MIT is disassociating itself from Nectome, the Y Combinator-backed startup promising to preserve customers’ brains for the possibility of future digital upload.

Co-founder Robert McIntyre described the procedure as “100 percent fatal” — it involves connecting terminally ill patients to a machine that pumps embalming fluids into their arteries.

The company has collected (refundable) $10,000 payments for a wait list, but its website now carries a note in “Response to recent press,” suggesting that the company would only carry the procedure out after further research:

We believe that clinical human brain preservation has immense potential to benefit humanity, but only if it is developed in the light, with input from medical and neuroscience experts. We believe that rushing to apply vitrification today would be extremely irresponsible and hurt eventual adoption of a validated protocol.

As noted in the MIT Technology Review, MIT has been criticized for potentially giving the company credibility by association — MIT Media Lab professor Edward Boyden was receiving money through a federal grant won by Nectome. (McIntyre and his co-founder Michael McCanna are both MIT graduates.)

Now the Media Lab has released a statement saying that after reviewing “the scientific premises underlying the company’s commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made,” it will “terminate the subcontract between MIT and Nectome in accordance with the terms of their agreement.”

The Media Lab says that the grant involved a research project to “combine aspects of Nectome’s chemistry with the Boyden group’s invention, expansion microscopy, to better visualize mouse brain circuits for basic science and research purposes.” Apparently Prof. Boyden has “no personal affiliation — financial, operational, or contractual — with the company Nectome.”

The statement concludes with a discussion of the science behind Nectome. The Media Lab doesn’t completely rule out the possibility of brain preservation and uploading in the future, but it suggests that the science isn’t solid yet:

Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness.

McIntyre told the MIT Technology Review, “We appreciate the help MIT has given us, understand their choice, and wish them the best.”

With 2018 midterms around the corner, the Democrats are looking for their answer to Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer-backed political data firm that either won the 2016 election or tricked everyone into believing that it did, depending on who’s talking.

To that end, a prominent left-leaning accelerator is out with a new graduating class, just in time to gear up for November. Higher Ground Labs seeks to “supercharge” political startups with progressive causes at heart. The incubator and accelerator’s main cause is notching Democratic wins, from local to federal elections.

The group just announced a class of 13 politics-minded companies offering “innovative solutions” to get Democrats elected. The 13 new companies join 10 companies from Higher Ground’s 2017 class. The chosen startups will each receive around $100,000 each in seed funding, an invitation to Higher Ground’s accelerator bootcamp and proximity to the group’s star-studded advisory board, which boasts a former COO of the Obama Foundation, a former Clinton campaign CTO and current Strava chief product officer, a former FCC chairman, the guys at Crooked Media and the chief technology officer of the DNC, among many other high-profile names. The political accelerator’s investor list features notable names like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Silicon Valley super angel investor Ron Conway.

“Last year, Higher Ground Labs invested in companies and entrepreneurs that provided game-changing technologies in Virginia’s state elections and the Alabama Senate race,” said Ron Klain, chair of the Higher Ground board and former White House aide. “Now, we are more than doubling the size of our portfolio, and will be backing two dozen companies that aim to have a major impact on the 2018 election, up and down the ballot.”

The 2018 class startups include:

5 Calls, an affordable phone-banking platform for everything from school board elections to federal campaigns.

Avalanche, a cognitive science-driven communications company.

CallTime, which aggregates data into comprehensive donor profiles using AI to optimize donor outreach.

Change Research, quick, accurate public opinion polling that cuts costs by as much as 90 percent.

Civic Eagle, a SaaS platform for policy advocacy campaigns.

Factba.se, a “transparency engine” that collects “every word spoken” by a political opponent to allow for discrepancies and shifts to be identified quickly.

GiveMini, a micro-donation tool that lets donors round up to the nearest dollar.

GrowProgress, a tool that predicts audience personality for message targeting.

Humanize, “a platform that democratizes the tools of advertising” to give regular people access to ad strategies that would normally be price prohibitive.

New Mode, engagement tools that highlight supporters’ stories.

Same Side, a platform to activate supporters who are “already doing cool things” in music, art and culture.

Swayable, a data science platform that enables rapid-response digital campaigns and examines “which kinds of people respond to which content.”

Voter Protection Partners, a group that works with campaigns to “manage voter protection teams and track, analyze, and respond to voting incidents and election administration problems.”

