One little-known home and retail automation startup might seem like an unlikely candidate to help combat the ongoing pandemic. But its founder says its technology can do just that, even if it wasn’t the company’s original plan.

Butlr, a spin-out of the MIT Media Lab, uses a mix of wireless, battery-powered hardware and artificial intelligence to track people’s movements indoors without violating their privacy. The startup uses ceiling-mounted sensors to detect individuals’ body heat to track where a person walks and where they might go next. The use cases are near-endless. The sensors can turn on mood-lighting or air conditioning when it detects movement, help businesses understand how shoppers navigate their stores, determine the wait-time in the queues at the checkout and even sound the alarm if it detects a person after-hours.

By using passive infrared sensors to detect only body heat, the sensors don’t know who you are — only where you are and where you’re heading. The tracking stops as soon as you leave the sensor’s range, like when you leave a store.

The technology is in high demand. Butlr says it’s delivering its technology to some 200,000 retail stores, not least because it’s far cheaper than the more privacy-invading — and expensive — alternatives, like surveillance cameras and facial recognition.

But when the pandemic hit, most of those stores closed — as effectively did entire cities and nations — to counter the ongoing threat from of COVID-19. But those stores would have to open again, and so Butlr got back to work.

Butlr’s co-founder Honghao Deng told TechCrunch that it began retooling its technology to help support stores opening again.

The company quickly rolled out new software features — like maximum occupancy and queue management — to help stores with sensors already installed cope with the new but ever-changing laws and guidance that businesses had to comply with.

Deng said that the sensors can make sure no more than the allowed number of people can be in a store at once, and make sure that staff are protected from customers by helping to enforce social distancing rules. Customers can also see live queue data to help them pick a less-crowded time to shop, said Deng.

All these things before a pandemic might have sounded, frankly, a little dull. Fast-forward to the middle of a pandemic and you’re probably thankful for all the help — and the technology — you can get.

Butlr tested its new features in China at the height of the pandemic’s rise in February, and later rolled out to its global customers, including in the United States. Deng said Butlr’s technology is already helping customers at supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market and the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi to help them reopen while minimizing the risk to others.

It’s a pivot that’s paid off. Last month Butlr raised $1.2 million in seed funding, just as the pandemic was reaching its peak in the United States.

Nobody knew a pandemic was coming, not least Deng. And as the pandemic spread, businesses have suffered. If it wasn’t for quick thinking, Butlr might’ve been another startup that succumbed to the pandemic.

Instead, the startup is probably going to help save lives — and without compromising anyone’s privacy.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sonali Vijayavargiya, Founder and Managing Partner, Augment Ventures. She discussed her firm’s investment approach, including early exits. Siply As...

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Quantum computing is at an interesting point. It’s at the cusp of being mature enough to solve real problems. But like in the early days of personal computers, there are lots of different companies trying different approaches to solving the fundamental physics problems that underly the technology, all while another set of startups is looking ahead and thinking about how to integrate these machines with classical computers — and how to write software for them.

At Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18, we will have a panel with D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz, Quantum Machines co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan and IonQ president and CEO Peter Chapman. The leaders of these three companies are all approaching quantum computing from different angles, yet all with the same goal of making this novel technology mainstream.

D-Wave may just be the best-known quantum computing company thanks to an early start and smart marketing in its early days. Alan Baratz took over as CEO earlier this year after a few years as chief product officer and executive VP of R&D at the company. Under Baratz, D-Wave has continued to build out its technology — and especially its D-Wave quantum cloud service. Leap 2, the latest version of its efforts, launched earlier this year. D-Wave’s technology is also very different from that of many other efforts thanks to its focus on quantum annealing. That drew a lot of skepticism in its early days, but it’s now a proven technology and the company is now advancing both its hardware and software platform.

