Automation is the name of the game in enterprise IT at the moment: We now have a plethora of solutions on the market to speed up your workflow, simplify a process and perform more repetitive tasks without humans getting involved. Now, a startup that is helping non-technical people get more directly involved in how to make automation work better for their tasks is announcing some funding to seize the opportunity.

Bryter — a no-code platform based in Berlin that lets workers in departments like accounting, legal, compliance and marketing who do not have any special technical or developer skills build tools like chatbots, trigger automated database and document actions and risk assessors — is today announcing that it has raised $16 million. This is a Series A round being co-led by Accel and Dawn Capital, with Notion Capital and Chalfen Ventures also participating.

The funding comes less than a year after Bryter raised a seed round — $6 million in November 2019 — and it was oversubscribed, with term sheets coming in from many of the bigger VCs in Europe and the U.S. With this funding, the company has now raised around $25 million, and while the valuation is considerably up on the last round, Bryter is not disclosing what it is.

Michael Grupp, the CEO who co-founded the company with Micha-Manuel Bues and Michael Hübl (pictured below), said that the whole Series A process took no more than a month to initiate and close, an impressive turnaround considering the chilling effect that the COVID-19 health pandemic has had on dealmaking.

Part of the reason for the enthusiasm is because of the traction that Bryter has had since launching in 2018. Its 50 enterprise customers include the likes of McDonald’s, Telefónica, banks, healthcare and industrial companies, and professional services firms PwC, KPMG and Deloitte (who in turn use it for themselves as well as for clients). (Note: Because of its target users being large enterprises, the company doesn’t publish per-person pricing on its site as such.)

Bryter’s been seeing a lot of attention from customers and investors because its platform speaks to a big opportunity within the wider world of software today.

Enterprise IT has long been thought of as the less-fun end of technology: It’s all about getting work done, and a lot of the software used in a business environment is complex and often requires technical knowledge to implement, use, fix and adapt in any way.

This may still the case for a lot of it, especially for the most sophisticated tools, but at the same time we have seen a lot of “consumerization” come into IT, where user-friendly hardware and software built for consumers — specifically non-technical consumers — either inspires new enterprise services, or are simply directly imported into the workplace environment.

No-code software — like automation, another big trend in enterprise IT right now — plays a big role in how enterprise tools are becoming more user-friendly. One of the biggest roadblocks in a lot of office environments is that when workers identify things that don’t work, or could work much better than they do, they need to file tickets and get IT teams — also often overworked — to do the fixing for them. No-code platforms can help circumvent some of that work — so long as the roadblock of IT approves the use, that is.

Bryter’s conception and existence comes out of the no-code trend. It plays on the same ideas as IFTTT or Zapier but is very firmly aimed at users who might use pieces of enterprise software as part of their jobs, but have never had to delve into figuring out how they actually work.

There are already a lot of “low-code” (minimal coding) and other no-code platforms on the market today for business (not consumer) use cases. They include Blender.io, Zapier, Tray.io (a London-founded startup that itself raised a big round last autumn), n8n (also German, backed by Sequoia), and also biggies like MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce in 2018 at a $6.5 billion valuation).

Bryter’s contention is that many of these actually need more technical know-how than they initially claim. Grupp pointed out that the earliest automation tools for enterprise have been around for decades at this point, but even most of the very modern descendants of those “will require some coding.” Bryter’s toolbox essentially lets users create dialogues with users — which they can program based on the expertise that they will have in their particular fields — which then sources data they can then plug into other software via the Bryter platform in order to “perform” different tasks more quickly.

Grupp’s contention is that while these kinds of tools have long been used, they will be in even more demand going forward.

“After COVID-19, workers will be even more distributed,” he said. “Teams and individuals will need to access information in a faster way, and the only way for big organizations to distribute that knowledge is through more digital tools.” The idea is that Bryter can essentially help bridge those gaps in a more efficient way.

Bryter’s target user and its approach underscores why investors like Accel see accessible, no-code solutions as a big opportunity.

“No-code software is really reducing the barriers of adoption,” Luca Bocchio, a partner at Accel, said in an interview. “If people like you and I can use the software, then that means demand can multiply by big numbers.” That’s in contrast to a lot of enterprise software today, which is very limited in how it can grow, he added. “Plus, enterprises these days want to see more future visibility in terms of the products they adopt. They want to make sure something will stick around, and so they tend not to want to work with super young startups. But it’s happening for Bryter, and the is a testament to Bryter and to the market potential.”

Homage, the Singapore-based startup that matches families and caregivers, has launched a new service that provides home medical visits, telehealth consultations and medication delivery. Called Homage Health, the service was already being developed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but co-founder and CEO Gillian Tee told TechCrunch that its launch was accelerated because many of the company’s caregiving recipients are elderly or have long-term health conditions, and are at higher risk for the disease.

