One of the biggest opportunities in the new space economy lies in taking the connectivity made possible by ever-growing communications satellite constellations and making that useful for things and companies here on Earth. Startup Skylo, which emerged from stealth today with a $103 million Series B funding announcement, is one of the players making that possible in an affordable way.

The funding brings Skylo’s total raised to $116 million, following a $14 million Series A. This new round was led by SoftBank Group (which at this point carries a complicated set of connotations) and includes existing investors DCM and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Skylo’s business is based on connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including sensors, industrial equipment, logistics hardware and more, to satellite networks using the cellular-based Narrowband IoT protocol. Its network is already deployed on current geostationary satellites, too, meaning its customers can get up and running without waiting for any new satellites or constellations with dedicated technology to launch.

Skylo has completed tests of its technology with commercial partners in real-world usage, including partners in private enterprise and government, across industries including fisheries, maritime logistics, automotive and more. The company’s main claim to advantage over other existing solutions is that it can offer connectivity for as little as $1 per seat, along with hardware that sells for less than $100, which it says adds up to a cost savings of as much as 95% versus other satellite IoT connectivity available on the market.

Its hardware, the Skylo Hub, is a satellite terminal that connects to its network on board geostationary satellites, acting as a “hot spot” to make that available to standard IoT sensors and devices. It’s roughly 8″ by 8″, can be powered internally via battery or plugged in, and is easy for customers to install on their own without any special expertise.

The company was founded in 2017 by CEO Parth Trivedi, CTO Dr. Andrew Nuttall and Chief Hub Architect Dr. Andrew Kalman. Trivedi is an MIT Aerospace and Astronautical engineering graduate; Nuttall has a Ph.D in Aeronautics from Stanford; and Kalman is a Stanford professor who previously founded CubeSat component kit startup Pumpkin, Inc.

Sramana Mitra: What is the fund size of rocketship.vc? Anand Rajaraman: We are on fund two. It’s $120 million. Fund one was a $40 million fund. That’s fully deployed. We started investing fund one...

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Good morning, friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Equity’s regular, long-form shows still land each and every Friday, including this entry from just a few days ago.

This morning, coming to you early from the frozen tundra of the American East Coast, it’s Tuesday. That’s because yesterday was a holiday in the United States, so we took the day to work a little bit less than usual. But that doesn’t mean we’d skip an episode, so let’s dive into topics:

Uber is cutting its losses in India, selling its Eats business for a stake in Zomato. Zomato is well-funded, and Uber now loses less money. However, where it will find growth is the next question.Earnings season is upon us. This week, Netflix, IBM, and Intel will announce their results. Naturally, those aren’t the companies that we care about the most on Equity, but they are big enough to generate quite a lot of noise. Noise that will help set market sentiment regarding technology companies, both public and private.Also on the news front, Tesla is saying ‘no’ to reports that its cars accelerate without input.Qonto, a French neobank, has raised a $115 million Series C. That’s a huge round for a neat company that is taking a popular model in a fresh direction.Stasher is a neat company in that it must make sense, even if your humble servant doesn’t really get it. It raised $2.5 million more.Captrace also put together a round, though we don’t know how large. What happens if you cross the cap table with blockchain? We may find out.Finally, a reminder as to why Uber is leaving Eats in India behind. Globally, Uber Eats turned $3.66 billion in GMV into $392 million in adjusted net revenue in Q3 2019. That wound up generating -$316 million in adjusted EBITDA. Damn.

And that was all the time that we had. We’re back Friday and Monday.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 469th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, January 23, 2020, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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This morning FloQast, an LA-area startup, announced that it closed a $40 million Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners. The company also told TechCrunch in an interview that it raised a $20 million inside round between today’s investment and its 2017 Series B. Including today’s infusion, the firm has raised a little over $90 million.

The small inside round, however, wasn’t executed because the firm was low on options at the time. Instead, FloQast chose it over larger term sheets, using the cash to help launch a new product. It then raised the round we’re discussing today at a higher valuation. What did FloQast launch, and what impact did that choice have on its business? Let’s talk about what FloQast sells to help us answer both questions.

Product

FloQast sells what it calls “close management software,” which might not mean much if you aren’t read-up on accounting. So, TechCrunch got FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire on the phone to explain it in more detail. According to the technology executive, his company helps “teams collaborate around the month-end close — we help them communicate [and] stay on the same page with this process that occurs at the end of every month. And then we provide some light automation around [the] tie-out and reconciliation process, which is one of the steps of actually closing the books.”

Why does all that matter? Because a company can’t report its financial results until its books (accounts) are closed (finalized). So, Whitmire explained, you can’t get to a 10-Q or other bedrock financial report without this sort of work. And given that every company in the world has books that need closing, you can see where FloQast fits into the business landscape.

FloQast doesn’t target every business, however. According to Whitmire, when a company reaches “five people in the corporate accounting department” is “where the pain starts to present itself” that FloQast wants to help with. And, in his view, the more complex a business becomes, the larger the need for the sort of help that his company’s software can provide.

You can see where we’re going with this by now. If not, here’s some help: If FloQast’s product works for larger companies, how quickly is its revenue (measured in annual recurring revenue, or ARR) growing, and, more precisely, how quickly is its average annual contract value (ACV) expanding?

Results

Earlier we noted that FloQast decided to raise a small round before its Series C, using that money to launch a new product before raising its later, larger investment. That product, something called “AutoRec,” uses what the company calls “AI” to help reconcile accounts more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

The wager, launching that product before its Series C, paid off. Last year FloQast’s annual contract value (ACV) rose 60%. That gain was driven, according to the CEO, by the “new AutoRec product [helping add] more value” to contracts, and his company focusing more on upper-market customers. Its ACV growth helped FloQast’s growth stay consistent in percentage terms, with the CEO telling TechCrunch that his firm grows like “clockwork,” doubling its ARR on average every year. And the company’s SaaS metrics look good: Including customer churn, Floqast has a net retention of 115%, which is solid.

Summarizing his company’s last year or so, Whitmire said that FloQast “cut [its] cash burn, became very efficient, grew at a similar clip to what we’ve grown historically, maintained our net revenue retention number, and had this massive ACV kick.” It’s not hard to see, then, how FloQast put together its latest round.

So, the L.A. area really is more than Snap and Bird. You can build big SaaS companies there, too.

As the total cost of cybercrime reaches into trillions of dollars and continues to rise, an Israeli firm called Intezer — which has built a way to analyse, identify and eradicate malware by way of an ordering system similar to what’s used when mapping out DNA — has raised $15 million to double down on growth.

The funding, a Series B, is being led by OpenView Partners, the VC with a focus on expansion rounds for enterprise software companies, with participation from previous investors Intel Capital (which led the Series A in 2017), Magma, Samsung NEXT, the United Services Automobile Association, and Alon Cohen, the founder and former CEO of CyberArk, who is also a co-founder of Intezer. The company is not disclosing its valuation, and it has raised a relatively modest $25 million to date.

Itai Tevet, Intezer’s other co-founder and CEO who had previously run the Cyber Incident Response Team (CERT) in Israel’s IDF, notes that the startup’s customers include “Fortune 500 companies, late stage startups, and elite government agencies” (it doesn’t disclose any specific names although it’s notable to see the USAA as an investor here).

In an interview, he said Intezer will be using the funding both to expand that list — through two products it currently offers, Intezer Protect and Intezer Analyze (which comes without remediation) — and also to explore how to apply its model to other areas under threat from malicious cyberattacks not traditionally associated with malware.

“Because our technology deals with binary code in general, it’s applicable in many different ways,” he said. “Since any digital device runs binary code (even drones, medical devices, smart phones, …), our technology has the potential to create a big impact in numerous aspects of cyber security to provide visibility, control and protection from any unauthorized and malicious code.”

