TechCrunch Startup News

Valued at $535 million, autonomous retail startup Standard Cognition has emerged as a soon-to-be tech giant and the best hope for merchants to compete with Amazon Go. Cashierless checkout is poised to transform brick-and-mortar commerce, and shop owners fear having to battle Amazon’s technology alone or partner with it, exposing data it could use against them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Missing out on a month’s rent because you can’t find a tenant is a huge loss. Searching for someone to fill a home takes work, while property managers are incentivized to price your place too high leading to costly vacancies. But new startup Doorstead wants to take on the risk and the work for you. It acts as a property manager for single-family homes but guarantees you rent at a specific rate starting in a certain number of days, even if it can’t fill the house or apartment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a wide-ranging conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann made light of the company’s lack of IPO documents. The San Francisco-based on-demand delivery business was expected to publicly file its IPO prospectus in September in preparation for a fall exit, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch this summer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Editor’s note: James Buckhouse is design partner at Sequoia. Last Tuesday, the teams competing in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF, as well as founders chosen as Top Picks in Startup Alley, visited Sequoia Capital’s office in San Francisco for a discussion with partners Jess Lee, Roelof Botha, Mike Vernal, Alfred Lin and James Buckhouse. The following is a partial transcript of the session, which was moderated by Buckhouse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Greyparrot, a London-based startup that wants to improve waste management. The company uses computer vision to make sorting more efficient at different stages of the waste chain. And Greyparrot has been selected as a wildcard for the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. The company has been using machine learning with images of different types of waste to train a model that detects glass, paper, cardboard, newspapers, cans and different types of plastics (black trays, PET, HDPE). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Russ Heddleston Contributor Share on Twitter Russ is the cofounder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe, and Trulia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Think Jack Dorsey’s jobs are tough? Well, Tom Chavez is running six startups. He thinks building businesses can be boiled down to science, so today he’s unveiling his laboratory for founding, funding and operating companies. He and his team have already proven they can do it themselves after selling their startups Rapt to Microsoft and Krux to Salesforce for a combined $1.2 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two years after the Los Angeles-based fintech startup Dave launched with a suite of money management tools to save consumers from overdraft fees, the company is now worth $1 billion thanks to a nascent banking practice that had investors lining up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The EcoFlow Delta is a new battery generator available on Kickstarter with incredible features claimed. Most are true, some are not. Devices like the Delta offer incredible battery storage capacity. Designed for more than just recharging phones and tablets, these can run refrigerators, pumps, power tools and medical equipment. They’re great for emergencies, camping and general use where power is not available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy news pertaining to startups and venture capital. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. I’ve been on a bit of startup profile kick as of late. Last week, I wrote a little bit about Landline, a bus network backed by Upfront Ventures. Before that, I profiled an e-commerce startup called Part & Parcel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

StrongSalt, then known as OverNest, appeared at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Battlefield in 2016, and announced product for searching encrypted code, which remains unusual to this day. Today, the company announced a $3 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners. StrongSalt founder and CEO Ed Yu, says encryption remains a difficult proposition, and that when you look at the majority of breaches, encryption wasn’t used. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The climate crisis continues to be just that… a crisis. And it’s spurring people across the country (and globe) to take action, particularly when it comes to their own lifestyle. Lauren Singer is one such person. After studying Environmental Science and Politics at NYU, she started a blog called Trash Is For Tossers to make a zero-waste lifestyle more accessible and comprehensible to everyone. But there’s still an issue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

