On the heels of nCino’s blockbuster debut, GoHealth’s public offering proved a more sedate affair, at least when comparing the two companies’ initial trading days.

GoHealth priced above its anticipated IPO range, selling more shares than initially planned in the process. By vending 43.5 million shares at $21 apiece — $1 per share more than the top of its preceding $18 to $20 range, and four million shares more than its target of 39.5 million — the insurance technology company put more than $900 million onto its balance sheet this week.

The debut is a win for Chicago’s industry and tech scenes. GoHealth was worth a little less than $6.7 billion at its IPO price, not counting shares that may be sold to its underwriters, which would boost its valuation.

Despite its better-than-anticipated pricing, however, GoHealth shares sagged in afternoon trading, slipping to $19.00 per share, down 9.5% as of the time of writing. The declines stand in contrast to the recent debuts of nCino, Lemonade and others, which saw their shares instantly gain value after going public.

GoHealth’s CEO, however, stressed the long-term vision of his company in an interview with TechCrunch. Speaking with Clint Jones during GoHealth’s first trading day, the executive told TechCrunch that his company’s offering was oversubscribed, and had met its goal of accumulating long-term investors during its IPO process.

The company intends to hire with its new funds, including 1,000 more licensed insurance agents, the CEO said.

Asked whether the company has plans to acquire smaller companies with its IPO funds, Jones told TechCrunch that it could be “opportunistic” regarding buying tech platforms, or smaller teams with particular talent. For the many startups competing in other parts of the insurance marketplace world — TechCrunch has covered the space extensively, including a bevy of funding rounds for insurtech startups — a newly wealthy public company could provide an interesting exit opportunity.

The company’s strong IPO pricing, if somewhat slack first-day’s trading, feels akin to a wash for related, smaller firms watching its public offering with interest; how GoHealth trades moving forward could help set the tone for select insurtech startup valuations.

For today, however, we have yet another unicorn tech-ish offering all wrapped up. GoHealth’s path to the public market’s wasn’t as straightforward as some, but it got there all the same.

Some audience questions answered by Sramana: – How do you bootstrap an AI startup? – How can I get feedback on my startup venture? Rendezvous Online with Sramana Mitra 7.14.20

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Those forced to acclimate to remote work understand what a pain it can be. Sure, there are certainly benefits to not having to commute into work each day, but among other things, you lose a lot when you eliminate human interaction. Apps like Zoom and Slack have their place, certainly, but none does a particularly good job replicating the in-person work environment.

Formed by three ex-Palantir employees and a former Googler, Y Combinator-backed Sidekick has impeccable timing. The startup (which is fittingly remotely split between the Bay Area and New York), has built a hardware solution designed to bring an always-on video connection to the desk of remote workers (which, as it so happens, is most of us non-essentials, these days).

Development of the project began in earnest when the startup set out interviewing 100+ teams to discuss the challenges of remote work.

“We reflected deeply on what’s needed to enable these organic conversations. We came from a background as ICs and managers working on distributed teams at Palantir and Google, where we had all the shiniest collaboration tools at our disposal — Slack, Zoom, Notion, Tandem,” Sidekick writes in a recent blog post. “Despite this entire suite of shiny tools, we would still fly out for a week every month from our home office in NYC to join our remote halves in London — over 20 hours in travel and thousands of dollars in expenses every month.”

Sidekick contends that teleconferencing apps like Zoom create too much friction between the user and creating a kind of virtual open office. The teams the company spoke with suggested that a dedicated hardware device was the way to go here, so Sidekick repurposed an OEMed tablet, forking Android to their purpose. The company’s roadmap involves a proprietary hardware device sporting key aspects like a depth sensor.

For now, however, it’s selling its version of the existing consumer tablet through a hardware-as-a-service plan. Customers will be charged $50 per month, per device.

“They should only pay us as long as we’re delivering that value, and stop paying us if we’re not,” Sidekick told TechCrunch when asked about the subscription method. “We see the hardware as the best way of delivering that, but we believe that what’s most fair is for our users to pay for exactly the continued value we provide — not the hardware itself.”