Intezer describes its technique as “genetic malware analysis”, and the basic premise is that “all software, whether legitimate or malicious, is comprised of previously written code,” Tevet said. (He said he first came up with this revelation at the IDF, where he was “dealing with the best cyber attackers in the world,” later working with Cohen and a third co-founder, Roy Halevi, to perfect the idea.)

Intezer therefore has built software that can “map” out different malware, making connections by detecting code reuse and code similarities, which in turn can help it identify new threats, and help put a stop to them.

There is a reason why cybercriminals reuse code, and it has to do with economies of scale: they can reuse and work faster. Conversely, it also becomes “exponentially harder for them to launch a new attack campaign since they would need to start completely from scratch,” Tevet notes.

While there are literally hundreds of startups now on the market building ways to identify, mitigate and remediate the effects of malware on systems, Intezer claims to stand apart from the pack.

“The vast majority of security systems in the market today detect threats by looking for anomalies and other indicators of compromise,” usually using machine learning and AI, but Tevet adds that this “can be evaded by ‘blending in’ as normal activity.” One consequence of that is that these methods also drown security teams with vague and false-positive alerts, he added. “On the other hand, Intezer doesn’t look for the symptoms of the attack, but can actually uncover the origins of the root cause of nearly all cyber attacks — the code itself.”

The startup’s proof is in the pudding so to speak: it has scored some notable successes to date through its use. Intezer was the first to identify that WannaCry came out of North Korea; it built a code map that helped provide the links between the Democratic National Committee breach and Russian hackers; and most recently it identified a new malware family called “HiddenWasp” linked specifically to Linux systems.

Itai Tevet, the co-founder and CEO, says that “hands down,” Linux-focused threats are the biggest issue of the moment.

“Everybody’s talking about cloud security but it is rarely discussed that Linux malware is a thing,” he said in an interview. “Since the dawn of cloud and IoT, Linux has become the most common operating system and, in turn, the biggest prize for hackers.” He added that in the more traditional enterprise landscape, “banking trojans such as Emotet and Trickbot remain the most common malware families seen in the wild.”

“Itai, Roy and the team at Intezer possess a rare expertise in incident response, malware analysis, and reverse engineering having mitigated many nation-state sponsored threats in the past,” said Scott Maxwell, founder and managing partner of OpenView, in a statement. “The Genetic Malware Analysis technology they’ve developed represents the next-generation of cyber threat detection, classification, and remediation. We’re excited to support them as they build a category-defining company.”

Since its launch in May of last year, the cannabis-infused drink company Cann has sold 150,000 cans of its THC and CBD-infused, alcohol-free intoxicants, in a sign of success that’s bucking current industry trends.

On its way to that milestone, the company has sold out multiple times as it wrestled with manufacturing facilities that simply couldn’t keep up with demand, according to the company’s co-founders, Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock.

Now, thanks to a $5 million investment from new backers led by Imaginary, an early-stage investment firm launched by the founder of the Net-a-Porter group, and JM10, a leading cannabis company, Cann is hoping to break through the legal obstacles surrounding distribution of cannabis-derived intoxicants and overcome investors growing skepticism around the viability of cannabis as a business.

“Overall, the industry is hurting. They’re not meeting the growth expectations that they set out,” says Bullock. “What’s happening on delivery platforms is not connected with the mainstream. You have folks that are not going to smoke or are not going to inhale vapor… [and so] you’ve seen a much slower adoption of cannabis as a mainstream, mild intoxicant.”

Those problems are threatening the existence of one of the cannabis industry’s most recognizable startups, Eaze. According to earlier TechCrunch reports, the company is running low on cash thanks to a perfect storm of working capital constraints, increased marketing spend and lower customer demand.

Cann’s co-founders think their drink offers something more appealing to a casual consumer than vaping or smoking — but the company chafes under the distribution constraints that tie it to dispensary businesses.