Projects like Higher Ground are fueling the kind of political technology operations that Democrats hope can translate into wins in 2018 and beyond. While national post-mortems on the 2016 election remain obsessed with the right’s deep pocketed big data mythos, plenty of folks in tech’s left-leaning epicenters believe that Democrats can do better with the right tools.

More than ten years ago, betaworks launched to foster an ecosystem of startups focused on the intersection of media and consumer behavior. While the mission hasn’t changed, the structure has seen some tweaks. The company has introduced its own venture arm, led by Matt Hartman, as well as the more recent launch of betaworks Studios.

But nestled gently between the two are betaworks Camps program. Camps are a sort of hyper-specific accelerator program, within which a small cohort of early-stage startups build out their products within a certain theme, complete with the full resources of betaworks (marketing, legal, space, etc.) as well as a small investment.

Camps first launched with BotCamp, followed shortly by VoiceCamp, and today the graduates of VisionCamp are showing off their wares for the first time at Demo Day.

Camera IQ

Camera IQ calls itself a camera experience manager. The company works with brands and publishers to develop virtual worlds for customers, with partners including Spotify, Neiman Marcus and Viacom. The technology integrates AR toolkits and mobile OSes with brands native apps to offer different experiences for consumers. Camera IQ was founded by Allison Wood and Sonia Tsao. The founders say that the camera represents the next great consumption experience, as well as the next great transaction experience. The company hopes to sit at that intersection.

Facemoji

Livestreaming and FaceTime are now accessible to everyone, but not everyone wants to show their face on these platforms. Enter Facemoji. The startup offers 3D avatar webcams that streams your facial expressions via the avatar without ever showing your real likeness. The company was originally focused on gamers who stream on Twitch, with plans to expand to video chat. Facemoji was founded by Robin Raszka and Tom Krcha.

Leo

Originally called Surreal, Leo offers a vast marketplace of AR objects, stamps and artwork so that users can change the world around them. Leo has raised $1.5 million in seed and has relationships with upwards of 2,000 artists on the platform. The company, which was founded by Dana Loberg and Sahin Boydas, makes money by sharing revenue with artists who create objects for the platform.

Numina

Nearly half of land area in cities is made up of streets, sidewalks and parks, and cities have no data or insights on these spaces. Numina partners with cities to place computer vision sensors on light poles in these areas and offer anonymous flow data about pedestrians in these spaces. The company offers an API for streets, as well, to give developers access to real-time activity and a backlog of activity for their apps, whether it’s for mobility, insurance, real estate, or logistics. Numina was founded by Tara Pham.

Selerio

Selerio brings together the real world and the virtual world by using computer vision to map the layout and objects in a room and replace them with a virtual world. Imagine putting old-school Victorian furniture inside an existing space. The company uses deep learning and computer vision in its technology, which was spun out of Cambridge University. Selerio offers an SDK to developers and is currently being integrated with Apple’s ARKit. Selerio was founded by Ghislain Tasse.

Streem

Streem supports the professional home services industry by using computer vision, machine learning, and AR to capture vital information (like model, make and serial number) through a simply live video chat. Through Streem’s technology, service pros can capture information, take measurements and save notes without ever stepping foot in the client’s home, letting them offer quotes much faster and solve the problem in one try. Streem was founded by Ryan Fink and Sean Adkinson.

Trash TV

Despite the fact that capturing and editing video is more accessible than ever, video editing remains a time-consuming and tedious process. The Trash TV app uses computer vision and AI to edit consumer videos into something beautiful and usable. The company uses a stock video repository that includes proof of creation to fill in the gaps. Trash TV was founded by Hannah Donovan and Anton Marini.

This is the third of betaworks’ Camps. The next one, according to Camps General Manager Danika Laszuk, is focused on the intersection of live streaming and participatory audiences. Dubbed LiveCamp, betaworks hopes to find startups evolving the space as Twitch streaming and apps like HQ continue to pull in large viewerships and the lines between performer and audience are blurred.

When Stackery’s founders were still at New Relic in 2014, they recognized there was an opportunity to provide instrumentation for the emerging serverless tech market. They left the company after New Relic’s IPO and founded Stackery with the goal of providing a governance and management layer for serverless architecture.

The company had a couple of big announcements today starting with their $5.5 million round, which they are calling a “seed plus” — and a new tool for tracking serverless performance called the Health Metrics Dashboard.