Backed by investors, including HealthXCapital, Alternate Ventures and KDV Capital, Homage launched in 2016 with a caregiving program that focuses on people who need long-term assisted living and rehabilitation care. This integrates with Homage Health because the platform’s caregivers, including nurses, are able to provide in-person support for online consultations with doctors and can help follow up on recommended healthcare regimens.

Before launching Homage Health, the startup worked with healthcare organizations to deliver mobile medical services, including doctor house calls, for its clients, and telehealth consultations as part of its COVID-19 response. Even before the pandemic, however, there was demand because many clients need regular health screenings.

“Particularly with COVID-19, as an essential service, we felt a higher impetus to ensure our care recipients can continue to gain access to in-home and caregiving services,” she said.

“A key example would be where our care recipients can receive speech therapy through teleconsultations,” she added. “For specific hallmark assessment sessions where a therapy care plan is defined, or where subsequent delivery is adjusted due to progressional improvements made, in-person sessions can be conducted, leading to best health, accessibility and cost outcomes.”

Having caregivers, medical sessions and prescriptions records on one platform also makes long-term healthcare management easier. For example, Homage can provide baseline medical assessment reports for medical and care providers.

Homage prescreens doctors before adding them to the platform. All of them are registered with the Singapore Medical Council, have a minimum of five years practicing medicine and receive medical teleconsultation training. The service can be used to diagnose common conditions, like a cold or allergies, or when prescriptions need to be refilled. It also can provide the follow-up consultations needed by people recovering from strokes or with chronic conditions like Parkinson’s disease and hypertension.

Homage Health will expand to include more rehabilitation and therapy categories. Basic teleconsultations have a flat fee of SGD $20, excluding prescriptions and delivery fees. Mobile medical services, which start at SGD $180, include at-home blood tests, home visits by doctors and minor surgery, like wound care and drainage.

RiskIQ, a startup providing application security, risk assessment and vulnerability management services, has added National Grid Partners as a strategic investor. 

The funding from the investment arm of National Grid, a multinational energy provider, is part of a $15 million new round of financing designed to take the company’s technology into critical industrial infrastructure — with National Grid as a point of entry.

More than 6,000 companies use the company’s services, and the roster list and technology on offer has attracted some of the biggest names in investing, including Summit Partners, Battery Ventures, Georgian Partners and MassMutual Ventures.

“We view NGP’s show of support as an incredible opportunity to help customers in new markets thrive as their attack surfaces expand outside the firewall, especially now amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” RiskIQ chief executive Lou Manousos said in a statement. 

RiskIQ has spent the past 10 years spidering the internet looking for all of the exploits that hackers use to penetrate networks and have built that into a database of threats. This inventory gives the company an ability to identify which assets within a company present the most obvious threats. Its automated services constantly scan third-party code, internet-connected devices and mobile applications for potential vulnerabilities, the company said.

“As a staple platform in their core security environment, our cyber threat analysts use RiskIQ regularly to enrich and identify incoming threats,” said Lisa Lambert, president of National Grid Partners and chief technology and innovation officer of National Grid, in a statement.

National Grid’s investment is a piece of a deeper partnership that will see NGP providing strategic advice for the security company as it looks to expand its commercial operations among industrial and utility customers.

For developers looking to quickly build identity management into their platforms, the most readily available options don’t stray far from the internet’s biggest, most data-hungry platforms.

Magic, a small SF startup building a decentralized blockchain-based identity solution, wants to create a seamless experience that feels similar to login workflows from apps like Slack and Medium, where users are sent a link to they can click to immediately log in. Magic’s SDK allows developers to craft similar experiences to Medium and Slack without building them from scratch, leveraging authentication via blockchain key pairs that allows users to securely log in across devices.

“Our identity these days is mostly controlled by Facebook and Google; what’s cool about this identity solution is that it’s a decentralized identity,” Magic CEO Sean Li says.

The startup is launching out of stealth, rebranding from its previous company name Fortmatic, and announcing that they’ve raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Placeholder. A host of other investors participated in the company’s funding, including Lightspeed Ventures, SV Angel, Social Capital, Cherubic Ventures, Volt Capital, Refactor Capital, Unusual Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch and Roham Gharegozlou.

Li has largely sought to minimize the blockchain aspect of the company’s tech in an attempt to keep the appeal more mass market, but Magic’s early customers are largely in the blockchain world, specifically Ethereum applications. The company is free for customers with less than 250 users, and past that subscription pricing scales from a $79/mo plan to custom pricing for full white-labeled enterprise roll-outs with custom integrations. Li says the Magic platform is SOC 2 compliant.

