Back in 2016, Mobalytics wowed the judges at Disrupt SF with its data-based coach for the exploding competitive gaming world, winning the Startup Battlefield. The company is building on the success of the past few years with a new funding round and a compelling new collaboration with Tobii that uses eye-tracking to provide powerful insights into gamers’ skills.

Mobalytics began with the idea that, by leveraging the in-game data of a competitive esport like League of Legends (LoL), they could provide objective feedback to players along the lines of how fast or effective they are in different situations. Quantifying things like survivability or teamplay provides an analogue to similar measures in physical sports.

“On an athlete you have all these measurements, like pulse oximeters, ECGs, the 40-yard dash,” said Amine Issa, co-founder and “Warchief of Science.” Not so much with PC games. Their challenge at that time was to take the LoL API provided by Riot and transform it into actionable feedback, which the company’s success in the years since suggests they managed to do.

But Issa had always wanted to use another, more direct and objective measurement of a gamer’s mental processes: eye tracking. And last year they began an internal project to evaluate doing just that, in partnership with eye-tracking hardware maker Tobii.

“If you know where someone is looking, it’s the closest thing to knowing what they’re thinking,” Issa said. “When you combine that with the larger picture you can put together something to help them along. So we spent six months conducting research, taking players of different levels and roles and studying their eye tracking data to find some metrics we could organize the platform around.”

Not surprisingly, there are characteristics of the highly skilled (and practiced) that set them apart, and the team was able to collect them into a set of characteristics that any player can relate to.

“We had to think about how to build a product that people want to use. One thing we learned after TechCrunch is that even a simple score from 0-100 doesn’t work for everyone. You need to provide the context for that. So with something like eye tracking, you’re getting 30 data points per second — how do you break that down in a way that players understand it?”

Talking to professional gamers and coaches during the study helped them form the main categories that Mobalytics now tracks with the aid of a Tobii device, like information processing, map awareness and tunnel vision.

“It’s important to be able to tell a narrative to people. Say you get ganked a lot,” said Issa, referring to the unfortunate occurrence of being picked off by enemy players while alone. “Why are you getting ganked? If your vision score is high but map awareness is low, that’s one thing. Did you know all the information and go in arrogantly, or were you not aware? League is a very complicated game, so players want to know, in this specific fight, what did I do wrong, and what should I have done instead?”

That second question is a tougher one (though perhaps AI MOBA players may have something to say about it), but the metrics are powerful in and of themselves. “Pros are fascinated by this technology,” Issa said. “There’s a lot of ‘I had no idea’ moments. Coaches have said, these are my fastest players but it’s cool to see that as a quantifiable variable.”

Tobii’s head of gaming, Martin Lindgren, echoed this feeling: “Pro teams aren’t interested in being told what to do. They want the data so they can draw their own conclusions.”

Tobii now has a gaming-focused eye-tracker and integrates with a number of AAA games, like Rise of the Tomb Raider, where it can be used in place of fiddly aiming using the analog sticks. As someone who’s bad at specifically that part of games, this is attractive to me, and Lindgren said opportunities like that are only increasing as gaming companies embrace both accessibility and try to stand out in a crowded market.

The companies have worked together to improve the eye-tracking coaching, for instance lowering the number of games a user must play before the system can accurately track their in-game actions; Lindgren said the collaboration with Mobalytics is ongoing — “definitely a long-term partnership” — in fact Tobii’s relationship with the founders predates their startup.

The ultimate goal of Mobalytics is to have a gaming assistant that adapts itself to your playing and preferences, making intelligent suggestions to improve your skills. That’s a ways off, but the company is getting the hang of it. Its first product, the LoL assistant, took a year to build, Issa said. A more recent one, for Legends of Runeterra, took three months. Teamfight Tactics took three weeks.

Admittedly it was more difficult to design one for Valorant, which, being a first-person shooter, is wildly different from the other games — but now that it’s done, a lot of that work could be applied to an assistant for Counter-Strike or Overwatch.