Let’s start with the funding round. Why the Seed Plus designation? Company co-founder and CEO Nathan Taggart says they could have done an A round, but the designation was a reflection of the reality of where their potential market is today. “From our perspective, there was an appetite for an A, but the Seed Plus represents the current stage of the market,” he said. That stage is still emerging as companies begin to see the benefits of the serverless approach.

HWVP led the round. Voyager Capital, Pipeline Capital Partners, and Founders’ Co-op also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $7.3 million since the company was founded in 2016.

Serverless computing like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions is a bit of a misnomer. There is a server underlying the program, but instead of maintaining a dedicated server for your particular application, you only pay when there is a trigger event. Like cloud computing that came before, developers love it because it saves them a ton of time configuring (or begging) for resources for their applications.

But as with traditional cloud computing — serverless is actually a cloud service — developers can easily access it. If you think back to the Consumerization of IT phenomenon that began around 2011, it was this ability to procure cloud services so easily that resulted in a loss of control inside organizations.

As back then, companies want the advantages of serverless technology, but they also want to know how much they are paying, who’s using it and that it’s secure and in compliance with all the rules of the organization. That’s where Stackery comes in.

As for the new Health Metrics Dashboard, that’s an extension of this vision, one that fits in quite well with the monitoring roots of the founders. Serverless often involves containers, which can encompass many functions. When something goes wrong it’s hard to trace what the root cause was.

“We are showing architecture-wide throughput and performance at each resource point and [developers] can figure out where there are bottlenecks, performance problems or failure.

The company launched in 2016. It is based in Portland, Oregon and currently has 9 employees, of which five are engineers. They plan to bring on three more by the end of the year.

SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based startup that helps companies manage the contact phase of the sales process, announced a $50 million Series C today.

Insight Venture Partners was lead investor with participation from LinkedIn and Emergence Capital, which also participated in the company’s A and B rounds. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $75 million, so this was a significant capital infusion.

What attracted investors was that SalesLoft has concentrated on an area of the sales pipeline called ‘sales engagement.’ It provides a framework for sales people around how to contact potential customers, how often and with what language. It is significant enough that it caught the attention of Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Venture Partners, who was willing to write a big check.

He sees sales engagement an emerging and fast-growing area of the sales stack. “SalesLoft consistently helps customers increase their pipelines, but also strengthen their relationships with buyers — that’s a huge differentiator,” Horing said in a statement.

Kyle Porter, co-founder and CEO at SalesLoft says that what his company does is essentially create a contact workflow for the sales team. It provides a framework or blueprint, while applying a measurable structure to the process for management. Whether the sale is successful or not, there is an audit trail of all the interactions and what the software recommended for actions and what actions the sales person took.

That involves providing the sales team with the next best actions, which could be an email, a phone call or even a handwritten note.”The suggested email content and phone scripts come from experience with buyers. Here’s the right way to communicate,” Porter said. “At the end of the day, we are enabling our customers to deliver better sales experience,” he added.

Machine learning will play an increasing role in building that workflow, as the system learns what types of interactions work best for certain types of customers, it will learn from that, and the system’s recommendations should improve over time.

It appears to be working. The company, which launched in 2011, currently has 230 employees and over 2000 customers including Square, Cisco, Alteryx, Dell and MuleSoft (which Salesforce bought last month for $6.5 billion.) The company reported that they have increased revenue over the last two years by 800 percent (yes, 800 percent).

Porter says this money sets them up to really scale the company with plans to reach 350 employees by the end of the year. In fact, they have more than 40 openings at the moment.

Snapchat has today introduced a new group video chat feature, letting users chat with up to 16 of their closest friends. If users need more people in the chat (which, for those of us who have large conference calls, sounds awful!), Snap is also offering group voice calls with up to 32 participants.

The feature is relatively simple. Just tap the video icon in a group chat to get started, or start up a call with a few people and invite new friends to join.

As one might expect, Snapchat’s crown jewel filters will also be available to use within a group video chat.

Folks that aren’t camera ready can easily toggle between voice and video to just voice.

Snap first introduced group chat and video chat in 2016, looking to give people new ways to communicate on the image-first platform. Snap says that the community is making millions of calls a day since launch.

That said, it’s worth wondering about the timing of this new feature, which comes almost two years after the company announced video chat. It’s possible that Snap wants to take advantage of the #deletefacebook movement offering people as much functionality as possible to connect on their platform instead of the incumbent’s.