In the company’s security documentation, they note that any user keys completely bypass Magic servers and are stored encrypted on AWS’s Key Management Service, ensuring that Magic never sees private user keys. The company is currently building out their SDK to support authenticator apps and hardware-based authentication through YubiKeys

“One big difference that we have compared with something like Medium, is if you’re trying to log into your laptop and click on the link on your phone, you’d be logged in on your phone and that’s not the ideal place to edit an article,” Li says. “But with our Magic link login you’re logged into the laptop and you can click your magic link from anywhere.”

Alongside the funding news, Magic announced partnerships with front-end developer platform Vercel, Cryptokitties-maker Dapper Labs and the Max Planck Society research institute.

Remote work has changed the tools offices need for communicating asynchronously across meetings and chat, but not all collaboration takes place in neat little chat bubbles.

Anvil is a San Francisco startup that’s aiming to transform how businesses collaborate around the humble PDF. Anvil’s automation platform levels up Google Forms and allows customers to digitize tiresome PDFs through dynamic forms that unify processes customers might have typically needed to use several pieces of software to access previously. Users can leverage the platform to create, share, fill in, sign and download completed docs without picking up a pen.

Anvil announced today that it had raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures .

The startup is competing directly with rivals like DocuSign, a product that Anvil CEO Mang-Git Ng believes is “great for completing and executing a document,” but is “lacking when it comes to actually creating the document.” Anvil integrates directly with DocuSign for customers that have already integrated the service into their workflows, but Anvil is also replicating some of the service’s functionality as they look to build out an end-to-end solution for document automation.

Anvil is focusing early efforts on courting customers in the wealth and banking space. On the pricing side, they have both per-project and subscription plans, which start at $99 per month.

The startup recently tested their own abilities to get up-and-running quickly as they partnered with a bank to create an online portal for filling out applications for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Ng says the startup helped Sunrise Bank customers apply for $127 million worth of PPP loans. “It was a whirlwind experience for us. We pretty much went from first conversation to deploying with them in six days,” Ng told TechCrunch.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitization of paper processes, Ng says that the company has seen a bump in interest as more companies have gone remote and discovered new needs around making paperwork more collaborative and more digital-friendly, especially when it comes to areas like onboarding, compliance and internal applications.

“The overall trend that we’ve been seeing is that people in these industries are thinking about going more digital, but generally speaking, the people who are at the forefront of that tend to be in larger organizations where squeezing a little bit more operational efficiency will save a ton of money,” Ng says. “But as we’ve gone into lockdown, everybody has to figure out how to do things remotely and the solutions that help people do things remotely are definitely pushing to the forefront.”

Citi Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Financial Venture Studio and 122 West also participated in Anvil’s seed round.

COVID-19 has transformed the global business landscape.

So much so that in a matter of weeks after the onset of the pandemic in the United States, Congress provided more than $1.1 trillion in fiscal stimulus directly to businesses and distressed industries — four times more than was distributed during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

It came as no surprise when, at the start of COVID-19, venture capital investors largely went pencils-down for several weeks and shifted their focus to their existing portfolio companies. Extending company runways, preparing for longer funding cycles and managing operations in a novel business environment became the crux of company resilience. Now, moving into May, we can see this shift reflected in both the decline in number of early-stage companies funded and total capital invested.

As investors begin acclimating to this new normal, they have begun wading into new opportunities in time-proven, healthy industries and new emerging industries that are positioned to succeed during the pandemic. While we are seeing lower valuations, we believe certain B2B technology companies may be uniquely poised to thrive, and are pursuing investment opportunities in this space with a renewed focus.

*Excluding Biotech & Pharmaceuticals (Source: Crunchbase Data via Tableau Public)

Prior to COVID-19, early-stage B2B investors wanted to see strong growth and healthy unit economics; 3X year-over-year sales growth or 10% monthly growth was the gold standard. An LTV-to-CAC ratio over 3X signified a healthy payback cycle. There was less focus on capital efficiency; for every $1 million invested, investors were happy with $500,000 in generated revenues. Get to these numbers and your next funding round was guaranteed — but no longer.

During COVID, and likely beyond, company expectations and goalposts have been adjusted; 2X year-over-year growth may be the new 3X. While growth and unit economics are important, there are now new health indicators that will determine if a B2B company will thrive in a post-COVID world. With that in mind, we have put together a COVID reslience test that startups can use as a north star to grow their business in this new world.

This COVID-19 test is meant to be a gated checklist that will indicate where efforts should be focused, whether it be sales, product or finance. Before we leave you to your own devices, we wanted to walk through a couple of these new post-COVID questions that you should try to answer (and why they are relevant).

When Spotinst rebranded to Spot in March, it seemed big changes were afoot for the startup, which originally helped companies find and manage cheap infrastructure known as spot instances (hence its original name). We had no idea how big at the time. Today, NetApp announced plans to acquire the startup.

