Hugging Face has raised a $40 million Series B funding round — Addition is leading the round. The company has been building an open source library for natural language processing (NLP) technologies. You can find the Transformers library on GitHub — it has 42,000 stars and 10,000 forks.

Existing investors Lux Capital, A.Capital and Betaworks also participated in today’s funding round. Other investors include Dev Ittycheria, Olivier Pomel, Alex Wang, Aghi Marietti, Florian Douetteau, Richard Socher, Paul St. John, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman.

With Transformers, you can leverage popular NLP models, such as BERT, GPT, XLNet, T5 or DistilBERT and use those models to manipulate text in one way or another. For instance, you can classify text, extract information, automatically answer questions, summarize text, generate text, etc.

There are many different use cases for NLP. A popular one has been support chatbot. For instance, challenger bank Monzo has been using Hugging Face behind the scenes to answer questions from its customers. Overall, around 5,000 companies are using Hugging Face in one way or another, including Microsoft with its search engine Bing.

When it comes to business model, the startup has recently launched a way to get prioritized support, manage private models and host the inference API for you. Clients include Bloomberg and Typeform.

With the new funding round, the company plans to triple its headcount in New York and Paris — there will be remote positions too. Interestingly, the company is also sharing some details about its bank account.

Hugging Face has been cash-flow positive in January and February 2021. The company raised a $15 million round a little over a year ago — 90% of the previous round is still available on the bank account. And the company’s valuation saw a fivefold increase. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as you can negotiate better terms if you don’t actually need to raise.

And it looks like Hugging Face is on the right path as the company is hosting a vibrant community of NLP developers. You can browse models and datasets, take advantage of them and contribute as Hugging Face is becoming the central brick of NLP enthusiasts.

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20 percent off tickets right here.

If there were any doubt about a cryptocurrency boom, we need look no further than at the explosion of growth of certain companies in the space.

One such company is BlockFi, which today announced it has closed on a massive $350 million Series D funding that values it at $3 billion. While this news in and of itself is certainly attention-getting, it’s even more impressive when you consider the startup just raised a $50 million Series C last August at a $450 million valuation. The latest financing brings its total equity raised since inception to about $450 million, with the company raising $100 million across its seed and Series C rounds.

Zac Prince — who comes from a background in consumer lending —  founded BlockFi with Flori Marquez in 2017. The Jersey City, New Jersey-based startup raised $1.6 million in a seed round of funding that closed in 2018 and was led by ConsenSys Ventures and included participation from SoFi.  

Prince describes BlockFi as a financial services company for crypto market investors that offers a retail and institutional-facing suite of products. On the retail side of its platform, people can use its mobile app to earn a yield on their crypto holdings (6% on Bitcoin, 8.6% on stablecoins), buy and sell crypto and get low-cost loans secured by the value of their crypto portfolio “so they can get liquidity without selling,” he said. Specifically, clients can buy and sell digital assets (from Bitcoin, Ethereum and Link to Litecoin, PaxG and multiple stablecoins) directly on BlockFi.

The startup is also a lender and provider of trade execution services to institutions participating in digital asset markets. 

It’s a model that seems to be working in a big way. Since the end of 2019, BlockFi has seen its client base grow from 10,000 to more than 225,000. Today, BlockFi has 265,000 funded retail clients and over 200 institutional clients.

And it’s lent over $10 billion to its retail, corporate and institutional clients.

Over the past year, BlockFi has also accomplished the following:

“In less than six months since we completed our Series C, Bitcoin and other digital assets have assumed a central role in many investors’ portfolios and in broader financial markets,” Prince said. “Our conviction that digital assets are the future of finance has been vindicated by our client base, which grew 10 times year over year in 2020 and has more than doubled since the end of 2020.”

New investor Bain Capital Ventures, partners of DST Global, Pomp Investments and Tiger Global co-led the Series D, which included participation from a slew of other firms including existing backer Valar Ventures, Breyer Capital, Susquehanna Government Products, Jump Capital and Paradigm, among many others. BlockFi employees who have been employed for more than one year have the opportunity to receive liquidity on a portion of their equity via a secondary tender offer as part of the financing round.  

BlockFi believes that investor enthusiasm for the Series D round reflects both the company’s strong business growth, as well as “broader conviction in cryptocurrencies as an asset class.” 

“Individual investors, institutional asset managers and corporate treasury departments are all exploring avenues to invest in cryptocurrencies,” the company said.

“Our goal for BlockFi has always been for it to facilitate cryptocurrencies going mainstream – and each day provides more evidence that is exactly what is occurring,” said Marquez, who serves as the company’s SVP of operations.

Bain Capital Ventures Partner Stefan Cohen agrees. He believes there are currently limited banking services available for crypto holders, which puts BlockFi in an opportune position.

“Bitcoin has already eclipsed $1 trillion in market cap and is likely headed higher to fulfill its store of value promise. As wealth accumulates to BTC holders, most will look for ways to earn yield or borrow against their holdings for more traditional asset purchases such as homes, cars and education,” he wrote via email. “BlockFi stands alone as the leader in bringing simple, secure, everyday financial services to cryptocurrency holders.”

The startup’s exponential growth over the past year proves “there was clearly a huge need for BlockFi’s services,” Cohen said.

“Their vision was to build an easy-to-use, trusted platform to bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream, and they’ve truly succeeded,” he added.

Meanwhile, Cohen said Bain Capital has had a long-term thesis on Bitcoin becoming a store of value and has actively invested in “picks-and-shovels businesses” that enable what is now a $1 trillion-plus market. 

