According to a  Zion report, the global talent management software market is estimated to grow at 10% CAGR to reach $10.9 billion by 2025. The recent virus-driven pandemic would have changed those...

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Athlane, the YC-backed company from the Summer ’19 cohort, is today ready to launch with a fresh $3.3 million in capital. Investors include Y Combinator, Jonathan Kraft (New England Patriots), Michael Gordon (President of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club), Global Founders Capital, Romulus Capital, Seabed VC and more.

The startup originally positioned itself as the “NCAA of esports” but, after some time in stealth, has taken a new approach. Athlane is looking to be the connective fiber between streamers and brands, facilitating sponsorship and endorsement deals with more transparent data and analytics and a streamlined communications flow.

Athlane has products for both brands and streamers.

Brands can use the Athlane Terminal to manage their sponsorships. The Insights Hub uses proprietary data to help brands understand which streamers are followed by their target demographic, and whether or not the products will resonate with that fan base. Insights also allow brands to see when a streamer’s viewership is growing.

From there, brands can send out sponsorship deals to streamers directly through the Athlane Terminal, and then track the ROI on that sponsorship deal throughout the campaign.

On the streamer side, the company has built out a platform called Athlane Pro, which lets streamers manage each task from their sponsors individually. Streamers can also use Athlane Pro to counter-offer inbound sponsorship deals or negotiate terms.

Streamers can also use Athlane’s machine learning algorithm to get clearer insights on their stream performance, such as whether their YouTube viewership overlaps with their Twitch viewership, or see which videos do better based on title or thumbnail. But more importantly, the Athlane Content Hub gives streamers the opportunity to understand if their fan base specifically aligns with this or that brand, and gives them the tools to reach out directly to that brand to solicit a sponsorship.

Athlane has also built out a Shop tool that lets streamers build out a no-code storefront for their fans, which they can link to on their Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This storefront can be a repository for all the products that streamer is endorsing, allowing fans to see products from multiple brands in a single place.

“We have a number of proprietary partnerships with data providers including companies like Twitter,” said co-founder Faisal Younus. “For example, we have a partnership with the leading manufacturer of apparel in esports, which ties back into our system so we can look at how merchandise is moving.”

That data, when paired with the data provided when a streamer signs in and integrates with the platform, becomes very precise, according to the company.

The startup charges brands using a tiered SaaS model, and streamers can do their first sponsorship for free on the platform. After the first sponsorship, streamers are charged a fee between $10 and $20 per deal. Athlane has also started working with agencies that represent brands and charges a discovery fee for talent those agencies find on the platform.

“COVID-19 has brought on very rapid growth on the viewership side, and because of that we’ve seen an intense interest from a number of brands while conventional entertainment is shut down,” said Younus. “A lot of media spend is going to go unspent, but there is also a higher risk appetite for spending a little bit in esports, and our challenge is making sure this industry growth is sustained.”

He added that helping brands understand the true ROI of that spend will be key.

Meet Koyeb, a new French startup founded by Yann Léger, Édouard Bonlieu and Bastien Chatelard, who have previously worked at Scaleway for many years. Koyeb is a serverless startup that helps you manipulate data in different ways without worrying about your server infrastructure.

Competition has become incredibly fierce between cloud service providers, and Koyeb wants to take advantage of that. You can integrate Koyeb with multiple cloud service providers and let Koyeb do the heavy lifting.

For instance, you may store a ton of videos on an object storage bucket managed by DigitalOcean. Let’s say you want to re-encode those videos to optimize them for a new device. Koyeb can import data from this bucket, re-encode those videos and upload the new files to your bucket.

But Koyeb goes one step-further by letting you mix and match services and APIs. As cloud platforms become smarter, they provide services that go beyond running servers and storing data for you.

For instance, Google Cloud’s speech-to-text API is arguably better than Amazon Transcribe. Instead of having to manually set up a multi-cloud workflow, Koyeb can take video files from an AWS S3 bucket, transcribe the audio from those video files on Google Cloud and save the result on the AWS S3 bucket.