The companies did not share the price, but Israeli publication CTECH pegged the deal at $450 million. NetApp would not confirm that price.

It may seem like a strange pairing, a storage company and a startup that helps companies find bargain infrastructure and monitor cloud costs, but NetApp sees the acquisition as a way for its customers to bridge storage and infrastructure requirements.

“The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object and Spot’s compute platform will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy,” Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager for public cloud services at NetApp said in a statement.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research says the deal makes sense on that level, but it depends on how well NetApp incorporates the Spot technology into its stack. “At the end of the day to run next generation applications successfully in the cloud you need to be efficient on compute and storage usage. NetApp is doing great on the latter but needed way to monitor and automate compute consultation. This is what Spot brings to the table, so the combination makes sense, but as in all acquisitions execution is key now,” Mueller told TechCrunch.

Spot helps companies do a couple of things. First of all it manages spot and reserved instances for customers in the cloud. Spot instances in particular, are extremely cheap because they represent unused capacity at the cloud provider. The catch is that the vendor can take the resources back when they need them, and Spot helps safely move workloads around these requirements.

Reserved instances are cloud infrastructure you buy in advance for a discounted price. The cloud vendor gives a break on pricing, knowing that it can count on the customer to use a certain amount of infrastructure resources.

At the time it rebranded, the company also had gotten into monitoring cloud spending and usage across clouds. Amiram Shachar, co-founder and CEO at Spot, told TechCrunch in March, “With this new product we’re providing a more holistic platform that lets customers see all of their cloud spending in one place — all of their usage, all of their costs, what they are spending and doing across multiple clouds — and then what they can actually do [to deploy resources more efficiently],” he said at the time.

Shachar writing in a blog post today announcing the deal indicated the company will continue to support its products as part of the NetApp family, and as startup CEOs typically say at a time like this, move much faster as part of a large organization.

“Spot will continue to offer and fully support our products, both now and as part of NetApp when the transaction closes. In fact, joining forces with NetApp will bring additional resources to Spot that you’ll see in our ability to deliver our roadmap and new innovation even faster and more broadly,” he wrote in the post.

NetApp has been quite acquisitive this year. It acquired Talon Storage in early March and CloudJumper at the end of April. This represents the twentieth acquisition overall for the company, according to Crunchbase data.

Spot was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv. It has raised over $52 million, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close later this year, assuming it passes typical regulatory hurdles.

If you want to capture investor attention, you need a killer pitch. And that’s under normal circumstances. You’ve probably noticed that circumstances are anything but normal. With a global pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, you’ll need to up your pitching game and get ready to bring the heat. We can help.

Register today for the second installment of our Pitchers and Pitches series. This interactive elevator pitch feedback session will take place on June 10 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. Pour yourself a refreshing glass of something tasty and get ready to take your pitching game to the next level.

Note: The Pitchers and Pitches webinar series is free and open to all, but only companies that have purchased a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package get to pitch. If your startup wants to be in the running to pitch, you can purchase a ticket here.

We’ll choose five exhibiting startups at random to give their best 60-second pitch to the panel of judges. Who will hear those pitches and offer their sage advice? Excellent question.

Four people will evaluate each pitch and provide incisive feedback. Amish Jani, Managing Director at First Mark Capital and Merritt Hummer, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures are our two featured VC judge for this session. They will join Darrell Etherington and Jordan Crook, two of our TechCrunch editors with years of experience coaching participants in the epic Startup Battlefield pitch competition.

Whether you watch or whether you pitch, you’ll come away with actionable tips, strategies and fresh ideas to improve the way you present your startup to the world.

Oh, and one more thing — there’s a prize package. Who doesn’t love prizes? The winning startup gets a consulting session with cela, an organization that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help them scale their business.

Early-stage startup founders rise to face challenges on the daily. And now you need to rise further and faster than ever before. Take advantage of every tool and every opportunity to adapt and move forward. The next Pitchers and Pitches session kicks off at 4pm ET / 1pm PT on June 10th. Don’t miss out — register today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Mobile banking startup Varo Money has raised an additional $241 million in Series D funding, the company announced today. The investment was co-led by new investor Gallatin Point Capital and existing investor The Rise Fund, co-founded by TPG. Also participating in the round were Bono (yes, that one), along with entrepreneur, impact investor and movie producer Jeff Skoll; plus HarbourVest Partners and Progressive Insurance.

To date, Varo has raised $419.4 million in funding.

Launched in July 2017, Varo is now one of several digital banking apps that are taking on traditional banks. Its rivals include startups like Chime, Current, Space, Cleo, N26, Empower Finance, Level, Step, Moven and many more.

