Ask any woman and she will tell you that most of her bras do not fit her optimally. In fact, a majority of women end up wearing the wrong size. A large part of the problem is that sizing is standardized, unlike women’s bodies. With every passing year, more people are also shopping online, meaning fewer opportunities to actually try on bras — a trend that’s only accelerating given the shutdown the world is experiencing right now.

One particular problem, and a widespread one, according to entrepreneurs Jaclyn Fu and Lia Winograd, is that bras are generally too big for small-chested women. It’s the reason the former co-workers came together to found Pepper, a three-year-old, Denver-based startup that’s expressly focused on creating bras that fit smaller cup sizes.

As Fu explains it, most bra companies use a size, say 36C, then apply that same design to other bra sizes, like a 32A. While the step is logistically sound — applying a standard base design to other sizes — it doesn’t translate well into actual fit.

“It means a person who is a 32A is wearing a design that was intended for a 36C, causing fit issues like cup gaps,” says Fu.

Usually, women try to resolve the problem by tightening their bra straps or changing sizes, but Pepper’s solution is to create its own, smaller cup molds from a factory in Medellin, Colombia, where Winograd grew up.

Fu made the first prototype for Pepper based on her own chest size. Since then, she’s gone to customers’ houses to conduct fittings and research. Beyond cup size, Pepper also addresses underwire woes, making its products less curved and shorter to follow the natural size of a smaller-chested woman.

To increase customer engagement, Pepper started virtual one-to-one fit sessions for customers who are buying a bra online for the first time, and like other companies has a “fit quiz” for people to take online, too.

Pepper now sells a wide variety of sizes, all the way from from 30A to 38B, and prices range from $48 to $54.

Pepper certainly isn’t the only startup trying to fit into the bra industry. Companies like Kala, SlickChicks and ThirdLove all tout comfort and inclusivity in sizing and fitting.

The biggest of the three is ThirdLove, a San Francisco DTC bra and underwear company that has raised $68.6 million in known venture capital to date, per Crunchbase. ThirdLove brands itself as a brand that sells a “bra for every body” with inclusive sizes, and is now expanding into retail, international markets and swim and athletic wear. The company was last valued at more than $750 million.

It’s unclear how many new brands the market can support, or that can survive this pandemic. Even companies with meaningful market share and fresh capital are struggling to stay afloat as shoppers reduce their spend right now. Earlier this month, ThirdLove laid off 30% of its staff, citing COVID-19’s impact on business.

Even still, Pepper’s founders remain optimistic. Pepper’s Kickstarter $10,000 launch campaign — staged in 2017 — was separately funded in less than 10 hours, Fu notes.

The success of that campaign just helped the company secure $2 million in seed funding from investors, including Precursor Ventures, New York University Innovation Fund and Denver Angels. Others participating include the co-founder of MyFitnessPal, Albert Lee.

Fu adds that the company, which employs three people, is “close to profitability” on a $3 million revenue run rate. In 2019, most of its sales came directly from consumers on their site — a good sign that its growth ties to user loyalty versus relying on partnerships with retailers.

The nuance of buying a bra has long been an in-person ordeal. But now, because of COVID-19’s spread and the resulting shut down of many brick-and-mortar stores, those who need a new bra might have to turn online for the very first time. It’s an opportunity for companies like Pepper to prove that they can master fit without measuring tape and a changing room.

The tech industry (and the world at large) is not experiencing temporary anxiety — the uncertainty we’re all coping with is the new normal.

Sudden shifts in behavior have made some startups targeting slow-moving, old-school industries more relevant than they could have imagined, such as those in telehealth, distance learning and remote work. Most, however are seeing massive decreases in revenue, forcing them to cut costs and even lay off teams to slash burn rates. Other startups simply won’t be here in three to six months.

Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee, who coined the term “unicorn,” says tech companies going through scenario planning need to begin thinking long-term.