There are many use cases for Koyeb. It ranges from copying data from an S3-compatible object storage provider to another every day for redundancy, to triggering data processing with API calls. Everything scales automatically and once a workflow is done, you no longer get billed for runtime.

There are already dozens of integrations with data sources (as input and output) and ready-to-use processing APIs. Everything can be configured in the web interface with multiple processing steps, using a command-line interface or the Koyeb API.

The company is just coming out of stealth and is already working on more product updates. For instance, you’ll be able to use Docker containers and custom functions in the future, which should enable a lot more workflows. But it’s a promising start.

Northflank, a startup from a couple of guys in their 20s, has been working on a full-stack DevOps platform in the cloud since their first year at university in 2016. Today the startup announced a $2.6 million seed investment and the launch of that platform.

The round was led by ​Kindred Ventures, ​Stride.VC​ and Amaranthine Partners, with support from numerous CTO angel investors who believe in the company’s vision.

Those CTOs like that the company is building a one-stop shop for DevOps in the cloud, says co-founder and CEO Will Stewart. “Northflank is what we call a full-stack cloud platform that allows a developer to sign up, connect their version control — GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab — and immediately build and deploy all of their repositories via a Docker file,” he explained.

The two founders, Stewart and Frederik Brix, met in 2011 as young teens through online multi-player gaming. Stewart was in London, while Brix grew up in Zurich. As they got older, they helped build online communities around their passion for gaming, and eventually decided to build an online DevOps platform together as they entered university, because they saw firsthand the issues they had running game servers in the 2015 time frame.

Even though they were quite young at the time, they wanted to take advantage of the nascent cloud native tooling like Kubernetes, and as they began to tinker with it, the idea of building their own platform began to take shape. They continued working on the idea while attending university and didn’t even meet in person until last year when they attended an accelerator together in Paris.

That led to £250,000 in angel money and bought them time to hire some additional engineers to build out the platform and get it ready for market. Today it provides a soup-to-nuts modern developer experience in a slick interface where you can schedule jobs and projects and manage and run builds.

They currently have a team of nine people, including the two founders. The pandemic did not change the way they worked, as they have worked remotely from the start. Most of the team has never met in person. He says as an international, fully remote company, he can hire people from anywhere, and he’s hopeful that will lead to a more diverse workforce as they grow and develop as a company.

Stewart admits that making the transition from full time developer to managing a company has been challenging, but he’s learning as he goes. “It’s been an interesting learning process. It’s almost like diving in at the deep end. We obviously have to get at least some things right immediately like running payroll and the legal stuff,” he says.

He has leaned on accountants and lawyers to help, as well as financial services like Revolut and TransferWise. They have also set up spreadsheets to automate some activities like managing payroll.

Today marks the first day of the company with the platform going live, and the two founders have high hopes for the product they have been working on in some ways since they were kids. Now, they will try to grow a successful company based on all they learned through all of those experiences along the way.

Replenysh has been kicking since 2016, but up til now, the Orange County, California startup hasn’t done much press. That changes today, as the company announces that it has raised a $2 million seed round with the fairly lofty goal of transforming recycling in the U.S.

A press release outlining Replenysh’s plans offers up plenty of information about what’s wrong with recycling here in the States. Among some of the key figures are the fact that it can be up to 3x more expensive to recycle a ton of material rather than simply dropping it off in a landfill. Outside of the positive press around sustainability and the rare instance of corporate altruism, that’s a rather large fiscal penalty for doing the right thing.

For its part, the Replenysh team says it’s “building this new digital supply chain.” What that means in less buzzwordy terms is that the company is working to provide software solutions designed to benefit both those selling recycled goods and companies looking to acquire the materials. That latter bit is hotter market than you’re likely aware, as big corporations have set commitments to adopt recycled materials as part of larger pledges for sustainability.

The company’s primary value comes by way of its interfacing with the owners and employees at the thousands of recycling centers based in the U.S. Replenysh has developed a software dashboard that allows the centers to find the best price for materials and schedule shipments. On the buyer side, the company also offers means by which brands can find sufficient materials and foster relationships with the aforementioned recycling centers. The company says it already has relationships with hundreds of recycling centers it has helped connect with buyers from large retailers and big brands (though it’s not yet disclosing the names of either).

“The response to our technology and services has been exciting,” founder Mark Armen told TechCrunch. “Recycling centers benefit from our rate discovery, price transparency, and workflow automation tools – and we are just getting started. We envision a world where all materials circulate through an intelligent system of continual reuse, which brands, recycling centers, and collectors can tap into and propel. The result will be a regenerative economy that restores ecosystems, relationships, and value.”

Replenysh is still a lean team, with an eight-person headcount (plus one intern). While it was founded and began working on pilots way back in 2016, the company says it really began work in earnest when it incorporated last year. The $2 million seed round is led by Kindred Ventures, Floodgate Fund and 122WEST, with plans to further build out the technologies and Replenysh’s network.

A few years back, startups focusing on artificial intelligence had a whiff of bullshit about them; venture capitalists became inured to young tech companies claiming that their new AI-powered product was going to change the world as hype exceeded product reality.

But in the time since, AI-powered startups have matured into real companies, with investors stepping up to fund their growth. In niches, from medical imaging, of course, to speech recognition, machine learning and deep learning and neural nets and everything else that one might scoop into the AI bucket has seemed to have grown neatly in recent quarters.

Indeed, AI investing has become so popular amongst VCs that this publication wound up debating the finer points of AI-focused startup revenue quality earlier this year.

But AI is not the only startup niche appearing to enjoy tailwinds lately. No-code and low-code startups have also enjoyed increasing media recognition, and, as TechCrunch has covered, notable venture capital rounds.

Sitting in the middle of the two trends, a startup called MonkeyLearn wants to bring low-code AI to companies of all sizes. And the firm just raised $2.2 million. Let’s take a look.

No-code AI

Starting with the round, MonkeyLearn has raised $2.2 million in a round led by Uncork Capital and Bling Capital. Speaking with Raúl Garreta, a co-founder at the company and also its CEO, TechCrunch learned that MonkeyLearn started off as a more developer-focused service that provided machine learning tooling via an API. But after demand materialized from people who couldn’t code to use the company’s tech for text analysis, the company wound up heading in a slightly different direction.

Garreta gave TechCrunch a demo of the company’s service, which allows users to upload data — think rows of text in an Excel file, for example — and quickly train MonkeyLearn’s software to parse out what they are looking for. After the model is trained over the course of a few minutes, it can then be set to work on a full data set.

According to Garreta, text analysis has a lot of demand in corporate environments, from categories like support ticket sorting to sentiment analysis.

But MonkeyLearn’s product that TechCrunch saw is not the company’s final vision. Today the service focuses on data analysis. In time, Garreta wants it to do more with data visualization, providing graphing and other similar outputs to give more of a dashboard-feel to its product.

Demand

At the core of MonkeyLearn’s early market traction that helped it land its seed round is the ever-increasing need for non-developers to collect, parse, act on and share data inside of their workplace. If you’ve ever worked nearby to a startup’s marketing or customer success team, you understand this phenomenon. MonkeyLearn wants to give non-developer teams the tools they need to understand data sets without forcing them to go find the engineering team and argue for a spot on the roadmap.

“Our vision is to make AI approachable by providing a toolkit for teams to actually use AI in their daily operations,” Garreta said in a release. MonkeyLearn is theoretically well-situated in the market. Companies are increasingly data-driven at the same time as the market is strapped for employees who can make data sing.

The startup has a free tier, and a few paid tiers, along with add-ons and a one-off option. You can call that the “all of the above” pricing model, which is fine, given the youth of the company; startups are allowed to experiment.

After slower than anticipated early fundraising, MonkeyLearn told TechCrunch that it could have raised double in its seed round what it wound up accepting.

What plans does the company have for the new capital? A more aggressive go-to-market motion, and a more formal sales team, it said. As MonkeyLearn sells to to mid-market and enterprise firms, Garreta explained, a more formal sales team is needed, though he also emphasized that founders must start the selling process at a startup.

As with most seed companies that raise capital, there’s a lot to like with MonkeyLearn. Let’s see how well it executes and how fast it can get to a Series A.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the specifics of that business in terms of metrics. How many transactions were you doing? Paul Johnson: This is a long time ago. I’ll see if I can remember. We started off...

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Raoul Maier is Founder and Managing Partner at Eudemian Ventures, a fund focused on post-seed investment in North America.

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

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Model N (NYSE: MODN) is a leading player in the revenue management market that is focused on the Life Sciences vertical. Amid the current pandemic, Life Sciences companies are in great demand and as...

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Paul started as an eBay seller and then developed software to help other sellers sell online.  A classic case study of an entrepreneur solving problems he faced himself and building a business...

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Uber has reportedly agreed to buy Postmates in an all-stock deal worth $2.65 billion. According to Bloomberg, the deal may be announced on Monday morning.

Like other travel- and transportation-related businesses, Uber’s ride-hailing segment has been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, due to shelter-in-place orders throughout the United States. On-demand delivery, however, has grown, with people relying on services like Uber Eats to get food without leaving their homes. According to its last earnings report, Uber’s ride-hailing gross bookings dropped, but its food delivery service saw gross sales growth of 54% during its first fiscal quarter.

According to previous reports, Uber made an offer to buy Grubhub, another on-demand delivery service, earlier this year, but after that deal fell through, it approached Postmates. Bloomberg reports that Uber and Postmates have actually talked on and off for about four years, but negotiations became more intense about a week ago.

Grubhub ended up being acquired by Just Eat Takeway in a deal worth $7.3 billion after its negotiations with Uber stalled.

With a valuation of $2.4 billion, Postmates is a smaller company than Grubhub. The company filed to go public in February 2019, but decided to hold off because of “choppy market” conditions.

If the deal goes through, the main competitors in the American food delivery market would be Uber Eats/Postmates versus Grubhub/Takeaway versus DoorDash.

In other countries, companies like Grab have also begun building out their on-demand delivery services to make up for losses from fewer ride-hailing bookings. For example, Grab responded to stay-at-home orders in Indonesia (its main market) and other Southeast Asian countries by re-deploying ride-hailing drivers to on-demand deliveries for food and essential items.

French startup Lydia is announcing a new partnership with Younited Credit, which lets you borrow anything between €500 and €3,000 and pay back within 6 to 36 months. The feature will be released in France at some point during the summer.

This isn’t the first time Lydia is playing around with credit. The company already partnered with Banque Casino to let users borrow between €100 and €1,000. But that feature was limited to short-term credit as you had to reimburse everything over three installments.

This time, you can borrow more money and you have more time to pay back your loan. Lydia will try to be as transparent as possible when it comes to interests. And there’s no fee in case or early repayment.

Compared to the first credit product, you can’t borrow money instantly. You apply for a loan in the app and get an answer within 24 hours. If you accept the offer, you have seven days to change your mind — it’s a regulatory requirement in France. You then receive money on your account.

By offering two different credit products, Lydia wants to cover more use cases. If something unexpected happens (your laptop broke down, you have to book an emergency flight, etc.), you can borrow as much as €1,000 in just a few seconds.

You receive the money on your Lydia account and you can start using it instantly using a virtual card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Lydia’s debit cards or Lydia’s peer-to-peer payments.

Fees on instant credit lines are pretty high as you pay 3.13% in interests and a one-time fee of €6.90 to €19.90 to receive the money instantly depending on how much you borrow.

If you’re planning a big purchase but you can wait a week, you can go through the new credit offering with Younited Credit . This isn’t the first time Younited Credit offers an integrated credit product with another fintech startup. For instance, N26 also offers credit lines with Younited Credit in France.

Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app with 3.5 million users in Europe. It recently raised a $45 million funding round led by Tencent. The startup now wants to build a marketplace of financial products. And integrating Younited Credit in the app seems in line with that strategy.

This report from CBI Insights analyzes the industries that are poised to thrive in the post-COVID world. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech Posts Square Continues to...

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Hundreds of tech-oriented startups worth a billion or more dollars had envisioned successful public offerings before the pandemic hit. But new tech listings slowed to nearly nothing this spring as companies have tried to adjust to the profound changes sweeping the world.