Like Baratz, IonQ’s Peter Chapman isn’t a founder either. Instead, he was the engineering director for Amazon Prime before joining IonQ in 2019. Under his leadership, the company raised a $55 million funding round in late 2019, which the company extended by another $7 million last month. He is also continuing IonQ’s bet on its trapped ion technology, which makes it relatively easy to create qubits and which, the company argues, allows it to focus its efforts on controlling them. This approach also has the advantage that IonQ’s machines are able to run at room temperature, while many of its competitors have to cool their machines to as close to zero Kelvin as possible, which is an engineering challenge in itself, especially as these companies aim to miniaturize their quantum processors.

Quantum Machines plays in a slightly different part of the ecosystem from D-Wave and IonQ. The company, which recently raised $17.5 million in a Series A round, is building a quantum orchestration platform that combines novel custom hardware for controlling quantum processors — because once quantum machines reach a bit more maturity, a standard PC won’t be fast enough to control them — with a matching software platform and its own QUA language for programming quantum algorithms. Quantum Machines is Itamar Sivan’s first startup, which he launched with his co-founders after getting his Ph.D. in condensed matter and material physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Come to Disrupt 2020 and hear from these companies and others on September 14-18. Get a front-row seat with your Digital Pro Pass for just $245 or with a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package for $445. Prices are increasing next week, so grab yours today to save up to $300.

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The outages at RBS, TSB and Visa left millions of people unable to deposit their paychecks, pay their bills, acquire new loans and more. As a result, the House of Commons’ Treasury Select Committee (TSC) began an investigation of the U.K. finance industry and found the “current level of financial services IT failures is unacceptable.” Following this, the Bank of England (BoE), Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) decided to take action and set a standard for operational resiliency.

While policies can often feel burdensome and detached from reality, these guidelines are reasonable steps that any company across any industry can exercise to improve the resilience of their software systems.

The BoE standard breaks down to these five steps:

Following this process aligns with best practices in architecting resilient systems. Let’s break each of these steps down and discuss how chaos engineering can help.

Identify critical business services

The operational resilience framework recommends focusing on the services that serve external customers. While internal applications are important for productivity, this customer-first mentality is sound advice for determining a starting place for reliability efforts. While it’s ultimately up to the business to weigh the criticality of the different services they offer, the ones necessary to make payments, retrieve payments, investing or insuring against risks are all recommended priorities.

When it comes to choosing a tech stack, the decisions you make today could have a cascading impact for years. On one hand you want to be cool and modern, but on the other, you want to build with technology you know — and sometimes getting to market is more important than riding the latest technology wave.

The problem is that your decisions can have consequences that result in technical debt, the concept that as you make one decision, you have to pay a debt of sorts to fix underlying structural problems in the code as the result of those decisions you made early on.

Before you start freaking out, it’s something that happens to every company and is really impossible to avoid — so you make your choices and get your product out the door.

At this week’s TechCrunch Early Stage conference, HappyFunCorp CEO and co-founder Ben Schippers and CTO Jon Evans spoke about choosing the optimal tech stack. The pair have built custom software for companies like Amazon, Samsung, WeWork and AMC, so they know a thing or two about the subject.

What to consider before choosing

Evans says startups must weigh several key factors when choosing a tech stack, but development speed tops the list. “The single most key thing about your tech stack is speed,” he said. “The right stack will give you the most speed, compared to the alternatives.”

But early choices have other implications. “In the medium- to long-run, you have to be conscious about running up what we call technical debt, which is really the side effects of a spaghetti nest of bad code that is tightly coupled and leads to negative side effects all over the place,” he said.

The last few years haven’t proven too friendly to hardware companies in the augmented reality world. Enterprise-centric efforts like ODG, Daqri and Meta flared out, Magic Leap raised massive amounts of cash only to scale back its dreams this year in the face of looming disaster and just about every other hardware player has suffered some form of an identity crisis. As someone who covers the space closely, this has led me to keep an eye on companies I’ve covered that seem to have been a bit quiet.

Over the past three years, every few months or so, I’d check in on the AR startup Mira just to see if they had any updates. I met with them in 2017 after they announced they’d raised funding from Sequoia, notable as one of that firms few public AR/VR investments. Back then, Mira pitched its device as a Google Cardboard for AR, something that could give people a lightweight introduction to the world of augmented reality. They teased both workplace and at-home use cases, but there was an early skew toward approaching developers building consumer apps.