It’s also worth noting that Snap’s 16-person group video chat is strikingly similar to Houseparty, the video chat app launched by the founders of live streaming app Meerkat.

Alongside the introduction of group video calls, Snap is also bringing @mentions to the platform. Users can now tag each other in their snaps and Stories by simply typing @ before their user name. Users who have been tagged will be notified when they appear in their friends’ Stories.

InVision, the NY-based design platform focused on collaboration, has today announced the acquisition of Wake.

Wake is a design tool focused squarely on supporting design visibility throughout a particular organization. Wake allows companies to share design assets and view work in progress as designers build out their screens, logos, or other designs. Design team leaders, or other higher-ups at the company, can upvote certain design projects or give feedback on specific tweaks.

InVision CEO Clark Valberg said that one of the most attractive features of Wake is that sharing on the Wake platform was implicit, rather than on InVision where designers have to take an extra step to upload their prototypes on InVision.

Wake will continue to operate independently within InVision, and Valberg has plans to integrate some of the Wake tools into the InVision core product. Moreover, as part of the deal, Wake will be introducing a free tier.

“We’re in the midst of a shift,” said CEO Clark Valberg. “The screen is the most important place in the world. Every company is now a digital product company. The world of design is growing and the Wake product represents a very interesting philosophical vector of that market.”

The entire Wake team will join InVision. Wake was founded in 2013 by Chris Kalani and Johan Bakken, with a customer list that includes Capital One, Spotify, Palantir, Stripe, and Airbnb. In fact, InVision’s Valberg said that Wake’s customer overlap with InVision was one of the first things that alerted InVision to Wake.

Wake has raised a total of $3.8 million, with investments from First Round and Designer Fund.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Shine, an early arrival in a market now teeming with self-care apps and services, has closed on $5 million in Series A funding, the company announced today, alongside the milestone of hitting 2 million active users. The round was led by existing investor by Comcast Ventures with betaworks, Felix Capital, The New York Times, Eniac Ventures, Female Founders Fund
and BBG Ventures also participating.

The investment comes roughly two years after Shine launched its free service, a messaging bot aimed at younger users that doles out life advice and positive reinforcement on a daily basis through SMS texts or Facebook’s Messenger.

At the time, the idea that self-help could be put into an app or bot-like format was still a relatively novel concept. But today, digital wellness has become far more common with apps for everything from meditation to self-help to talk therapy.

“We’re proud that we were part of the catalyst to make well-being as an industry something that is so much more top-of-mind. We really sensed where the world was going and we were ahead of it,” says co-founder Naomi Hirabayashi, who built Shine along with her former DoSomething.org co-worker Marah Lidey. The founders had wanted to offer others something akin to the personal support system they had with each other, as close friends.

“Marah and I are both women of color, and we created this company from a very non-traditional background from an entrepreneurship standpoint – we didn’t go to business school,” Hirabayashi explains. “We saw there was something missing in the market because wellbeing companies didn’t really reach us – they didn’t speak to us. We didn’t see people that looked like us. We didn’t feel like the way they shared content sounded like how we spoke about the different wellbeing issues in our lives,” she says.

The company’s free messaging product, Shine Text, was the result of their frustrations with existing products. It tackles a timely theme every day in areas like confidence, productivity, mental health, happiness and more. And it isn’t just some sort of life-affirming text – Shine converses with you on the topic at hand using research-backed materials to help you better understand the information. It’s also presented in a style that makes Shine feel more like a friend chatting with you.

The service has grown to 2 million users across 189 countries, despite not being localized in other languages. 88 percent of users are under the age of 35, and 70 percent are female.

Shine attempted to generate revenue in the past with a life-coaching subscription, but users wanted to talk to a real person and the subscription was fairly steep at $15.99 per week. That product never emerged from testing, and the founders now refer to it as an “experiment.”

The company gave subscriptions another shot this past December, with the launch of a freemium (free with paid upgrades) app on iOS. The new app offers meditations, affirmations, and something called “Shine Stories.”

The meditations are short audio tracks voiced by influencers that help you with various challenges. There are quick hit meditations for recentering and relaxing, those where you can focus on handling a specific situation – like toxic friendships or online dating – and seven-day challenges that deal with a particular issue like burnout or productivity.

Affirmations are quick pep talks and Shine Stories are slightly longer – around five minutes-long, and also voiced by influencers.