Similar to others in this space, Varo promises an easily accessible bank account with no monthly fees or minimum balance, plus high-interest savings, and a modern mobile app experience. Though it doesn’t have any brick-and-mortar branches, customers can access their money through a network of more than 55,000 fee-free Allpoint ATMs worldwide.

During the COVID-19 crisis, Varo served its customer base by providing early access to stimulus and unemployment relief funds, as it already does with users’ direct deposit paychecks. It also increased its deposit and ATM limits, and partnered with job platforms Steady and Wonolo to help connect its customers to new work opportunities.

Like most of its competitors, Varo itself is not a bank — its accounts to date have been provided by The Bancorp Bank, member FDIC.

That may soon change, the company says.

In September 2018, Varo received preliminary approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). In February 2020, Varo announced it was the first banking startup to win approval for FDIC insurance. Last month, the company said it was moving to the final stage of its bank charter journey.

“Varo was founded first and foremost to make a powerful impact on systemic financial inequality in communities across this country,” said Colin Walsh, founder and CEO of Varo, in a statement. “As the first fully digital bank, Varo will bring our mission of financial inclusion to life and create more financially resilient — and thus healthier and stronger — communities. This new investment will enable us to complete the chartering process and leverage our modern banking technology to build on our track record of innovation and inclusion,” he added.

Pending completion of the conditions required by the OCC, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, Varo will receive approval to become a national bank.

The company expects this process to complete by summer 2020, at which point it will expand its lineup of services to include credit cards, loans and additional savings products.

Those expansions will help to further differentiate its mobile banking app from a number of competitors, as a large group today remain largely focused on offering checking and savings accounts, not a fuller range of financial products.

Varo is not the only fintech startup that’s moving toward becoming a real bank. In March, Square said it had also received approval from the FDIC to conduct deposit insurance. It aims to launch Square Financial Services, offering small business loans, in 2021.

These moves by fintech startups come at a time when the younger generation is ditching legacy banking in favor of tech. Millennials in particular don’t trust big banks, preferring instead the fee-free challenger banks offering modern mobile features they’ve come to expect from all their other apps.

“In the midst of all the economic challenges people are facing right now, the digital economy can still be a force for good. Varo’s focus on financial inclusion and the support they offer people to help manage their finances and reduce financial stress really matters at a time when so many American families are struggling in a volatile economy. And that’s why RISE chose to partner with the team at Varo,” said Maya Chorengel, co-managing partner of The Rise Fund.

In addition to its expansion into new products, Varo will hire across operations, marketing, risk, engineering and communications following the round’s close. It has recently added headcount to its customer care teams.

Varo today counts nearly 2 million banking and savings accounts and is growing rapidly. Since the beginning of 2020, account growth is up 60%, spend is up roughly 1.5x over the same period and deposits are up by roughly 3.5x.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, continues to be faced with tough decisions linked to the coronavirus crisis and resulting economic downturn.

Following the shuttering of its Las Vegas-based customer support office and almost 300 staff being furloughed in U.K., the company has announced internally that up to 120 U.K. staff are being made redundant. Reuters first reported the news just moments ago — which I have now confirmed based on my own sources.

According to an internal memo written by new CEO TS Anil, following an all-hands earlier this afternoon led by Anil and Monzo co-founder and president Tom Blomfield, the bank is to make up to 120 roles redundant, despite previously stating that furloughs and pay cuts already carried out would mean further layoffs could be avoided. That no longer appears to be the case, with Anil explaining that the current economic situation isn’t expected to revert back to normal quickly.

I understand a full consultation period for those employees potentially affected will now take place, as is stipulated under U.K. employment law. In addition, Anil told staff that in order to recognise their contribution, the bank will be waiving the one year “cliff” from their vesting schedule so that they won’t lose out on any shares due to them.

The announced layoffs add to a turbulent time for Monzo in recent months, as it, along with many other fintech companies, has attempted to insulate itself from the coronavirus crisis and resulting economic downturn.

In April, I reported that Monzo was shuttering its customer support office in Las Vegas, seeing 165 customer support staff in the U.S. lose their jobs. And just a few weeks earlier, we reported that the bank was furloughing up to 295 staff under the U.K.’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. In addition, the senior management team and the board has volunteered to take a 25% cut in salary, and co-founder Tom Blomfield has decided not to take a salary for the next 12 months.

Like other banks and fintechs, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in Monzo seeing customer card spend reduce at home and (of course) abroad, meaning it is generating significantly less revenue from interchange fees. The bank has also postponed the launch of premium paid-for consumer accounts, one of only a handful of known planned revenue streams, alongside lending, of course.

And just last week, it was reported that Monzo is closing in on £70-80 million in top-up funding, to help extend its coronavirus crisis runaway. However, as new and some existing investors play hardball, the company has reportedly had to accept a 40% reduction in its previously £2 billion valuation as part of its last funding round last June, with a new valuation of £1.25 billion.