“Trusted financial services are a critical pillar of the space, and we view it as a highly strategic component of the market,” he added.

Looking ahead, the startup has plans to launch in the second quarter a Bitcoin Rewards Credit Card, which will give BlockFi clients the ability to earn Bitcoin cash back on every transaction. It plans to use the new capital to continue growing its product suite, expand into new global markets and for strategic acquisitions. The company also plans to double its headcount by year’s end, according to Prince.

BlockFi already has a global presence and retail clients in over 100 countries. Last year, it opened institutional client service offices in London and Singapore.  This year, the startup is looking to add regional support in Europe, APAC and LatAm for its retail clients. 

Over the past week, BlockFi was making headlines for other reasons. The company was the victim of an “unusual assault” on March 7 when an attacker spammed the platform with fake sign-ups and abusive language.

To that end, the company acknowledges that it became aware that an unauthorized third party began attempting bulk sign-ups on its platform on March 7.

“We do not know the origin of the email addresses used for these ‘sign-ups’  but they did not come from us and they were not the emails of BlockFi clients,” the company told TechCrunch. “In general, we would characterize the event as vulgar spam’ and the total number of valid emails affected was less than 1,000.”

The company maintains that no data from BlockFi was accessed and its data was not compromised.  

“Our clients’ funds and data were safeguarded throughout the incident,” the company added. “Since then, our engineering and security teams have taken steps to prevent events like this from happening in the future. In addition, we reached out directly to all of the valid email recipients to apologize for the incident.”

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20 percent off tickets right here.

Scott Galloway, the New York University professor, author, and tech entrepreneur, is taking the wraps off a $30 million Series A round for his newest company, Section4, a platform for business “upskilling” that has now raised $37 million altogether.

The company is premised on the belief that millions of workers need help to stay competitive and employable, yet not all have access to, or interest in, costly graduate school programs. In fact, Section4 thinks more affordable “sprints” — or two- to three-long week courses taught by prominent professors from top schools that can also be mind expanding — is the way to go.

Whether that thesis proves out remains to be seen, but Section4 — whose new round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Learn Capital and GSV Ventures — says early indications are good and that it already has 10,000 alums from dozens of countries.

We talked with Galloway yesterday about who, specifically, Section4 aims to serve, what percentage of its students is outside the U.S., and how universities feel about their professors participating in a startup that could eat into their own revenue. Excerpts from that chat follow, edited lightly for length.

TC: Why start this company?

SG: Graduate education was transformative in my life, and I enjoy teaching, and we thought there was an opportunity — because of the pandemic and changing behaviors — to start an online ed concept that tried to deliver 50% to 70% of the value of an elite MBA elective at 10% of the cost and 1% of the friction.

TC: Is this competition then for shorter executive MBA programs?

SG: I would say not even exec MBAs, because part-time MBAs  get a certification that is still incredibly valuable in the marketplace. And we don’t offer that. It’s somewhat competitive [instead] with executive education, the bring-50-people-from-Pfizer-in-for-two-days-and-charge-a-bunch-of-money-and- have-them-eat-lunch-together-on-campus-in-Palo Alto-and-throw-some-professors-at-them-for-some learning. I would argue that we’re competitive with that. It’s incredibly expensive, both financially and just [through] trying to gather 40 or 50 executives.

Also, quite frankly, it’s a little bit exclusionary because a company like Verizon can only send 100 people to Wharton’s exec ed, and we’re hoping that we can run thousands of people from these companies through our programs.

TC: So these are companies that are your customers, not individuals seeking betterment for themselves.

SG: It’s both. The funnel is: organically people sign up. And the idea is that the course costs $700, $800 versus $7,000, which is what it costs to take an elective at an elite business school right now. So for example, 120 people have organically, individually signed up on their own who work at Google. Then our expectation is that over time, these companies will approach us and say, ‘We would like to buy a certain number of seats or a membership that covers 100 or 1,000 of our employees.’

TC: You say Section4 has already taught 10,000 students; when did you start offering your programming?

SG: In March of last year. Our first course had 300 people; the course I just wrapped up had 1,500, so it scales pretty well.

What’s different about it is our completion rates, which are 70%-plus. The curse of online ed is that completion rates are really low because video doesn’t capture people or create an intensity, and we try to be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous, so [there is] project work and teams, live streams with the professor, and live one-on-one sessions with a TA. It’s meant to hold people accountable and engage them.

TC: You’re promising students access to top professors like yourself. How do the schools for which they teach feel about this? They’re perhaps helping build the brand of the school, but are there also competitive concerns?

SG: For some yes, for some no. Some universities have asked their faculty to take a pause and not engage in any type of relationship like this, but some universities embrace it. Several students who have taken our course have sent us messages saying they are now going to apply to a full-time MBA program because they see the value and they want the certification. So I’m not sure it’s purely complimentary, but it’s also not purely competitive.

TC: What is your economic relationship with these professors?

SG: I’m not going to disclose the exact economic agreement. What I will say is that we see attracting these superstars and retaining them as key to our value proposition. And so our aim is that this is the greatest compensation per podium hour that they’re going to receive. If you have a course with 800 people, and they’re each paying $800, that’s $640,000. As you can imagine, there is a lot of gross margin capital that can be deployed or can be paid to the professor.

TC: Are most of the students gravitating to this platform coming from inside or outside of the tech industry?