There’s a physical button that puts the system to sleep, but when it’s on, it’s on. Users can’t turn the camera off and remain in stealth, either. Personally, I’d be hesitant to have an always-on camera sitting in my living room (small, one bedroom New York apartment) with a direct line to my co-workers. One of the things you risk working from home is getting a little too…comfortable, if you will. After a few hours of not interacting, it’s easy to forget that there’s a camera trained on you.

The startup tells TechCrunch that the system isn’t for everyone. “Sidekick is meant for fast-moving teams, often forced into remote work, that truly need to be in the same room to make progress,” the company explains. “Teams like startup founding teams, product leadership, executives/chief-of-staffs and sales.”

There’s probably something to be said for the executives themselves who are looking for an easier way to keep tabs on employees now that they can’t just swing by their cubicle. Sidekick has a purchasing option “for teams of all sizes and setups,” though hopefully the product remains more about collaboration and less about monitoring for most teams.

The U.S.’s COVID-19 caseload continues to set records as major states move to re-shutter their economies in hopes of stemming its spread. For many workers the situation means more time in the home office and less time in their traditional workplace. My colleague Greg Kumparak spent some time talking to companies about how best to work remotely. You can read that on Extra Crunch here.

What the world will look like when safety eventually returns is not clear, but it’s becoming plain that the workplace will not revert to its old normal. New data details changed employee sentiment, showing that a good portion of the working world doesn’t want to get back to its pre-COVID commute, and, in many cases, is eyeing a move to a different city or state in the wake of the pandemic and its economic disruptions.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, and now you can receive it in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which will drop every Saturday starting July 25.

The changing workplace has shifted — accelerated, you could say — demand for all sorts of products and services, from grocery delivery to software. The latter category of tools has seen quickening demand as the world moves to support newly remote workforces, helping keep them both productive and secure.

TechCrunch has covered the accelerating digital transformation — industry slang for companies moving to a more software-and-cloud world — before, noting that investors are making big bets on companies that might benefit from its ramping pace. Thanks to new data from a Twilio-led survey, we have a fresh look at that trend.

Undergirding the digital transformation is how today’s workers are adapting to remote work. If many workers don’t want to stop working from home, the gains that companies serving the digital transformation are seeing could prove permanent. New data from a Qualtrics -led survey may help us understand the new mindset of the domestic and global worker.

At the union of the two datasets is a lens into the future of not only how many information workers, to borrow an old phrase, will labor in the future, but how they’ll feel about it. So, this morning let’s explore the world through two data-driven lenses, helped as we go with notes from interviews with Qualtrics’ CEO Ryan Smith and Twilio’s chief customer officer, Glenn Weinstein.

What workers want

Sramana Mitra: What is the technology angle to this? Stuart Robertson: All our plans are sold online. We enable anyone to come to the site, get a quote, and buy the plan. Sramana Mitra: How do people...

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The BeanBon Coffee Roaster is kicking off a crowdfunding campaign for its countertop smart roaster device, seeking a total of $10,000 over the next month. The BeanBon is already a fully realized product, and I was able to test one to confirm it matches its creator’s claims — and it does indeed offer a simple, easy way to get into at-home coffee roasting, with minimal expertise and cleanup required.

The basics

The BeanBon is a relatively small countertop device, about the size of your average juicer or drip coffee maker. It has a simple function: roast coffee beans, in small batches designed to be optimized for daily coffee drinking use. The machine itself arrives fully assembled, and is just as approachable in terms of ease of use as your average coffee maker.

At-home roasting can be accomplished in a number of ways, but BeanBon’s whole approach is designed around simplicity and flexibility. Out of the box, you can be roasting beans in no time with no prior experience, thanks to its simple manual settings. And if you want to get more in-depth, there’s an app for iOS and Android that lets you tune all the roasting settings to fit your exact tastes and needs.

BeanBon plans to retail its roaster for around $1,000, but is offering it to Early Bird backers for $699 during the Kickstarter campaign.

Design and performance

While the BeanBon I tested out is the product of a tooling sample, rather than the shipping version, it’s still pretty well put-together in terms of fit and finish. The exterior is black anodized aluminium and it feels sturdy and well-constructed. The design is modern but relatively understated, so it won’t look out of place in a modern kitchen atop the counter next to a coffee machine.