Imagine going from zero followers to 10,000,000+ followers in less than five months. I have watched somebody do exactly that.

My brother Topper Guild is already reaping the benefits of fame: People stop him in the street for photos and he’s been offered thousands of dollars to promote brands and befriend celebrities.

In less than 150 days, he went from being a high school sophomore to earning more than a Harvard MBA and working with his idols like boxer Ryan Garcia. In time, he also leveraged his following to score more than 100,000,000 views for direct-to-consumer brands like FashionNova and NUGGS.

How did he do it? And how would he advise you?

Consumer startups can apply these same strategies, tactics and ideas to grow quickly on TikTok, which is not nearly as saturated as Instagram and offers faster growth rates.

Let’s dive right into the principles he used to grow (that you can use too).

Do what works

Some audience questions answered by Sramana: – What is a good course for tech entrepreneurship? – What are some proven strategies for entrepreneurs to get a phone meeting with VCs?...

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Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in general in terms of types of companies? Are there any highlights of what kinds of companies we’re seeing in 2020? Parthib Srivathsan: We have a very specific...

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Big Data player Splunk’s (NASDAQ: SPLK) cloud bets are paying off. The company recently announced its first quarter results. While the results were not entirely impressive, the market’s pleased...

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Sramana Mitra: You said it took you two years to get to $60,000 annual revenue. That’s 2010 then, right? Florin Cornianu: It took us all the way to 2014 to get to a million dollars in revenue. ...

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Like many parents, Zigazoo founder Zak Ringelstein worries about his children’s screen time. His worries only grew when COVID-19 led to school shutdowns and kids came home to a world of remote learning. Now, as lockdowns extend, Ringelstein is learning to embrace screen time as a way to sneak education and entertainment into his kids’ digital diet.

Ringelstein, the former founder of UClass (acquired in 2015), launched Zigazoo, which he describes as a “TikTok for kids.”

Zigazoo is a free app where kids can answer short video-based exercises that they can answer through video and share responses with friends. Exercises range from how to create a baking soda volcano to making fractions out of food, and targets kids from preschool to middle school.

To ensure the app’s privacy, Ringelstein says that parents should be the primary users of the app. Users have to accept a friend request in order for their content to be seen, a move Ringelstein sees as key to avoiding bad actors or potential bullying.

Additionally, Zigazoo uses an API through SightEngine to moderate content.

Ringelstein’s first users were his own kids, a test he says was very rewarding.

The testing process made him realize that kids like to create longer videos, and watch smaller videos, so Zigazoo is figuring out an attention span for viewing. Currently, average time on site per user has gone up to 19 minutes and 43 seconds per day.

Ringelstein pointed to “Sesame Street” as his inspiration. Mixing education and entertainment has proven successful for a number of businesses. Kids were drooling in front of the screen watching the characters of “Sesame Street,” spending mindless hours staring at the television set, he recalls.

“The creators of Sesame Street…used the medium to educate kids and entertain them at the same time,” Ringelstein said. Vox described “Sesame Street” as a “bedrock for educational television,” bringing loved characters to the table with former First Lady Michelle Obama or using a silly song to teach kids about recycling.

In one month, Zigazoo has had 100,000 videos uploaded to and downloaded from its site.

While Zigazoo claims to be a “TikTok” for kids, it is competing with the platform itself. Some teachers have turned to TikTok to create lessons on solar cell systems and experiments.

Others are putting together guides of “kid friendly” TikTok creators. And TikTok itself recently let parents set restrictions on content, DMs and screen time for their kids.

Video-based learning is a better way for students to engage actively in an educational activity, versus passively reading a paragraph from a Google doc, according to Ringelstein.

Combining education with entertainment comes with a set of risks around child safety. Last March, The New York Times wrote a story about how “kidfluencers” has grown as a concept, where parents put their kids online, touting brands, and make money off of it. The resulting ethical concerns are why Ringelstein is confident that Zigazoo is needed.

“Zigazoo is a not a kid play date smack dab in the middle of an adult party like YouTube and TikTok, it is a universe tailor-made for kid safety, learning and enjoyment,” he said.

Ringelstein sees Zigazoo’s “friend” versus “follow” feature as key to the safety of kids: Unlike TikTok, where there is a public feed and users can follow everyone, Zigazoo requires users to opt-in to being followed, similar to Facebook.

The partnerships will allow Zigazoo to post verified content using favorite and well-known characters to teach kids about the subjects they care about. And in a world where digital detoxes are no longer a reality, a smarter screen-time activity seems much needed.

Recently, Zigazoo partnered with The American Federation of Teachers for a capstone project directed at millions of K-12 students. Students are invited to submit a video using Zigazoo to encapsulate their learning experience over the past school year, which AFT says is a “far better way to sum up learning than a high-stakes test.”