$1.5 trillion. That’s the amount of outstanding student loan debt held by American citizens according to the New York Fed. It is an astronomical sum, and has led to much hand-wringing about whether there is a coming bubble in U.S. higher education. What’s even worse than the scale of the debt load though is the fact that for millions of borrowers, they literally don’t have to pay some of those dollars. Thanks to the complexity of the loan system in the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fivetran, a startup that helps companies move data from disparate repositories to data warehouses, announced $44 million Series B financing today, less than a year after collecting a $15 million Series A round. Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) led the round with participation from existing investors Matrix Partners and CEAS Investments. As part of the deal, Martin Casado from A16Z will join the Fivetran board. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We might have just completed a full-day program devoted completely to enterprise at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise last week, but it doesn’t mean we plan to sell that subject short at TechCrunch Disrupt next month in San Francisco. In fact, we have something for everyone from startups to established public companies and everything in between along with investors and industry luminaries to discuss all-things enterprise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quilt Data‘s founders, Kevin Moore and Aneesh Karve, have been hard at work for the last four years building a platform to search for data quickly across vast repositories on AWS S3 storage. The idea is to give data scientists a way to find data in S3 buckets, and then package that data in forms that a business can use. Today, the company launched out of stealth with a free data search portal that not only proves what they can do, but also provides valuable access to 3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Startup founders are hard-pressed to find the right investors — not only to fund their businesses but to help their businesses grow. These days, investors represent a variety of backgrounds and industries — traditional venture capital, Hollywood even the NBA. When Golden State Warriors point guard and two-time MVP Stephen Curry isn’t playing basketball, he’s working with his business partner and former college basketball teammate Bryant Barr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fieldwire just raised $33.5 million more to give PlanGrid and its new owner Autodesk a run for their money Fieldwire, which makes task management software for construction teams on commercial projects so things don’t fall through the figurative (or literal) cracks, has raised $33.5 million in Series C funding. Menlo Ventures led the round, joined by Brick & Mortar Ventures, Hilti Group and Formation 8. It isn’t a huge amount of money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GitLab is a company that doesn’t pull any punches or try to be coy. It actually has had a page on its website for sometime stating it intends to go public on November 18, 2020. You don’t see that level of transparency from late-stage startups all that often. Today, the company announced a huge $268 million Series E on a tidy $2.768 billion valuation. Investors included Adage Capital Management, L.P, Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, Blackrock, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As more enterprise developers make use of open source, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make sure that they are complying with licensing requirements. They also need to ensure the open sources bits are being updated over time for security purposes. That’s where FOSSA comes in, and today the company announced an $8.5 million Series A. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with help from Costanoa Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While Apple and Microsoft strain to sell augmented reality as the next major computing platform, many of the startups aiming to beat them to the punch are crashing and burning. Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets, has shuttered its HQ, laid off many of its employees and is selling off assets ahead of a shutdown, former employees and sources close to the company tell TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Policing hate speech is something nearly every online communication platform struggles with. Because to police it, you must detect it; and to detect it, you must understand it. Hatebase is a company that has made understanding hate speech its primary mission, and it provides that understanding as a service — an increasingly valuable one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Caper wants to deliver a major update to the self checkout aisle without keeping its dreaded catchphrases, i.e. “Unknown item in the bagging area,” “Please place the item in the bag.” The New York startup is tapping some of Silicon Valley’s more recognizable VC firms to fund their dreams for a shopping cart of the future that uses computer vision and other sensors to let shoppers quickly scan items as they drop them into their carts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Former New York Yankees all star Alex Rodriguez is racking up quite an impressive batting average in his new career as an investor and has added Fitplan to his roster of portfolio companies. The Los Angeles-based workout app launched by Landon Hamilton and Cam Speck has closed on $4.5 million led by A-Rod and Corazon Capital, and has added new celebrity athlete trainers — including Rodriguez — to cover the needs of would-be sports stars and interested amateurs alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pagerduty‘s CEO Jennifer Tejada and Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie both guided their companies to successful IPOs, with Box going public in 2015 and Pagerduty listing its stocks only a few months ago. Both of them will join us on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2 to talk about their experiences in getting their companies to this point and managing the changes that come with being a public company. It took both companies about ten years to get to their IPOs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Superside, a startup aiming to create a premium alternative to the existing crowdsourced design platforms, is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in new funding. It’s also adding new features like the ability to work on user interfaces, interaction design and motion graphics. Co-founder and CEO Fredrik Thomassen said this allows the company to offer “a full-service design solution.” You may have heard about Superside under its old name Konsus . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey European startup fans, Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but our super early-bird ticket pricing won’t last nearly that long. You have just three days left to save up to €600. Pay close attention to the deadline and buy your Disrupt passes by 11:59 p.m. (CEST) on 6 September. You’ll save even more money if you act quickly enough and combine the super early bird price with our group discounts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is perhaps best known for his acting across films like 10 Things I Hate About You, 500 Days of Summer, and Snowden. But times weren’t always peachy for Gordon-Levitt as a creative. After leaving the movie business to go to college, he realized the limits of the industry on his potential as a creative. He decided he wanted to take his creativity into his own hands and launched a message board where he’d post films, songs, etc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