Cann wants to transform the social alcohol drinker into a Cann consumer, but is hampered by its inability to appear next to beer and wine on grocery store shelves. In fact, the company’s products can’t appear in the grocery store at all.

So to woo these would-be Cann fans, the company is casting about for new distribution deals and cutting its pricing — selling its drinks at a retail price of roughly $4 per Cann.

The $16 four-pack or $24 six-pack is more palatable to consumers than the $27 price point for a euphoric like Kin, the company’s founders think. Investors have backed other would-be bud beverages. K-Zen Beverages raised $5 million from the investment firm DCM  and California Dreamin’, a Y Combinator-backed intoxicant containing a whopping 10 milligrams of THC, has also nabbed some investor cash. Even traditional breweries are getting into the act, with the Heineken-owned brewery Lagunitas offering a THC and CBD-infused, alcohol-free version of their famous beer under the moniker HiFi Hops.

Bullock and Anderson say that their company’s drinks, which pack 2MG of THC and 4MG of CBD, could be a challenger to traditional liquors — offering all of the buzz and none of the bad hangover — if they could only get over the regulatory and supply chain hurdles. 

To address their manufacturing issues, the company found a co-packer called Space Station, a Sacramento, Calif.-based producer that will help boost volumes.

“We are trying to create a product that can appeal to mainstream consumers,” says Bullock. “There are only 600 licensed distributors, so how do you meet customers where they are?”

Instead of vertically integrating (just as Eaze is rushing to make its own products, Cann could build out its own distribution channels and delivery services), Cann is doubling down on third parties and will spend at least some of its new money to reach beyond California into other states where weed is legally sold and regulated.

Right now, it’s pretty much a land grab for shelf space at dispensaries, with few THC and CBD beverages on store shelves, but one reason for the new capital is that both Bullock and Anderson know that any edible company would be foolish not to explore the beverage market too.

Investors like Massenet view the investment in companies like Cann as a bet on the increasing movement toward sobriety among younger generations.

“We have been tracking the new generation of consumers who are searching for and embracing new forms of responsible social drinking which do not involve alcohol,” said Natalie Massenet, co-founder of Imaginary. “Cann, with its formulation that has the potency of a light beer without the alcohol or calories, addresses this growing trend in a brilliantly formulated series of beverages. Being obsessed with backing the best new disruptive consumer product companies, Imaginary also loves the fantastic branding and positioning of Cann.”

According to a Markets and Markets report, the global enterprise collaboration market is expected to grow 9% over the year to $48.1 billion by 2024 from $31 billion in 2019. Last month, Seattle-based...

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Satellite and Earth observation startup Capella Space has unveiled a new design for its satellite technology, which improves upon its existing testbed hardware platform to deliver high-resolution imaging capable of providing detail at less than 0.5 meters (1.6 feet). Its new satellite, code-named “Sequoia,” also will be able to provide real-time tasking, meaning Capella’s clients will be able to get imaging from these satellites of a desired area basically on demand.

Capella’s satellites are “synthetic aperture radar” (SAR for short) imaging satellites, which means they’re able to provide 2D images of the Earth’s surface even through cloud cover, or when the area being imaged is on the night side of the planet. SAR imaging resolution is typically much higher than the 0.5-meter range that Capella’s new design will enable — and it’s especially challenging to get that kind of performance from small satellites, which is what Sequoia will be.

The new satellite design is a “direct result of customer feedback,” Capella says, and includes advancements like an improved solar array for faster charging and quicker recycling; better thermals to allow it to image for longer stretches at a time; a much more agile targeting array, which means it can switch targets much more quickly in response to customer needs; and a higher bandwidth downlink, meaning it can transfer more data per orbital pass than any other SAR system from a commercial company in its size class.

This upgrade led to Capella Space locking in contracts with major U.S. government clients, including the  U.S. Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). And the tech is ready to fly — it’ll be incorporated into Capella’s next six commercial satellites, which are set to fly starting in March.

AppsFlyer has raised a massive Series D of $210 million, led by General Atlantic.

Founded in 2011, the company is best known for mobile ad attribution — allowing advertisers to see which campaigns are driving results. At the same time, AppsFlyer has expanded into other areas, like fraud prevention.

And in the funding announcement, General Atlantic Manager Director Alex Crisses suggested that there’s a broader opportunity here.

“Attribution is becoming the core of the marketing tech stack, and AppsFlyer has established itself as a leader in this fast-growing category,” Crisses said. “AppsFlyer’s commitment to being independent, unbiased, and representing the marketer’s interests has garnered the trust of many of the world’s leading brands, and we see significant potential to capture additional opportunity in the market.”

Crisses and General Atlantic’s co-president and global head of technology, Anton Levy, are both joining AppsFlyer’s board of directors. Previous investors Qumra Capital, Goldman Sachs Growth, DTCP (Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners), Pitango Venture Capital and Magma Venture Partners also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $294 million.

AppsFlyer said it works with more than 12,000 customers, including eBay, HBO, Tencent, NBC Universal, Minecraft, US Bank, Macy’s and Nike. It also says it saw more than $150 million in annual recurring revenue in 2019, up 5x from its Series C in 2017.

Co-founder and CEO Oren Kaniel said that as attribution becomes more important, marketers need a partner they can trust. And with AppsFlyer driving $28 billion in ad spend last year, he argued, “There’s a lot of trust there.”

Kaniel added, “It doesn’t really matter how sophisticated your marketing stack is, or whether you have AI or machine learning — if the data feed is wrong … everything else will be wrong. I think companies realize how sensitive and critical this data platform is for them. I think that in the past couple of years, they’re investing more in selecting the right platform.”

In order to ensure that trust, he said that AppsFlyer has avoided any conflicts of interest in its business model — a position that extends to fundraising, where Kaniel made sure not to raise money from any of the big players in digital advertising.

And moving forward, he said, “We will never go into media business, never go into media services. We want to maintain our independence, we want to maintain our previous unbiased positions.”

Kaniel also argued that while he doesn’t see regulations like Europe GDPR and California’s CCPA hindering ad attribution directly, the regulatory environment has justified AppsFlyer’s investment in privacy and security.

“Even more than just being in compliance, [with AppsFlyer], marketers all of a sudden have full control of their data,” he said. “Let’s say on the web, probably your website is sending data and information to partners who don’t need to have access to this information. The reason is, there’s no logic, there’s a lot of pixels going everywhere, the publishers don’t have control. If you use our platform, you have full control, you can configure the exact data points that you’d like to share.”

Snyk, the company that wants to help developers secure their code as part of the development process, announced a $150 million investment today. The company indicated the investment brings its valuation to more than $1 billion (although it did not share the exact figure).

Today’s round was led by Stripes, a New York City investment firm, with help from Coatue, Tiger Global, BoldStart,Trend Forward, Amity and Salesforce Ventures. The company reports it has now raised more than $250 million.

The idea behind Snyk is to fit security firmly in the development process. Rather than offloading it to a separate team, something that can slow down a continuous development environment, Snyk builds in security as part of the code commit.

The company offers an open-source tool that helps developers find open-source vulnerabilities when they commit their code to GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab or any CI/CD tool. It has built up a community of more than 400,000 developers with this approach.

Snyk makes money with a container security product, and by making available to companies as a commercial product the underlying vulnerability database they use in the open-source product.

CEO Peter McKay, who came on board last year as the company was making a move to expand into the enterprise, says the open-source product drives the revenue-producing products and helped attract this kind of investment. “Getting to [today’s] funding round was the momentum in the open source model from the community to freemium to [land] and expand — and that’s where we are today,” he told TechCrunch.

He said the company wasn’t looking for this money, but investors came knocking and gave them a good offer, based on Snyk’s growing market momentum. “Investors said we want to take advantage of the market, and we want to make sure you can invest the way you want to invest and take advantage of what we all believe is this very large opportunity,” McKay said.