This summer Ringelstein is launching “Zigazoo Channels” with a select group of major children’s entertainment companies, podcasts, museums, libraries, zoos, social media influencers and more.

French startup Majelan is pivoting a year after launching a podcast player and service. The company, created by former Radio France CEO Mathieu Gallet and Arthur Perticoz, is ditching the podcast aggregation side of its business and focusing on premium audio content going forward.

Like many podcast startups, Majelan faced some criticism shortly after its launch. Aggregating free podcasts with premium content next to them à la Luminary is a controversial topic in the podcast community. Spotify has been going down the same path, but Spotify is also an order of magnitude bigger than any other podcast startup out there.

Some podcast creators have decided to remove their podcast feeds from Majelan to protest against that business model.

Podcasts remain an open format. Creators can create a feed, users can subscribe to that feed in their favorite podcast app. You don’t have to sign up to a particular service to access a particular podcast — everything is open.

“We have decided to stop aggregating free podcasts — free podcasts mean podcasts, period. For us, podcasts are RSS feeds, it’s an open world,” Perticoz said in a podcast episode. “We need an app that is more focused on payment. We can’t aggregate free podcasts given that our strategy is paid content.”

The result is a more focused service that is going to launch on July 7th in France. After a free trial, you have to subscribe for €5 to €7 per month, depending on the length of your subscription. You can then access a library of premium audio content — Majelan rightfully doesn’t call them podcasts.

“Going forward, we’re going to focus on original content, we’re going to focus 100% on paid content,” Gallet said in the same podcast episode.

And in order to be even more specific, Majelan will focus on personal growth, such as creativity, activism, mindfulness, innovation, entrepreneurship and health. According to the co-founders, some content will be produced in house, some content will be co-produced with other companies, and the startup will also acquire existing podcasts and repackage them for Majelan.

That move has been in the works for a while. The startup pitched it to its board of investors back in December. Premium subscriptions have worked well for movies, TV and music. Now let’s see if subscriptions will also take off with spoken-word audio.

In today’s new world completely engulfed by COVID-19, all sorts of innovations are emerging to help the world overcome this difficult time: 3D printers are cranking out medical supplies; rapid advancements in testing have been made — now providing results in five minutes; teachers have transformed curricula to be taught entirely online. It’s humanity vs. the virus, and innovators around the world are acting as fast as they can.

Yet I was recently chatting with a leading Silicon Valley investor about what incentivizes entrepreneurship. To him — and his Silicon Valley peers — the answer was obvious: People are motivated to become heroes. Their ambition stems from an unquenchable thirst for being recognized as the victor and reaping the riches that come with it.

This view is troubling. It excludes many of the innovators responding to COVID-19 — people who are passionate about solving complex problems like poverty, public health issues or education. Working closely with over 100 global social entrepreneurs at MIT Solve, I’ve noticed a very different profile than the Silicon Valley hero. The entrepreneurs I know want to solve real problems — not become influencers or Netflix stars.

Take Luis Garza, Founder of Kinedu, an app that provides parents with tools to promote their child’s development. Working on a child care chain in Latin America, Garza could sense the anxiety that first-time caretakers felt when it came to raising a baby. He wanted to find a solution that would help everyone know what to do, and “feel like a good parent.” Since its founding, Kinedu has impacted 4 million lives, and now, in response to COVID-19, Kinedu is offering free subscriptions to any parent in need of support while they self-isolate at home.

A recent experiment measuring drivers of innovation we ran with Columbia Business School and Carnegie Mellon, points to the same conclusion: Not all entrepreneurs are motivated by fame and fortune. If we assume they are, we’re excluding those who aren’t — limiting opportunities for these “helper” entrepreneurs.

We emailed 11,000 innovators across 76 countries and asked them to apply to Solve’s Global Challenges. Global entrepreneurs can submit their business solutions to be selected for funding, mentorship and support. Each individual randomly received one of three messages: one emphasizing social impact, one emphasizing prize funding, and one neutral control message. We measured their email engagement to determine which messages resonated the most.

The findings convey that women are more driven by social impact, while men are more driven by funding. Country culture also matters; people in more altruistic cultures were more driven by social impact, while those in less altruistic cultures were more driven by funding.

To be truly inclusive — of gender, culture and background — we must be intentional in how we inspire and support entrepreneurs. We must speak to both instincts: the hero and the helper. But speaking a language that invites diverse participation is only the first step. Here are three guidelines for investors and supporters who want to intentionally motivate diverse innovators.