India’s Oyo said on Monday it has acquired Copenhagen-based data science firm Danamica as the fast-growing lodging startup works to expand its business in Europe. Neither of the parties disclosed financial terms of the deal, but a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Oyo paid about $10 million to acquire the Danish firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Juul Labs, the e-cigarette behemoth partially owned by Altria, has today announced a new POS age-verification system that it will require all Juul retailers to comply with by May 2021. The Retail Access Control Standards program, or RACS for short, raises the standard for age-restricted POS systems, automatically locking the POS each time a Juul product is scanned until a valid, adult ID is scanned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The future is female and all you fierce female founders have one last shot at receiving 30 minutes of face time with some of the industry’s leading female funders. Say what now? We’re talking the All Raise “ask me anything” (AMA) sessions at Disrupt SF 2019 — and applications close tomorrow, August 30. All Raise, a startup nonprofit focused on accelerating female founder success, will host a day-long AMA event on October 3 at Disrupt SF 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At a time when the industry appears to bet that AI will replace most human jobs, starting with the tens of millions currently residing in call centers, one startup is working to use the same technology to empower the jobs it is pegged to displace. VoiceOps, a San Francisco-based startup, today announced it has raised $9 million in a Series A financing round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Existing investors Accel and Y Combinator also participated in the round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This post goes out to a special group of early-stage hardware startup founders — the procrastinators, the vacillators and the last-minute decision-makers. You have just 24 hours left to submit your application to compete in the Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhenon November 11-12. The application window closes at precisely 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28. Apply right here, right now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stylitics, a startup powering outfit-based shopping recommendations for online retailers, is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The company was initially known for ClosetSpace, a mobile app that provided consumers with outfit recommendations and inspiration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

DoorDash announced last month that it would be changing its controversial tipping model. Today it’s revealing the basics of how the new system will work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lasst die Spiele beginnen, startup founders — let the games begin! In case you haven’t heard, the application window for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019 is wide open and waiting for you. Don’t miss the chance to launch your early-stage startup on an international stage in front of some of tech’s most influential movers and shakers. Grab this opportunity and apply to compete today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After his tenure as Chief Scientist at Baidu, Andrew Ng, the founder of the Google Brain project and former CEO of Coursera, set up a number of different proejcts that all focus on making AI more approachable. These include the education startup Deeplearning.ai, the AI Fund startup studio for building AI companies and Landing.ai, which helps enterprises (and especially manufacturing companies) use AI. Today, Ng announced that he has opened a second office for these projects in Medellin, Colombia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today — and it is a doozy. The “Wafer Scale Engine” is 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