SG: Fifty of the Fortune 100 [companies] have people who’ve taken our class so far, and it’s all walks. It’s pharma, it’s big AG, it’s big tech, it’s big oil. I would say we probably overindex in tech because these organizations are generous in terms of giving employees tuition remission, and I think, to a certain extent, my brand is bigger in the tech community and initially, that was kind of the awareness we had.

The other big cohort is middle-market companies, 10- to 500-people companies where a director there either didn’t have the opportunity or the inclination to go back to business school, but still would like a taste of supply chain from an MIT professor.

TC: What percentage of your students are outside the U.S.?

SG: I think it’s about 30% international. We have every continent covered.

We also try to reserve at least 10% of our class for scholarships. We have a rigorous scholarship process, where you send us an email saying you can’t afford it, and you get a scholarship. And a lot of our scholarships go to people internationally, because $800 in Rwanda is real money.

For more on Section4, including NYU’s relationship with Section4 and why Galloway raised what he did — and not three times as much — you can listen to our full conversation here.

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20 percent off tickets right here.

Primary care startup Forward Health is looking to expand its tech-powered, personalized healthcare model across the U.S., and will use a new $225 million Series D raise to help make it happen. The new capital comes from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Mark Benioff – and recording artist The Weeknd – among others. I spoke to Forward Health co-founder and CEO Adrian Aoun about his company’s plans for this fresh capital, and we also chatted briefly about how The Weeknd got involved.

Forward, which currently operates clinics in select U.S. markets including LA, New York, Chicago, SF and Washington, D.C., has a number of distinguishing features, but most notable are likely its tech-first approach that includes a full biometric assessment upon first visit, and its business model, which eschews insurance providers altogether and instead works based on a single flat membership fee.

Aoun and his co-founders created Forward Health with the idea of building a healthcare business that’s aligned with its customers in terms of incentives, which is why they sidestepped insurance altogether. That’s led to a focus on customer service and long-term patient relationships and outcomes, which Aoun says are stronger because they’re not bound by an individual’s relationship with their employer, for instance, which is often the case when an employer foots the bill for healthcare via company-provided insurance.

“The average person in the Bay Area is with their employer for about two and a quarter years,” Aoun told me. “So your employer is kind of sitting there thinking, if you get the flu, you’re missing three days of work – I’m out some money.” That means they’ll do things like institute programs to remind employees constantly to get their annual flu vaccine, and do other things to make that happen like provide on-premise shots. But Aoun says they’re optimizing for short-term outcomes, not long-term health – because that’s where their incentives tell them to optimize.

But when long-term healthcare programs, like lifestyle shifts that can lessen the potential of truly dangerous outcomes like heart disease and cancer, come into play, an employer who expects you to stick around for a few years at most is far less incentivized to want to fund that. Forward Health, which aims to attract subscribers and, for lack of a better term, minimize churn, actually is incentivized to make those long-term outcomes positive for everyone who comes through the door.

That’s part of why one focus with this new funding is to debut new doctor-led programs tailored to treating conditions that individual patients might be predisposed to – like heart health, if heart disease runs in your family, or specific types of cancer, if there’s a history of that, for instance.

“We’ve got our [in-clinic] body scanners, our blood tests, our gene sequencing – we basically collect on the order of about 500 biometric data points,” Aoun said. “The idea is you and your doctor then figure out which which kind of programs make sense for you based upon those.”

For example, Aoun says he’s actually at fairly high risk for developing heart disease, so there’s a Forward program that includes doing a heart risk analysis, blood tests, and regular at-home monitoring of key risk factors like blood pressure and weight. Another program for cancer prevention includes measures designed to help lessen the risk of contracting the top five cancers in terms of prevalence — so Forward created a dermatoscope for that, which is essentially a skin scanner to map out an individual’s moles and skin features and alert them of any changes.

This builds on work that Forward began at the outset of COVID-19 — its ‘Forward at Home’ program, which includes sending patients home with specialized sensors for remote care. Another specialized program tailored to COVID-19 actually offers monitoring specific to the disease in order to track a patient’s progress safely.

“We’re now launching programs for all the top diseases to help you get ahead of them,” Aoun said. “And whatever kind of programs you’re using, you walk away with plans that are tailored to you, again, to counsel you not only on the potential risks for the things like the cancer and heart disease, but also to be proactive, with guidance from diet, to exercise, to stress, and to sleep, etc.”

The programs are supported by Forward’s 24/7 worldwide care support team, which subscribers can access via their mobile app. It’s also complemented by the check-ins with your physician via the ‘Forward at Home’ in-home virtual visits.

While Forward is already rolling these out, it has plans to continue to develop new ones, and it’s also monitoring results in order to understand how they’re working for users, and will be sharing that data once it has collected a significant sample. I asked Aoun how Forward can scale this kind of personalized care – especially now that the startup plans to open additional locations in other parts of the country.

Basically, Aoun said that Forward approached it as an engineering problem. He argues that most solutions in healthcare see the fundamental issue as a labor problem — but trying to scale that, with the salaries that medical professionals command, and the limited availability of skilled talent, makes no sense. Especially because consumers are naturally looking for improvements in their standard of care over time, in the same way they expect improvements in the products they buy or services they use.

Rather than relying on a chain of increasingly specific medical professionals to address individual health risks and needs, Aoun said Forward identified that there’s a massive amount of overlap in preventative care courses of action. The Forward team focused on breaking the fundamental elements down into what equate roughly to reusable Lego blocks, which can be recombined with relative speed and repeatability to produce a program that’s nonetheless tailored to an individual’s needs.