Expansion to other games and genres is the reason for raising an $11 million Series A, led by Almaz Capital and Cabra VC, with HP Tech Ventures, General Catalyst, GGV Capital, RRE Ventures, Axiomatic and T1 Esports participating.

“It was a very different experience from the post-TechCrunch one, where you’re in the spotlight and everyone’s throwing money your way,” said Issa. “But we’ve built a successful product on LoL, expanded to four games, today we have more than seven million monthly active users… Our plan is to double down on what’s worked for us and create the ultimate gaming companion.”

SaaS is hot in 2020. Tooling that helps facilitate remote work is hot in 2020. And we all know that anything related to video chatting in particular is on fire this year. In the midst of all three trends is Kudo, which just raised $6 million in a round led by Felicis.

But Kudo’s video chatting and conferencing tool with built-in support for translators and multiple audio streams wasn’t initially constructed for the COVID-19 era. It got started back in 2016, so let’s talk about how it got to where it is today before we talk about how much the pandemic and ensuing remote-work boom accelerated its growth by what the company described in a release as 3,500%.

Pain to proof to product

TechCrunch spoke to Fardad Zabetian, Kudo’s founder and CEO, earlier this week to learn about how his company got started. According to the executive, he started working on Kudo back in 2016 after feeling the need to add language support to what he calls decentralized meetings.

After getting a proof of concept (could interactive audio and video be compiled for remote participants with less than 500 milliseconds of latency?) in place, the company itself launched in 2017, and after more work its product was put into the market in September, 2018.

During that time, Kudo put together angel and friends-and-family money that Zabetian described as less than $1 million, meaning that the startup got a lot done without spending a lot. (In my experience, talking to founders over the last decade or so, that’s a good sign.)

All that work paid off this year when COVID-19 shook up the world, forcing companies to cancel business travel and instead lean on video conferencing solutions. Given the international nature of modern business — globalization is a fact, regardless of what nationalists want — the change in the world’s meeting landscape scooted demand toward Kudo.

Here’s how it works: Kudo provides a self-serve SaaS video conferencing solution, allowing any company to spin up meetings as they need. It also has a translator pool, and can supply humans to fill out a meeting’s needs if a customer wants. Or, customers can bring their own translators.

So, Kudo is SaaS with an optional services component, though given the lower margins inherent to services over software, I’d hazard that we should think of its services revenue as a helper to its SaaS incomes. There’s no need to fret about their impact on Kudo’s blended gross margins, in other words.

According to Zabetian, about three-quarters of its customers bring their own translators, while about a fourth hire them through Kudo’s cadre.

Growth

As noted, Kudo got into the market back in 2018, which means it was already selling its software in the pre-pandemic days. Lead investor Niki Pezeshki told TechCrunch that Kudo has “stepped up in a big way for its customers during the pandemic,” but that while COVID “has certainly accelerated Kudo’s growth, we think they are enabling a longer-term shift in the market by showing customers that it is possible to effectively run multilingual conferences and meetings without the hassle of international travel and all the planning that goes into it.”

Kudo was already right about where the world was going, then, even if the pandemic provided a boost.

That tailwind is evident in its round size, notably. Kudo’s CEO said that he set out to raise $2 million, not $6 million; the $4 million delta is indicative of a company that has become a competitive asset for the venture class to fight over.

And Kudo’s growth has brought with it notable financial benefits, including several months of cash flow positivity — something nearly unheard of amongst startups of its age and size. But the company will spend from its $6 million and push that line-item negative, it said. Kudo has 30 open positions today that it expects to fill in the next few quarters, including building out its sales and marketing functions, which to date it has not invested in (another good sign among startups is how long they can grow attractively without needing to spend heavily on sales and marketing). That won’t come cheap, in the short-term.