“The biggest thing is that we want to meet the user where they are – and we know people are on the go,” says Hirabayashi. “You can expect a lot more to come in the future around how we combine this really exciting time that’s happening for audio consumption and the hunger that there is for audio content that’s motivational and makes you feel better.”

Asked specifically if the company was considering a voice-first app, like an Alexa skill, or perhaps a more traditional podcast, Lidey said they weren’t yet sure, but didn’t plan on limiting the Shine Stories to a single platform indefinitely. But one thing they weren’t interested in doing in the near-term was introducing ads into Shine’s audio content.

The Shine app for iOS is a free download with some selection of its audio available to free users. Users can unlock the full library for $4.99 per month, billed as an annual subscription of $59.99, or $7.99 per month if paid monthly.

The founders declined to offer specifics on their conversions from free to paid members, but said it was “on par with industry standards.”

With the Series A now under its belt, Shine plans to double its 8-person team this year, launch the app on Android, continue to grow the business, including potentially launching new products.

Now the question is whether the millennials are actually so into self-care that they’ll pay. There are some signs that could be true – the top ten self-care apps pulled in $15 million last quarter, with meditation apps leading the way.

“We’re dominating the self-care routine of millennial women right now and we want to keep doing that,” Lidey says.

Digital music giant Spotify is joining the stock market on Tuesday, making it the biggest consumer tech company to go public since Snap debuted early last year.

But unlike Snap, Spotify isn’t doing an IPO. The “o” part of IPO stands for offering and Spotify isn’t raising any money.

Instead, existing Spotify shareholders will be selling shares directly onto the stock market. This means that employees, venture capitalists or anyone else who managed to buy Spotify shares on the  “secondary markets” can make money right away. But Spotify doesn’t know yet how many will want to sell their shares.

In fact, no one really knows how this “direct listing” is going to go. Even in Spotify’s prospectus, the company acknowledged that what it’s doing is “risky.” Smaller companies have listed without an IPO, but for a company of Spotify’s size, this is unprecedented.

Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek claims that they are doing things differently because “Spotify has never been a normal kind of company.” In a release today, he wrote that “our focus isn’t on the initial splash. Instead, we will be working on trying to build, plan, and imagine for the long term.”

In a recent investor presentation, Ek said Spotify is doing this because of “our desire to become more transparent and more accessible.” Unlike a traditional IPO where employees don’t sell shares for months, known as a “lock-up,” Spotify insiders can sell on day one.

But like a typical IPO, Spotify will still be working with “market makers” to help determine the price that the company should begin trading. I’m told that this could anytime during the trading day on Tuesday.

Spotify doesn’t know how many people will be selling shares. If few people opt to sell, it will drive the share price up, because of limited supply. If a lot of people sell, the reverse could happen, if investor demand doesn’t match it. It’s likely that this process will lead to increased volatility in the first few days or weeks of trading.

But in the long-run, Spotify’s performance in the stock market will largely depend on investor philosophies about the company and its business model.

Some are concerned that Spotify will run the course of competitor Pandora, which has struggled on the stock market, partly due to hefty artist fees. Others argue that Spotify could be viewed as a Netflix, which has been successful at its entertainment licensing agreements.

But regardless of what happens Tuesday, Ek said that listing day is not time to celebrate. “You won’t see us ringing any bells or throwing any parties.”

Walmart is in discussions to acquire medication delivery service PillPack for “under $1 billion,” reports CNBC. CNBC’s sources said the deal isn’t final yet, but talks have been going on for months and Amazon was also a potential suitor for the startup, which delivers medications to tens of thousands of customers in the United States.

Launched in 2013, PillPack has raised $118 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and CRV. PillPack doesn’t just fill prescriptions: it also helps patients manage their medications by sorting pills into packets for individual doses, automatically delivering refills to homes and providing 24/7 customer service, all major selling points for seniors and people with multiple conditions. Last year, PillPack also unveiled prescription management software called PharmacyOS, which it described as “the first backend pharmacy system designed specifically for customers with complex medication regimes.”

Last November, co-founder and chief executive officer T.J. Parker, who trained as a pharmacist, said PillPack would do over $100 million revenue in 2017. It has a loyal customer base, who helped PillPack win a public relations battle in 2016 with Express Scripts, the country’s largest pharmacy-benefits manager. After Express Scripts cut off its partnership with PillPack, claiming that the company needed to be licensed as a mail-order operation instead of a retail pharmacy, PillPack said this would force it stop delivering to a third of its customers. It also accused Express Scripts, which runs its own home delivery service, of trying to block competition. Online outcry by customers, driven by a PillPack campaign, forced Express Scripts to back down.