Today, more and more companies are back to their previous plans, with Lemonade and Accolade finding an enthusiastic public this week, following Agora’s pop last Friday, as Alex Wilhelm has been covering.

The first big tech IPO this week was in online insurance, the second in health, and despite both being in promising markets, the valuations are quite a bit higher than their business realities to date. Here’s more, from his analysis on Extra Crunch:

Lemonade is being valued at more than 15x the value of its annualized Q1 revenue despite not sporting the gross margins you might expect investors to demand for it to merit that SaaS valuation. And Accolade only expects to grow by about 20% in Q2 2020 compared to its year-ago results while probably losing more money.

But who cares? The IPO market is standing there with open arms today (there’s always another IPO cliché lurking).

The read of this is impossibly simple: However open we thought that the IPO market was before, it is even more welcoming. For companies on the sidelines, like Palantir, Airbnb, DoorDash and Asana, you have to wonder what they are waiting for. Sure, you can raise more private capital like Palantir and DoorDash have, but so what; if you want to defend your valuation, isn’t this the market that was hoped for?

He also takes a look at a few more companies getting ready to file, including banking software company nCino and GoHealth, an insurance portal that was bought by a private equity firm last year, as well as gaming company DoubleDown Interactive. The general trend seems to be that initial stock pricing has stayed more conservative than how public markets are feeling.

Startup survey shows remote is new normal already

“Early-stage startups are confident of re-opening their offices in the wake of the COVID-19 within the next six months,” writes Mike Butcher for TechCrunch this week. “But there will be changes.” Here’s more from our UK-based editor-at-large:

An exclusive survey compiled by Founders Forum, with TechCrunch, found 63% of those surveyed said they would only re-open in either 1-3 months or 3-6 months — even if the government advises [sic] that it is safe to do so before then. A minority have re-opened their offices, while 10% have closed their office permanently. The full survey results can be found here.

However, there will clearly be long-term impact on the model of office working, with a majority of those surveyed saying they would now move to either a flexible remote working model (some with permanent offices, some without), but only a small number plan a “normal” return to work. A very small number plan to go fully “remote.” Many cited the continuing benefits of face-to-face interaction when trying to build the team culture so crucial with early-stage companies.

Title insurance is getting the tech competition it deserves

A lot of people are thinking harder about homeownership as they wait out quarantines — but real estate is still an old-fashioned industry, layered with complexities and surprising costs that can keep a dream purchase out of reach. Title insurance is a great example. A one-time cost to protect buyers and sellers during the closing process, it can extend the purchase process by a month or two, in addition to potentially adding thousands of dollars in costs. But various new regulations and rulings have combined with the larger trends in SaaS to open up the market. Here’s more, in a detailed guest post for Extra Crunch from Ashley Paston of Bain Capital Ventures:

In a very short period of time, we’ve seen startups take advantage of this new, more competitive landscape by offering solutions to streamline the task of getting title insurance. Qualia, for example, offers an end-to-end platform that connects all parties involved in a real estate transaction, so title agents can manage and coordinate all aspects of the process in real time. San Francisco-based States Title, for example, uses a predictive underwriting engine that produces nearly instantaneous title assessment, dramatically reducing the cost and time required to issue a policy. Qualia and States Title are among several companies hoping to revolutionize title insurance and they reflect the two emerging meta-trends.

The first trend, enablement, consists of companies developing technology designed to integrate with incumbent real estate businesses… The second trend, disruption, consists of companies displacing incumbent real estate business altogether.

Tech diversity stays in focus

The tech industry has talked about making its opportunities available to all for many years, and struggled to deliver. But more than a month after George Floyd was killed, this time is still feeling different. One example is .fm, a viral sort of insidery prank from last weekend that a diverse small group of friends in tech created and turned into a successful grassroots fundraiser for racial justice organizations (it was not a VC fundraising stunt). “In one fell swoop,” veteran product leader Ravi Mehta wrote for TechCrunch, “the team chastised Silicon Valley’s use of exclusivity as a marketing tactic, trolled thirsty VCs for their desire to always be first on the next big thing, deftly leveraged the virality of Twitter to build awareness and channeled that awareness into dollars that will have a real impact on groups too often overlooked.”