Lower entrepreneurship’s barrier to entry

Strip industry jargon from your application. Coach innovators to prepare for a pitch. Tailor your language to appeal to mission-driven innovators — not just money-driven innovators. These are all ways to make your program feel accessible to an innovator without an MBA or tech background — someone like Arturo Hernández, a comedian turned startup founder who created Supercívicos, an app whose 1.5 million users geolocalize urban challenges and crowdsource support for public officials to address them.

Expand the definition of a “promising” entrepreneur

When did we decide that hoodie-wearing founders building the next unicorn with “hockey stick growth” is the gold standard for promising ventures? What’s wrong with zebras? (They’re real; they have two-color stripes: for-profit and for-purpose; and they collaborate to survive). Nicole Bassett who co-founded The Renewal Workshop — which provides zero-waste, circular solutions for apparel and textile brands — is now part of the $51 billion secondhand clothes industry. She turned a new business model for recycling and upcycling clothing into a rapidly growing, for-profit startup, saving over 100,000 pounds of textiles from landfills while driving revenue.

Support beyond funding

While financing is a crucial part of launching a new venture, we must recognize that other resources such as technical expertise or mentorship are just as important to social entrepreneurs. Founders that are mentored by a top-performing entrepreneur are three times more likely to lead top-performing companies themselves. Consider Ram Katamaraja, creator of Refactored.ai, a data and analytics skills training platform. He needed marketing and branding support to scale and notes that a mentor “made what could have been a turbulent and intimidating process gratifying and extremely productive.” Refactored.ai has upskilled more than 6,000 users.

If we don’t expand our understanding of a promising entrepreneur, lower the barrier to entry to our programs and provide tailored support, then we will ignore many of the game-changing ideas that will get us through this pandemic — and ultimately, leave big problems unsolved and large communities unserved.

Overjet, a startup focused on using AI to help dentists and insurance companies understand dental scans, today announced that it has raised $7.85 million in what it describes as a seed round.

According to Overjet’s CEO Wardah Inam (an MIT PhD in electrical engineering and computer science), the company raised the funds from Crosslink Capital, which led its round, and E14 Fund, which “only invests in MIT startups,” Inam said.

The MIT-E14 connection is not surprising, given that Overjet has been supported by two different MIT groups. Continuing the Boston-area educational links, the startup was incubated by the Harvard Innovation Lab, which Inam told TechCrunch that it is “growing out of” in terms of space.

The selection of Crosslink as its lead investor wasn’t accidental. Inam told TechCrunch that Overjet was interested in raising from Crosslink thanks to its prior investments into Weave, a startup whose software is often used in a dental context. (Weave raised a $70 million Series D at a near-unicorn valuation in 2019, TechCrunch previously reported.)

But enough about the money, let’s talk about what Overjet does.

Applied AI

When you go to the dentist, you’ll often get an x-ray taken of your teeth. Then, a dentist will read the chart and make some recommendations. They may say that you’re in good shape, and can come back for a cleaning in a few months. Or your dentist might tell you that some work is needed. The latter scenario is where Overjet comes into play.

According to Inam, Overjet’s “core technology [helps] to determine what treatments are needed.”

The CEO told TechCrunch in an interview that while most medical imaging AI services are focused on finding out if there is anything wrong (the startup executive gave an example of tumor detection) with someone, Overjet can “go one step further,” helping to not only note that there is a problem (tooth decay, to select a hypothetical), but the extent of the issue itself.

This ability to “analyze clinical data at scale” and “determine what treatments are necessary,” as Overjet’s CEO put it over the phone, is potentially attractive to both dentists and insurance companies alike.

For dentists, it’s the ability to lean on AI-styled technology to help confirm their diagnosis, or help them not miss issues that are hard to spot. Overjet may also be able to help insurance companies process their huge influx of dental images more quickly. Currently, Inam told TechCrunch, “every crown that is sent to any major insurance company is reviewed” manually by humans, something that is expensive.

AI might be able to better tell, and more quickly, if a claim is reasonable, and not fraudulent.

This also helps patients to a degree. Recalling our example of going to the dentist, how much control do you really have over the work that is done to your teeth? Not a lot, frankly. This opens up the chance for dentists to pursue unneeded treatments for financial gain. If Overjet can help root out some fraud in the system, it could lead to better patient care.

Growth

Chatting with a startup it’s hard to grok how good its tech is. In the case of Overjet, it’s nearly impossible. But if the company’s tech works as it thinks it does, it may be able to quickly grow inside its target market; we’ll have to vet the quality of its technology through the lens of business growth for the time being.

Overjet charges insurance companies per claim analyzed, even if it includes more than one x-ray. Dental practices pay on a SaaS model, Inam told TechCrunch.

The company currently has “around 20” people on staff, according to its CEO, and expects to grow this year. I’m super curious how many new customers the startup can gain this year, and how fast it can scale revenue, as well. More when we talk to Overjet again.