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Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone after October 2008? Joel Thomas: I had invested every dollar back into this marketing idea. There were two strategies. I believe in web-based marketing....

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Today’s 474th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, February 27 at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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The on-demand food delivery wars continue to heat up in the U.S. DoorDash announced today that it has filed confidentially to go public. The company noted that its Form S-1, a draft registration statement, was filed with the SEC and is now being reviewed. It did not say how many shares it would potentially sell, the share price range for the IPO or what the timing of its next steps would be.

A public listing would be another way for the company to pick up a significant injection of capital at a key time in the on-demand delivery industry, where competition is fierce and we’re seeing a lot of consolidation globally. The timing of the news also underscores just how cash-intensive this business can be. DoorDash — which by some estimates currently leads the food delivery market in the U.S. — closed its latest round only in November last year, just over three months ago. That was for $700 million at a $13 billion valuation.

In the U.S. — which is DoorDash’s main market, alongside Canada, Puerto Rico and Australia — the company is understood to have 38% of the market. It operates in heated, and subsequently expensive, rivalry with the likes of Postmates (10% share) and Uber Eats (20%), and more legacy players like Grubhub (31%). That fierce competition is very capital-intensive and has led to rumors over the few years that the company has explored mergers with Uber Eats and Postmates.

But DoorDash has also had its share of controversy, specifically around labour issues and how it interfaces with and pays its thousands-strong workforce of contractors. It also faced a data breach last year that affected nearly 5 million consumers, workers and merchants. It also has been quietly building up its technology stack, with acquisitions like Scotty Labs to explore autonomous driving systems (to complement or potentially replace human delivery drivers).

Confidential IPO filings allow startups that are still in “growth” mode (and often unprofitable) to explore the early stages of setting themselves up for a public listing without the public scrutiny that comes with the process. Although it has been popularised by companies like Spotify and Slack — both of which went public — it doesn’t always lead to an IPO. Witness WeWork’s filing and subsequent U-turn after it disclosed more details about how the company worked. And Postmates, which filed for an IPO a year ago, has subsequently raised money and is said to be delaying any public moves.

More to come.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re starting on a somber topic, so I’ll hold off on our usual jokes and attempts at puns. The impact of the coronavirus known as COVID-19 is starting to show up in U.S.-based technology earnings, and it’s something we need to discuss. We’ll get back to SaaS multiples, the IPO market, and riffing on startups later today, but first, some bad news from the public markets.

Let’s examine the latest from Microsoft, Nutanix, and Booking Holdings (parent company of Bookings.com), OpenTable, and Kayak. Afterwards, we’ll talk about what types of companies might be impacted, given what we’ve learned. And finally, we’ll link this all back to startups, younger technology shops sensitive to changes in market sentiment and repricing due to public market gyrations.

This week has been slow for the stock markets. The growing fear of the spread of Coronavirus, coupled with the uncertainty about the elections and overall economic conditions have sent the stocks...

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Sramana Mitra: Who were buying at this point when you were doing this company in the early 2000s? Bassel Ojjeh: I left Yahoo in 2009 and started what I just mentioned to you. That was from 2009 to...

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Cioplenu, an Augsburg-based startup that is building what it dubs an “operating system” for the production floor, has raised €4.2M in seed financing. Berlin-based Cherry Ventures led the round, and Munich’s 42Cap, which led Cioplenu’s pre-seed round in 2018, joined three fairly high-profile angels in the round.

The three angels include Fabian Heinrich, co-founder of Scoutbee (which recently announced a $60 million Series B), Christian Heinrich, founder and professor for digital transformation, and Moritz Zimmermann, co-founder of Hybris (which exited to SAP for $1.5 billion in 2013).

Billed as a SaaS for “deskless” workers, Cioplenu aims to digitize an array of production floor processes like maintenance, on-boarding, assembly, and inspection. The software works on any device and can connect to existing IT infrastructure used by production companies. It is already being used in more than 10 countries by large corporates such as Bosch, Stabilo and Hirschvogel.

“If you walk into a typical industrial company today you will find 10 meters of cabinets full of folders with paper protocols, documents, instructions etc.,” explains Cioplenu co-founder and CEO Benjamin Brockmann.