Because it’s a pre-release product, the tester version I received shipped in generic packaging and didn’t include any instructions. Luckily, none were required for me to figure out how to use it, and to get started actually roasting the two included packs of green coffee beans in just minutes. The design is clever and simple, and by referencing a promotional video for the BeanBon released in Asia, I was quickly able to get up and running.

Operating the BeanBon is as easy as removing the plastic lid of the machine and pouring beans into the central transparent roasting chamber. Once you turn on the the machine, you then turn the dial to select your roast level (1 to 8, 1 being the lightest) and then press to start. The roast cycle runs automatically, showing you a countdown timer. Once that timer runs down, there’s a cooling cycle that follows, and then you simply press a lever located on the side to drop the roasted beans into a collection bin.

One of the most clever things the BeanBon team has done is implement a fan that comes on automatically when you press this lever, which blows up the chaff (coffee bean shells that crack and shed during roasting) to be collected in an easy-to-clean filter located at the top of the machine while dropping the much heavier beans into the pot. Too much chaff can affect the taste of the coffee, resulting in increased bitterness, and this is a clever way to automate the chaff removal process.

One note about operation: The BeanBon roasting process did set off my condo’s smoke alarms, even though no smoke was visible. It gives off a strong (and very pleasant, if you’re a coffee lover) aroma while working, but this is likely enough to trigger your smoke detectors depending on the space in which you’re using it. Turning on the stove vent and using it near that seemed to solve the problem, as did ensuring I use it with windows open and fans going.

Bottom line

The pre-packaged BeanBon coffee I received had an included recommended roasting level, which also makes it very easy to get started. I wasn’t able to test the more advanced app-based features, because the software isn’t yet available here, but the manual modes worked exactly as advertised.

Roasting at home, especially with smart features, can be a very expensive affair — BeanBon’s price point at $699 (and $749 after the Early Bird units are gone) is remarkably low for what it can do. Over time, you can definitely realize cost savings from using unroasted beans and doing it yourself — green beans are easier to buy in bulk because they take longer to go bad than do roasted beans. But if you’re thinking about getting into this world, it’s probably better to be motivated by the skill and enjoyment of custom roasts than anything else.

BeanBon does lower the cleanup and skill requirements considerably, however, making at-home roasting pretty approachable. It’s a great way to get started, provided BeanBon meets its production goals and starts shipping these later this year, as it plans to do.

Crisp, a demand forecasting platform for the food industry, has today announced the close of a $12 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Spring Capital and Swell Partners.

Crisp launched out of beta in January of this year with a product that aimed to give food suppliers and distributors a clearer picture of customer demand at retailers. Before Crisp, these organizations usually had several data scientists compiling data from various sources into an unintelligible spreadsheet, making it difficult to see general demand outlooks, and nearly impossible to spot anomalies.

Not only does this lead to losses in revenue, but it also contributes to a terrible amount of food waste.

Crisp looks to solve this by giving these suppliers and distributors a visualization of their data instantly and in real time. The company has built integrations with a large number of ERP software, ingesting historical data from food brands and combining them with a wide range of other signals around demand drivers, such as seasonality, holidays, price sensitivity, past marketing campaigns, changes in the competitive landscape and weather that might affect the sale or shipment of ingredients or the product itself.

The end goal is to consolidate data across the industry, from brands to distributors to grocery stores, so that each individual link in the food chain can do a better job of matching their supply with their demand on an individual basis.

Since launching out of beta, Crisp has expanded beyond food brands and suppliers into retail and distributor space. The company has also expanded beyond produce and dairy into verticals like beverages, bakery, CPG, flowers, meat and poultry. The startup says its seen an 80% increase in the number of customers using the platform since January.

Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic brings its own unique challenges and opportunities to Crisp’s business. On the one hand, grocery store shopping is booming and the supply chain behind it is certainly in need of better data science and demand forecasting as user behavior shifts rapidly. On the other hand, user behavior is shifting rapidly.

With state by state, and sometimes county by county, lockdowns and shifts in the restrictions imposed on small businesses, Crisp has had to manually track what’s going on around the country in order to provide clear insights to its customers.