“We’ve spent the last month scenario planning with our portfolio companies, and in most cases, we’ll have conversations about what these scenarios can include,” said Lee. “And when we look at the planning around those scenarios, they often don’t feel conservative enough. Most entrepreneurs are optimists, and we are, too! But it seems safer to have more conservative plans [and start expecting] that this is going to impact us for longer and be worse than we expected.”

Lee and Cowboy Ventures partner Ted Wang joined TechCrunch on Tuesday for our first episode of Extra Crunch Live, a virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. In a live Q&A that included questions from myself and the Extra Crunch audience, Wang and Lee covered a wide range of topics, including PPP loans, advice for business leaders around layoffs, the right time to seek funding and the right firms from which to seek that funding, how to pitch during a downturn and which sectors in particular Cowboy is interested in financing right now.

You can check out the best insights from the call, or catch up on the full conversation via the YouTube embed below.

We have several outstanding guests, including Charles Hudson, Mitch and Freada Kapor, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, Hunter Walk and Kirsten Green, joining us on Extra Crunch Live over the next few weeks. Sign up for Extra Crunch to get access to all of them.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: Rendezvous Online with Sramana Mitra 2.18.20

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Two months ago, seemingly out of nowhere, CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch decided it was time to depart.

Alperovitch, who served as the cybersecurity giant’s chief technology office since its 2011 debut, said he was leaving to launch a non-profit policy accelerator. CrowdStrike named Michael Sentonas, who managed the firm’s tech strategy for three years, as his replacement.

The news came at a critical time for the maker and seller of subscription-based endpoint security software that protects against breaches and cyberattacks. The company’s stock was in recovery after it fell below its IPO price, just months after popping 90% on its first day on the public market. It was one of the biggest offerings of the year, reaching more than $11 billion in value by the end, a far cry from a decade earlier when the security giant started out as a few notes scribbled on a napkin in a hotel lobby.

And then the pandemic happened.

By the time of his appointment, Sentonas was preparing to move to the U.S. from his native Australia, but “that hasn’t been the easiest thing to work through,” he told TechCrunch in a recent call. Despite having to balance the time difference and often swapping days with nights, the newly-appointed chief technology officer says it’s largely been “business as usual” for CrowdStrike.

Here’s why.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

TechCrunch: Two months ago, you were appointed chief technology officer at CrowdStrike. Prior to that you were vice president of tech strategy. How have things been since the promotion?

Michael Sentonas: In some respects, things have been business as usual. A lot of the work I was doing around tech strategy and longer-term vision about [what] we should be working on hasn’t changed for me. Obviously, when one of the co-founders moves on, they have big shoes to fill. So, I’ve inherited a larger team. It’s working with the team around what can I assist them with to help us continue to focus. Probably the biggest change is just being stuck here because of what’s going on around the world and just adjusting to largely covering a U.S. timezone from Australia, which isn’t easy.

That can’t be easy?

We’re a globally-spread and globally-diverse organization. The last statistic that I looked at a few weeks ago was that 70% of our staff logins are remote. I’m dealing with Europe and the U.S., that’s just the way we’re spread. It’s all around the world.

Meet Libeo, a French startup that just raised a $4.4 million (€4 million) funding round led by LocalGlobe, with Breega and various business angels also participating. The company has built a service that helps you pay your providers much more easily. You no longer have to manually keep track of invoices, log into your banking interface, enter banking information and transfer money.

Libeo targets small and medium companies that don’t necessarily have a dedicated accounting team. It wants to simplify payment processes as much as possible.

It starts by collecting invoices from your suppliers. You can import invoices to your Libeo account directly on Libeo by forwarding emails to a special address, by connecting Libeo to popular services, such as Amazon, or by connecting Libeo with your existing accounting platform, such as QuickBooks or Receipt Bank.

Once your invoices are all on Libeo, the startup automatically fills out payment information based on information on the invoice. It also can identify duplicates and keep track of VAT payments.

After that, Libeo wants to simplify payments. When you sign up, you share your company’s IBAN with Libeo so that it can take money from your account using direct debits. Whenever there’s an outstanding invoice in your Libeo account, you can decide to pay it now or schedule payment for later. Libeo transfers money to your recipient and collects money from your bank account at the same time.

What if it’s a new supplier and you don’t have their banking information? Instead of going back and forth with your supplier to get their IBAN, your supplier receives an email from Libeo with a link. The supplier drags and drops their bank details on Libeo’s web page. Libeo then checks that everything matches with the invoice and automatically adds the IBAN information to the payment.

Over time, if you use Libeo, you get an address book of all your suppliers. You can see how much you’re spending with a specific supplier, track your cash flow and more.

Like modern software-as-a-service tools, Libeo lets you collaborate on your invoices. Multiple people can have a Libeo account with different rights. You can set up an approval workflow as well.

There’s a free plan, but it’s limited to five payments per month. You can then pay to access advanced features and get bigger limits. Five thousand companies are currently using Libeo four months after the initial release. The company has facilitated €2 million in payments.

Michael Ovitz didn’t invent the idea of a talent agency, but one might argue that he perfected it. He founded the CAA in 1975, and grew it into the world’s leading talent agency, serving as chairman for 20 years. Now, Ovitz is investing in a brand new type of talent agency called Human Capital.

Human Capital is a hybrid organization, one part VC fund, one part recruiting business and one part creative agency. (Human Capital did not invest in its agency startup from its VC fund.) The Human Capital VC fund has $210 million in assets under management.

The Human Capital recruitment/agency company, founded by former General Catalyst associate Armaan Ali and Stanford grad Baris Akis, looks to provide for tech engineers the same services that Ovitz provided to actors and creatives back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Engineers are some of the most sought-after talent in Silicon Valley and across the globe. And while big corporations and high-growth startups duke it out over these young engineers, the candidates themselves have little to no guidance around where they should go, what they should expect during the process, and, in some cases, what they should expect to earn.

Ovitz — alongside Qasar Younis, founder of Applied Intuition and former partner and COO of YC; Adam Zoia, founder and chairman of Glocap; Stephen Ehikian, co-founder and CEO of Airkit; and other financial institutions and LPs — recently injected $15 million into Human Capital, which is valued in the hundreds of millions according to the company.

Human Capital looks to pair the brightest engineers with the right company for them, while giving startups a new way to approach recruitment. Thus far, the company has 5,000 members (engineers) and has placed them at startups like Brex, Grammarly, Robinhood and more.

Human Capital starts by doing outreach on university campuses with outstanding engineering programs, setting up coffee with engineers who have been recommended or referred by alumni of the program. Once accepted as a member, the engineer explains to Human Capital what type of role they’re interested in, whether it’s at a big corporation, a high-growth startup or an early-stage company where they have the opportunity to build something from scratch.

The recruitment team at Human Capital then coaches the engineer through the interview process and beyond, helping with decision-making around promotions, understanding equity and negotiating new offers.

The org never charges the engineer, but rather takes a commission on the engineer’s annual income for the first year from the startup that recruited them.

Ali explained to TechCrunch how Human Capital is operating during the coronavirus pandemic, describing a situation in which the top talent that is in the market right now has a level of uncertainty about the future, leading them to seek positions at huge companies like Facebook and Google.

“Our hypothesis when we started this was that there are amazing businesses that are being run better at an earlier stage and have a proxy for that same type of stability [at a Google or Facebook] via their access to capital, alongside other foundational pieces of business security, such as their business model, unit economics, long-term vision for the company, gross margin rate, and growth opportunities for individuals at those companies.”

He said that Human Capital believed that, if a macro event occurred in the market place — we’re right in the middle of one of the least predictable and most impactful macro economic events ever — some of those “stable” earlier-stage businesses wouldn’t be hit in the same way as public companies who have to worry about short-term profitability.

“The issue is that you have to know a lot about those businesses in order to be able to discern that, and that’s our job,” said Ali. “And what we’ve seen is that a number of the companies in that position are actually ramping up recruiting right now.”

There is no mandatory link between Human Capital’s venture capital fund and their recruiting/agency entity, though the fund does like to invest in engineers who have gone through the program and move on to start their own businesses. Those types of investments include Brex, Bolt and Qualia, among others. Human Capital also invests in companies for whom they’ve recruited, such as Livongo, Snowflake, Clumio, Wildlife and Trackonomy. Human Capital has a preference for leading rounds only for companies that are started by its engineer members.

The model isn’t unlike SignalFire or Glocap, founded by Adam Zoia (investor in Human Capital). The idea is that VC funds are great for capital injections, but with the cut-throat recruiting atmosphere and a finite number of engineers, that money can be relatively useless if it can’t be used to bring on the best talent. So firms like SignalFire (in the tech world) and Glocap (in the business/finance world) put recruitment front and center in their value proposition. (Glocap doesn’t invest, but is the premier recruitment platform in the financial sector.)

Human Capital is also starting to look at potential acquisitions that can beef up its agency business, recently acqui-hiring Khonvo Corporation, a recruitment agency founded by Archit Bhise and Andrew Rising.

Ovitz explained to TechCrunch that his ultra-successful career as an agent stemmed from his ability to make decisions about people and projects quickly. He sees the same type of intuition in Ali and Akis at a much younger age and with less experience than he had.

“It’s a checklist in your head,” said Ovitz. “It’s a combination of when your brain meets your stomach, your intellect meets your gut that lets you know you’ve hit a winner. The thing that’s allowed Ali and Akis to build a company that’s worth the hundreds of millions in such a short period of time is that they had that when I met them without having an enormous amount of experience.”

He added that access to the internet, which he did not have during his agency days, is an amazing learning tool and an “epic crutch” that, when paired with good instincts, can accelerate the learning curve on building a business.

(It’s worth noting that this isn’t Ovitz’s first foray into Silicon Valley. The entertainment powerhouse was one of the earliest advisors to Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz during the formation of the legendary VC firm a16z, helping them model the firm after CAA itself. Ovitz has been quietly investing in and advising tech startups for the past 15 years.)

As companies increasingly look to find ways to cut costs, Granulate, an early-stage Israeli startup, has come up with a clever way to optimize infrastructure usage. Today it was rewarded with a tidy $12 million Series A investment.

Insight Partners led the round with participation from TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures. Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners, will be joining the Granulate board under the terms of the agreement. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $15.6 million, according to the company.

The startup claims it can cut infrastructure costs, whether on-prem or in the cloud, from between 20% and 80%. This is not insignificant if they can pull this off, especially in the economic maelstrom in which we find ourselves.

Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO at Granulate, says the company achieved the efficiency through a lot of studying about how Linux virtual machines work. Over six months of experimentation, they simply moved the bottleneck around until they learned how to take advantage of the way the Linux kernel operates to gain massive efficiencies.

It turns out that Linux has been optimized for resource fairness, but Granulate’s founders wanted to flip this idea on its head and look for repetitiveness, concentrating on one function instead of fair allocation across many functions, some of which might not really need access at any given moment.

“When it comes to production systems, you have a lot of repetitiveness in the machine, and you basically want it to do one thing really well,” he said.

He points out that it doesn’t even have to be a VM. It could also be a container or a pod in Kubernetes. The important thing to remember is that you no longer care about the interactivity and fairness inherent in Linux; instead, you want that the machine to be optimized for certain things.

“You let us know what your utility function for that production system is, then our agents. basically optimize all the decision making for that utility function. That means that you don’t even have to do any code changes to gain the benefit,” Ezra explained.

What’s more, the solution uses machine learning to help understand how the different utility functions work to provide greater optimization to improve performance even more over time.

Insight’s Jaffe certainly recognized the potential of such a solution, especially right now.

“The need to have high-performance digital experiences and lower infrastructure costs has never been more important, and Granulate has a highly differentiated offering powered by machine learning that’s not dependent on configuration management or cloud resource purchasing solutions,” Jaffe said in a statement.

Ezra understands that a product like his could be particularly helpful at the moment. “We’re in a unique position. Our offering right now helps organizations survive the downturn by saving costs without firing people,” he said.

The company was founded in 2018 and currently has 20 employees. They plan to double that by the end of 2020.

Sramana Mitra: A couple of metrics before we go on to the post-Lehman story. What kind of revenues were you making in college? What kind of revenues were you making from the company while you were...

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Workplace productivity software has had an insane year, with slick subscription tools popping up seemingly each new day. VCs have been backing the tools en masse, and startups are continuing to find new holes in company workflows that can be patched with a new service.

Hugo is a collaborative note-taking app focused on sharing meeting notes across teams within companies to reduce redundancy and improve information accessibility.

The startup’s founders tell TechCrunch they’ve closed a $6.1 million seed round led by Google’s AI-focused investment fund, Gradient Ventures . Slack Fund, Founder Collective and Entrée Capital also participated in the raise.

Hugo’s software is structured around ensuring that insights from important meetings don’t die in a user’s notepad app or one-off Google Docs files. There are plenty of startups building wiki software, including heavy hitters like Notion, which recently reached a $2 billion valuation. Hugo’s innovation is a platform that integrates more deeply within a user’s calendar, recognizing things like past notes from a meeting with a specific person.

CEO Josh Lowy tells TechCrunch that a big goal of the platform is ensuring that insights from meetings don’t stay siloed inside different teams. “In Hugo, when you have a sales meeting with a customer, Hugo would already know that someone in the pre-sales cycle had met with that same person.”

The end result, Lowy says, is that companies using Hugo end up reducing non-billable hours and reducing the number of people they need handling a sale or customer-facing task.

Hugo also integrates heavily with existing toolsets, so that users can create actionable items directly from meeting notes, quickly firing off Jira bug reports or Zendesk ticket requests. Other software integrations support products from the company’s latest investors, including Slack and Google’s G Suite.

While a lot of startups in the workplace software space have focused on scaling team-by-team inside organizations, Hugo’s founders think the advantages of their product are best showcased when everyone is using it, so they’ve tried to build out pricing to entice small and medium-sized teams to bring everyone onboard.

The platform is free for up to 40 users, charges a flat $399 fee up to 100 users and relies on custom pricing beyond that. While the sales cycle for software companies will undoubtedly be affected by the COVID-19-related crunch, Hugo’s co-founders believe that the way work is changing internally further proves out their platform.

“There’s a stronger need for asynchronous communication,” co-founder Darren Chait told TechCrunch in an interview. “The volume of meetings has increased and what we do has, if anything, gotten more valuable.”

Hugo’s customers include teams at Netflix, Dropbox, Shopify and Twitter.

Just months after graduating from Y Combinator, H1 Insights, the LinkedIn for the healthcare industry, has raised $12.9 million in a new round of funding.

“It’s a better way to connect the ecosystem,” says co-founder Ariel Katz. The company already has more than 8 million profiles for healthcare professionals in its database and is generating multiple millions of dollars in revenue, according to Katz. The company said it’s seen 350% growth over the last year and already counts 35 pharmaceutical companies among its customers.

By scraping public records and working with healthcare systems, payers and data brokers, H1 has amassed perhaps the most comprehensive profiles of medical professionals and service providers, including their expertise, interests, publications, location, speaking engagements and involvement in clinical trials.

Katz envisions a service that allows doctors to communicate with each other across specialties and a better way for pharmaceutical companies to find physicians that can be relevant to new pharmaceutical trials and treatments.