Both Walmart and PillPack declined to comment on a potential acquisition to CNBC.

Amazon is said to be working on its own prescription delivery service, after launching a line of over-the-counter health products like allergy treatments. If its pharmacy business comes to fruition, that means Amazon will compete even more closely with Walmart, putting increasing pressure on the big-box store chain.

Walmart is also reportedly in talks to acquire health insurer Humana.

Robinhood is rolling out its Coinbase-killer that’s already helped the fintech startup’s valuation grow 4X in a year. Zero-fee trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum is now available to all investors in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. Everyone else is still on the waitlist. Robinhood users everywhere can already track 16 crypto coins including BTC, ETH, Litecoin, and Ripple, as well as trade traditional stocks with no transaction commission.

Announced in January, Robinhood Crypto vastly undercuts Coinbase’s U.S. fees that range from 1.5 to 4 percent. One million users waitlisted for Robinhood Crypto in the first 5 days after it was announced, and the app now has four million total registered users. Its lack of fees is proving to be a way to lure both veteran and rookie crypto investors to Robinhood, though it lacks support for trading as wide of a range of coins as Coinbase. Rather than charging per trade, Robinhood earns money from interest on money in users’ accounts and its Robinhood Gold subscription service. For for $6 to $200 a month in subscription fees, users can borrow between $1,000 and $50,000 to trade with.

Robinhood Gold’s success, adding options and web trading, and the new Robinhood Crypto helped the startup attract a $350 million Series D round led by Russian fund DST Global, which a source confirms will value it at $5.6 billion and bring it to $526 million in total funding. That’s up from the $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation it raised last year.

That massive valuation will put a ton of pressure on Robinhood’s co-CEOs Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt to keep it growing, build out its subscription and interest revenue, and invade the space of competitors. [Disclosure: I know the founders from college] Those include traditional brokers like Scottrade and E*Trade that can charge $7 or more per trade, crypto-specific exchanges like Coinbase, and news sources like CoinDesk.

Robinhood risks a down round if the heightened societal and regulatory skepticism about cryptocurrencies curtail investments from the public. Robinhood’s historical focus on younger, less wealthy investors who aren’t “accredited” could make it especially vulnerable to crypto backlash if users see the space as too volatile or scammy for amateur investors to join. There are also heightened cybersecurity concerns, as users might bail on the app if they fear their cryptocurrency could be stolen.

Robinhood might do well to get more serious about how it offers crypto education. It’s promised to provide a feed of crypto news to keep people informed about why markets are moving, though it’s still in testing with a small number of users right now. The problem is that the crypto journalism space is rife with integrity violations and reporters with questionable expertise. If Robinhood bought or built a truly neutral crypto news source, it could use that to attract investors to its crypto trading platform.

[Disclosre: The author of this article owns small positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum but does not day trade. Detailed disclosures can be found here.]

In an unusual move, Pluralsight has announced that it filed confidentially for IPO. Companies typically stay quiet until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.

But it’s no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now.

Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard built the foundations of the education technology business back in 2004. Like many startups outside of Silicon Valley, it bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013.

Then it raised at least three rounds, nearing $200 million in financing. Insight Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures and ICONIQ Capital are amongst its backers.

It’s a competitive market, but Pluralsight has built a big business around online software development courses, helping people hone their skills in categories like IT, data and security.

Small businesses and large enterprises pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. Individuals can also subscribe to its services.

It is unclear when Pluralsight will complete the IPO. The release said that “the initial public offering is expected to commence after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”

Companies often remain on file confidentially for several months, reviewing and perfecting their prospectus. Once the filing is unveiled, companies must wait 15 days before the investor roadshow, and typically go public the week after that.

There has been a flurry of IPO activity in recent weeks, particularly in the enterprise technology category. Dropbox recently went public and Spotify is listing Tuesday. Other companies that have submitted filings include DocuSign, Zuora, Smartsheet and Pivotal.

After a slow first quarter, it is expected to be a busy spring for tech IPOs.

This report from Business Insider covers the recent spate in IPO activity from software companies such as Smartsheet, Pivotal, DocuSign, ZScaler, and Zuora. For this week’s posts, click on the...

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