Meanwhile, a group of Black startup founders and the Transparent Collective created a public spreadsheet to provide a comprehensive list of every VC who has backed a Black founder in the US, and the umbrella Black Innovation Alliance launched to help hundreds of related Black-focused tech and entrepreneurship organizations connect and support each other. Efforts like these, combined with a real generational willingness to address the structural problems, are what can make the difference finally.

Why AR has mostly failed (so far)

Augmented reality concepts may become a core part of how people live in the future, but the first wave of companies in the space have not fared well. Here’s why, from Lucas Matney on Extra Crunch:

The technology was almost there in a lot of cases, but the real issue was that the stakes to beat the major players to market were so high that many entrants pushed out boring, general consumer products. In a race to be everything for everybody, the industry relied on nascent developer platforms to do the dirty work of building their early use cases, which contributed heavily to nonexistent user adoption.

Instead, he says success will come from nailing the use-cases first, and not messing around with complex developer platforms and expensive hardware.

Around TechCrunch

Hear Charles Hudson explain how to sell an idea (without a product) at Early Stage

Get your pitchdeck critiqued by Accel’s Amy Saper and Bessemer’s Talia Goldberg at Early Stage

Pioneering CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna is coming to Disrupt

One week only: Score 4th of July discounts on Disrupt 2020 passes

Sale: Save 25% on annual Extra Crunch membership

Extra Crunch is now available in Greece, Ireland and Portugal

Extra Crunch expands into Romania

Across the week

TechCrunch

Global app revenue jumps to $50B in the first half of 2020, in part due to COVID-19 impacts

Let’s stop COVID-19 from undoing diversity gains

Strap in — a virtual Tour de France is coming this weekend

US suspends export of sensitive tech to Hong Kong as China passes new national security law

India bans TikTok, dozens of other Chinese apps

Extra Crunch

Top LA investors discuss the city’s post-COVID-19 prospects

13 Boston-focused venture capitalists talk green shoots and startup recovery

How $20 billion health care behemoth Blue Shield of California sees startups

From napkin notes to term sheets: A chat with Inspired Capital’s Alexa von Tobel

Where to open a game studio

Are virtual concerts here to stay?

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Before we dive in, don’t forget that the show is on Twitter now, so follow us there if you want to see discarded headline ideas, outtakes from the show that got cut, and more. It’s fun!

Back to task, listen, we’re tired too. But we didn’t let that stop us from packing this week’s Equity to the very gills with news and notes and jokes and fun. Hopefully you can chuckle along with myself and Natasha and Danny and Chris on the dials as we riffed through all of this:

Journalism, venture capitalists, and not being a colossal jerk: Listen in for more, but there’s once again a brouhaha in the world of technology twitter and media twitter concerning whether journalists should write more positive things about tech companies (no), and if venture capitalists are a bit too thin-skinned for their net worth (yes).Lemonade’s IPO went kaboom out of the gate, more than doubling in value. But the CEO isn’t too worried. I spoke with him before we recorded and he was more interested in getting a bedrock of solid, long-term investors than extracting every possible dollar in their raise. And Lemonade had a bunch of money already, so it wasn’t a huge concern.We also spent a minute on the possible Uber-Postmates deal, that could get announced early next week. That or Postmates really is serious about going public. We’ll see.Next up we had to talk about Mirror, Lululemon, and what’s up with home fitness. Is the trend here to stay? Natasha thinks so, and the rest of the crew are pretty bullish as well. Especially as it is not like we are going to get back to life anytime soon.After that it was time to get to a few funding rounds, including the latest from Neo.Tax, and a check-in on the early-stage Lessonbee, which sounds really cool.We also crammed in a quick word on Contrary Capital and startup mafias, the Envision accelerator, Discord’s latest $100 million round, and we closed with the Final Luckin Letdown.Whew!

Right, that’s our ep. Hugs from the team and have a lovely weekend. You are all tremendous and we appreciate you spending part of your day with the four of us.