Combined with Forward Health’s longitudinal approach to care, these programs and their recombinant nature should prove a good dataset from which to assess how a direct, client-focused primary care model affects overall health.

And, because I promised, I’ll leave you with how Aoun says The Weeknd got involved in the Series D.

“He literally just walked by one of our locations, and walked in and was like, ‘This is awesome,’ and then asked a friend, who asked a friend, who asked a friend to get connected,” he told me.

The traditional process of buying, insuring and financing cars across emerging markets can be challenging, and it defeats the purpose of building an all-around car shopping experience. Today, FlexClub, a South African company, has been provided with $5 million to improve drivers’ experience in these markets.

FlexClub was founded in 2019 by Marlon Gallardo, Rudolf Vavruch and Tinashe Ruzane. The company is an online marketplace that connects customers looking for flexible access to long-term cars with its partners, offering car subscriptions.

That same year, the company closed a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital. According to Ruzane, the company’s CEO, this $5 million (in equity and debt) is a seed extension round, bringing the total investment raised by FlexClub to over $6 million. The company says it will use the funding to improve its technology which protects and limit partners’ exposure to risk.

Across emerging markets in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, most ride-hailing drivers don’t have access to car financing. Typically, they rent their cars via social media, classified sites, or connect with a car owner willing to rent. That was the model FlexClub launched in South Africa, and after raising $1.2 million, it expanded to Mexico.

Partnering with Uber in both countries and helping their community of drivers subscribe for cars, FlexClub claims to have garnered traction but wouldn’t divulge numbers. These customers, including those who use the cars for deliveries, are called commercial members by FlexClub. In December last year, the company decided to open up its product to another set of customers who are called private members.

“When we first started, we were focused on phase one of our strategy, which came from our knowledge about ride-hailing drivers because of our careers at Uber,” Ruzane said to TechCrunch. “We wanted to help a community of ride-hailing drivers that had been excluded from accessing cars. But right now, we’ve built the product to work for anyone and not just ride-hailing drivers.”

In FlexClub’s marketplace, cars are subscribed for between a hybrid of short- and long-term lease. It means customers pay an all monthly inclusive fee, and at any time, they can cancel a subscription, switch cars or buy it.

But to buy a car from FlexClub, drivers are encouraged to drive safely and comply with FlexClub’s recommendations while using the car. Doing that earns them points that accumulate over time, making cars cheaper to buy if they choose to.

This, alongside the use of banking, credit bureau and identity data, lets FlexClub assess its members’ risk profile and reward them when need be. 

Ruzane says last year was challenging for the company because of what it meant for mobility. At the peak of the first wave of the pandemic, ride-hailing members had financial difficulties. Still, the company partnered with delivery platforms to allow ride-hailing drivers to use their cars to transport goods and packages.

During that period, FlexClub was also able to partner with large brands like U.S. car rental company Avis to offer car subscriptions on its marketplace. Aside from Avis, Ruzane says the company’s partners range from small fleet owners to multinational fleet operators.

The pandemic made it possible for FlexClub to think outside the box and enlist these partners on its platform. However, it didn’t come easy as FlexClub has had to earn trust by building credibility.

“One of the challenges we have faced was that we had to build a reputation to be trusted in the industry. It took us two years to get a brand like Avis to see the value in putting their subscription offers on FlexClub. But with that established, it’s now a lot easier for us to continue investing in driving this new distribution model.”

He likens the distribution model of the automotive industry to how the music industry was decades ago. Then, CDs dominated music revenue but has now given way to streaming.

“If you look at what the music industry looked like 10 years ago, over 50% of music revenue was CDs. Now over 80% is streaming. The industry successfully transitioned from product-led distribution to service-led distribution. I think that’s what we can expect in the automotive industry over the next decade,” Ruzane remarked. “We can be an ally to the automotive industry in driving that evolution because we’ve tested our product in a marketplace with the segment of the population that people thought wasn’t a good profile of customers to serve.”

FlexClub’s expansion to Mexico instead of other African countries continues a series of global expansion that has become common for South African companies.

Two factors decided the move for FlexClub, according to the CEO. First, the founders are from both countries — Marlon Gallardo is Mexican while Rudolf Vavruch and Tinashe Ruzane are South Africans. Next, both markets have a lot of similarities in terms of how the automotive industry works.

South Africa and Mexico have large manufacturing bases and advanced secondary markets where brands can lease used cars. 

Kenya and Nigeria, on the other hand, have a different automotive value chain. Although there’s a growing manufacturing industry in both countries, it is still nascent as most vehicles are imported from countries like the U.S. and Japan.

That said, Tinashe says there’s an opportunity to take FlexClub to not only these regions but most emerging markets around the world. However, it is in no rush to do so.

FlexClub has been able to attract investors who are aligned with its mission of democratizing access to car financing and becoming a global mobility company.

Kindred Ventures, its lead investor, has backed mobility-first companies like Postmates, Uber and Virgin Hyperloop. Other VC investors include CRE Venture Capital and Endeavor. Angel investors like Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress; Federico Ranero, COO of KAVAK; Tariq Zaid, formerly of Shopify and Getaround; and Ron Pragides, formerly of Twitter and Salesforce, also took part in the round.

Montreal-based Heyday announced today that it has raised $6.5 million Canadian ($5.1 million in US dollars) in additional seed funding.