Over on Extra Crunch, read about why the first wave of AR hardware companies died and what the next generation of startups need to do to succeed.

The company has been keeping a pretty low profile since it publicly launched in 2017, but they’re finally ready to give some updates.

Mira now tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised about $10 million worth of funding over a few top-ups, which the team is collectively deeming as a seed extension round. Sequoia and SF-based Happiness Ventures led these financings, of which the startup did not break out the specific terms. The team has now raised just under $13 million to date. Mira has used this cash to refocus its business and refine its hardware.

By late-2018, the founders had decided to move their focus solely toward industrial rollouts of their headset.

“As we looked across the consumer landscape, as we looked across the industrial landscape, as we looked across government, it became very clear that where that value-driven use case is ripe today is much more in the industrial landscape,” Mira co-founder and COO Matt Stern told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company’s Prism Pro headset sidesteps the technical complexity that has been a major stumbling block for previous entrants in the space that have struggled with their devices holding up in the field. Mira’s device is about as simple as the task requires, integrating a slot-in design for users to pop in an older-generation iPhone and physically connect it to a head-mounted camera that allows workers to scan items and markers. There are a number of advantages to this type of device. It’s cheaper, it’s simpler to operate and it’s easier to integrate into a company’s enterprise device management structure.

Compared to the experience a worker might get with a HoloLens, there’s a much lower ceiling to the capabilities of these devices. The Prism Pro hardware eschews what some consider “true AR” capabilities, dumping spatial tracking and mapping, and opting instead to augment your vision with a heads-up display window. The added camera is for scanning items, not generating depth maps so that holograms can be projected onto a space’s geometry, i.e. there are no floating whales to be had here. This isn’t a dramatic rethinking of the future of work so much as it’s a rethinking of form factors already being used; it’s a tablet for your face that you can control with taps and your gaze.

The AR world is still certainly a rough place to be building a startup, but Mira’s founders feel good about where the company has ended up after refocusing on manufacturing, especially within the competitive landscape.

“I can’t confirm this because I don’t work at Magic Leap, but we have literally onboarded more customers to our platform that are using our device every single day than companies like Magic Leap that have raised literally hundreds of times our funding,” CEO Ben Taft tells TechCrunch. “And it’s just been by trying to grow a business in a conservative manner and actually keeping up with the rate of adoption.”

As an early-stage investor, Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko looks for two breakthroughs in order to invest in a startup: The first happens in the value-seeking stage of a startup’s journey and the second occurs in its growth-seeking phase.

“There are really two stages to building a company,” Miura-Ko said at the TechCrunch Early Stage virtual event earlier this week. “One is what we call value-seeking mode, and this is where you’re really trying to figure out what the company actually looks like, including what’s the product? Who are you selling to? How do you price it? All of these things are still being discovered in the value-seeking mode.”

After founders have answered those questions, they can move into growth-seeking mode, she said. That’s the point when startups are trying to attract as many customers as possible.

Throughout these two distinct stages, Miura-Ko says she looks for the two breakthroughs: the inflection insight and product-market fit.

Inflection insights

The idea of an inflection insight, Miura-Ko said, is a relatively new framework Floodgate is exploring. Often times, she said founders need to ride some massive, exponential curves that allow their businesses to grow sustainably and scale.

These inflections have two parts to it: cause and impact. The causes are generally either technological (cloud, 5G), regulatory (GDPR, AV regulation) or societal (belief or behavior shifts). On the impact side, products and distribution may become cheaper or faster, while also presenting new use cases or customers, she said.

“Or even more interesting, you have something that was impossible that now is possible,” she said. “And that is an exponential impact that you could ride on.”

But simply finding that inflection insight doesn’t mean you should create a business. What founders must do next is determine if the insight is right and nonconsensus.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Vincent Diallo was recorded in June 2020. Vincent...