“This period we’re in has increased that willingness to share data and increased collaboration between everybody in the supply chain,” said founder and CEO Are Traasdahl. “We’ve seen a big shift there. Earlier, everyone assumed that everyone else was able to deliver, but now this ability to have a full, top-down visibility across a whole depth of companies, not just the companies next to you in your trading relationships, but being able to unify data and have more insights from multiple steps away from yourself, and get that data in real time been accelerated.”

Crisp currently has 33 employees (with plans to hire on the back of the funding), which is 33% women and 15% people of color. Half of Crisp’s management team are women.

The Cusp, a newly launched startup offering telemedicine services for women in perimenopause and menopause, is launching an at-home hormone test service that slashes the cost of in-office visits and lab tests.

Women in California can order the test at a cost of $159 for a telemedical consultation and test, versus roughly $500 for having the same test and lab work administered in a clinic, according to the company.

Unlike other, commonly prescribed hormone tests, The Cusp bases its test relies on new research that a key hormone measurement can help predict the time to menopause. The company is currently working with researchers to help the broader medical community validate these findings and believes the combination of consultation and improved access to diagnostics will greatly enhance the ability to more accurately predict onset. 

“Menopause is very stigmatized and midlife care is a highly underserved market. We launched The Cusp to provide women with a new model of care during this stage of life so women can optimize their health,” said The Cusp, chief executive, Taylor Sittler. “Our focus begins with perimenopause treatment, as early care can lead to healthier outcomes.”

The company said that the test is best for women experiencing early signs of perimenopause, typically between the ages of 42 and 50.

“Throughout my career I’ve been focused on the intersection of women’s health, menopause and breast cancer. It was shocking to me how little information is out there for women, so I worked with national committees helping establish guidelines for managing menopause symptoms and sexual functioning in cancer survivors,” said Dr. Mindy Goldman, director of the Gynecology Center for Cancer Survivors and At-Risk Women Program at UCSF, and a physician working with The Cusp . “I’m thrilled to be a part of  The Cusp, as we are on the front lines providing women with comprehensive diagnostic tools and personalized care so that menopause can be faced head-on and managed with a multi-pronged approach that can include medical interventions, naturopathic solutions and/or hormone replacement therapies.”

The company is providing care to roughly 200 patients, and is growing its membership rapidly. With its recent launch, The Cusp has joined startups like CurieMD, Elektra Health and Geneve, which are all focused on providing medical services to women in perimenopause and menopause.

To date, the company has raised $4 million from investors, including HomeBrew, Village Global and individual investors like Katie Stanton and Megan Pai.

Sittler, a co-founder of Color Genomics, sees an opportunity in applying new diagnostics tests and technology to treating women as they enter menopause.

The Cusp charges an initial $210 for its expert care package. That includes the test and three months of care including virtual care visits with clinicians, unlimited chats, personalized treatment plans and discounts on supplements. Should patients want to continue using the company’s services they pay an additional monthly fee of $72 per month.

In the Spring of 2020, parents of young children have suddenly woken up to a world where kids have to be homeschooled. They are supposedly guided by the teachers. These teachers have no experience of...

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Nick Dazé, the co-founder and chief executive of the new Los Angeles-based apartment rental services company PocketList, likes to say that his company is the first one to put the renter at the core of the platform. 

The company Dazé has built with co-founder Julian Vergel de Dios, has, in fact, flipped the traditional script of relying on landlords and property managers to source information about available rentals and is relying on renters to provide information about the apartments they’re in… and the apartments where they’d like to be. 

PocketList started as an experiment born out of a lot of trial and error, according to Dazé, but it was around the initial revelation that “renters typically know they’re going to be moving way ahead of time.”

The service, which is available as an app and online, was a business nearly four years in the making. Initially Dazé and Vergel de Dios built a service called Block. “The hypothesis with Block was that a big pain point for renters was communication between people looking for apartments together,” Dazé said. “We made a tool that was well designed and well built … it was a cross between Slack and Microsoft Excel, but specifically for renters. The biggest problem was that it didn’t have a good business model.”