H20.ai‘s mission is to democratize AI by providing a set of tools that frees companies from relying on teams of data scientists. Today it got a bushel of money to help. The company announced a $72.5 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs and Ping An Global Voyager Fund. Previous investors Wells Fargo, NVIDIA and Nexus Venture Partners also participated. Under the terms of the deal, Jade Mandel from Goldman Sachs will be joining the H2O.ai Board. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Huron founder and CEO Matt Mullenax is hoping to build a big business around body wash. “For us, the broader mission is A+ personal care for guys everywhere — not just guys in New York or guys in the Bay Area or guys in Los Angeles,” he said. The startup has raised $1 million in seed funding from RXBAR founders Peter Rahal and Jared Smith, CXT Investments, and Lean Luxe founder M. Paul Munford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is there room for another social media platform? ShareChat, a four-year-old social network in India that serves tens of million of people in regional languages, just answered that question with a $100 million financing round led by global giant Twitter . Other than Twitter, TrustBridge Partners, and existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital also participated in the Series D round of ShareChat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced today that it will launch an open blockchain project called Venus to develop regional stablecoins pegged to fiat currencies (or traditional currencies usually issued and backed by a government). Based in Malta, Binance launched its decentralized trading service, Binance Chain, earlier this year, and since then has issued stablecoins pegged to Bitcoin and the British pound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

UrbanStems is announcing that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding. CEO Seth Goldman told me the startup has already been using the money to expand nationally. He explained that UrbanStems now has two delivery models — there are bike couriers who deliver plants and flowers within two hours in New York City and Washington, D.C. (where the company is headquartered), and then there’s a third-party shipping partner who offers next-day delivery to anywhere else in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Holy hardware, startup founders! You have only 24 hours left to apply to the Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhenon November 11-12. This hardware-only pitch competition, cousin to TechCrunch’s world-renown Startup Battlefield, is a real game-changer. Got hardware? Want to launch on a world stage? Do. Not. Delay. Apply to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 before 11:59pm on August 14th. What’s in it for you? Excellent question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What happens when two former spies meet the startup world? We’re about to find out. We’re pleased to announce former National Security Agency director Adm. Mike Rogers will be at Disrupt SF on October 2-4. The former U.S. intelligence head oversaw the shadowy agency during one of its most tumultuous times in its history in the aftermath of the massive leak of classified documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden. He also oversaw the Pentagon’s cyberwar-fighting division, U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Would you rent out your living room for a few hours? This startup is counting on it Recharge, a startup that tried convincing hotels to let its customers rent their rooms by the hour and even minute, has revamped and rebranded. Now Globe, the company is hoping to convince guests to sign up for short stays instead in people’s homes so that they can kick back between other commitments, and, if the host allows it, to shower and nap. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Postmates plans to make its IPO paperwork public in September, TechCrunch has learned. Despite previous reports indicating the on-demand delivery company is seeking an M&A exit, sources close to the matter say Postmates is on track to go complete an initial public offering this year. With the S-1 dropping in September, San Francisco-based Postmates is expected to debut on the stock exchange by the end of the third fiscal quarter of 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ro, a two-year-old startup known for its online pharmacy of men’s health products, has named BuzzFeed’s Todd Levy its chief technology officer. Levy first joined BuzzFeed in 2014 as the digital media company’s vice president of engineering; he was named CTO in 2016. Prior to BuzzFeed, Levy co-founded and led link management tool bit.ly. Levy begins his new role Wednesday, August 14. We’ve reached out to BuzzFeed for comment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Small satellite launch startup Vector has indefinitely shut down operations “in response a major change in financing,” the company confirmed. Co-founder and CEO Jim Cantrell has also been cut loose as part of the upset. The news comes as a surprise to the space startup community, and apparently to its employees. The company lined up $70 million in funding late last year, and recently was announced as a qualified contestant in DARPA’s Launch Challenge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Considering its unparalleled success, it was only a matter of time before a Brex copycat emerged. Ramp Financial, a new startup led by Capital One-acquired Paribus founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh (pictured), has raised $7 million, TechCrunch has learned. The capital came from Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, BoxGroup’s Adam Rothenberg and Coatue Management, a hedge fund that recently launched a $700 million early-stage investment vehicle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices