TechCrunch Startup News

Last month, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) general partner Chris Dixon announced at TechCrunch Disrupt that the VC firm would run a free crypto startup school. And the company is officially launching its school today. Applications are now open and you have four weeks to apply. With this initiative, a16z wants to democratize cryptocurrencies. Dixon and the a16z has been involved in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space for 7 years, and the firm now wants to share some of its learnings with entrepreneurs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain. Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department; and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory; Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Better than expected revenues couldn’t divert investor attention from the fact that Uber still managed to lose more than $1 billion in the most recent quarter as the company’s stock fell in after-hours trading. There are bright spots in the latest earnings report, not least that the company managed to stanch the bleeding that had cost the company over $5 billion in the previous quarter. Revenue grew to $3.8 billion, up from $2.9 billion in the year-ago period, representing a 30% boost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been a hot commodity in recent years as it helps automate tedious manual workflows inside large organizations. Robocorp, a San Francisco startup, wants to bring open source and RPA together. Today it announced a $5.6 million seed investment. Benchmark led the round with participation from Slow Ventures, firstminute Capital, Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce and Docker CEO Rob Bearden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wardrobe, a new peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace, has today announced the close of a $1.5 million seed round and its public launch out of beta. The funding was led by angel investor Cyan Banister and Ludlow Ventures, with participation from GroupUp Ventures, Airbnb cofounder Nate Blecharczyk and HQ Trivia founder Rus Yusupov, among others. Wardrobe was founded by Adarsh Alphons after he had an epiphany about just how many items of clothes in his own house went mostly unused. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if you could pay now to store something online permanently? You could preserve a website against censorship, save legal contracts, or offer an app even after your company fails. That’s the promise of Arweave‘s Permaweb. The startup has built a new type of blockchain that relies on Moore’s Law-style declining data storage costs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gradeup, an edtech startup in India that operates an exam preparation platform for undergraduate and postgraduate level courses, has raised $7 million from Times Internet as it looks to expand its business in the country. Times Internet, a conglomerate in India, invested $7 million in Series A and $3 million in Seed financing rounds of the four-year-old Noida-based startup, it said. Times Internet is the only external investor in Gradeup, they said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s too much hype about mythical “10X developers”. Everyone’s desperate to hire these ‘ninja rockstars’. In reality, it’s smarter to find ways of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have. That’s where CTO.ai comes in. Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts. These automate long series of steps they usually have to do manually thanks to integrations with GitHub, AWS, Slack, and more. CTO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Max Q, our weekly look at what’s happening in space and space startup news. This week was a bit more quiet than usual coming off of the amazingly over-packed International Astronautical Congress, but there were still some big moves that promise a lot more action to come before they year’s over – particularly in the race to fly American astronauts to space on a rocket launched from American soil once again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Addresses are ambiguous, not precise enough or don’t even exist in some places. what3words wants to map the entire world and overhaul addresses three words at a time. That’s why I’m excited to announce that what3words Chief Commercial Officer Clare Jones is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. The startup has divided the world in 3 meter squares. Each square has been assigned three words. This way, it’s easy to read, easy to write and even easy to say. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The cloud kitchen craze has reached Latin America. Food tech startup called Muy landed a fresh $15 million Series B to expand into Mexico and soon Brazil. The service is currently operative in Colombia. Muy is a “cloud kitchen meets Chipotle,” says one investor. The company describes itself as a virtual kitchen and smart chef system that uses AI to produce food based on forecasts of demand, which can help to reduce food waste. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Digital media startup Brut is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The money will be used, in part, to finance its launch in the United States. CEO Guillaume Lacroix said that that he and his co-founders all come from the French TV industry, where they were all “frustrated not to be able to follow up the conversation on social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Webiny, a London startup developing a serverless content management system, announced a $347,000 (£247,000) seed round today led by EU investment firm Episode 1. Webiny founder Sven Al Hamad says that Webiny is the first full-feature content management built for a serverless environment. “That means that we built Webiny from the ground up, and architected it so it works only inside serverless functions,” he said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quip, the dental care startup that first went to market with electric toothbrushes, has launched its first product outside of brushes:a floss applicator with a refillable canister. The floss costs $20 for the metallic applicator and refills cost $5. Each string is pre-marked every 18 inches to help guide people to use that amount for each session. The floss has been in the works since before Quip officially launched its toothbrush, Quip CEO Simon Enever told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Blade, the French startup behind Shadow, held a press conference this morning to announce some product news as well as some corporate changes. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can access a gaming PC in a data center near you. Compared to other cloud gaming services, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 instance. You can install anything you want, Steam, Photoshop or Word. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Entrepreneurs, founders, investors and all startup fans in between — take heed. The days for saving serious dough on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2019areseriously numbered. Right now, early bird pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on the type of pass you purchase, you can save up to €500. But this bird takes flight for parts unknown on 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Get serious, beat the deadline and save. Buy your early bird pass to Disrupt Berlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Welcome to the Jungle has raised a new $22.3 million funding round (€20 million). The startup is both a media company and a tech startup that wants to empower tech companies when it comes to recruitment. It doesn’t find the right candidate for you, it helps you get exposure, track application and facilitate onboarding. Gaia Capital Partners is leading the round with existing investors Bpifance, XAnge and Jean-Paul Guisset also participating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers. The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps. In a post, Medium’s Emma Smith describes reading time as “a closer measure of quality and resonance with readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anyone who has tried to ride an electric scooter knows the likelihood of finding one with a charged battery is quite low. Swiftmile, which just landed a contract with the city of Austin, supplies cities and private operators with docks equipped to park and charge both scooters and e-bikes. What Swiftmile offers serves as a win for operators, riders and cities alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Electric-bike maker Cowboy recently let me spend a couple of weeks with one of their e-bikes. It’s a well-designed e-bike that makes biking effortless, even if you’re going uphill. Cowboy is a Brussels-based startup. The company raised a $3 million seed round a couple of years ago and an $11.1 million (€10 million) Series A round last year. The company designs e-bikes from scratch. Components feel more integrated than in a normal e-bike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open source tools, and apparently it’s been going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ever. Today the company announced a massive $400 million Series F funding round on a hefty $6.2 billion valuation. Today’s funding brings the total raised to almost a $900 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

YellowHeart is trying to solve a problem that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to buy a ticket to a popular concert: Those tickets will often get snatched up by scalpers, who then resell them at a much higher price. In fact, the startup’s CEO, Josh Katz, said he founded the company because he’s a music “megafan” himself, and he was “just tired of getting ripped off by scalpers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tilting Point announced yesterday that it has acquired Gondola, a company that aims to increase to improve game monetization by optimizing in-game offers and video ads. Tilting Point CEO Kevin Segalla described his company’s model as “progressive publishing” — usually, mobile game developers starting working with Tilting Point because they need help with user acquisition, and then develop a deeper publishing relationship over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since it was founded by journalist Jessica Lessin in 2013, The Information has stood out in the tech news landscape for its focus on an ad-free, subscription-driven business model (a focus that seems increasingly prescient). Now, the upcoming launch of an app called Ticker suggests that the company is looking to expand its audience while maintaining that subscription model. The Information describes Ticker as its first consumer app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

&Open is a startup with an unusual name, and one that fills an unusual niche in the business world. It has built a gift giving platform, so that businesses can reward loyalty with a small token of appreciation. The gift depends on the business and the circumstances, but it could be something like a book or a tea towel and a recipe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Interior design platform Havenly is raising $32 million in new funding to create its first private label brand as the startup aims to integrate its own products into its design recommendation engine. The Denver-based startup is an online interior design consultancy of sorts that pairs with expert designers users looking to redesign their homes or apartments. For Havenly, there have been two sides of the business, commercial partnerships with vendors and the paid design services for users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Opendoor has named Gautam Gupta its chief financial officer and chief business offer, critical roles as the business continues to alter the way in which homes are bought and sold. Uber’s former head of finance, Gupta joined the $3.8 billion home-selling platform as its chief operating officer in 2017. The company, which has raised more than $4 billion in debt and equity funding to date, is announcing several new hires this morning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brian Kateman Contributor Share on Twitter Brian Kateman is president and co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation. More posts by this contributor Fish replacement may be the next big wave in alternative protein development From food and drink to health and wellness and beyond, there’s one plant we can’t seem to get enough of: cannabis. It seems like every consumer product nowadays is taking part in reefer madness. Home cooks are taking edibles to new heights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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