptions. Billie’s blade cartridges have rounded edges to fit in areas like armpits and are encased in shaving soap since shaving cream rinses off too quickly in the shower. There is also more space between each cartridge’s five blades to keep hair and lather from gunking it up. In addition to the Dollar Shave Club, Billie is up against Oui Shave, another women’s shaving product startup. Billie’s founders say one of its main differentiators will be offering much lower prices than its rivals.

In a prepared statement, Silverton Partners general partner Mike Dodd, who is joining Billie’s board, said the startup is “standing in front of a huge untapped market driven by two outstanding founders who have created a brand that speaks perfectly to this opportunity.”

Cluno, a startup operating out of Munich that offers what it calls a “car subscription” service, has raised €7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Acton Capital Partners, with participation from previous investor Atlantic Labs.

Founded in 2017 by the same team behind easyautosale, which exited to Autoscout24 in 2015, Cluno lets you subscribe to a car for a fixed and all-inclusive monthly fee as an alternative to car ownership or a more restrictive lease. It’s a similar proposition to Drover, the London startup that raised £5.5 million ‘seed’ funding last month.

“Our vision is to give people smarter access to unrestricted, personalised mobility,” says Cluno co-founder Nico Polleti. “We still see a lot of people who want to have their car in front of their home every day. But in a smarter way than today! Carsharing is not the answer for the mass market. That’s why car subscription or smart ownership solutions will completely change the way people get access to everyday mobility”.

The Cluno service works as follows: You visit the Cluno website and choose the vehicle you want to subscribe to for a minimum period of six months. You then pay a setup fee, and a fixed monthly fee dependent on the model you have chosen, which covers the vehicle, insurance, breakdown cover, tax, and maintenance. The idea is that the only cost you are left with is fuel. You are also free to upgrade or downgrade your car after six months or can pause/cancel the subscription altogether.

“Why do customers have to buy, finance or lease a car for several years?” asks Polleti rhetorically. “People’s lives and needs change and so should their cars. We take care of the whole process… Our customers subscribe and get a car “ready-to-drive” and home delivered”.

To that end, Polleti cites the startup’s main competition as “buying, financing or leasing a car,” and says that typical Cluno customers have usually considered traditional ways of accessing a car. “Then they find us and see the huge advantage of flexibility and an all-inclusive rate. I think, that’s the big difference and main reason to choose a Cluno car,” he says.

Dr. Christoph Braun, Managing Partner at Acton Capital, echoes this sentiment, noting that the notion of mobility is changing, and argues that technologies such as electric vehicles or self-driving cars will no longer be bought or leased in the traditional way.

“In just a few months, Cluno has created an attractive car subscription model that makes these new technologies easily accessible. While traditional leasing offerings are characterised by rigid contracts and lack of transparency, Cluno relies on a flexible model, digital-first customer experience with transparent all-inclusive pricing,” he says.

If you’ve ever gone camping and found yourself thinking it kind of sucks, likely because you’re too close to other campers, you might be interested to learn about Tentrr, a three-year-old, 47-person company that’s promising to make it “dirt simple” to enjoy the great outdoors. How: by striking deals with private landowners who are willing to host semi-permanent campsites on their property.

What do these look like? Picture elevated decks with Adirondack chairs, canvas expedition tents, wood picnic tables and sun showers, not to mention a fire pit, lanterns, dry food storage, cookware, a camping toilet and air mattresses that, courtesy of most hosts, will come with fresh linens.

Venture capitalists certainly appreciate the startup’s pitch. Tentrr — founded by one-time investment banker turned former NYSE managing director Michael D’Agostino — has raised $13 million to date, including a newly closed $8 million Series A round led by West, a San Francisco-based venture studio that both funds startups and helps them market their goods and services.

No doubt the investors are looking at the overall market, whose numbers are compelling. According to one trade association, the outdoor recreation industry represents an $887 billion opportunity, with Americans shelling out $24 billion annually on campsites alone.

Still, it’s easy to wonder how scalable the company will be. Tentrr had 100 campsites up and running in the Northeastern U.S. as of the end of last year. D’Agostino expects it will have 1,000 sites by year-end, including on the West Coast, where it will begin installing camps this summer. But this assumes that Tentrr can convince enough families with sufficiently large properties that partnering with the company is worthwhile.

D’Agostino says its landowner partners need to have 15 acres at least and that the average property on the platform currently is much larger than that. He also says these property owners keep 80 percent of whatever they decide to charge campers to stay on their grounds.

For what it’s worth, Tentrr doesn’t seem to have much in the way of direct competition if you exclude state campgrounds. Venture-backed Hipcamp, for example, which raised a small amount of seed funding back in 2014, partners with private landowners to help arrange camping experiences, but it mostly acts as a search engine. A growing number of RV-focused startups have also sprung up, including Outdoorsy. But their customers are largely looking for adventure on the road, not in a secluded field.