And the company continues to see growth even with pharmaceutical companies freezing their clinical trials. The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced most companies to halt clinical trials as most patients avoid hospitals for nearly everything but the most vital medical procedures, but H1 Insights offers services for pharmaceutical companies’ medical affairs department, which are still looking for healthcare officials to collaborate with, says Katz.

The company’s $12.9 million Series A round closed in February and was led by Menlo Ventures . Other investors included Baron Davis Enterprises (the eponymous personal investment vehicle for the NBA star), ClearPoint Investment Partners, Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher, Liquid 2 Ventures (the investment fund founded by former NFL superstar Joe Montana), Novartis dRx and Underscore VC.

H1 signed its term sheet in February, but wasn’t forced to reprice its round as the pandemic began to spread. With that cash now in hand, the company is poised to go on a massive hiring spree, says Katz.

“Advances in machine learning and AI are creating new opportunities to leverage data for a positive impact on human health,” said Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures, and a new addition to the H1 board. “H1 is harnessing the power of this data and providing a robust platform for pharma, biotech and life sciences companies to connect with healthcare professionals. Their early traction is promising and shows that it meets a clear need for the industry.”

M&A has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia — a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is doing right and wrong and what needs to get addressed — announced that it would acquire Voci Technologies, a speech-to-text startup, for $59 million in cash.

Medallia plans to integrate the startup’s AI technology so that voice-based interactions — for example from calls into call centers — can be part of the data crunched by its analytics platform. Despite the rise of social media, messaging channels, and (currently) a shift for people to do a lot more online, voice still accounts for the majority of customer interactions for a business, so this is an important area for Medallia to tackle.

“Voci transcribes 100% of live and recorded calls into text that can be analyzed quickly to determine customer satisfaction, adding a powerful set of signals to the Medallia Experience Cloud,” said Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia, in a statement. “At the same time, Voci enables call analysis moments after each interaction has completed, optimizing every aspect of call center operations securely. Especially important as virtual and remote contact center operations take shape.”

While there are a lot of speech-to-text offerings in the market today, the key with Voci is that it is able to discern a number of other details in the call, including emotion, gender, sentiment, and voice biometric identity. It’s also able to filter out personal identifiable information to ensure more privacy around using the data for further analytics.

Voci started life as a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University (its three founders were all PhDs from the school), and it had raised a total of about $18 million from investors that included Grotech Ventures, Harbert Growth Parnters, and the university itself. It was last valued at $28 million in March 2018 (during a Series B raise), meaning that today’s acquisition was slightly more than double that value.

The company seems to have been on an upswing with its business. Voci has to date processed some 2 billion minutes of speech, and in January, the company published some momentum numbers that said bookings had grown some 63% in the last quarter, boosted by contact center customers.

In addition to contact centers, the company catered to companies in finance, healthcare, insurance and others areas of business process outsourcing, although it does not disclose names. As with all companies and organizations that have products that cater to offering services remotely, Voci has seen stronger demand for its business in recent weeks, at a time when many have curtailed physical contact due to COVID-19-related movement restrictions.

“Our whole company is delighted to be joining forces with experience management leader Medallia. We are thrilled that Voci’s powerful speech to text capabilities will become part of Medallia Experience Cloud,” said Mike Coney, CEO of Voci, in a statement. “The consolidation of all contact center signals with video, survey and other critical feedback is a game changer for the industry.”

It’s not clear whether Voci had been trying to raise money in the last few months, or if this was a proactive approach from Medallia. But more generally, M&A has found itself in a particularly key position in the world of tech: startups are finding it more challenging right now to raise money, and one big question has been whether that will lead to more hail-mary-style M&A plays, as one route for promising businesses and technologies to avoid shutting down altogether.

For its part, Medallia, which went public in July 2019 after raising money from the likes of Sequoia, has seen its stock hit like the rest of the market in recent weeks. Its current market cap is at around $2.8 billion, just $400 million more than its last private valuation.

The deal is expected to close in May 2020, Medallia said.