Co-founder and CEO Steve Desjarlais told me that the startup’s goal is to allow retailers to support more automation and more personalization in their online customer interactions, while co-founder and CMO Etienne Merineau described it as an “all-in-one unified customer messaging platform.”

So whether a customer is sending a message from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Google’s Business Messages or just via email, Heyday brings all that communication together in one dashboard. It then uses artificial intelligence to determine whether it’s a customer service or sales-related interaction, and it automates basic responses when possible.

Heyday chatbots can provide order updates or even recommend products (it integrates with Salesforce, Shopify, Magento, Lightspeed and PrestaShop), then route the conversation to a human team member when necessary.

There are other platforms that combine customer service and sales, but at the same time, Merineau said it’s important to treat the two categories as distinct and trust that a good service experience will lead to sales in the feature.

“We believe that helping is the new selling,” he said.

Desjarlais added, “We’re really against the ticket ID system. A customer is not a ticket …
I truly believe that every single customer is a relationship with a brand that needs to be nurtured over time and that will give more value to the brand over time.”

Heyday was founded in 2017 and says that over the past two quarters, it has doubled recurring revenue. Customers include French sporting good company Decathlon, Danish fashion house Bestseller to food and consumer product brand Dannon — Merineau noted that the platform was “bilingual out of the box” and has seen strong international growth.

“Retailers who believe that [the changes brought about by] COVID-19 are temporary are in the wrong mindset,” he said. “The new mantra of future-forward brands is ‘adapt or die.’ … Brands obviously want to delvier great service, but they care about the bottom line. We help them kill two birds with one stone.”

The startup had previously raised $2 million Canadian, according to Crunchbase. This new round comes from existing investors Innovobot and Desjardins Capital. Merineau said the money will help Heyday “double down on the U.S. and scale.”

A newly launched Mac app called Superpowered aims to make it easier to stay on top of all your Zoom calls and Google Meets, without having to scramble to find the meeting link in your inbox or calendar app at the last minute. Instead of relying on calendar reminders, Superpowered offers a notification inbox for the Mac menu bar that alerts you to online meetings just before they start, which you can then join with a click of a button.

To use Superpowered, you first download the app then authorize it to access to your Google Calendar. The app currently works with any Google account, including G Suite, as well as your subscribed calendars.

Once connected, Superpowered pulls all your events into the menu bar, which you can view at any time throughout the day with a click or by using the keyboard shortcut Command+Y.

When you have a meeting coming up, Superpowered will display a drop-down notification to alert you, or you can opt for a more subtle halo effect instead to have it get your attention. You can also configure other preferences — like whether you want a chime to sound, how far in advance you want to be alerted, whether you want a meeting reminder as text to appear in the menu bar ahead of the meeting and so on.

When it’s time for the meeting, all you have to do is click the button it displays to join your Zoom call or Google Meet. The solution is simple, but effective. The startup plans to add support for more integrations going forward, including Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx and others.

The idea for the app comes from four computer science and software engineering students from the University of Waterloo, who previously interned at tech companies like Google, Facebook, Asana and Spotify.

Wanting to build a startup of their own, the team applied to the accelerator Y Combinator with an idea to build a lecture platform for professors. But they soon faced issues in keeping up with their own calendar appointments as they began to conduct user research interviews.

“We were struggling to keep up with each other’s calendars and balance all these meetings throughout the day,” explains Superpowered co-founder Jordan Dearsley, who built the service alongside teammates Nikhil Gupta, Ibrahim Irfan and Nick Yang. “We would be at lunch and be like, ‘Oh shoot, we have a meeting now — I have to run!’ or just completely miss it altogether,” he says.

Irfan had the idea to just put a button in the Mac menu bar to make it easier to join Zoom meetings and soon the team pivoted to work on Superpowered instead.

The product itself is very new. Development work began roughly two months ago and Superpowered opened up to users just last month — a quick pace that Dearsley says was possible because three of the four team members are engineers, and the other, Yang, is the designer.

Although it’s a paid product offered at $10 per month, Superpowered already has hundreds of users who are interacting with the app, on average, 10 times per day. Busier users, like product managers, are clicking on Superpowered as many as 20 to 40 times per day — an indication that it’s found a place in users’ workflows. In the month since its launch, the app has connected users with over 10,000 online meetings, the company says.

Superpowered is not the first to add calendar appointments to the Mac’s menu bar. It competes with a range of products, like MeetingBar, Meeter, Next Meeting and others. But users have been responding to Superpowered’s sleek, clean design.

The company also has a vision for the product’s future that extends beyond meetings. After solving this particular pain point, Superpowered plans to broaden its scope to fix other annoyances for knowledge workers — like Slack notifications, for example.

“It’s really annoying to be pinged all the time while I’m coding … and I don’t know if it’s something that’s worth seeing because Slack doesn’t really give me those controls or ability to peek,” explains Dearsley. Meanwhile, Mac’s built-in Notification Center isn’t smart enough to show you just those items that you really need to know about.

To address this, the team is now working on a Slack integration that will let you quickly check your messages and reply without having to launch the Slack app. Further down the road, the team wants to integrate support for other platforms — like Google Docs, JIRA and GitHub — which would all be pulled into Superpowered’s universal notification inbox.

For the time being, Superpowered is $10 per month for Mac users or $8 per month for those who sign up with a team. Annual pricing is not yet available.

In 1998, Sun Microsystems piloted its “Open Work” program, letting roughly half of their workforce work flexibly from wherever they wanted. The project required new hardware, software and telecommunications solutions, and took about 24 months to implement.