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The wider field of cyber security — not just defending networks, but identifying fraudulent activity — has seen a big boost in activity in the last few months, and that’s no surprise. The global health pandemic has led to more interactions and transactions moving online, and the contractions we’re feeling across the economy and society have led some to take more desperate and illegal actions, using digital challenges to do it.

Today, a UK company called Quantexa — which has built a machine learning platform branded “Contextual Decision Intelligence” (CDI) that analyses disparate data points to get better insight into nefarious activity, as well as to (more productively) build better profiles of a company’s entire customer base — is raising a growth round of funding to address that opportunity.

The London-based startup has picked up $64.7 million, a Series C the it will be using to continue building out both its tools and the use cases for applying them, as well as expanding geographically, specifically in North America, Asia-Pacific and more European territories.

The mission, said Vishal Marria, Quantexa’s founder and CEO, is to “connect the dots to make better business decisions.”

The startup built its business on the back of doing work for major banks and others in the financial services sector, and Marria added that the plan will be to continue enhancing tools for that vertical while also expanding into two growing opportunities: working with insurance and government/public sector organizations.

The backers in this round speak to how Quantexa positions itself in the market, and the traction it’s seen to date for its business. It’s being led by Evolution Equity Partners — a VC that specialises in innovative cybersecurity startups — with participation also from previous backers Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, HSBC and Accenture, as well as new backers ABN AMRO Ventures. HSBC, Accenture and ABN AMRO are all strategic investors working directly with the startup in their businesses.

Altogether, Quantexa has “thousands of users” across 70+ countries, it said, with additional large enterprises including Standard Chartered, OFX and Dunn & Bradstreet.

The company has now raised some $90 million to date, and reliable sources close to the company tell us that the valuation is “well north” of $250 million — which to me sounds like it’s between $250 million and $300 million.

Marria said in an interview that he initially got the idea for Quantexa — which I believe may be a creative portmanteau of “quantum” and “context” — when he was working as an executive director at Ernst & Young and saw “many challenges with investigations” in the financial services industry.

“Is this a money launderer?” is the basic question that investigators aim to answer, but they were going about it, “using just a sliver of information,” he said. “I thought to myself, this is bonkers. There must be a better way.”

That better way, as built by Quantexa, is to solve it in the classic approach of tapping big data and building AI algorithms that help, in Marria’s words, connect the dots.

As an example, typically, an investigation needs to do significantly more than just track the activity of one individual or one shell company, and you need to seek out the most unlikely connections between a number of actions in order to build up an accurate picture. When you think about it, trying to identify, track, shut down and catch a large money launderer (a typical use case for Quantexa’s software) is a classic big data problem.

While there is a lot of attention these days on data protection and security breaches that leak sensitive customer information, Quantexa’s approach, Marria said, is to sell software, not ingest proprietary data into its engine to provide insights. He said that these days deployments typically either are done on premises or within private clouds, rather than using public cloud infrastructure, and that when Quantexa provides data to complement its customers’ data, it comes from publicly available sources (for example Companies House filings in the UK).

There are a number of companies offering services in the same general area as Quantexa. They include those that present themselves more as business intelligence platforms that help detect fraud (such as Looker) through to those that are secretive and present themselves as AI businesses working behind the scenes for enterprises and governments to solve tough challenges, such as Palantir, through to others focusing specifically on some of the use cases for the technology, such as ComplyAdvantage and its focus on financial fraud detection.

Marria says that it has a few key differentiators from these. First is how its software works at scale: “It comes back to entity resolution that [calculations] can be done in real time and at batch,” he said. “And this is a platform, software that is easily deployed and configured at a much lower total cost of ownership. It is tech and that’s quite important in the current climate.”

And that is what has resonated with investors.

“Quantexa’s proprietary platform heralds a new generation of decision intelligence technology that uses a single contextual view of customers to profoundly improve operational decision making and overcome big data challenges,” said Richard Seewald, founding and managing partner of Evolution, in a statement. “Its impressive rapid growth, renowned client base and potential to build further value across so many sectors make Quantexa a fantastic partner whose team I look forward to working with.” Seewald is joining the board with this round.