“Most maintenance and inspection is not done digitally today and assembly instructions are simply printed out. Finding or sharing documents is a nightmare and there is also no real-time communication or any kind of analytics, which creates a huge blindspot for companies”.

To help solve this, Brockmann says Cioplenu is building an intuitive “operating system” for the production floor that acts as an all-in-one platform for maintenance, inspection, work assembly and other processes.

“We provide an easy editor with which multimedia documents, protocols, and questionnaires can be created as well as an operator software for the deskless worker that works on any device,” he explains. “Our easy ERP integration allows [production companies] to pull in and organize data quickly, while our analytics platform helps companies to optimize their processes. Sounds easy, but to make it enterprise-ready, we also built in many other features, like, for example, complex access rights management”.

Cioplenu customers are described as SMBs and enterprises in the industrial market, such as Bosch or Stabilo, while its user base spans across different departments and organisational levels.

For example, a quality manager might use the software for documentation by completing the respective protocol checklists digitally while walking across the production floor with a tablet.

“When something is broken, she can snap a photo, annotate it and log it. When she wants to share her protocol with her foreign co-worker, she can send it in a click and it gets automatically translated,” says Cioplenu.

The team leader then receives all the consolidated reports with anomalies highlighted, and the facility head gets a real-time overview and analytics on whether or not everything is running according to plan.

“The beauty is that because of its modular format, inspection is really just one use case of many,” adds Cioplenu’s CEO. “[Our software] is also being used for teaching workers how to assemble plants, how to troubleshoot machines and much more”.

Meanwhile, Cioplenu says that strong demand for its product will see it open a second office in Frankfurt. “We plan to triple our team this year with big hiring plans for our new office in Frankfurt. Key will be the expansion of our marketing and sales team,” says the startup’s other co-founder Daniel Grobe.

SparkLabs Group announced today that it has launched SparkLabs Connex, the latest program in its network of startup accelerators and venture funds. Focused on real estate technology (proptech) and the Internet of Things, SparkLabs Connex will tap into startup ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Seoul, Shenzhen, Taipei and Singapore.

The program will support startups working with tech, like artificial intelligence, 5G, low-power wide area networks, eSIMS and security, essential to green building and smart city programs. Charles Reed Anderson, the founder of Singapore-based IoT, mobility and smart city advisory firm CRA & Associates, will lead SparkLabs Connex as its managing partner.

The program’s partners include Nokia, True Digital, Beca and Skyroam, as well as the cities of Taipei, Taiwan, Songdo, South Korea and Darwin, Australia, which will be working with its portfolio startups to test and deploy their technology. SparkLabs Connex is also working with Go Smart, the Taipei City initiative to create a global network of smart cities, and the Urban Technology Alliance, which tests smart city tech in France, Spain, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

In a press statement, Anderson said, “My ambition for SparkLabs Connex is to become the innovation hub for the IoT, smart city and prop tech ecosystems, and I’m excited with the quality and variety of partnerships we have signed at launch-and will sign in the future. SparkLabs Connex is more than an accelerator, it’s an ecosystem play, and we believe it creates a unique value proposition for startups, partners and investors.”

Dahmakan, a full-stack food delivery startup based in Malaysia, announced today that it has closed a $18 million Series B. Investors include Rakuten Capital, White Star Capital, JAFCO Asia and GEC-KIP Fund, along with participation from South Korean food delivery app Woowa Brothers, and returning investors Partech Partners and Y Combinator.

This brings Dahmakan’s total funding to about $28 million. Its previous round of financing was announced last May.

Launched by former executives from FoodPanda, Dahmakan was the first Malaysian startup to participate in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. Operational costs for food delivery companies are notoriously high, and eat away at their profitability, but Dahmakan is among several startups that use “cloud” kitchens, located closer to customers, in order to reduce delivery costs.

The foundation of the startup’s full-stack platform is an operating system that controls nearly every step of its operations, from recipe development to last-mile delivery, and its cloud kitchens are part of “satellite” hubs placed around different cities to be closer to customers.

Instead of delivering from restaurants, Dahmakan creates its own meals, offering about 40 options each week from a database of 2,000 dishes. It selects its weekly menu based on customer data, including food preferences and spending habits, along with market research.

Then customers are given a menu and pick from a schedule of delivery times. Other startups trying to make food delivery more efficient in Southeast Asia by using a vertically-integrated model and cloud kitchens include Grain, which s backed by investors including Openspace Ventures, First Gourmet and Singha Ventures.

In a press statement about Dahmakan’s funding, White Star Capital managing partner Eric Martineau-Fortin said “Dahmakan is well-positioned to serve the growing demand for food delivery services in Southeast Asia with its unique, technology-forward approach of taking control of the entire value chain to provide affordable delivery options to SEA’s rising middle class.”

In an early-evening press conference, President Donald Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread through Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The new coronavirus strain, which has infected about 81,000 people around the world and killed 3,000, has already wrought havoc on the global economy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned yesterday that the U.S. will likely not be able to escape the spread of the virus.

“It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” said Dr. Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a press conference given by the Centers for Disease Control on Tuesday. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

Earlier this evening, California reported its first case of community transmission, which was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control, according to The New York Times. That’s a case where an infected person was not exposed to anyone known to be infected with the virus and had not traveled to countries where the virus had spread.

Speaking alongside Pence; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci; and principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control Dr. Anne Schuchat, the President stressed that the U.S. government was “very, very ready” to respond to the disease.

Vice President Pence said that the White House would continue to work closely with state and local officials, add additional personnel and work with Congress to ensure that the necessary resources are available. “The threat to the American public remains low,” Pence said.

The White House is asking Congress for $2.5 billion to support efforts to stop the spread of the virus in the U.S. while Senate Democrats led by Chuck Schumer have put an $8.5 billion price tag on the coronavirus fight.

Secretary Azar outlined five areas where the government would look to spend money including: monitor the spread of the virus, cooperate with local governments, develop therapeutics, develop vaccines, and manufacture and purchase personal protective equipment.

Diagnosing the illness has been a particular problem for the U.S. According to multiple reports, the CDC isn’t prepared to test for a potentially rapidly expanding number of cases in the U.S.

Only 12 of the 100 public health labs in the U.S. are able to diagnose the coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, according to a Politico report.

Better diagnostics tools are going to be one of the critical areas where startups could play a role in combating the spread of the virus.

“Where startups are going to make contributions is in detection, monitoring, epidemiological predictions, sequencing, supply chain [and] distribution logistics,” wrote James Birch, an entrepreneur and former researcher with the American College of Surgeons.

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief and an investor with New Enterprise Associates, has advocated for the expansion of Emergency Use Authorizations from the organization he used to lead as a way to respond to the need for more, better diagnostic tests.

The lack of effective tests available to public health facilities calls into question exactly how prepared the government is for the potential health crisis. In fact, the White House got rid of the pandemic response group in the Administration in a cost-cutting measure in 2018.

California’s recently diagnosed new case also casts doubt on the government’s ability to effectively respond to the emerging illness. As the University of California Davis Medical Center wrote in an internal document:

“Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19. We requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, since neither Sacramento County nor (the California Department of Public Health) is doing testing for coronavirus at this time. Since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered…”

On Sunday, the CDC ordered COVID-19 testing of the patient and the patient was put on airborne precautions and strict contact precautions. The positive test results were announced on Wednesday.

Also troubling to some healthcare observers is Pence’s own track record when it comes to healthcare crises.

As governor of Indiana, Pence’s inaction led to an outbreak of HIV in one of the state’s more rural counties, according to a report in HuffPost. As drug use soared in the state during the opioid crisis, addicts in the county were also becoming infected with the virus because they were sharing needles. Pence opposed a needle-sharing program, which could have limited the spread of the virus.

Fears about how the new coronavirus would impact the economy rattled stock markets earlier this week as news of the disease’s spread to Europe were confirmed. The market’s slide and the political response in Washington played a role in the president’s decision to hold a press conference today, judging by the president’s own Twitter account.

Quickbooks’s parent company Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) is the talk of the town these days. Not only did it deliver stellar second quarter results, but the company also recently announced a $7.1 billion...

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Made Renovation, a new, San Francisco-based company, thinks it has found a profitable way to help homeowners get done something that busy general contractors in the Bay Area won’t otherwise make time for, which is bathroom remodels.