Results were very positive, with a reduction in costs and the company’s carbon footprint. Despite this outcome, long-term remote work never really caught on more broadly. In fact, the 2010s were focused on going the other direction, as open offices, on-site perks and coworking spaces sprung up around the idea that in-person community is an essential component of innovation.

In 2020, companies of all sizes, in all corners of the world, were forced to shift to remote work with the onset of COVID-19. While some companies were better positioned than others — whether it be due to a previously distributed workforce, a reliance on cloud apps and services, or already-established flexible work policies — the adjustment to a fully remote workforce has been challenging for everyone. The truth is that even the largest companies have had to rely on the heroics of employees making sacrifices and persevering through numerous challenges to get through this time.

Technology like high-quality video conferencing and the cloud have been integral in making remote work possible. But we don’t yet have a complete substitute for in-person work because we continue to lack tooling in one critical area: passive collaboration. While active collaboration (which is the lion’s share) can happen over virtual meetings and emails, we haven’t fully solved for enabling the types of serendipitous conversations and chance connections that often power our biggest innovations and serve as the cornerstone of passive collaboration.

Active versus passive collaboration

Those outside of the tech industry may think that software engineers only need a computer and a secure internet connection to do their work. But the stereotype of the lone engineer coding away in solitude has long been shattered. The best engineering work isn’t done in isolation, but in collaboration, as teams discuss, wrangle and brainstorm through problems. Video conference platforms and chat applications help us collaborate actively, and tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Google Docs allow for dedicated asynchronous collaboration, too.

But what we currently lack are the moments of spontaneous engagement that energize us and invite new ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have been part of the conversation. The long-term impact of not having access to this has not yet been measured, but it’s my belief that it will have a negative effect on innovation because passive collaboration plays such a critical role in fostering creativity.

The whiteboard

The best way to think about the differences between passive and active collaboration is to look at a whiteboard. Someone recently asked me, “What is it with people in tech and whiteboards? Why are they such a big deal?” Whiteboards are simple and “low-tech,” yet have become quintessential in our industry. That’s because they represent a source of multimodal collaboration for engineers. Let’s think back to before COVID. How many times have you walked by (or been a part of) a scrum meeting of engineers huddled around a whiteboard?

Have you ever stopped by because you overheard a snippet of a conversation and wanted to learn more or share your perspective? Or maybe something on a whiteboard caught your eye and caused you to start a conversation with another colleague, leading to a breakthrough. These are all moments of passive collaboration, which whiteboards so excellently enable (in addition to being a tool for real-time, active collaboration). They’re low-friction ways to invite new ideas and perspectives to the conversation that otherwise wouldn’t have been considered.

While whiteboards are one mode of facilitating passive collaboration, they aren’t the only option. Serendipitous meetings in the break room, overhearing a conversation from the next cubicle over, or spotting someone across the room who’s free for a quick gut check are also examples of passive collaboration. These interactions are a critical piece of how we work together and the hardest to recreate in a world of remote work. Just as silos in the development process are detrimental to software quality, so too is a lack of passive collaboration.

We need tools that will help us peek over at what other people are working on without the pressure of a dedicated meeting time or update email. The free and open exchange of ideas is a birthplace for innovation, but we haven’t yet figured out how to create a good virtual space for this.

Looking forward

The future of work is one in which teams are more distributed than ever before, meaning we need new tools for passive collaboration not just for this year, but for the future, too. Our own internal survey results tell us that while some employees prefer the option to be fully remote once the pandemic is behind us, the majority want a more flexible solution in the future.

Crucially, the answer is not to create more meetings or email threads, but instead to reimagine virtual spaces that can function like the classic whiteboard and other serendipitous modes of collaboration. As we all still look for ways to solve this challenge, we at LinkedIn have been thinking about how to encourage cross-team conversations and open Q&As to share resources, as a start.

For decades, the tech industry has paved the way for innovations in employee experience, creating spaces and benefits that reduced friction in collaboration and productivity. Now, as we look ahead to a hybrid work world, we must find new ways to continue supporting employee productivity and creativity. It’s only when we’re able to fully realize passive collaboration virtually that we’ll have unlocked the full potential of remote and hybrid work situations.

As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share. Currently, Roblox is trading at $71.10 per share, up just over 60% from the reference price that it announced last night. That effort finally set a directional value of sorts on Roblox’s shares before it floated on the public markets. 

Roblox, a gaming company aimed at children and powered by an internal economy and third-party development activity, has had a tumultuous if exciting path to the public markets. The company initially intended to list in a traditional IPO, but after enthusiastic market conditions sent the value of some public-offering shares higher after they began to trade, Roblox hit pause.

The former startup then raised a Series H round of capital, a $520 million investment that boosted the value of Roblox from around $4 billion to $29.5 billion. TechCrunch jokes that, far from IPOs mispricing IPOs, that $4 billion price set in early 2020 was the real theft, given where the company was valued just a year later. Sure, the pandemic was good for Roblox, but seeing a 5x repricing in four quarters was hilarious.

Regardless. At $45 per share, Roblox’s direct listing reference price, the company was worth $29.1 billion, per Renaissance Capital, an IPO-focused group. Barron’s placed the number at $29.3 billion. No matter which is closer to the truth, they were both right next to the company’s final private price.

So, the Series H investors nailed the value of Roblox, or the company merely tied its reference price to that price. Either way, we had a pretty clear Series H → direct listing reference price handoff.