There’s always industry giant Airbnb to worry about. But Airbnb, whose offerings include campsites, emphasizes unique experiences. Tentrr is largely about standardizing its process in order to leave fewer questions — and less doubt — about what to expect. (D’Agostino says that roughly 40 percent of Tentrr customers are first-time campers.)

We know that if the service makes it way to California, we’re likely to try it, having suffered through some fairly crummy camping experiences. If you’re also interested in learning more, you might check out our conversation with D’Agostino, edited for length. We chatted yesterday.

TC: You were a banker, then you traveled around the country and world, trying to convince companies that they should list on the NYSE instead of Nasdaq. How did this company come to pass?

MD: When I was a little kid, we’d sometimes stay at a family friend’s farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. I assumed that every kid had a Litchfield farm where they could camp, which isn’t the case obviously. Meanwhile, working 100 hours a week as an investment banker, it just became harder and harder to get out of the city and have great experiences.

After a couple of disastrous camping trips at noisy, dirty campgrounds with my girlfriend and now wife, Eloise, we just realized the idea [of camping as it’s known today] is stupid. It’s taking a bunch of people who are living on top of each other in a city and moving them to a campground where they’re living on top of each other in flimsy tents.

The legacy campground industry hasn’t changed since the Civil War. It’s run by the government — which I’m happy to compete with all day long. And these are just terrible businesspeople. We want to wipe away this infrastructure by distributing it among rural landowners.

TC: So you’re building these semi-permanent camping sites. How standardized is the pricing?

MD: Pricing is variable and set by the landowner who keeps 80 percent of that fee. We keep 20 percent; we also charge a 15 percent fee on top of that nightly rate. Right now, the average price per night is $140, but we’re introducing more features for [hosts], including minimum-night stays, and [surge] pricing if they have demand for a bunch of bookings at the same time.

They can also offer extra amenities and experiences that will allow you to have a personalized experience. For example, landowners, or “camp keepers” as we call them, can offer extra bundles of wood or luxury bedding or horseback riding or skeet shooting. It’s really only limited by the imagination. We’ll also soon allow third parties to provide curated activities so that when you log on to our app, you can book a whitewater rafting trip or reservations at the best farm-to-table restaurant nearby.

TC: What happens if something goes wrong? Who insures what?

MD: Every campsite is covered by a $2 million commercial insurance policy. It’s a benefit not just in terms of liability but in making people feel more comfortable during these stays — both the hosts and guests.

TC: Where are you building these sites, exactly, and how long do you estimate that they will last?

MD: We build them ourselves, right now in places from southern Maine to eastern Pennsylvania.

We get our tents from a family company in Colorado that’s been around for 90 years and that still receives requests to repair tents they’d built 30 years ago [meaning they’re durable]. We also use pressure-treated lumber and marine-grade plywood, so we expect they’ll last for 10 to 20 years.

TC: You’re having to convince people to let strangers onto their properties, sprawling as they may be. What does that sales process look like?

MD: It used to look like me putting 45,000 miles on my Jeep Cherokee and explaining to families why they should have a Tentrr campsite in their hayfields. [Laughs.] Today, direct mail campaigns work beautifully. [Hosts] are also hearing about us from other [hosts] and we make it easier for them to [apply] to join the platform. You click on a link that says “List my property” and you’re walked through a 20-point checklist, including about accessibility and how secluded a property is. Using that feedback, we know with 90 percent accuracy whether or not a property is appropriate. If we think it is, we’ll send out a scout.

TC: Are there sometimes more than one campsite on a property?

MD: No, and we ensure the sites are secluded from neighbors, as well as the landowners, as well as other possible distractions.

TC: What does the clean-up process involve?

MD: It’s relatively maintenance free. There’s no maid service. No keys. No worries about someone stealing silverware. Homeowners have to make sure there are no beer cans left behind, but we place a high priority on land stewardship and emphasize a leave-no-trace approach when it comes to our guests.

Who are you? That’s both an existential question, and also a very practical administrative concern. Today, identity is often exchanged through the use of government ID cards and official paperwork, but what happens when someone loses that paperwork or it is destroyed? Or, as is often the case in many countries around the world, a citizen never received the paperwork to begin with?

Element wants to completely change the way banks, hospitals, and other service providers work with their customers by providing a platform for decentralized biometric identity. The company’s software runs on any mobile device, and using the device’s camera, it can identify a user’s face, palm, and fingerprints to create a verified match. Users have options on which modality they want to use.

Biometric identification is a tough machine learning application, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Element, which was formed in 2012, was co-founded by Adam Perold, a Stanford-educated product designer, and Yann LeCun, a famed machine learning researcher. LeCun was the progenitor of convolution neural nets, which today form one of the foundational theories for deep learning AI. He is now chief science advisor for the company, having taken a role as Director of AI Research at Facebook in New York while continuing his professorship at NYU.

Element is announcing a $12 million Series A round, led by PTB Ventures and GDP Ventures, with David Fields of PTB and On Lee of GDP joining the company’s board of directors. Earlier investors of the company included Pandu Sjahrir, Scott Belsky, Box Group, and Recruit Strategic Partners.

While technologies like Apple’s Touch ID and Face ID systems have popularized biometric identity, neither of these were around when Element got started. The early years of the company were devoted to solving critical technical challenges. Wireless connectivity can be limited in many developing countries, which meant that identities had to be local to the device in order to be useful. That also meant that the platform couldn’t be a cloud infrastructure solution, since identity information had to be processed on the device.

Furthermore, given the quality of hardware available, data had to be extremely compressed to be useful, and the machine learning algorithms couldn’t use too much compute power since a low-powered Android device wouldn’t be able to execute an identity match quickly enough to provide a good user experience.

That’s where LeCun’s deep expertise in neural nets, and particularly in areas like optical character recognition, came in handy. The Element team managed to reduce the amount of data required to store the identity of a single person down to about two kilobytes, according to the company.

The next challenge the company faced in building out its platform was security. Identity data, particularly biometrics, is a major security challenge, but it was exacerbated by the fact that devices would often be shared between users. A single device at a bank, for instance, might service thousands of users, all of which need independent, secured data. The company said that these security challenges have been designed into the core of the system.

Ultimately, the company’s platform lives as an SDK behind the mobile apps of its partners. It provides not only the identity layer itself, but also a secure data infrastructure that allows records such as bank accounts and medical files to be connected to the underlying identity.

Element is targeting the developing world, and Perold tole me he spends more than half of his time traveling to Southeast Asia and Africa building partnerships and doing research on how the company’s technology can improve critical social services. Among the company’s signed partnerships is Telekom Indonesia, which as the service provider for 180 million subscribers, is one of the key connections between people and their identity in that fast-growing economy.

Another partnership formed by the company is with the Global Good Fund, a joint venture between Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures. That project works to create better biometric identities for newborns and infants, which is critical for health outcomes. The company is working with icddr,b and the Angkor Hospital for Children in Cambodia to build out the program.

In addition to the lead investors, the company received strategic venture capital investments from Bank BCA (via Central Capital Ventura), Bank BRI, Telkom Indonesia (via MDI Ventures), and Maloekoe Ventures.

Correction: The Global Good Fund is a joint venture with Bill Gates, not the Gates Foundation.

Startup life is full of quick, lateral thinking. “Move fast and break things” is the mantra. However, with the rise of token sales – essentially vehicles for untested startups to raise millions in a few minutes – lots of stuff gets broken and little gets fixed.

Take BCT – the Blockchain Terminal – for example. This frothy project led by Bob Bonomo, a former hedge fund guy turned Blockchain guru, features some interesting breakages.

Yesterday at about 3pm Eastern Time the company’s FAQ – which has since been updated but is still hidden here – read something like this:

While this sort of techno greeking is fine if you’re sending mock-ups back and forth, the token sale had been running since April 1st, a fact that was baffling to me and another reporter. Was this an April Fool’s joke? No, because when I visited the sale’s Telegram room I found a group of happy buyers asking questions about their future tokens.

Ever the reporter, I asked if anyone had seen the terminals and a community manager sent me this:

Interesting… blank screens at a demo event. The other CM, quicker on the draw, sent this:

Fair enough. In fact, crypto needs a product like this to legitimize it with Wall Street. But clearly they were moving so fast that the wheels were falling off.

Finally I did the obvious thing: visit the white paper. There we find that the Terminal is being built in conjunction with FactSet, a venerable research company that has seen all the vicissitudes of financial data. In fact, the paper is a tour-de-force on par with the best of the white papers I’ve seen. But we also discover that the white paper is a draft.

In short, BCT wouldn’t pass the average human investor sniff test but is definitely well on the way to completing its token sale. This is a problem.

BCT is not alone. I’ve spoken to development houses working with founders who barely understand cryptocurrency let alone understand their own token sales. I’ve seen founders’ eyes light up like the Big Bad Wolf eyeing Porky Pig when they talk about all the capital they will unlock. And I spoke to a founder on stage who said he would be very careful with the $80 million they raised for a company designed to raise money for ICOs. Greed is clouding this market in ways that are at once dangerous and comical.