What started as Block eventually morphed into PocketList, and the two Los Angeles-based founders quickly took the app to market with little fanfare in November. Growing initially by word of mouth, the service allows for an easy sign-up, where renters fill out a brief description of their apartment — basically letting the community know what it’s like and that it will soon be on the market — and then can search for other apartments in areas in which they’re interested.

Rentals typically sit vacant for an average of 26 days every time they turn over, according to PocketList’s internal data. That delay costs landlords as much as $43 billion and puts pressure on supply-constrained housing markets, the company said. But using PocketList, renters can leave a place more quickly and owners reduce to perhaps one week the time an apartment stands empty. Currently, the average unit on PocketList is rented 67 days before the landlord is given notice, and 97 days before the unit appears on other listing sites, the company said in a statement. 

For renters, the network provides information about apartments that will be available on the market and a way to query current occupants about potential units. Interested renters can also reach out directly to landlords and property managers via the PocketList app to indicate that they’d be interested in looking at a place. To ensure security, no contact information is shared with a property manager until a renter submits an application, and last names and images are hidden until the renter applies for an apartment.

On the other side of the equation, landlords and property managers are able to claim properties for free and see feedback from renters about their buildings — and the thoughts renters have of other properties in their area. They also get earlier access to potential tenants once a previous tenant gives notice.

The next features on the product roadmap include descriptions of areas, which give potential renters the option to select for the kinds of neighborhood features they want, and more tools for landlords, like direct application submissions, renter resumes and other landlord response tools.

The company’s rental marketplace already has tens of thousands of units in Los Angeles described on its platform by the renters themselves, and will be expanding to San Francisco and San Diego later this year, with plans to move into Seattle in 2021 and New York and Chicago later that same year.

Backing the company’s expansion plans and development is a $2.8 million seed round, which came from David Sacks’ investment firm, Craft ventures, along with Abstract VC, Wonder Ventures and Zillow co-founder and recent Los Angeles returnee, Spencer Rascoff. Other, undisclosed, angel investors also participated in the round.

Still pre-revenue, PocketList plans to make money off of charging property managers and landlords for leads on likely renters for their apartments. Landlords can send outbound messages to potential renters that have expressed interest in a property, said Dazé, of one of the company’s planned new services.

“Bringing transparency to real estate has been a nearly 20-year process, and the apartment market is only just getting there,” said Rascoff, PocketList investor and founder of dot.LA and Zillow. “PocketList takes transparency to the next level, bringing exclusive ‘pre-market’ inventory into the light, and it’s no surprise that renters have flocked to the service.”

Renters can download the PocketList app for free, rate their current apartment and get access to the listings available on the app. Meanwhile, property managers and landlords have access to a pro version, which has all of the outreach, management and overview features that they’d want, the company said.

“Given the way the current rental market is set up, there’s almost always a gap between when a renter ‘needs to find a place’ and actually ‘rents a place,’ ” continued Dazé. “PocketList breaks the cycle and gets people into homes they love earlier than ever before.”

A recent market report on endpoint security systems estimates the industry to grow at 6% CAGR to reach $18.6 billion by 2027. As organizations continue to operate under remote working conditions,...

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Scooters, a common sight on the streets of Taiwan, give commuters an alternative to cars in the country’s densely populated cities. But they also contribute to pollution and jam-packed parking spaces. Over the past few years, several companies haven taken on the challenge of creating more environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional gas scooters. Gogoro is probably best-known internationally for its electric SmartScooters, which are now the category’s top-sellers in Taiwan. While less known outside of the country, however, scooter-sharing startup WeMo has grown steadily since launching in 2016. It now has a fleet of more than 7,000 scooters in three of Taiwan’s biggest cities and says users take about one million rides per month.

WeMo recently announced it has raised a multi-million-dollar Series A led by AppWorks, making it the Taiwanese venture capital firm’s first smart mobility investment. The funding is being used to expand beyond Taipei City, New Taipei City and Kaohsiung, WeMo’s current markets, with plans to go international, too, launching first in Southeast Asian countries.

In Taiwan, WeMo competes with iRent, a car and scooter rental service, as well as GoShare, the mobility-sharing platform Gogoro launched a year ago.