The company’s performance today makes that effort appear somewhat meaningless as both prices were wildly under what traders were willing to cough up during its first day of trading; naturally, we’ll keep tabs on its price as time continues, and one day is not a trend, but seeing Roblox trade so very far above its direct listing reference price and final private valuation appears to undercut the argument that this sort of debut can sort out pricing issues inherent in more traditional IPOs.

To understand the company’s early trading activity, however, we need to understand just how well Roblox performed in Q4 2020. When we last noodled on the company’s valuation, we only had data through the third quarter of last year. Now we have data through December 31, 2020. Let’s check how much Roblox grew in that final period, and if it helps explain how the company managed that epic Series H markup.

Gaming is popular, who knew

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U.S. What are the benefits and drawbacks of various types of visas and green cards?

The ones I’ve heard the most about are the H-1B, O-1 and EB-1A.

— Intelligent in India

Dear Intelligent:

I’m happy to hear you’re considering the O-1A extraordinary ability visa and the EB-1A extraordinary green card! Individuals often assume they need to have won a Nobel Prize or some other major award or be well known in their field to qualify for either the O-1A or the EB-1A — and that’s simply not the case.

“Particularly for folks from Asia, being a self-promoter is massively looked down upon. Humility is important,” says Navroop Sahdev, a pioneering economist and blockchain expert I recently interviewed for my podcast. Sahdev is founder and CEO of The Digital Economist, a Connection Science Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a partner at NextGen Venture Partners.

She spoke with me about her immigration journey to the United States, which included two H-1B visas, an O-1A visa and an EB-1A green card.

Here are the pros and cons of each visa and green card that you listed.

H-1B visa

Overall, the requirements for the H-1B specialty occupation visa are not as stringent as those for the O-1A visa and the EB-1A green card, which is why many employers sponsor international students who are on an F-1 visa and recently graduated or on OPT (Optional Practical Training) or STEM OPT for an H-1B.

Because demand for the H-1B far exceeds the annual supply of 85,000, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) holds a random lottery to determine who can apply for an H-1B. (That random lottery is slated to switch to a wage-based selection process next year.)

This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.9 million after adding $2 million to its prior raise.

TechCrunch has covered the company modestly before this seed-extension, noting that it was part of the CRV-backed Liftoff List, and reporting on some of its business details when it took part in a recent Y Combinator demo day.

Something that stood out in our notes on the company when it presented at the accelerator’s graduation event was its economics, with our piece noting that the startup “already [has] several big ticket clients and [says it] will soon be profitable.” Profitable is just not a word TechCrunch hears often when it comes to early-stage, high-growth companies.

So, when the company picked up more capital, we picked up the phone. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s founding team, including Maxine Anderson, the company’s current COO; Ryan Laverty, its president; and Michael Ioffe, its CEO, about its latest round.

According to the trio, Arist raised its initial $1.9 million around the time it left Y Combinator, a round that was led by Craft Ventures at a $15 million valuation. Following that early investment, the company’s business with large clients performed well, leading to it closing $2 million more last December. The founders said that the new funds were raised at a higher price-point than its previous seed tranche.

The second deal was led by Global Founders Capital.

The company’s enterprise adoption makes sense, as all large companies have regular training requirements for their workers; and as anyone who has worked for a megacorp knows, current training, while improved in recent years, is far from perfect. Arist is a bet that lots of corporate training — and the training that emanates from governments, nonprofits and the like — can be sliced into small pieces and ingested via text-message.

For that the company charges around $1,000 per month, minimum.

Arist did catch something of a COVID wave, with its founding team telling TechCrunch that pitching its service to large companies got easier after the pandemic hit. Many concerns better realized how busy their staff was when they moved to working from home, the trio explained, and with some folks suffering from limited internet connectivity, text-based training helped pick up slack.

We were also curious about how the startup onboards customers to the somewhat new text-based learning world; is there a steep learning curve to be managed? As it turns out, the startup helps new customers build their first course. And, in response to our question about the expense of that effort, the Arist crew said that they use freelancers for the task, keeping costs low.

Recently Arist has expanded its engineering staff, and plans to scale from around 11 people today to around 30 by the end of the year. And while Anderson, Laverty and Ioffe are based in Boston, they are hiring remotely. The startup serves global customers via a WhatsApp integration. So Arist should be able to scale its staff and customer base around the world effectively from birth. (This is the new normal, we reckon.)

What’s ahead? Arist wants to grow its revenues by 5x to 10x by the end of the year, hire, and might share if it wants to raise more capital around the end of the year.

Oh, and it partners with Twilio to some degree, though the group was coy on just what sort of discounts it may receive; the founding team merely noted that they liked the SMS giant and deferred further commentary.

All told, Arist is what we look for in an early-stage startup in terms of growth, vision and potential market scale — the startup thinks that 80% of training should be via SMS or Slack and Teams, the latter two of which are a hint about its product direction. But Arist feels a bit more mature financially than some of its peers, perhaps due to its price point. Regardless, we’ll check back in at the mid-point of the year and see how growth is ticking along at the company.

My first full day in isolation was one year ago. My last dinner out was on Tuesday, March 10, 2020, with Mike Platt. I remember driving home that night pondering when I’d be back in the office.

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, I had a full schedule at home, starting at 9 am and ending at 5:45 pm. Little did I know that would be the pattern for at least a year.

Amy and I each had a long day yesterday, so we spend the evening having “morning coffee #2 without the coffee.” It was an emotional reflection on a year with a vast range of positives and negatives for both of us.