There is precedent for this. In the early days of the Internet and even the frothiest dot-com days you could see the avarice in the eyes of Pets.com and Cisco executives who knew that big money was just around the corner. And we can’t begrudge these founders their excitement. What founder wouldn’t want the sweet feeling of being fully funded for, we presume, the next decade?

I’ve been following token sales with great interest over the past few months for a few reasons. First, I understand the hype cycle. I’ve seen tactics used by token sellers used before by hardware sellers, most notably with flops like the Phantom gaming console and the Notion Ink Adam, and there is a stink that permeates projects that are, at best, half-baked.

I want token sales to thrive as a method to raise capital. I want small startups to be able to turn on a spigot previously available to the well-connected and well-heeled. But the exact opposite seems true. Bankers are moving into a technology space that they little understand while carpetbaggers – lawyers, PR folks, advisors – are working hard to extract cash out of these windfalls. In the end the token sale industry should formalize itself and become as boring as the VC industry. I just hope it survives long enough to get there.

Bloglovin’ has a new name, new funding and a new CEO: Kamiu Lee, who previously served as the company’s vice president of strategy and business development.

It sounds the rebrand and Lee’s promotion are both part of a growing emphasis on the company’s influencer marketing business, where it helps advertisers find influencers who can promote their brands and products. In fact, the new name Activate comes from the company’s existing influencer marketing platform Activate by Bloglovin’, which was built around its acquisition of Sverve two years ago.

“Activate, from a commercial standpoint, is what represents who we are today,” Lee told me.

At the same time, she said the company will continue to support the Bloglovin’ product, which allows readers to find and follow fashion bloggers. The two sides of the business are tied together because it’s “a way for these creators to get discovered, and so it continues to be an audience development tool … for them.”

Lee told me she’s actually worn a number of different hats at Bloglovin’ since joining four years ago as the company’s first monetization-focused hire. With her experience across the company and her current focus on business and strategy, she said it seemed like a “natural step” to take the lead for “the next stage of the company.”

Meanwhile, Bloglovin’s outgoing CEO Giordano Contestabile will remain involved as a board member and advisor.

Lee acknowledged that Activate faces plenty of competition from other influencer marketing companies, but she said its approach is distinguished by the richness of its data (Activate isn’t just scraping public data but also getting direct access to the influencers’ own analytics), as well as its “real care for the content and the influencers.”

“It’s really easy to completely cater to the brands, and to a certain extent, if the dollars are there, the influencers will follow,” Lee said. “But in order to be really sustainable, you need great content, and you need to really understand the influencers.”

She also pointed to the size and breadth of Activate’s influencer network — it’s worked with 75,000 influencers to create 6,500 pieces of content per month over the past 12 months. This allows brands to create campaigns that combine content from, say, a single top tier influencer, 15 mid-tier influencers and 100 micro-influencers.

Activate is also launching a new service called Activate Studio, which supplements its existing self-serve product by supporting brands that don’t have large social media teams of their own, helping them develop and manage their influencer marketing strategy.

On top of its other news, the company has also raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from Northzone.

“Within the marketing and advertising industries, we see the incredible value to be captured by influencer marketing,” said Northzone’s Par Jorgen Parson in a statement. “Activate’s unique relationship and dedication to their influencers and industry-leading expertise make them an obvious front-runner among companies competing in the space.”

Let’s share a bit more about our agenda for TechCrunch’s Tel Aviv event. This year, the event will focus on mobility and everything around it, from autonomous vehicles, to sensors, drones and security.

That’s why I’m incredibly excited to announce two great speakers. Argus Cyber Security co-founder and CEO Ofer Ben Noon and Here Technologies Head of Mobility Liad Itzhak will join us on stage.

By focusing on mobility, we have the opportunity to spend more time talking about the companies making the magic happen behind the scene.

Here Technologies has been around for more than 30 years. But the company is currently going through a sort of renaissance. After flourishing as an independent company and getting acquired by Nokia, the company is now owned by Audi, BMW and Daimler.

In many ways, mapping technology is the new oil. Car manufacturers need to control mapping data to develop self-driving technologies and services. And Liad Itzhak is well aware of that as he was previously working for Waze and Google.

As for Argus Cyber Security, the company is well-positioned to become one of the companies that matter when it comes to security in the mobility industry. Argus has been working with some of the biggest car manufacturers out there to protect their connected vehicles.

Ofer Ben Noon is a cyber security veteran and the co-founder and CEO of Argus. He’s going to talk about the security risks associated with the cars of the future.

These two speakers will have plenty of interesting things to say on June 7 at the TechCrunch Tel Aviv conference.

Buy tickets here and see you at the Tel Aviv Convention Center!