In fact, the company has been raising money at a rapid clip since it came out of the gate in 2016 with a $3 million seed round. A $7 million Series A and $22 million Series B followed in 2018, with a $70 million Series C last fall.

The company reports over 4X revenue growth in 2019 (without giving exact revenue figures), and some major customer wins, including the likes of Google, Intuit, Nordstrom and Salesforce. It’s worth noting that Salesforce thought enough of the company that it also invested in this round through its Salesforce Ventures investment arm.

Ran Ilany: The second thing that we’re doing is authenticating the communication of those workloads. That is to say, the actual identity of the workload is injected into the traffic stream so that...

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This interview puts the spotlight on a highly specialized area of cyber security, identity-based workload protection. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to...

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San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup Flutterwave has raised a $35 million Series B round and announced a partnership with Worldpay FIS for payments in Africa.

With the funding, Flutterwave will invest in technology and business development to grow market share in existing operating countries, CEO Olugbenga Agboola — aka GB — told TechCrunch.

The company will also expand capabilities to offer more services around its payment products.

More than payments

“We don’t just want to be a payment technology company, we have sector expertise around education, travel, gaming, e-commerce, fintech companies. They all use our expertise,” said GB.

That means Flutterwave will provide more solutions around the broader needs of its clients.

The Nigerian-founded startup’s main business is providing B2B payments services for companies operating in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad.

Launched in 2016, Flutterwave allows clients to tap its APIs and work with Flutterwave developers to customize payments applications. Existing customers include Uber, Booking.com and e-commerce company Jumia.

In 2019, Flutterwave processed 107 million transactions worth $5.4 billion, according to company data.

Flutterwave did the payment integration for U.S. pop-star Cardi B’s 2019 performances in Nigeria and Ghana. Those are two of the countries in which the startup operates, in addition to South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the U.K. and Rwanda.

“We want to scale in all those markets and be the payment processor of choice,” GB said.

The company will hire more business development staff and expand its developer team to create more sector expertise, according to GB.

“Our business goes beyond payments. People don’t want to just make payments, they want to do something,” he said. And Fluterwave aims to offer more capabilities toward what those clients want to do in Africa.

“If you are a charity that wants to raise money for cancer research in Ghana, or you want to sell online, or you’re Cardi B…who wants to do concerts in Africa…we want to be able to set up payments, write the code and create the platform for those needs,” GB explained.

That also means Flutterwave, which built its early client base across global companies, aims to serve smaller African businesses, including startups. Current customers include African-founded tech companies, such as moto ride-hail venture Max.ng.

Worldpay partnership

The new round makes Flutterwave the payment provider for Worldpay in Africa.

“With this partnership, any Worldpay merchant in Europe or the U.S. can accept any African payment. If someone goes to pay Netflix with an African card, it just works,” GB said.

In 2019, Worldpay was acquired for a reported $35 billion by FIS, a U.S. financial services provider. At the time of the purchase, it was projected the two companies would generate revenues of $12 billion annually, yet neither has notable presence in Africa.

Therein lies the benefit of collaborating with Flutterwave.

FIS’s Head of Ventures Joon Cho confirmed the partnership with TechCrunch. FIS also backed Flutterwave’s $35 million Series B. US VC firms Greycroft and eVentures led the round, with participation of Visa, Green Visor and African fund CRE Venture Capital.

Flutterwave’s latest funding brings the company’s total investment to $55 million and follows a year in which the fintech venture announced a series of weighty partnerships.

In July 2019, the startup joined forces with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba’s Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China.

The Alipay collaboration followed one between Flutterwave and Visa to launch a consumer payment product for Africa, called GetBarter.

Flutterwave and African fintech

Flutterwave’s $35 million round and latest partnership are among the reasons the startup has become a standout in Africa’s digital-finance landscape.