Cowboy has raised a $26 million (€23 million) Series B funding round from Exor Seeds, HCVC, Isomer Capital, Future Positive Capital and Index Ventures. The startup has been manufacturing premium electric bikes and selling them directly to consumers around Europe.

The company recently released the third generation of its flagship bike, which is all about refinements and iterating on its existing offering. If you haven’t seen one in a European city, it features an iconic triangle-shaped aluminum frame with integrated pill-shaped lights.

With a focus on simplicity, there are no gears or buttons to control motor assistance. The motor kicks in automatically when you start pedaling. Some of the key features of the Cowboy bike are the carbon belt, custom-made tires with a puncture protection layer and the detachable battery.

Cowboy bikes are also connected bikes thanks to some electronic components. For instance, you can lock your bike when you’re not using it. The company is currently testing auto-unlock, a feature that takes advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy to detect your phone.

By combining data from the accelerometer, the speed of the bike and your pedal power, Cowboy will also soon automatically detect crash and notify an emergency contact.

In addition to designing a bike, Cowboy is also a service company. It has built a network of repair partners and offers test rides to potential clients. It is now available in dozens of European cities.

The company also offers an insurance product thanks a partnership with Qover. For €8 per month, you can receive real-time notification whenever someone is trying to steal your bike and you’re insured against theft. For €10 per month, you’re also insured against damage.

With today’s funding round, the startup plans to hire over 30 people in the next six months, expand its network of test rides and scale production operations with Flex.

Partipost, a Singapore-based marketing startup that lets anyone with a social media profile sign up for influencer campaigns, has raised $3.5 million in new funding. The round was led by SPH Ventures, the investment arm of publisher Singapore Press Holdings, with participation from Quest Ventures and other investors.

The funding will be used to grow Partipost’s current operations in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan, and expand into Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, other Southeast Asian markets with heavy social media usage. Since launching its mobile app in 2018, Partipost says it has added about 200,000 influencers to its platform, and that over the past 12 months, it has helped conduct 2,500 social media marketing campaigns for more than 850 brands, including Adidas, Arnott’s, Red Bull, Chope and Gojek.

According to benchmark report released in March by Influencer Marketing Hub, the influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth about $9.7 billion in 2020, with companies spending increasing amounts on social media campaigns and working with more “micro-influencers.” To serve them, the report said that more than 380 new influencer marketing agencies and platforms were launched last year, joining a roster of companies that already include AspireIQ, Upfluence, BuzzSumo, SparkToro and Inzpsire.me, to name just a few examples.

While most of these companies focus on helping brands identify the influencers with the widest social media reach, Partipost lets anyone sign up to take part in a campaign.

“Partipost’s main difference is that we believe that everyone can be an influencer,” founder and chief executive officer Jonathan Eg told TechCrunch. “Even if you have 200 followers, you can be one. We want to create a new market that we believe will be the future. Everyone can post on social media, write a review or give some feedback and be paid for it.”

“We want to empower everyone to monetize off their own data and influence and not just allow the big tech companies to do so,” he added.

Aspiring influencers browse brand campaigns on Partipost’s app and apply to take part by submitting a post draft. If the brand approves it, the user can then go ahead and post it on their social media profiles.

The amount of cash they earn is based on how much engagement each post receives. According to the company’s website, most campaigns require a minimum of 200 followers or more, and successful users can earn an average of $5 to $150 per campaign, depending on the brand’s payout structure.

One of Partipost’s selling points for brands is that it enables them to sign up thousands of influencers for a campaign in a single day, help them react quickly to online trends. Part of the funding will also be used to build data tools to help brands match campaigns with Partipost users more efficiently. The company says it expects to increase its base of aspiring influencers to one million within the next 18 months.

As part of the funding, SPH Ventures chief executive officer Chua Boon Ping will join Partipost’s board, while Quest Ventures partner Jeffrey Seah will become an observer.

In a media statement, Chua said, “Social influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing segments within Digital marketing. Hence, we are very excited to lead Partipost’s Series A round to further accelerate its growth. We are impressed by Partipost’s strong traction in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan as a young startup and look forward to partnering it to scale to new markets.”

