Augmented reality technology did not, it turns out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead were a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has seen pretty limited success.

Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to look at plans whilst they assemble something, for instance.

A new U.K. startup hopes to nudge that future on further with a radical new technology which, although it resembles the HoloLens, is in fact a highly accurate helmet-mounted screen that enables construction workers to place beams or bricks in exactly the right locations, thus introducing significant savings in time normally lost due to mistakes.

To further boost its efforts, XYZ Reality has closed a £5 million Series A funding round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Adara Ventures and J Coffey Construction. The company will build out its AR cloud and software platform and build its team to serve the EU market and expand to the U.S. and Asia.

The idea behind it is highly innovative. A dedicated helmet with an attached visor projects a highly accurate hologram — based on laser positioning — in front of the wearer’s face, allowing them to place objects precisely according to plans projected in front of their eyes.

The company claims its HoloSite headset is the “world’s first engineering-grade Augmented Reality device,” that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to a five-millimeter accuracy.

The problem it’s solving is an age-old one. In today’s construction industry, buildings are designed in 3D and then converted into 2D drawings. But tradespeople are asked to interpret those 2D drawings and turn them into 3D buildings within construction “tolerances.” This process creates inefficiencies that mean up to 80% of the construction being “out-of-tolerance.” It’s estimated that 7-11% of project costs are wasted this way and, of course, in mega-projects like huge bridges, this amounts to an average of more than $100 million.

Founder, CEO and builder David Mitchell, who has spent his career in the construction industry, says: “Works are currently validated after the fact through laser scanning. But 80% of the time the construction fails to meet acceptable tolerances. With HoloSite, we can prevent errors happening in the first place.”

Mitchell came up with the idea of eliminating 2D designs after the 2008 recession devastated the industry.

I tried out the headset for myself and found that I could, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, from scratch complete a basic assembly of bricks according to the plans projected in front of my eyes.

XYZ says it is possible to build a bathroom in two hours using the headset, versus a day without it, using the technology.

The hope is that as this technology improves, any tradesperson would be able to work on a construction site with less need for training in 2D plans, but still with a high degree of accuracy.

The project is not without risk. Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets for construction, shuttered its HQ last year. Earlier, Osterhout Design Group unloaded its AR glasses patents after acquisition talks with Magic Leap, Facebook and others stalled. Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, including Tencent, also sold its assets earlier this year after the company ran out of cash.

But Amadeus is bullish. Nick Kingsbury, partner, Amadeus Capital Partners said: “Construction is a sector that’s ripe for radical innovation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize how the construction industry sets out and validates its work, reducing costs and the chance of project slippage from mistakes.”

The insurance industry depends on data to support a number of functions the average person in the street is usually completely unaware of, such as “informed risk selection,” underwriting and claims management. Like many industries, it would like to automate much of this, but it’s just not that simple.

Synthesized is a U.K. startup that tries to reduce friction on preparing all the data that’s needed, to enable insurers to share data safely, complying with regulations. The more that happens, the more innovation can happen, such as insuring for a low-carbon economy, something that will become increasingly important.

It has now raised $2.8 million in a new round of funding co-led by Cambridge-based IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Pretiosum Ventures and a number of finance and technology executives in the U.K. Financing from the round will be used to double the number of its employees in London, and build out its sales and product teams.

Co-founder Nicolai Baldin said: “Synthesized substantially reduces the time to develop and comprehensively test data-driven projects and as a result empowers engineers to build better products and services for end-users. With the new funding from IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures, Synthesized is well-positioned to facilitate its business operations to turbocharge development processes across many sectors, such as finance, insurance and healthcare.”

Ed Stacey, managing partner at IQ Capital said: “Responsible organizations are waking up to the need to ensure that their deployed machine learning systems are fair and unbiased, as well as being robust and accurate. Synthesized’s ability to create multiple, balanced data sets in a flexible way gives organizations and their customers the confidence they need in deployed production systems, while also greatly speeding up the development process. Javier Santiso, CEO and founder of Alma Mundi Ventures, said that “The prospects for Synthesized are bright and we see the impact of synthetic data permeating almost every industry.”

Synthesized competes in various ways with products from Gretel AI, Snorkel, Tonic AI, Hazy and Mostly AI.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 475th 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs March 5, 2020

___

The apartment rental market in the US will be worth $174.1 billion this year, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help it along by connecting renters with rentals is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Zumper, which provides listings of available rental properties and services (such as rent payments) to help manage landlords’ rental businesses, has raised $60 million, money that CEO and co-founder Anthemos Georgiades said it plans to use to continue both expanding its footprint in the US (its primary market today), as well as to continue building out its platform and the data science behind it, as well as more tools for users of its two-sided marketplace.

This Series D is being led by new backer e.ventures — the VC that originally started out as BV Ventures, the strategic VC arm of publishing giant Bertelsmann — and includes participation from a number of existing investors. Zumper has raised $150 million to date from backers that include Andreessen Horowitz, Axel Springer, the Blackstone Group, Breyer Capital, CrunchFund, Dawn Capital, Goodwater Capital, Greycroft, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Stereo Capital, Foxhaven Asset Management, and others.

The company is not talking about its valuation but we understand that it is more than double the valuation Zumper had in its previous round. For context, that was a $46 million Series C round in 2018 that was made at over $200 million but under $300 million, putting Zumper’s current valuation at between $400 million and $600 million.

Zumper also doesn’t disclose financials but says that it’s been seeing 100% growth year-on-year for its revenues and is on track to have some 80 million people using its platform in 2020, with 13 million visitors per month, typically looking for one-year leases. And within its B2B rental big data play, some 1 million listings are analysed monthly.

The startup’s growth is coming at a pivotal time in the property market.

On one hand, Zumper competes against the likes of other fast-growing startups like Compass, as well as giants like Zillow and more recently Costar (owner of Apartments.com and many others). The latter two have shaped up to be key consolidators, acquiring smaller outfits and bigger rivals that have fallen into trouble to get better economies of scale.

But at the same time, we have seen a fair amount of stress in the industry, caused by the oversupply of inventory in the market, which puts pressure on prices; and some of the biggest and most established players getting hit hard trying to modernise their businesses. As one example, after RentPath — the owner of Rent.com, Rentals.com, ApartmentGuide.com and others — filed for Chapter 11, Costar picked it up for $588 million (that deal has not officially closed).

“Everyone is falling by the wayside,” Georgiades said.

Beyond market trends, there are also consumer trends, with those who are traditional renters looking to buy property, or those who continue renting exploring shorter leases or home shares as ways of saving money and looking for better deals. Zumper notes that some 66% of renters today in the US live in a co-living situation.

Within those wider developments, Zumper — which Georgiades describes as the largest privately-backed rentals platform — has been working on building a modern platform that provides more than just a simple place to discover what’s available in the market.

“We want to add lease signing and more financial offerings for landlords,” Georgiades said, noting that insurance is one area that it is also exploring. “The idea is to build in more peace of mind for our customers, not just more software.”

And it’s doing so by delivering a key demographic that everyone wants to target: millennial users. 

“Zumper is the single best source for younger millennials to find apartments,” he said, noting that one in four Americans will use Zumper this year to search for an apartment. A typical user, he added, is “more mobile,” and averages at 28 years old, and its user base skews female.

Working to serve that demographic and its changing tastes for where and how to put down roots, Zumper has partnerships in place with the likes of Airbnb and Facebook to target different parts of the market. Georgiades said that he does not view either as a competitor, but nor are there plans to expand these relationships at the moment (and he would not comment on whether Airbnb or Facebook has ever tried to acquire Zumper).

“We see ourselves as the Airbnb of one-year leases,” he said. “We start where Airbnb ends.” While today there seems to be a way on Zumper to search for rooms, it doesn’t seem to be optimised for that kind of search, so that is another area where you could see the startup growing.

“Zumper’s progress so far is striking, and it has quickly become the leading independent company focused on the rental market,” said Mathias Schilling Co-Founder & Managing Partner with e.ventures, in a statement. “We believe that Zumper is well positioned because of its focus on providing an exceptional product for renters and great value for landlords and multi-family properties.”

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? Rob Keve: We charge a subscription. We’re a software platform. We should not be a pure revenue share. You pay the subscription and can use it for one country or 200...

___

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 476th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 12, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

___

No-code tools are on the rise, and a YC-backed company called Snapboard is looking to join the fight.

Snapboard, led by solo founder Calum Moore, started when Moore decided to build one product a week for a year as a personal challenge. In the second week, he realized just how many apps and services it took not only to build the product, but to post about it on social media.

He wanted a way to manage all those apps and tools from one dashboard. So he built Snapboard.

Snapboard allows users to link and manage a wide variety of apps and platforms in a single, customizable dashboard. Users can create boards that act as internal tools without getting the product or engineering team involved for an internal project. Moore describes it as “Airtable, but with all of your data already in there.”

More than 50 apps are available on the Snapboard platform, including Shopify, Dropbox, Google Analytics, MailChimp, MongoDB, MySQL, Trello, Zendesk and many more. Moore isn’t concerned with onboarding new integrated apps for Snapboard, as most of the popular tools used by startups and tech firms are API supported.

[gallery ids="1956734,1956735,1956736,1956737"]

The use cases are innumerable, which is just as challenging as it is beneficial. Moore detailed a few examples, including building boards for each individual customer, combining Stripe data with emails sent through Mail Chimp to try to target behavior.

However, the flexibility of the platform means that it can do almost anything, but only if you know what you want to do with it. It can be difficult to evangelize for something that is so nebulous, and can be used so many ways.

Moore says the key is to sprint on building out the template library for Snapboard, offering new users a multitude of options as inspiration.

Snapboard offers a free tier, and then charges $10/month/seat for more advanced features. Thus far, the company has 3,000 registered users and around 230 WAUs.

The company is targeting tech companies but sees the potential for other industries to tap into Snapboard’s internal tool-making platform.

Beyond the difficulty of messaging a platform that can be used in countless ways, Moore identifies UX design as one of the company’s greatest challenges.

“We’re taking something only developers used to be able to do and making it available for everyone else,” said Moore. “If you give a developer a platform, they’ll work their way through it. They’ll find some way to make it work. Whereas, with less technical people, they want products to be very obvious and easy to use. So, for us, it’s about delivering that kind of technical experience in a really non-technical way.”

Snapboard has raised a total of $150K from Y Combinator and will present in the upcoming demo day.

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling another new product today, this time taking aim at the $350 billion customer service market.

Dubbed Inbox.ai and positioned as “Slack for external communications,” the new product — which is to be offered largely for free — enables customers to communicate with businesses via practically any channel of their choosing. This includes WhatsApp, SMS, Voice, Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, Apple Business Chat, RCS, Line and Telegram — in a bid to meet customers on their own digital, “messaging-first” turf. In terms of message content, at launch there is already support for text, images, video, geolocation and more.

And perhaps crucially, regardless of channel, incoming messages and customer conversations are presented in a single thread for easy ticketing and collaboration amongst support agents. There’s some built in intelligence, too, with “AI” promising to analyse keywords and anticipate customer needs, including providing a list of suggested replies. Agents can also drag and drop components to create auto-replies, and there’s support for things like automated NPS surveys, or rules for message routing.

As you’d expect from a company that has primarily targeted developers, Inbox.ai leverages webhooks for integration with various third-party tools used by enterprises and also comes pre-loaded with support for Shopify, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, and more. This includes the ability to have content created within Inbox.ai synced with other software used by a company for its various communication, sales and other business processes — even if over time, and for some companies, Inbox.ai may become all they need.

In a video call with MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis, he gave me a personal demo of Inbox.ai, including showing how quick the on-boarding process can be for a new business but also for a new customer. He had me WhatsApp a company’s support number and I could instantly see my message show up within the software and was able to send a photo to help with my request and receive other rich media in return.

Vis explained that the impetus for the new offering was his own frustration with customer support from companies in general, who, he says, haven’t adapted to the new world where customers expect to have their issues solved digitally and where it is no longer acceptable to queue for hours on hold or wait 24 hours or more for an email reply.

He says that a quick back of a napkin calculation suggests that, at the age of 35, he has already spent 2 weeks of his life on hold. He also said Inbox.ai wants to solve the continuity of support problem that typically sees customers having to re-explain their issue each time they are handed off to a different support agent or department.

“From a MessageBird perspective, we built these APIs and people [already] have the possibility to build these experiences, so why am I not living in this world?” Vis says rhetorically, after recalling a recent bad experience with his mobile telephone service provider. “I want to live in a world where I can text and have my problems easily solved… What I don’t want is for them to drop me a note into my email and then have to call them”.

So, rather than simply providing developer hooks and carrying out the infrastructure heavy-lifting, MessageBird is betting on its first user-facing product, which, I’m told, raised a few eyebrows amongst the board.

To that end, Vis told me that Inbox.ai was developed by the MessageBird team in 12 months and followed extensive research with customers, support agents and managers. Prior to launch, the software has been tested and is currently used by, HelloFresh and Deliveroo in Europe, Zilingo in Asia, and Join Buggy and Tix Telecom in Latin America.

Challenged on why nobody has really cracked this problem so far, despite a number of attempts to create a single source of customer support “truth,” Vis told me “everybody is talking about it but nobody is doing it”. That’s because you need to understand and then solve three related and difficult problems.

The first is ingesting data from all the various communication channels, for which MessageBird has previous form. The second is “experience generation”: the ability for support agents to easily communicate via rich experiences, such as images, videos, geolocation, tracking codes, discounts etc. That’s something most companies don’t have the developer resources to create, argues Vis. And thirdly is the UI, which has to allow agents to communicate and track tickets seamlessly across channels in a way that is agnostic to where those messages originate from.

“I think this is a new category, I think this is where things converge together,” adds the MessageBird CEO. “We compete with a lot of tools but we’re not any of them. We’re how we think in five years every tool is going to be”.

Electric, the platform that delivers IT services to small and medium businesses, has today announced that it has raised an additional $14.5 million on its Series B from 01 Advisors, the fund led by Twitter alums Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.

Though the funding is a part of the company’s Series B financing, founder Ryan Denehy explained that the deal was signed on an uptick in valuation, though wouldn’t elaborate further.

Electric raised a $25 million Series B led by GGV in January of 2019.

The company allows businesses with small IT teams, or no IT team, to get on the platform and either automate or manage with one click the various administrative facets of that role. Most IT tasks are focused on administration, distribution and maintenance of software programs.

Electric customers ensure that the software is installed on every corporate machine, effectively giving the top IT employee or decision-maker an easy way to grant and revoke permissions, assign roles and make sure software is up to date on various machines.

The hope is that this allows IT specialists to focus on the jobs that are best suited to their skills, such as troubleshooting, hardware installation and other more difficult tasks.

Denehy said this new fundraise was all about bringing strategic operators under the tent, not cash. He explained that at the close of last year, VCs started reaching out to get in on the company’s Series C. The team sat down for a board meeting where they weighed their options, one of which being a $40 million Series C.

“We have no immediate use for most of that money,” said Denehy. “Is it going to make our customers happy or is it going to make us a better-run company? It’s kind of a philosophical question. A lot of founders sort of equate success to the fact that they raised two rounds within six months of each other, and I just took the contrarian view. I wondered what we could actually do to make our company run better and the conclusion was to get the best business leaders and operators in tech to get around the table at our company.”

This brings Electric’s total funding to just over $50 million. Denehy says part of the reluctance around fundraising stemmed from the fact that Electric had tripled top-line growth over the past two years. But that doesn’t mean he had all the answers when it comes to hyper growth and scaling the business.

Costolo recalled when Bain first met Ryan Denehy, and came back excited about his willingness to learn.

“Ryan is a really enthusiastic founder/CEO,” said Costolo. “Some founders know they don’t have the answers to everything and that there’s still a lot to learn, and they want to learn. And Ryan is right down the middle for that.”

Costolo also explained that he’s excited about how well Electric fits in to the dogma of “software is eating the world,” automating these low-level tasks to free up resources and energy for higher-order tasks.

Costolo and Bain operate slightly unusually for a growth-stage fund (01 Advisors writes checks for later A rounds and B rounds). The duo don’t want to take board seats, as they’d rather be “sitting next to the founder instead of across the table from the founder.”

This results in a hands-on approach based on their experience as operators. Remember, Costolo grew Twitter to a market cap of $23.4 billion before stepping down, and Bain spent six years at Twitter as president of Global Revenue and Partnerships before stepping into the COO role.

Costolo and Bain have already brought their hands-on approach to Electric, having conversations with the head of HR around how to introduce HR business partners to different departments and how to scale and set goals for the enterprise sales team.

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to eDiscovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. Today, the company announced a $62 million Series C investment.

CapitalG (Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and K9 Ventures also participated. The startup has now raised $96 million, according to the company.

Everlaw co-founder and CEO AJ Shankar says eDiscovery, which has been around for years, has become a classic big data problem. “We help legal professionals sift through huge volumes of evidence in lawsuits and investigations to find the smoking gun and the incriminating email,” Shankar told TechCrunch.

The software also helps teams of legal professionals work together and collaborate around this evidence. “Turns out that the law is incredibly collaborative, and we help these teams create a work product, and communicate and collaborate with each other in a system specifically built for the practice of law,” he explained.

He says this coordination is often done manually in spreadsheets with communication taking place via email, and even companies using legacy eDiscovery software are using systems designed in a time of lower data volumes.

The company offers a variety of tools to help humans locate the information they need to build a case. There is a search feature, of course, and data visualization tools including a timeline tool that helps pinpoint when key events happened. This can help lawyers direct researchers to find evidence within that critical period, greatly narrowing the focus of the search.

And the company also offers both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to help the team find specific bits of information. He acknowledges it will take human ingenuity working with the tool to find what you need. “No one’s handing you anything on a silver platter. It absolutely requires some detective work. It’s iterative and we have tools to help you with that,” he said.

Shankar stumbled into this area of technology when he was still a graduate student in computer science and a law firm came to his department looking for a technical expert. He ended up working with the firm for a couple of years, saw the kinds of technical challenges it faced, and decided to build some tooling to help.

He founded the company 2010, but says the product as it is today really began to take shape in 2015.  The company has over 200 employees with 300 customers, processing 3,000 cases. This includes every state’s attorney general, as well as major law firms.

It’s worth noting the company also offers the product for free to non-profits, educators and investigative journalists.

The company hopes to accelerate growth with this new funding “The investment gives us the opportunity to grow and innovate faster than we’ve ever done before, so I think that’s the opportunity ahead of us,” Shankar said.

Cleanly, the YC-backed company that looked to bring tech to the laundry industry, has today announced a merger with NextCleaners. The New York-based companies signed an all-stock deal after more than a year of negotiations, with Cleanly founder and CEO Tom Harari serving as Chairman of the Board and Next CEO Kam Saifi will stay in the Chief Executive role at the new company.

The new company will be called By Next. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cleanly launched out of YC in 2015 with a plan to use data around delivery to optimize laundry pick-up and drop-off in a complicated market like New York. Using hyper-specific local data, like if a building has a buzzer or a doorman, or if there’s parking on a certain street, Cleanly aimed to be able to deliver or pick-up laundry at almost anytime on any day. That speed, and the user convenience it would provide, would allow for Cleanly to partner with third-party laundry services while capturing market share with users.

Over the next two years, the startup would deal with several challenges. The first was that the on-demand space cooled down considerably, with VCs focused on profitability. Indeed, the on-demand laundry space in the New York area has been hammered, with Washio closing down and FlyCleaners suffering through several obstacles over the past year, including shutting down its LIC plant and laying off more than 100 employees.

The second, more specific challenge, was that in the midst of that focus on economics, Cleanly realized it needed to boost gross margins, and that the best way to execute on that was to become vertically integrated. In essence, the company needed to stop using third-party laundry services and bring the actual laundry in house.

NextCleaners, focused primarily on dry cleaning with a small home cleaning business on the side, has been growing its footprint in the New York area with more than 15 retail stores. The company had also made an impression as one of the few eco-friendly dry cleaners in the market.

With the launch of the newly merged company, By Next, users will have options to book wash and fold, dry cleaning or home cleaning services with options for delivery or pick-up and drop-off in store.

AddVenture led Cleanly’s Series A and also participated in the merger through an investment in the new company. Other existing Cleanly investors include Initialized Capital, AltaIR, Millhouse Capital, Y Combinator, Ludlow Ventures, Haystack Ventures, and a bunch of angel investors including Paul Buchheit.

According to a Research and Markets report, the global Big Data-as-a-Service market is estimated to grow at 25% CAGR to $46.82 billion by 2025 from $13.12 billion in 2019. Big data player Splunk...

___

BackboneAI, an early-stage startup that wants to help companies dealing with lots of data, particularly coming from a variety of external sources, announced a $4.7 million seed investment today.

The round was led by Fika Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Dynamo Ventures, GGV Capital, MetaProp, Spider VC and several other unnamed investors.

Company founder Rob Bailey says he has spent a lot of time in his career watching how data flows in organizations. There are still a myriad of challenges related to moving data between organizations, and that’s what his company is trying to solve. “BackboneAI is an AI platform specifically built for automating data flows within and between companies,” he said.

This could involve any number of scenarios from keeping large, complex data catalogues up-to-date to coordinating the intricate flow of construction materials between companies or content rights management across an entertainment industry.

Bailey says that he spent 18 months talking to companies before he built the product. “What we found is that every company we talked to was, in some way or another, concerned about an absolute flood of data from all these different applications and from all the companies that they’re working with externally,” he explained.

The BackboneAI platform aims to solve a number of problems related to this. For starters, it automates the acquisition of this data, usually from third parties like suppliers, customers, regulatory agencies and so forth. Then it handles ingestion of the data, and finally it takes care of a lot of actual processing from external sources, while mapping it to internal systems like the company ERP system.

As an example, he uses an industrial supply company that may deal with a million SKUs across a couple of dozen divisions. Trying to track that with manual or even legacy systems is difficult. “They take all this product data in [from external suppliers], and then process the information in their own [internal] product catalog, and then finally present that data about those products to hundreds of thousands of customers. It’s an incredibly large and challenging data problem as you’re processing millions and millions of SKUs and orders, and you have to keep that data current on a regular basis,” he explained.

The company is just getting started. It spent 2019 incubating inside of Boldstart Ventures . Today the company has close to 20 employees in New York City, and it has signed its first Fortune 500 customer. Bailey says they have 15 additional Fortune 500 companies in the pipeline. With the seed money, he hopes to build on this initial success.

Mike Hudack, the former CTO of Deliveroo and most recently a founding partner at London venture capital firm Blossom Capital, has quietly joined Monzo as the challenger bank’s new Chief Product Officer.

TechCrunch understands that Hudack had previously been advising Monzo on a part-time basis for the past 11 months, while simultaneously working part-time at Blossom. He has now quit the VC firm, founded by Ophelia Brown, to take up the full-time CPO position and become part of the fast-growing bank’s leadership team.

(Noteworthy, Blossom has now lost two founding members of its investment team since launching two years ago. Like Hudack, former Uber China executive Candice Lo was previously listed on the Blossom Capital website as a co-founder and partner, but left in February 2019).

Prior to Blossom Capital, Hudack spent almost two and a half years at Deliveroo — joining in September 2016 — as the takeout marketplace and delivery company’s CTO (and CPO) where he was responsible for product, engineering, design and growth, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before that, the experienced operator worked at Facebook for close to four and a half years, both in London and Menlo Park. His most recent role at the social networking behemoth was Director of Product Management, quitting in May 2016.

Along with a brief stint as a VC, Hudack has also done a startup of his own. He was co-founder and CEO of Blip.tv, the New York-based media platform acquired by the Walt Disney Company.

Meanwhile, in separate news, TechCrunch has learned that Monzo is gearing up to launch its business banking product more widely, which could happen as early as next week. Plans are still subject to change — as Monzo is wont to do — but according to sources the new offering will consist of a free and paid version. The latter is likely to provide additional features such as accounting software integrations, multi-user accounts, and possibly in-app invoicing.

Stefan Batory: After 12 years of running that first company, I got a little bit tired of growing a company that was in the service business. To double the revenue, I had to double the headcount. When...

___