As a sector, fintech gains the bulk of dealflow and the majority of startup capital flowing to African startups annually. VC to Africa totaled $1.35 billion in 2019, according to WeeTracker’s latest stats.

While a number of payment startups and products have scaled — see Paga in Nigeria and M-Pesa in Kenya — the majority of the continent’s fintech companies are P2P in focus and segregated to one or two markets.

Flutterwave’s platform has served the increased B2B business payment needs spurred by the decade of growth and reform that has occurred in Africa’s core economies.

The value the startup has created is underscored not just by transactional volume the company generates, but the partnerships it has attracted.

A growing list of the masters of the payment universe — Visa, Alipay, Worldpay — have shown they need Flutterwave to do finance in Africa.

Stasher, the luggage storage app for travelers, has raised $2.5 million in additional funding. Leading the round is VentureFriends, along with various angels, including Johan Svanstrom, former president of Expedia-owned Hotels.com.

Launched in 2015, and now calling itself a “sharing economy solution” to luggage storage, the Stasher marketplace and app connects travelers, event attendees and vacation rental guests with local shops and hotels that can store their luggage on a short to medium-term basis.

Insurance is included with each booking, and items stored at a StasherPoint are covered for damage, loss and theft up to the value of £1,000.

Meanwhile, the revenue share for hosts is roughly 50% of the storage fee. The idea is that brick and mortar shops can access an additional revenue stream, thanks to the so-called sharing economy.

More broadly, the problem Stasher wants to solve is that having to carry around luggage can often stop you enjoying part of your day when traveling, time that is otherwise wasted. “If you’ve ever been forced out of your Airbnb at 10am, you may be familiar with the issue,” co-founder Anthony Collias told me back in 2018.

To that end, the Stasher network has grown a lot since then, and now has a presence in 250 cities, up from 20. This has included bringing the luggage storage app to the U.S. and Australia.

This has seen the startup partner with the likes of Klook, Sonder, Marriott and Hotels.com, along with brands such as Premier Inn, Expedia, Holiday Express, OYO and Accor.

Home, the Berlin-based startup that set out offering an app to help landlords manage rentals but has since pivoted to solve the landlord-tenant problem more directly, has raised €11 million in Series A funding.

Backing the round is Capnamic, EQT Ventures, FJ Labs and Redalpine, whilst the new capital will be used for “product innovation,” particularly on the tenant side. In addition, Home plans to bring its offering to new cities.

“[We] started with an app for landlords, which tracked rent payments etc., but Home is now a managed marketplace for landlords and tenants,” Home co-founder and CEO Thilo Konzok tells me.

“Home now acts as both the tenant and the landlord. Landlords get an instant offer and sign a contract with Home. A digital lock is fitted at the apartment and the landlord then simply gets rent — no maintenance stresses, financial risks etc.”

The idea of essentially becoming a full-stack landlord (my words, not Konzok’s) is so that property owners don’t need to become experts in renting apartments, understanding legislation, maintenance and knowing what rent to charge.

“Tenants also have a far better, more transparent experience,” argues the Home CEO. This includes the ability to visit and book apartments themselves, thanks to Home’s use of smart locks. “If they need anything, they can reach Home 24/7 via the app,” he adds.

The proposition is currently available in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, and appears to be proving popular. Konzok says that every month more than 1,100 landlords request an offer from Home. To be able to accept more of these requests, the company will expand into new cities throughout 2020. Specifically, this should see seven more German cities by April 2020 and one international city in October 2020.

Adds Jörg Binnenbrücker, managing partner at Capnamic: “When we first met Thilo and Moritz we were impressed by their vision of creating a new asset class and form of ownership. Capnamic is excited to have found the best team to bring this new housing experience to everyone and capture a massive market opportunity.”

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Anand Rajaraman was recorded in October 2019. Anand...

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According to W3Techs, WordPress is used by 35% of all websites and it dominates the content management system market with a market share of 62.3%. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, last year...

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