Why they typically pass on these: they have too many entire homes, or, at least, entire floors, to build for affluent regional homeowners who’ve kept the construction industry buzzing for years.

It’s a problem that founders Roger Dickey, who previously co-founded Gigster, and Sagar Shah, who previously founded Quad, think they can solve through technology, naturally. Their big idea: create bathroom templates that customers can customize but whose scope and costs are generally understood, line up these customers, then hire general contractors who are willing to focus only on these bathrooms.

It’s an idea that’s picking up traction with these GCs, says Dickey, who explains it this way: “General contractors generally see net margin of 3%” no matter the size of the job, owing to unforeseen hurdles, like pipes that suddenly need to be rebuilt, drains that need to be dug and materials that don’t ship on schedule.

In addition to timing issues, GCs are also often dealing with frustrated building owners who might underestimate a project’s costs, particularly in California, where construction bills often cause sticker shock.

Made Renovation sees an opportunity to make both the lives of GCs and homeowners easier. Through pre-negotiated pricing, volume and materials handling (it right now rents part of a warehouse where it receives goods), it’s promising GCs a “reasonable margin” so they can not only pay their crews but live a higher quality of life themselves.

Meanwhile, per the plan, customers need only choose from the company’s “modern” collection, its more traditional “heritage”design or its “artisan” collection — all of which can be customized — then sit back while their long-neglected bathrooms are remade.

Whether Made Renovation can pull off its grand vision is a giant question mark. The construction industry is nothing if not messy, and in addition to convincing GCs of its merits, Made Renovation — like any marketplace company — has to strike the right balance between customer demand and supply as it gets off the ground.

In the meantime, investors clearly think it has promise. Led by Base10 Partners and with participation from Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund and some individual investors, the company has already raised $9 million in seed funding across two tranches.

Part of that capital is on display right now in San Francisco, where Made Renovation today opened its doors to customers who want to check out its design ideas and, if all goes as planned, will begin lining up their own home improvement projects. Customers simply pick a collection, Made Renovation then puts together a “mood board” of materials from that collection, sends out a 3D rendering of what to expect, then goes into build mode with its GC partners.

As for what happens when that build goes awry, Dickey says Made Renovation has it covered. Most notably, while it guarantees the work to its own customers, the GCs with whom it works guarantee their work to Made Renovation.

Dickey also notes that while the startup “may lose money on some projects,” he stresses there are caveats that customers agree to at the outset. Among these, he says, “We can’t X-ray their walls and see if they don’t have wiring up to code. We don’t cover dry rot in walls.” Technology, suggests Dickey, can only do so much.

If you’re in the Bay Area and want to check out its new storefront, it’s on Chestnut Street in SF, in the city’s Marina district. The company hopes to perfect its model in the Bay Area, says Dickey, then expand into other regions. As for why Made Renovation decided to tackle one of the most challenging U.S. markets first, he suggests it’s the best way to test its mettle. “I like the idea of starting a company here, because if we can make it work here, I think we can succeed anywhere.”

It’s T-minus one week to the big day, March 3, when more than 1,000 startuppers will convene in Berkeley, Calif. for TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. We’re talking a hefty cross-section representing big companies and exciting new startups. We’re talking some of the most innovative thinkers, makers, researchers, investors and influencers — all focused on creating the future of these two world-changing technologies.

Don’t miss out on this one-day conference of interviews, panel discussions, Q&As, workshops and demos dedicated to every aspect of robotics and AI. General admission tickets cost $345. Snag your ticket now and save, because prices go up at the door. Want to save even more? Save 15% when you buy four or more tickets. Are you a student? Grab a ticket for just $50.

What do we have planned for this TC Session? Here’s a small sample of the fab programming that awaits you, and be sure to check out the full TC Session agenda here.

Q&A with Founders: This is your chance to ask questions of Sébastien Boyer, co-founder and CEO of FarmWise and Noah Ready-Campbell, founder and CEO of Built Robotics — some of the most successful robotics founders on our stage.Disney Robotics: Imagineers from Disney will present state-of-the-art robotics built to populate its theme parks.Investing in Robotics and AI: Lessons from the Industry’s VCs: Dror Berman, founding partner at Innovation Endeavors, Jocelyn Goldfein, managing director at Zetta Venture Partners and Eric Migicovsky, general partner at Y Combinator will discuss the rising tide of venture capital funding in robotics and AI. The investors bring a combination of early-stage investing and corporate venture capital expertise, sharing a fondness for the wild world of robotics and AI investing.

And — new this year — don’t miss watching the finalists from our Pitch Night competition. Founders of these early-stage companies, hand-picked by TechCrunch editors, will take the stage and have just five minutes to present their wares.

With just one more week until TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 kicks off, you don’t have much time left to save on tickets. Why pay more at the door? Buy your ticket now and join the best and brightest for a full day dedicated to all things robotics.

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As much as we’d all like to believe that our houses are built with perfectly square angles and other highly regular measurements, that’s rarely the case — which makes remodeling complex and tedious. ShapeMeasure hopes to alleviate that pain with a device that automatically measures a space and a robotic mill that cuts the required lumber precisely to size, shortening and easing the process by huge amounts.

Founder Ben Blumer, who was exposed to the art of building and repair early by his father, a general contractor, had a brainwave that became the company during some renovations of his own.

“I was shocked to see our flooring installer, who had 10 years of experience, and was excellent at what he did, take over an hour to install a single stair,” Blumer said. “I started thinking, ‘a little bit of technology could go a long way here.’ ”

Finding himself at the time free to work on such a project, he recruited a former general contractor friend and applied to HAX, which soon shipped them off to Shenzhen to pursue their idea.

The main issue is stairs: they’re tricky, and especially in older homes can be pretty off-kilter. So although you know each stair is about 35 inches wide, it might be 35 and 3/64 inches, while the next one could be 34 and 61/64. Likewise, the angles might be ever so slightly off the 90 degrees or whatever they theoretically should be. Painstakingly measuring every single stair and manually cutting wood to those many slightly different dimensions is extremely time-consuming. The tool ShapeMeasure built makes it literally a push-button affair.

The device they settled on is essentially a super-precise lidar that measures around itself in wide arc, and the exact details of which comprise part of the company’s secret sauce. This gives the precise dimensions and attachment angles of the area around it, in the first intended use case a stair. The design, helped along by HAX’s Noel Joyce, looks a bit like a giant Dust Buster by way of the original “Alien.”

“We were working with Noel Joyce, HAX’s lead industrial designer. We wanted a product that looked and felt like a tool. We figured, if you’re trying to convince contractors to try something new, it should feel familiar,” Blumer said. “We spent hundreds of hours sourcing parts and re-engineering our scanning mechanism so that it could fit into Noel’s beautiful form factor. Turns out, contractors don’t care what it looks like. They liked the design, but were way more excited for the functionality.”

Once the shapes are scanned in and checked, that information can be beamed off to ShapeMeasure’s other device, a robotic lumber sizing system that cuts wood into the exact size and shape necessary to fit together as stairs. Of course, the contractor still has to bring them to the location and attach them by whatever means they see fit, but what was once a process with perhaps hundreds of steps has been simplified by an order of magnitude.

The machine is similar to other lumber-cutting devices, but simpler and easier to operate.

“There are lots of automatic cutting systems — often big, heavy, expensive and operated by professional CNC technicians. To cut flooring on a machine like that involves setting up jigs, clamping and reclamping each board, and generating custom gcode for each stair we cut,” Blumer said. They can be several times more costly and difficult to employ. “The cutting solution we’re building is compact, requires no clamping, and can be operated with just a few hours of training.”

It’s not just about length and width, either — molding and other flourishes on the stairs can make complex cuts necessary that would be impractical or at the very least extremely time-consuming to attempt manually.

The result is that the installation process from start to finish is about four times faster, they determined. If this seems a bit optimistic, know that it isn’t just armchair theorizing — they were careful to back up these numbers from the start.

“We take our speedup data really seriously,” said Blumer. “This is our top metric! One of the first purchases I made for the company was a dozen stopwatches. We’ve done installations in the ShapeMeasure lab and on real, messy construction sites — filming, timing and logging every moment.”