When you need a loan, the cost and speed of getting it can be as critical to get right as the financing itself, a principle that might be even more relevant today in our shaky pandemic-hit economy than ever before. Today, a company that proposes to cut both the time and price for securing financing, with a platform, initially aimed at SMBs, that lets business owners put up their home property as collateral to get the loan, is announcing a funding round to expand its business.

Selina Finance, which provides loans to small and medium businesses in the form of flexible credit facilities — you pay back only what you borrow, and you do that over time, rather than in one lump sum — that are backed by the value of your personal home, is today announcing that it has raised £42 million ($53 million) — £12 million in equity and £30 million in debt to distribute as loans. The company says it plans to raise significantly more debt in the coming months as its business expands.

The funding is coming from several investors, including Picus Capital and Global Founders Capital — two firms that are tied in part to the Samwer brothers, which built the Rocket Internet e-commerce incubator in Berlin. The company’s valuation is not being disclosed.

London-based Selina plans to use the funding in a couple of areas: first, to continue growing its business in the UK, which was founded by Andrea Olivari, Hubert Fenwick and Leonard Benning and launched in June 2019; and second, to start the process of opening up to other markets in Europe.

Selina today focuses on SMEs whose applications qualify as “prime” (as opposed to sub-prime). They can borrow up to £1 million in funds — the average amount is significantly less, £150,000, says Olivari — with interest rates starting at 4.95% APR. That undercuts the rates on typical unsecured loans. Selina is also in the process of getting a license to expand its offering to consumer borrowers, too.

We’ve moved on from the days when property investing was so stable that “safe as houses” was a common expression to mean absolute reliability. But for most people, their properties continue to represent the single-biggest asset that they own and thus become a key part of how a person might construct their wider financial profile when it comes to borrowing money.

Selina’s tech essentially operates a kind of two-sided marketplace: on one hand, its algorithms process details about your property to determine its market value and how that will appreciate (or depreciate), and on the other, it’s evaluating the health of the SME business, and the purpose of the loan, to determine whether the borrower will be good for it. It’s only a year old and so it’s hard to say whether this is a strong record, but Benning notes that so far, no customers have defaulted on loans.

“We have the security of the home, yes,” he said, “but we only take credit-worthy customers to make sure the default scenario doesn’t happen. It’s something that we avoid at any cost. Technically there is a long process that leads to that outcome, but it almost never happens.” He noted that Selina has people on its team who have worked for sub-prime lenders, which gives them experience in helping to determine prime opportunities.

More generally, the idea of leveraging your property to raise capital — say, through a remortgage or loan against its value — are not new concepts: banks have been offering and distributing this kind of financing for years. The issue that Selina is addressing is that typically these deals come with high interest rates and commissions, and might take six to eight weeks from application to approval and finally loan. Selina’s pitch is that it can bring that down to five days, or possibly less.

“It’s critical that we can make a loan in five days to be be nimble and accurate, because this is one area where banks break down,” said Fenwick. “It can take two weeks to arrange for someone to walk around on behalf of a bank to make a valuation. It’s just a backwards and archaic process. We can use big data and tap different areas and dynamics all that into a model to assess the valuation of a property with a low margin of error.”

Selina is not the only tech company tackling this opportunity — specifically, Figure, the startup founded by Mike Cagney formerly of SoFi, is also providing loans to individuals against the value of their property, among other services. And for those who have followed other commerce startups financed by the Samwers, you could even say that there is a hint of cloning going on here, with even the sites of the two bearing some similarities. But for now at least Selina seems to be the only one of its kind in the UK, and for now that spells opportunity.

“Selina Finance is bringing much-needed innovation to the UK lending space by allowing customers to access the equity locked up in their residential property, seamlessly and on flexible terms,” said Robin Godenrath, MD at Picus Capital, in a statement. “The team impressed us with their strong focus on building a fully digital customer experience and have already achieved great product-market fit with their business loan use case. We’re excited and confident that Selina’s consumer proposition will also become an attractive alternative in the consumer lending space.”