By far, the biggest positive has been spending 365 days together. We spent the first 25 years of our relationship apart more than 75% of the time as I traveled constantly. To spend 365 days together, waking up and having coffee each morning, and saying goodnight in person each night, has been amazing.

As we both look forward, we are talking a lot about what we’ve learned from the last year – both good and bad. It sets the table for how we want to live the rest of our lives, however long that may be.

Amy shared an article from The Atlantic titled We Have to Grieve Our Last Good Days, which impacted me. I encourage you to read it and ponder as you reflect on the anniversary of the start of the Covid crisis in the US.

The post One Year Ago Today appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

We’re putting aside the IPO news cycle this morning to check in on the venture capital world and the fintech market in particular.

As we all know, fintech is booming: Between Robinhood and Public and M1 Finance raising competing rounds, payment-tech startup Finix moving to diversify its cap table, and ideas that work in one market finding purchase and capital in others, it’s a damn good time to build financial technology.

But perhaps even with all that recent knowledge, we’re still missing the point.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

A provisional report from data and research group CB Insights indicates that we’re not merely in a warm period for fintech funding  — we are in a period of all-time record investment for so-called mega-rounds, or investments of $100 million or more inside the fintech realm.

The first quarter of 2020 had stiff competition to overcome to set a mega-round record. The preceding period, Q4 2020, for example, saw 30 fintech rounds across the globe that were worth nine figures. But, to date, Q1 2021 is ahead and is thus guaranteed to set a new record, having already bested the preceding all-time high.

This morning we’re talking big money and fintech, with a splash of early-stage digging. I asked a CB Insights analyst about what appears to be falling fintech seed deal volume. Is this the result of data reporting delays inherent to seed data, the impact of SAFEs and other sorts of notes limiting visibility into the earliest stages of venture, or just a plain-old slowdown? Let’s find out.

Big, bigger, small, fewer

Per the interim CB Insights dataset, there have been some 33 fintech mega-rounds so far in 2021. For context, it’s more than 50% more such rounds in Q1 2020 and Q1 2019. Via the preliminary report, here’s the data:

A team of mobile app engineers and designers from companies like Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Kickstarter and others, are now launching their own startup, Runway, to address the common pain points they experienced around the mobile app release cycle. With Runway, teams can connect their existing tools to keep track of the progress of an app’s release, automate many of the manual steps along the way and better facilitate communication among all those involved.

“Mobile app releases are exercises in herding cats, we often say. There’s a lot of moving pieces and a lot of fragmentation across tools,” explains Runway co-founder Gabriel Savit, who met his fellow co-founders — Isabel Barrera, David Filion, and Matt Varghese — when they all worked together as the first mobile app team at Rent the Runway.

“The result is a lot of overhead in terms of time spent and wasted, a lot of back and forth on Slack to make sure things are ready to ship,” he says.

Typically, interdisciplinary teams involving engineers, product, marketing, design, QA and more, will keep each other updated on the app’s progress using things like spreadsheets and other shared documents, in addition to Slack.

Meanwhile, the actual work taking place to prepare for the release is being managed with a variety of separate tools, like GitHub, JIRA, Trello, Bitrise, CircleCI and others.

Runway is designed to work as an integration layer across all the team’s tools. Using a simple OAuth authentication flow, the team connects whichever tools they use with Runway, then configure a few settings that allow Runway to understand their unique workflow — like what their branching strategy is, how they create release branches, how they tag releases and so on.

In other words, teams train Runway to understand how they operate — they don’t have to change their own processes or behavior to accommodate Runway.

Once set up, Runway reads the information from the various integration points, interprets it and takes action. Everyone on the team is able to log into Runway via its web interface and see exactly where they are in the release cycle and what still needs to be done.

“We’re forming this glue, this connective tissue between all of the moving pieces and the tools, and creating a true source of truth that everybody can refer to and sync or gather around. That really facilitates and improves the level of collaboration and getting people on the same page,” Savit says.

As the work continues, Runway helps to identify problems, like missing JIRA tags, for example. It then automatically backfills those tags. It can also help prevent other mistakes, like when the incorrect build is being selected for submission.

Another automation involves Slack communication. Because Runway understands who’s responsible for what, it can direct Slack notifications and updates to specific members of the team. This reduces the noise in the Slack channel and ensures that everyone knows what they’re meant to be working on.

Currently, Runway is focused on all the parts of the mobile app release cycle from kickoff to submission to the actual app store releases. On its near-term roadmap, it plans to expand its integrations to include connections to things like bug reporting and beta testing platforms. Longer term, the company wants to expand its workflow to include launching apps on other platforms, like desktop.

The startup is currently in pilot testing with a few early customers, including ClassPass, Kickstarter, Capsule and a few others. These customers, though not all yet paying clients, have already used the system in production for over 40 app release cycles.

The startup’s pricing will begin at $400 per app per month, which allows for unlimited release managers and unlimited apps, access to all integrations, and iOS and Android support, among other things. Custom pricing will be offered to those who want higher levels of customer support and consulting services.

The startup doesn’t have an exact ETA to when it will launch publicly as it’s working to onboard each customer and work closely with them to address their specific integration needs for now. Today, Runway supports integrations with the App Store, Google Play, GitHub, JIRA, Slack, Circle, fastlane, GitLab, Bitrise, Linear, Jenkins and others, but may add more integrations as customers require.

Runway’s team of four is mostly New York-based and is currently participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 virtual program. The company hasn’t yet raised a seed round.

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