Interestingly, the precut lumber made other improvements possible — the team designed a bucket to accommodate the increased rate at which the installer uses glue and other parts. It’s a bit like if you improved painting speed so much that your new bottleneck was mixing and pouring the paint into roller trays fast enough.

Currently the company is working on establishing standard practices and packaging so that a ShapeMeasure “microfactory” can be set up easily anywhere in the country on short notice. And they’re “considering” raising money before then to accelerate the process. Blumer built the prototype with his own money and they pulled in a bit from HAX and then a small pre-seed round to get things started.

With luck and a bit of elbow grease, ShapeMeasure could turn out to be a real differentiator in the contractor space — every hour counts, as does every dollar in an estimate.

When it comes to the so-called “consumerization of the enterprise,” a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trend’s final form. Brooklyn-based Air is building a digital asset manager for communications teams that aren’t satisfied with more general cloud storage options and want something that can show off visual files with a bit more pizzazz.

The startup tells TechCrunch that they have closed $6 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau . RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital and WndrCo also participated.

General-purpose cloud storage options from Google or Dropbox don’t always handle digital assets well — especially when it comes to previewing items, and Air’s more focused digital asset management competitors often require dedicated managers inside the org, the company says. Air has a pretty straightforward interface that looks more like a desktop site from Facebook or Pinterest, with a focus on thumbnails and video previews that’s simple and sleek.

Air is trying to capitalize on the trend toward greater à la carte software spend for teams looking to phase in products with very specific toolsets. The team is generally charging $10 per user per month, with 100GB of storage included.

“Adobe is an amazing suite of products, but with the idea that companies are mandating the tools that their employees use versus letting their employees choose — it makes a lot of sense that teams are going to ultimately end up having more autonomy and creating better work when they’re using tools that they care about,” Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer tells TechCrunch.

Air lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted storage platform, which displays files like photos, videos, PDFs, fonts and other visual assets as Pinterest-esque boards. The app is a way to view and store files, but Air’s platform play focuses pretty heavily on giving co-workers the ability to comment and tag assets. Collaborating around files is a pretty easy sell; a couple of users discussing which photo they like best for a particular marketing campaign doesn’t require too much imagination.

The team has been focusing largely on attracting users in roles like brand marketing managers, content coordinators and social media managers as a way of infiltrating and scaling vertically inside marketing departments.

“What Airtable did to spreadsheets and what Notion did to docs, we’re doing for visual work,” CEO Shane Hegde told TechCrunch in an interview. “As we think about how we differentiate, it’s really that we’re a workspace collaboration tool, we’re not just cloud storage or digital asset management…”

Eagle-eyed readers will recall that we mentioned M1 Finance earlier today in our look at a few trends in the fintech industry. We’re back with the firm this afternoon as it has a bit of news that’s worth discussing.

Chicago-based M1 Finance announced today that it has reached the $1 billion assets under management mark, or AUM. Reaching AUM thresholds provides useful milestones that we can use to track the progress of various players in the fintech and finservices worlds.

M1 is an interesting company, bringing together a number of products to form a single platform. Its hybrid nature makes comparing its AUM to other companies’ histories a bit dicey. Still, for reference, Wealthfront, a roboadvisor, announced that it started 2013 with AUM of $100 million, and closed that year with $538 million. By mid-2014, Wealthfront had $1 billion AUM. Today it has over $20 billion.

So, the numbers matter, and reaching thresholds can help us understand where a company is in its maturity cycle.

Let’s talk about M1 Finance’s AUM growth, its revenue growth and its product model. It’s a neat company with a history of efficient growth.

Growth, product

We’ll start with product, as how the company approaches its feature-set helps explain how the service is priced, which in turn helps us grok the company’s growth.

M1 is not a roboadvisor, or a simple neobank, or a lending product; it’s all three at once, providing effectively the digital equivalent of a full-service bank, admittedly in the form of an online experience instead of a brick-and-mortar outlet. M1 users can open investment accounts, checking accounts, get a debit card and borrow money against their investment portfolios; it’s a cohesive feature set.

And one that lets M1 price its products lower as a group than it could individually. During a call with M1’s CEO Brian Barnes about the company’s AUM milestone, the executive connected the company’s long-term vision to its ability to price aggressively. (All fintechs are expanding their platforms, it’s worth noting, meaning that, in time, nearly every fintech player will offer an array of services; Wealthfront, famous for its work in roboadvising, now also offers savings and borrowing capabilities.)

Barnes said that M1 has long wanted to “manage the bulk of [its users’] financial assets, not create a sort of low-friction acquisition hook” to bring in smaller-dollar accounts. This, in turn, means that M1 can have higher per-user sums on its books, which, it appears, helped the company reduce prices on a per-product basis.

Here’s Barnes connecting per-account totals to pricing:

Managing more of someone’s financial assets, and financial life, is going to be more economical. What it allows us to do is maintain lower margins per product, but have enough margin on the entire financial relationship that we can build a very sustainable durable, long-lasting business.

That’s neat! And folks with lots of money expect low fees, especially in the Robinhood-era, so the setup probably helps with attracting users.

Revenue

Summing so far, M1 runs a broad set of financial products, attracting more dollars-per-user than other companies, perhaps, which lets it charge, in its view, lower prices.

How low? Barnes told TechCrunch that his company is “building [its] business model to make 1% of assets we manage [into] top line. So every billion bucks on the platform will be 10 million dollars in recurring revenue. And it is a relatively linear relationship.” The CEO later extended the point, saying that when his firm has $10 billion in AUM, it will generate $100 million.

This means that as M1 scales, we’ll be able to know with reasonable confidence how much revenue it’s driving.

The company charges in the manner you’d expect, with incomes from loaning money, interchange and a SaaS-product called M1 Plus that lowers some fees and provides interest on checking accounts, costing $125 yearly.

Now that M1 is big enough to matter, it has to double, and then double again. We’ll know how well that’s going based on how quickly the company reaches the $2 billion mark.

Cartesiam, a startup that aims to bring machine learning to edge devices powered by microcontrollers, has launched a new tool for developers who want an easier way to build services for these devices. The new NanoEdge AI Studio is the first IDE specifically designed for enabling machine learning and inferencing on Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers, which power billions of devices already.

As Cartesiam GM Marc Dupaquier, who co-founded the company in 2016, told me, the company works very closely with Arm, given that both have a vested interest in having developers create new features for these devices. He noted that while the first wave of IoT was all about sending data to the cloud, that has now shifted and most companies now want to limit the amount of data they send out and do a lot more on the device itself. And that’s pretty much one of the founding theses of Cartesiam. “It’s just absurd to send all this data — which, by the way, also exposes the device from a security standpoint,” he said. “What if we could do it much closer to the device itself?”

The company first bet on Intel’s short-lived Curie SoC platform. That obviously didn’t work out all that well, given that Intel axed support for Curie in 2017. Since then, Cartesiam has focused on the Cortex-M platform, which worked out for the better, given how ubiquitous it has become. Since we’re talking about low-powered microcontrollers, though, it’s worth noting that we’re not talking about face recognition or natural language understanding here. Instead, using machine learning on these devices is more about making objects a little bit smarter and, especially in an industrial use case, detecting abnormalities or figuring out when it’s time to do preventive maintenance.

Today, Cartesiam already works with many large corporations that build Cortex-M-based devices. The NanoEdge Studio makes this development work far easier, though. “Developing a smart object must be simple, rapid and affordable — and today, it is not, so we are trying to change it,” said Dupaquier. But the company isn’t trying to pitch its product to data scientists, he stressed. “Our target is not the data scientists. We are actually not smart enough for that. But we are unbelievably smart for the embedded designer. We will resolve 99% of their problems.” He argues that Cartesiam reduced time to market by a factor of 20 to 50, “because you can get your solution running in days, not in multiple years.”

One nifty feature of the NanoEdge Studio is that it automatically tries to find the best algorithm for a given combination of sensors and use cases and the libraries it generates are extremely small and use somewhere between 4K to 16K of RAM.

NanoEdge Studio for both Windows and Linux is now generally available. Pricing starts at €690/month for a single user or €2,490/month for teams.

TechCrunch has learned that $28 million-funded crypto startup Tagomi will be the newest member of the Libra Association that governs the Facebook-backed Libra stablecoin. A formal announcement is slated for Friday or next week.