So that’s Kudo and its round. What we want to know next is its H1 2020 year-over-year revenue growth. Do write in if you know that number.

Ready to do everything in your power to keep your startup on track for success — and keep more of your hard-earned currency in your wallet? Listen up. Early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt 2020 ends in less than two weeks. Buy your pass before the bird expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, and you’ll save up to $300.

Disrupt 2020 will occur on September 14-18 — five full days of exploration, exhibition, education and connection. No matter your role in the startup universe, you’ll see innovative technologies, learn new skills, discover new resources, share ideas and network with people who can help your business move to the next level and beyond. And it all happens on a global scale.

A Digital PRO Pass is your ticket to everything Disrupt offers, including CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform. Based on a profile you create, CrunchMatch makes short work of finding and connecting you with people who share your business goals. The newly upgraded algorithm makes faster, more precise matches, and it gets smarter the more you use it.

It’s the perfect tool to help you meet Disrupt attendees from around the world. Use it as you explore hundreds of cutting-edge early-stage startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley. Meet founders, view product demos and uncover the latest innovations.

Want more? Okay — schedule 1:1 video meetings with potential investors and customers, showcase your innovative products, host private roundtable events or interview prospective employees.

I used CrunchMatch to schedule meetings, and the digital aspect made connecting easier. It helped me stay organized, meet people and still have time to take in a piece of everything at Disrupt. — JC Bodson, founder and CEO of Arbitrage Technologies.

If you like specifics, your Digital PRO Pass lets you view content from multiple stages as it happens, and it provides replays on demand. Our growing speaker roster includes top investors, founders and experts from across the startup ecosystem.

This is not a passive experience, folks. You get to engage with what’s happening while it’s happening. Ask questions and participate in polling during live-streamed sessions.

Don’t miss Startup Battlefield as this year’s cohort of extraordinary startups competes virtually for glory, massive media attention, investor affection and, of course, $100,000 in equity-free cash. Nothing virtual about those benefits, no ma’am.

Disrupt 2020 takes place from September 14-18, but you have less than two weeks to reap the lowest price. Choose the early bird’s smaller bill. Buy your pass before July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, and use the $300 savings to feather your nest.

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Reflect, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 class, is building a tool to automate website and web application testing, making it faster to get your site up and running without waiting for engineers to write testing code, or for human testers to run the site through its paces.

Company CEO and co-founder Fitz Nowlan says his startup’s goal is to allow companies to have the ease of use and convenience of manual testing, but the speed of execution of automated or code-based testing.

“Reflect is a no-code tool for creating automated tests. Typically when you change your website, or your web application, you have to test it, and you have the choice of either having your engineers build coded tests to run through and ensure the correctness of your application, or you can hire human testers to do it manually,” he said.

With Reflect, you simply teach the tool how to test your site or application by running through it once, and based on those actions, Reflect can create a test suite for you. “You enter your URL, and we load it in a browser in a virtual machine in the cloud. From there, you just use your application just like a normal user would, and by using your application, you’re telling us what is important to test,” Nowlan explained.

He adds, “Reflect will observe all of your actions throughout that whole interaction with that whole browser session. And then from those actions, it will distill that down into a repeatable machine executable test.”

Nowlan and co-founder Todd McNeal started the company in September 2019 after spending five years together at a digital marketing startup near Philadelphia, where they experienced problems with web testing first-hand.

They launched a free version of this product in April, just as we were beginning to feel the full force of the pandemic in the U.S, a point that was not lost on him. “We didn’t want to delay any longer and we just felt like, you know you got to get up there and swing the bat,” he said.

Today, the company has 20 paying customers, and he has found that the pandemic has helped speed up sales in some instances, while slowing it down in others.

He says the remote YC experience has been a positive one, and in fact he couldn’t have participated had they had to show up in California as they have families and homes in Pennsylvania.  He says that the remote nature of the current program forces you to be fully engaged mentally to get the most out of the program.

“It’s just a little more mental work to prepare yourself and to have the mental energy to stay locked in for a remote batch. But I think if you can get over that initial hump, the information flow and the knowledge sharing is all the same,” he said.

He says as technical founders, the program has helped them focus on the sales and marketing side of the equation, and taught them that it’s more than building a good product. You still have to go out there and sell it to build a company.

He says his short-term goal is to get as many people as he can using the platform, which will help them refine their ability to automate the test building. For starters, that involves recording activities on-screen, but over time they plan to layer on machine learning and that requires more data.

“We’re going to focus primarily over the next six to 12 months on growing our customer base — both paid and unpaid — and I really mean that we want people to come in and create tests. Even if they [use the free product], we’re benefiting from that creation of that test,” he said.

Dexterity emerged from stealth this week to announce its full-stack solution aimed at creating collaborative robotics systems. The hardware-software system is designed for a variety of different tasks, including bin picking and box packing, targeted at warehouse fulfillment and logistics needs.

The Bay Area-based startup has already built up significant support from the investment world, with $56.2 million raised to date, from a long list of backers, including Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Obvious Ventures, Pacific West Bank, B37 Ventures, Presidio (Sumitomo) Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and Stanford StartX.

The company was founded back in 2017 as an extension of CEO Samir Menon’s Stanford thesis, described by Dexterity thusly, “Menon worked on a control theory framework to describe how the human brain controls and coordinates the body, which serves as a model to distill human skill into mathematical programs that control robots in a graceful human-like manner.”

Part of the company’s appeal appears to be the versatility of the robotics, which are designed to work alongside their human counterparts and operate collaboratively. Among the early adopters for the system are an unnamed “global food manufacturer,” “a worldwide package delivery provider” and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

Dexterity says it’s also seen a boost from the push for essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many others in the robotics and automation fields, stating that its systems have been involved with the shipping of “half a million units of packaged food.”

We’ve all had annoyingly memorable experiences with websites — websites that invite you to subscribe to browser notifications or bombard you with pop-ups that ask for your email before you’ve even had a chance to look around. That’s no way to do customer service. Yet many brands still use these lead capture tactics, ones that often permanently turn off would-be customers.

The principle that underlies these tactics makes sense; brands want the chance to communicate with those visitors more personally on a channel like email. But a gap most brands never bridge is the one between how personal they want to get with a website visitor and how personal they are in their initial interaction with that visitor.

In my experience as a marketer, there are few better ways to bridge that gap than a thoughtful implementation of messenger tools, those chat bubbles many big brands use to offer real-time customer support.

Implementing this strategy alone has allowed me to help my clients recover millions of dollars in what would have been lost revenue — more than $5 million for a local dentistry I’ve worked with. Here’s how it works, starting with where to deploy it.

Picking candidate pages through observing user flow and bounce rates

When picking pages for where to deploy messenger tools, the one principle to keep in mind is that you don’t want to offer customer support to those who don’t need it. So every time I implement messenger tools, I think about four key customer segments:

A recurring website visitor — potentially an existing customer.Website visitors who have no interest in the product or service.Website visitors who have feature-related questions.Website visitors who are on the fence about buying a product or service offering.

Sometimes it’s obvious which category a website visitor falls into; for instance, someone who clicks on your client login portal is obviously already a customer and someone who rapidly clicks off your site is obviously not interested in your offering. But for most other users, it’s a lot less clear. That’s where heat map software used in tandem with Google Analytics could be tremendously helpful in mapping user behavior to a profile.

In a recent article, I covered all of the reasons you might be tempted to hold a highly concentrated position in your company stock as a tech founder and how it fits into your portfolio. I then followed up with a rundown on why resisting diversification is generally a bad idea and the subconscious biases that hold us back from selling.

So now that you understand the benefits of diversification and have taken inventory of your portfolio, what is the most effective way for you to move forward? I will share with you what to keep in mind before selling, how to decide when to sell, and strategies to execute sales such as options, exchange funds, prepaid variable forward contracts, qualified small business stock and tax considerations. Now, let’s take a deep dive into strategic approaches to take as a shareholder and important tax implications to consider.

Keep in mind: Lockups and blackout periods

Most tech companies that IPO have a 180-day lockup period that prevents insiders, employees and VC funds from selling immediately. There is usually language that also prohibits hedging with derivatives (options) during that period. Lockups are intended to help prevent insider trading and provide the company with additional post-IPO price stability.

It is also important to abide by the company’s blackout periods, which prohibit transactions during more share-price-sensitive times, such as earnings or material nonpublic information releases.

Concentrated stock strategies

Ad hoc selling — This is the most straightforward and involves the outright sale of your shares. However, this can be difficult for various reasons such as selling restrictions, the perception by others that you are unloading stock and many psychological biases that act as internal mental obstacles.

Scheduled selling — Selling all your stock at once could be both emotionally challenging and tax-inefficient. Scheduled selling involves the selling of a set number of shares over a specific period. This selling strategy can help by spreading the tax impact over a few years. It also provides an advantage from a psychological standpoint since the plan is determined upfront, then mechanically executed.

As an example, a founder might plan to sell 500,000 shares over 18 months. The founder is comfortable selling quarterly, which equals six selling periods of 83,333 shares per quarter. In a scenario where a founder is subject to blackout periods, a 10b5-1 trading plan can be implemented and set on autopilot. The company may even allow you to sell your shares during blackout periods with a 10b5-1 trading plan. See the example of scheduled selling below.

Hedging with options — Multiple hedging strategies can be implemented to protect your downside; however, some of the more common approaches used are the protective put and the protective collar. Below are basic examples of how these strategies are executed, for illustrative purposes.

Protective put: Buying protection against the downside.Collar: Give up some upside to limit some downside.

Each strategy allows the owner to continue holding the stock while providing some downside protection against a stock’s decline. However, these strategies are not tax-efficient and are complicated, so working with an expert is essential. Both puts and certain types of collars would have been extremely expensive to implement during the recent market crisis because market volatility is a factor in options prices. See the below chart of the VIX (volatility index) during peak crisis. However, in some instances, these strategies can make sense.

Sramana Mitra: Your business model is a SaaS business model, right? Sashi Narahari: Yes, but we charge based on transactions. Sramana Mitra: So it’s not a subscription fee model; it’s a transaction...

___

After the bell yesterday, Apple-device management company Jamf announced its final IPO pricing. We’ve been tracking the Jamf IPO for some time, as it is yet another example of a technology company worth $1 billion or more going public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in March, we’d have guessed that today’s IPO market would be devoid of any public offerings, let alone a litany of successful flotations. But, 2020 is unpredictable; instead of seeing an IPO drought, there have been a modest deluge of debuts.

And yesterday Jamf continued the trend of recent IPO pricing strongly, at times selling more shares in the bargain.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or receive it for free in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which drops Saturdays starting July 25.

Jamf’s IPO underscores that public market investors are hungry for new technology offerings and keen on growth but are willing to accept what startups would consider middling expansion — and sufficiently greedy to pay up both before and after a company begins to trade.

This is the IPO market that unicorns were waiting for.

Happily, more companies — and let’s be so bold as to say unicorns — could approach the public markets in short order. The Exchange spoke with Wouter Witvoet, CEO of startup equity service provider Secfi, yesterday to get his view on today’s IPO market and coming offerings. Sitting as he does between growing startups and their vested employees, Secfi has a fascinating lens into the maturity of the firms we discuss when we talk about future IPOs.

On the subject of companies going public today with strong pricing runs, Witvoet said that “what you’re seeing is that IPOs have dried up for a very long time, and people want to deploy cash.” More cash means more dollars chasing IPOs, which helps explain the current pricing cycles we’ve seen. Witvoet cited Palantir as a company that is “making use of the opportunity that there is somewhat of an IPO window now to go public,” going on to say that he had expected Snowflake to stay private longer, but that it instead opted to start its own IPO process, perhaps due to attractive market conditions.

Cooks Venture has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox, with participation from Larry Schwartz and John Roulac.

At its most basic level, Cooks Venture provides a proprietary breed of chicken to grocery stores for consumption. The company also lists Fresh Direct and direct online sales to its distribution channels. But it’s far more complex than that.

For one, Cooks Venture spent years researching the genetic lines of chickens to develop its own breed of heirloom chickens. Why? Cooks Venture chickens grow more slowly, can live in a wider range of climates, get sick less frequently, and most importantly, can thrive on a much more diverse diet than your average chicken.

These features breed (see what I did there?) their own benefits. For one, this proprietary breed (called Pioneer breed) can be sold to emerging nations that perhaps can’t afford to build state-of-the-art temperature-controlled facilities or don’t have access to tons of corn (but do have access to yucca or quinoa) for feed. Cooks Venture also color sexes its chickens, making it easier for a farm without advanced infrastructure to quickly tell the difference between male and female chickens, which have different uses.

Secondly, feed for livestock is a huge source of demand on the agricultural industry, but much of that demand is for a small number of grains, like corn.

With Cooks Venture Pioneer chickens, which can eat a wide variety of foods, farmers can practice regenerative agriculture and run a biodiverse farm with a reliable place to sell those yields.

As part of the fundraising deal, Cooks Venture has also partnered with FoodID.

The platform tests for the presence of antibiotics and other adulterants in near real time, providing a solution to the problem of label fraud.

Cooks Venture founder and CEO Matt Wadiak (cofounder of Blue Apron) explained that the USDA runs what is called a follicle test, “and one of the issues [they’ve] determined with this kind of testing is that the thresholds for those tests will never lead to a positive test.”

He said the same animal (that wouldn’t test positive in the USDA’s test) would be found to test positive for various proteins and antibiotics when submitted to FoodID’s mass spectrometer test. Moreover, your basic mass spectrometer test takes a few weeks to offer results, which by then means that the flock has already been slaughtered and is in the midst of being processed and sent off to stores. The FoodID test can be done in near real time.

Wadiak says that food fraud is one of the biggest challenges to Cooks Venture, which goes above and beyond to provide healthy chickens to customers. If other products can simply fake it, it’s all the more difficult for Cooks Venture to stand out at the point of sale.

Cooks Venture says that, through this partnership, it’s the first company in America to test for synthetic inputs and the only company that can independently validate that it never uses antibiotics and provides verified non-GMO feed to its birds.

The company has significantly expanded since its $12 million fundraise in September 2019, serving broad swaths of California, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Seattle, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Northeast.

The Cooks Venture team is made up of about 240 people, 42 percent of whom are female and 52 percent of whom are people of color. The leadership team, made up of 11 people, includes six women and two people of color.

Misfits Market, the e-commerce platform that sells “ugly” produce (among other things), has today announced the close of an $85 million Series B financing round. The funding was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Greenoaks Capital, Third Kind Venture Capital and Sound Ventures.

Misfits Market started as a subscription box that allowed folks to buy ugly or misshapen produce on the cheap each week. This produce would have been thrown out at the farm, before ever heading to a distributor or grocery store, because it usually goes to waste sitting on a grocery store shelf.

There’s nothing actually wrong with this produce, except for the fact that shoppers wouldn’t normally choose it from a pile of fruit or vegetables that look more pleasing.

Since raising its Series A, Misfits Market has been working to expand its selection, which now includes chocolate, snacks, chips, coffee, herbs, grains, lentils, sauces and spices. Users can add these products to their usual weekly produce box on an à la carte basis, and they’re priced 20-25% below retail. These products are available to “add to box” once a week (on Thursdays).

At its core, Misfits Market looks at any structural inefficiencies in the food supply chain and capitalizes on them, getting the product at a discount and passing those savings on to the customer. These inefficiencies may include issues with sell-by date — some products must be on store shelves nine months before their sell by date — or an ineffectual mistake (like the olive oil company that works with Misfits Market and has a bad habit of attaching its labels upside down on the cans).

Where timing is concerned, Misifts Market doesn’t have to play by the same rules as a distributor or grocery store, as it sends products directly to consumers, benefiting from a much faster logistical operation.

Alongside the funding announcement, Misfits Market is also announcing a new warehouse in Delanco, New Jersey that will allow the startup to double its capacity across the East Coast, the South and into the Midwest. This expands Misfits Market’s delivery footprint to Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, and the company has plans to launch in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan soon.

Obviously, the food industry doesn’t want to be inefficient to the point of massive food waste. We’ve seen startups like Crisp look to solve these problems on the data science side. I asked Misfits Market founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh if improvements to supply chain efficiency and the continued growth of Misfits might create challenges ahead.

“Despite these technological advancements that are happening, the amount of product that goes to waste in absolute and relative terms is increasing every year,” said Ramesh. “When you look at food waste over the past five years and compare that to the amount of food that went to waste in the prior five years, it’s increased. It’s one of those super long-term risks, but at least what we’re seeing, and what the data is showing directionally around food waste, is that it’s growing in magnitude, which means there will always be opportunities for us, or a version of us, to go in there and eliminate waste and provide affordability for customers.”

A study by Boston Consulting Group expects food waste to increase in the next 10 years to 2.1 billion tons, worth $1.5 trillion, which represents a one-third increase in the next decade.

On the heels of the funding, Misfits will continue to build out the team, which has been growing rapidly in the midst of the pandemic. The company has hired 400 people since March, compared to 150 in the three-month period prior. The total team is 750 people, with an even split (51% male, 49% female) on gender. The executive team is 30% women and 20% racially diverse.

Misfits Market has raised a total of $101.5 million.

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.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

My employer sponsored me and my family for green cards. We’re expecting to get a green card interview scheduled soon. What should we expect and how should we prepare for our interview?

— Nervous in Newark

Dear Nervous,

Thanks for reaching out. Great to hear that you’re in the final stretch of the green card process! Fortunately USCIS is starting up in-person interviews again now that they have COVID-precautions in place. For more info, check out what to expect and how to prepare for a green card interview.

Before 2017, USCIS waived interviews for most employment-based green card candidates. But an executive order directing federal agencies to implement screening and vetting processes prompted USCIS to institute a green card interview for all candidates, including dependents.

USCIS offices just reopened to the public on June 4, after being closed for nearly two months due to COVID-19, so scheduling — or rescheduling — a green card interview may require a bit of a wait. Be aware that USCIS tries to schedule families together for their interview at the same time and location; however, this is not guaranteed. USCIS may waive the interview requirement for children 14 years old and younger.

Always inform your immigration attorney of any changes to your employment prior to or immediately after the interview, such as:

When big platforms have carved out large swaths of the delivery market, the best thing for an upstart company to do is specialize.

For Chowbus, that meant building a food-delivery business that finds restaurants whose cuisines specialize in regional cuisines from Northern and Southern China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

It’s a strategy that has now netted the company $33 million in financing led by the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Altos Ventures and New York’s Left Lane Capital. Hyde Park Angels, Fika Ventures, FJ Labs and Silicon Valley Bank also participated in the round.

Founded four years ago in Chicago by Suyu Zhang and Linxin Wen, the company said that its goal was to connect people with authentic Asian food that’s not easy to find on delivery apps. Over the past year, the company touted significant growth in its business, a traction that can be reflected in its decision to bring on the former chief operating officer of Jump Bikes, Kenny Tsai, as its chief operating officer, and Jieying Zheng, a former Groupon product leader as its head of product.

“When we say we’re true partners to the restaurants we work with, we mean it. By eliminating hidden fees, helping them showcase their best dishes, and other efforts we make on their behalf, we really go the extra mile to help our restaurant partners succeed,” said Wen, Chowbus’ chief executive, in a statement. “We only succeed if they do.”

And seemingly, Chowbus is succeeding. The company raised $4 million in its first round of institutional funding just last year and its rise has been rapid ever since.

The Chicago-based company said it would use its new funding to expand to more cities across the U.S. and add new products like a “dine-in” feature allowing diners to order and pay for their meals on their phone for a contactless experience at restaurants in cities that have flattened the curve of COVID-19 infections and are now reopening. 

Chowbus pitches its lack of hidden fees, and its footprint across 20 cities in North America, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, and many others. In Los Angeles, the company offers menus in Mandarin and Cantonese and allows its users to bundle in a single delivery dishes from multiple restaurants.

Other companies are experimenting with specialization as a way to differentiate from the major delivery services that are on the market. Black and Mobile, which launched in Philadelphia but is in the process of expanding across the country, is a delivery service focused on Black-owned restaurants and food stores.

Founded by David Cabello, Black and Mobile was started in 2017 by the 22-year-old college dropout. The company launched its first operations outside of Atlanta earlier this month and is available on iOS.

“The market is experiencing a permanent shift from offline to online ordering, a trend that Chowbus is actively driving,” said Harley Miller, managing partner at Left Lane Capital . “Focusing on this large and loyal constituency with a vertical-approach to supporting Asian restaurants and food purveyors has allowed Chowbus to differentiate itself on both sides of the marketplace. The capital efficiency with which they have operated, relative to the scale achieved, is extraordinarily impressive, and not something we often see.”

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As the pandemic has shut down in-person meetings, and pushed us online, products like Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have become part of our daily lives. Into the fray jumps huddl.ai, a 3.5-year-old startup from a serial entrepreneur who wants to bring a dose of artificial intelligence to meeting technology.

Company co-founder and CEO Krishna Yarlagadda says while these companies have introduced the video meeting concept, his startup has a vision of taking it further. “As we move forward. I think the next [era] is going to be about intelligence,” Yarlagadda told TechCrunch.

That involves using AI tools to transcribe the meeting, pull out the salient points and help users understand what happened without poring over notes to find the key information in a long session. “Primarily there’s a purpose for every meeting, or essentially we’re meeting for outcomes, and that’s where Huddl comes in,” he said.

Yarlagadda said that current solutions simply give you a link to a cloud room and everyone involved clicks and enters. Huddl wants to bring some more structure to that whole process. “We’ve developed a very user-centric architecture and also added a layer called meeting memory, which essentially captures the core aspects of the meeting — the agenda, action items and moments and then added search,” he explained.

They call these meeting elements moments, and they involve capturing three key aspects of the meeting: the agenda and collaborative notes participants take during the meeting, screen captures the user takes using a built-in tool and, finally, audio, which captures a recording of the meeting. Users can search across these elements to find the parts of the meeting that are most relevant to them.

Further, it integrates with other enterprise applications like Slack or Salesforce to move to applicable tools items discussed during these meetings when it makes sense. “Essentially what we’re trying to do is create a five-minute version of your 60-minute meeting that is stored in your memory and that becomes part of your search. Post-meeting this content has a life, and through APIs and integrations, we can [share it with the right programs],” he said.

For instance, if it’s an action item in a sales meeting, it would go to Salesforce, and if it is a software bug in an engineering meeting, it could be shared with Jira.

The company was started in 2017, and has raised $8.7 million in seed money to date. It has 50 employees, with 10 in the U.S. and the others in India, and has plans to hire 15-20 additional people this year between the U.S. and India offices.

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