WeMo co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Wu told TechCrunch that his company differentiates because, from the beginning, it has focused on creating smart tech specifically for sharing scooters.

Instead of developing their own electric vehicles, like Gogoro, WeMo partnered with Kymco, one of Taiwan’s largest scooters brands. Each scooter is equipped with an internet-connected black box that was developed in-house by WeMo.

The black boxes enable WeMo to manage its fleet’s batteries, while providing data from rides, including traffic and road quality (for example, it detects when streets are bumpy) that can be shared with policymakers to improve transportation infrastructure. The black boxes also connect with WeMo’s user app, showing where scooters are available, unlocking them and sending alerts about traffic conditions.

WeMo began working on its service in 2015, about a year before launching with an initial fleet of 200 vehicles. Before co-founding WeMo, Wu was a consultant at McKinsey and Company.

“I was going back to my background of being a strategy consultant and at the time, my co-founder and I decided we wanted to do something in Taiwan that was very different from how people had practiced business in the past, because there were a lot of different macro-trends changing the environment,” he said.

“Obviously the shared economy sector was just booming and at the same time, mobile-first technology was beginning to prevail. But we realized that the transportation sector had not changed in a very, very long time, so we thought if we are able to use the sharing economy or pay-as-you-go concept coupled with green vehicles, and provide that on a massive scale to consumers, we could move to a greener, smarter and more convenient form of transportation.”

Wu also sensed a market opportunity because of the number of unused scooters he saw parked on the side of streets day after day. Despite being one of the most common transportation methods in Taiwan, finding parking in major cities is often a hassle, which means many scooters are underutilized.

WeMo fleets are located in parking lots, and scooters can be unlocked through the user app. Rental fees have different tiers, including per minute and hourly rates and monthly plans. The app is available in Chinese and English, to serve local riders as well as tourists. Riders can also now register accounts and rent scooters through LINE, the most widely-used messaging app in Taiwan.

To prepare for expanding into new markets, Wu said part of WeMo’s new funding is being used to expand its research and development center in Taiwan. The company plans to hire up to 100 hardware and software engineers, especially ones who have experience in self-driving technology, vehicle telematics and machine learning. Wu said WeMo’s plan is to be a “mobility-as-a-service” platform, working with partners to launch scooter-sharing services in new markets.

“Over the past five years, people have become used to shared mobility services, but five years ago it wasn’t such a developed space, so we had to come up with the technology and applications,” Wu said. “Now we’re looking at what the future of mobility should look like, and how we use IoT technology to expand outside of transportation and use our data to help users maneuver more easily in their cities.”

Virtual card payment startup Privacy.com has raised $10.2 million in a Series A fundraise, the company announced Wednesday.

The round was led by Teamworthy Ventures, with participation from Tusk Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Quiet Capital, Exor Seeds and Rainfall Ventures.

The startup, if you’re unfamiliar, lets anyone generate virtual and disposable payment card numbers for free, allowing those users to keep their actual credit card number safe while allowing the option to cut off companies from your bank account. In an age of near-constant data breaches and credit card skimmers targeting unsuspecting websites, Privacy.com makes it harder for hackers to get your real credit card details.

It’s a popular idea. In the past three years, Privacy.com has issued 5 million virtual card numbers.

Privacy.com’s chief executive Bo Jiang told TechCrunch that the new funds will help the company launch its new Card Issuing API — in beta testing for the past year — allowing corporate customers to issue virtual cards and manage expenses for their employees in their own back-end systems.

“We’re the first company that allows developers to see upfront, transparent revenue sharing and sign up and create cards programmatically the same day,” he said.

Privacy.com will primarily serve early-stage enterprise companies, which “traditionally need a lighter weight solution for their online payments,” said Jiang. “It’s an underserved market, because most incumbents focus on the larger enterprise with monthly minimums and long time frames.”

Jiang also said the round will help the company “hire and ramp up product development at a much faster pace” as part of its push to serve more enterprise customers.

Lemonade today launched pet insurance, marking its entry into a new vertical of insurance for the first time since it launched its renters/home owners insurance in 2016.