Tagomi offers a platform that helps large traders and funds easily access cryptocurrency markets. The news comes days after Libra added Shopify, a reversal of dwindling membership after major partners like Visa, PayPal and Stripe dropped out late last year.

We’ve reached out to the Libra Association and have been promised a response by Facebook’s communications team.

Joining Libra means Tagomi will be expected to contribute at least $10 million toward developing the cryptocurrency, with that investment eligible to reap dividends from interest earned on money kept in the Libra Reserve. Tagomi will also operate a node that validates transactions coming through the Libra blockchain.

Tagomi was founded by Jennifer Campbell, a former investor at Union Square Ventures, which is also a Libra Association Member. The company has 25 employees across five offices. Tagomi will be the 22nd member of the Libra Association, according to information from the startup’s press representative, who was apparently supposed to hold this news until later. “Tagomi is joining the Libra Foundation and Jennifer will be the newest member,” they emailed TechCrunch. We’ll update this story following our interview with Campbell tomorrow.

Campbell and Tagomi will offer technical and policy support to Libra in an effort to make the cryptocurrency more safe and compliant with international law. That will be critical for the Libra Association to get the green light from regulators for a launch in 2020 like it originally planned. Lawmakers in the U.S. and EU have slammed Libra in hearings and the press over its potential to facilitate money laundering, harm privacy and destabilize the global financial system.

The full membership of the Libra Association is now:

Current Members:

One of the biggest roadblocks to reducing costs in the American healthcare system is the system’s inherent lack of transparency.

Most healthcare networks and hospital systems can’t even accurately account for the doctors they manage and which insurance plans those doctors accept — let alone how good those doctors actually are at providing care, according to Ribbon Health chief executive Nate Maslak.

The former healthcare consultant founded Ribbon Health to address just that issue, and the company has raised $10.25 million in new financing to roll out its software services to a broader network of payers, providers and digital health companies.

The new financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, and included Y Combinator and the New York-based investment firm BoxGroup. Individual healthcare executives like Nat Turner, the chief executive of Flatiron Health; Vivek Garipalli, chief executive and co-founder of Clover Health; and Eric Roza, the former chief executive of DataLogix, also participated in the financing.

It’s the first deal for Andreessen’s newest healthcare-focused partner, Julie Yoo, and is in an area with which Yoo is quite familiar. The former serial healthcare entrepreneur developed a similar business to tackle better data collection and delivery for hospitals at Kyruus.

Taking an API -based approach, Ribbon Health is building on the Kyruus approach, Yoo said, with the potential to expand across the entire breadth of the American healthcare system.

Simply, Ribbon Health is trying to create an accurate database of what doctors and health plans have, which specializations offer their services to which insurance providers, and produce the best outcomes for patients.

“$700 billion wasted because of poor decisions,” said Maslak. “The information not flowing to the right place at the right time. Over a third of healthcare spending is wasted and we think that over half is data-addressable.”

“The majority of decisions in health care rely on data about a provider or health plan, yet our industry lacks the systematic infrastructure to centralize this information and contextualize it for those who need it. There is a clear need for a single platform that can provide comprehensive, up-to-date data to enable informed decision making across health care, and we believe Ribbon is poised to lead in this space,” said Yoo, in a statement.

Along with the new financing, Ribbon also unveiled a tool that provides cost and quality information for patients to understand their potential out-of-pocket cost estimates based on their deductible, plan design and provider prices.

“So much of the innovation in health care relies on accurate data. Our goal is to provide these companies the critical data infrastructure needed to improve quality of care, health outcomes, and control costs,” said Nate Fox, co-founder and chief technology officer at Ribbon Health, in a statement. “Our platform and seamless API make it easy for customers to trust us to deliver the most comprehensive, accurate data, allowing them to focus on what they do best on the front lines of health care.”

The company is already working with Oak Street Health and Well (Well Dot, Inc.), and will use the additional funding to expand its sales and marketing efforts and increase adoption.

“Provider data is a basic building block of every healthcare transaction,” said Yoo. “Whether it’s you or I trying to enroll… or referral claim processing… there are tens of billions of transactions, all of which require information about a provider.”