Lemonade CEO Daniel Schreiber told TechCrunch back in February that some 70% of Lemonade customers with a home owners or renters policy are also pet owners, and yet between 1 and 2% of pet owners in the United States have pet insurance.

It’s a relatively straightforward Venn diagram.

Pet insurance from Lemonade will cost users $12/month, with a 10% discount available to existing Lemonade policy holders who choose to bundle their new pet insurance with home/renters insurance. The policy is only available to dog and cat owners — other pets are not covered.

The policy covers blood tests, urinalysis, x-rays, MRIs, labwork, CT scans and ultrasounds, as well as outpatient, specialty and emergency care procedures, along with hospitalization and surgery, according to the Lemonade website. The company also covers medication, including injections and prescription meds. Pet owners can also get an extended Accident and Illness Package that goes beyond the initial coverage of accidental road accidents and poisonings, and a variety illnesses.

Lemonade Pet Insurance comes with an optional wellness package, as well, which provides savings for routine stuff like an annual physical checkup, heartworm tests, fecal tests, annual parasite evaluation tests, blood work and up to three vaccines. The wellness package also gives pet owners access to medical advice chat and offers reminders and tips to keep their pet healthy.

“Health insurance for pets dates back to over 100 years ago,” Schreiber told TechCrunch in February. “It started with horses in the Netherlands, and the heir to that pet insurance is actually car insurance. Horses were a mode of transportation, and the insurance was meant to protect you if something happened to that mode of transportation. But pets are now members of the family.”

According to Fortune, Americans spent upwards of $75 billion on their pets in 2019.

Insurance policies in general are also quite antiquated, with legal requirements to use language and clauses written decades ago. Lemonade has been trying to launch its Policy 2.0 — a simply worded policy that is open-sourced, allowing anyone to contribute or suggest changes to it — in the United States. Policy 2.0 is currently only available in Europe, but it marks a big change in the way insurance is handled, as one of the biggest issues in the industry is that policy holders simply don’t, and in some cases can’t, know what is and is not covered.

This launch comes at a time when Lemonade has just entered the public market, with a big pop in its first day of trading.

Alongside its public offering, Lemonade has raised $480 million in institutional investment from firms like Sequoia, Allianz and others, with a team of 382 employees globally.

On the U.S. team, 35% of full-time employees are people of color; 61% are women. Globally, Lemonade is 49% women; a quarter of the R&D team are women, and the executive team is 33% women. The eight-member board includes one person of color and one woman.

Sramana Mitra: What were you doing at this point that got you to Kleiner Perkins? Jon Hirschtick: I started when I was 24. I was probably 26 years old at this point. I didn’t know what I was doing....

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Neobank Revolut launched in the U.S. a couple of months ago. The startup is slowly catching up with features that are available in the U.K. and Europe. This time, Revolut is adding cryptocurrency trading through a partnership with Paxos.

Users in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum from the Revolut app. The feature is going to be available in 49 states as there are some regulatory issues in Tennessee. If you have USD or other currencies in your Revolut account, you can exchange manually whenever you want.

You can also set up alerts in case there are some important price changes happening. Optionally, users can also round up card payments to the nearest whole dollar and convert spare change into crypto assets.

If you’re familiar with Revolut’s cryptocurrency feature, you know that the company gives you access to more cryptocurrencies in Europe, such as Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and XRP. The company says it is starting with BTC and ETH in the U.S. but is already working on bringing more cryptocurrencies.

When it comes to fees, users with a free Revolut account will pay 2.5% in conversion fees. Users with a Premium and Metal subscription will pay 1.5% in fees. Revolut is waving fees for the first 30 days.

This is in line with the company’s current fees in Europe. Revolut also has some monthly limits on currency exchange in general for free users as well — it can be fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. You have to pay a 0.5% fee above that limit or pay for a subscription.

Revolut made some changes to its cryptocurrency feature recently. While you now technically own your cryptocurrencies, you can’t send and receive cryptocurrencies from third-party wallets. The feature is all about trading — buying, holding and selling.

In the U.S., Square’s Cash App and Robinhood also let you buy cryptocurrencies in their respective apps. While those features don’t offer the same flexibility as a full-fledged cryptocurrency exchange, it makes it easy to get started with cryptocurrencies.