TechCrunch Startup News

Red Cat, a startup that wants to store drone flight data on the blockchain to guarantee immutability, announced the second Beta of its drone data platform today. Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat says in 2017 he was looking at what was holding back the commercial drone business and the need for a black-box kind of system became apparent to him. The so-called black box is really a flight recorder that tracks data about a flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a long time, it was the norm for founders to haul their hardware to the 3000 block of Sand Hill Road, where the venture capitalists of “Silicon Valley” would be awaiting their pitches. Today, many of the investors that touted the exclusivity of “The Valley” have moved north to San Francisco, where they have better access to top entrepreneurs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eargo wants to become the ultimate consumer hearing brand. The company’s small and virtually invisible direct-to-consumer hearing aids, which come in an AirPods-style chargeable case, are designed to help destigmatize hearing loss. One month after revealing its newest product — the Eargo Neo ($2,550), which can be customized remotely via the case’s Bluetooth connectivity — the startup has closed a $52 million Series D, bringing its total raised to date to $135 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jupiter raises $23 million to tell businesses and governments how climate change will destroy them Whether it’s by flood, fire or the fury of a storm, climate-related catastrophes are now impacting most cities and towns across the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Glossier, known for its line of understated makeup products and a cult-following of millennial Instagrammers, is getting colorful with the launch of its first spin-off brand, Glossier Play. The company — led by founder and chief executive officer Emily Weiss, who built the nearly $400 million business from a makeup blog called Into The Gloss — has raised a total of $92 million in venture capital funding from top-tier consumer investors Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures and IVP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cerosallows marketers to create animated, interactive content — but don’t call it a content marketing company. “We think content is just a dry, bland, over-leveraged, oversaturated space,” said founder and CEO Simon Berg. “The goal is not to hack the system, the goal is to make a great experience for your customers.” That’s why he describes Ceros as a platform for creating experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Forget the office ping pong table,Cherry, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch, wants to let employees take company perks into their own hands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Customer experience management platform Medallia has filed to raise up to $70 million in Series F funding, according to regulatory documents obtained by the Prime Unicorn Index. The new shares were priced at $15 apiece, valuing the nearly two-decades-old business at $1.7 billion. We’ve reached out to Medallia for comment. Medallia is expected to finally transition to the public markets in 2019, a year chock-full of high-profile unicorn IPOs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botify, a search engine optimization company that works with customers like Expedia and Nike, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Adrien Menard said that the opportunity in SEO is “even bigger now than in the past,” and that the problem ismuch broader problem than many realize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost. I’ve been playing with the device for a couple of weeks and here’s my review. The Shadow Ghost is a tiny little box that doesn’t do much. The true magic happens in a data center near your home. When you sign up to Shadow, you don’t even have to get a box. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a monthly subscription fee, this startup will send out customized gifts to current and prospective clients at scale In today’s noisy, fast-paced world, finding a way to let clients and potential customers know that they are top of mind can be a major challenge for companies. Enter Sendoso, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online-to-offline startup that promises to source, store and ship anything a business ever needs to send — and track its return on investment, to boot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google’s Gradient Ventures, the search giant’s dedicated AI fund, is casting its eye to Asia after it led a $7 million Series A round for Elsa, a startup that operates an app for English language learners. The deal is Gradient’s first in Asia, and it includes participation from existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and SOSV. Elsa has now raised $12 million to date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last month I wrote about Ubiquitilink, which promised, through undisclosed means, it was on the verge of providing a sort of global satellite-based roaming service. But how, I asked? (Wait, they told me.) Turns out our phones are capable of a lot more than we think: they can reach satellites acting as cell towers in orbit just fine, and the company just proved it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor Companies raising supergiant VC aren’t getting any younger Coastal startups don’t have a monopoly on raising big at early-stage It takes a lot more than a good idea and the right timing to build a billion-dollar company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Delivery company DoorDash is announcing that it has raised $400 million in Series F financing. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $6 billion or more. In fact, DoorDash now says the funding came at a $7.1 billion valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I interviewed Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2016, he surprised everyone when he said he was working on a new kind of T-shirt —nobody knew for sure whether he was joking or not. But the connected T-shirt is real, and it’s called wearTRBL. While the project started as a Parrot subsidiary, the company was spun off in July 2018. Seydoux is still credited as co-founder and Olivier Levy acts as co-founder and CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has raised a new fund of its own to continue scaling globally. The $115 million first close was led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including new anchor LP Trusted Insight. A number of well-known European entrepreneurs also invested. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SendBird, a San Francisco area startup, helps developers add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code. It’s an idea similar to Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications. Today, the company announced a $52 million Series B investment. The round was led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, August Capital, Y Combinator, and Funders Club also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $70 million, according to Crunchbase. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings from Chittorgarh, one of my stops on a two-week excursion through Goa and Rajasthan, India. I’ve been a little too busy exploring, photographing cows and monkeys and eating a lot of delicious food to keep up with *all* the tech news, but I’ve still got the highlights. For starters, if you haven’t heard yet, TechCrunch launched Extra Crunch, a paid premium subscription offering full of amazing content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paris-based startup Alan has raised a Series B round of funding of $45 million (€40 million). Index Ventures is once again leading the round, with partners of DST Global also participating. The company had raised a $28 million funding round only ten months ago. Alan is a software-as-a-service startup tackling a very specific industry — the health insurance market in France — and soon across Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

3DEN is building spaces for what it calls the “in-between moments” of your day. The name (pronounced “Eden”) comes from the idea of the “third place” — a space that’s neither home nor work. Founder and CEO Ben Silver told me the idea is to create a space that people can use if, say, they’ve got 45 minutes to fill between meetings, or if they’ve just gotten off a red eye flight and need somewhere to freshen up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WeWork has made a big name for itself in a short period of time as a global co-working space. In fact, WeWork is now the largest private office tenant in all of Manhattan. But whether the real estate play alone can support its reported $47 billion valuation still remains to be seen. That might explain the company’s 2018 acquisition spree, as well as today’s newly announced changes to the WeWork app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gil Ben-Artzy Contributor Gil Ben-Artzy is a founding partner at UpWest Labs. One of the very first things we ask Israeli entrepreneurs who are hoping to break into the U.S. market is to tell us how their product or service is being received by their target market. What is the feedback? Are potential customers hungry for what the team is selling? Validation, both of the broader vision and the early product itself, has to be a key focus for any aspiring entrepreneur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donde Search has just closed a $6 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners, with participation from previous investors such as senior leaders from AliExpress, Google and Waze. Donde first launched in 2014 as a consumer-facing app that helped users search and discover apparel items based on visual characteristics rather than text-based searches. In early 2018, the company pivoted to the enterprise space, helping retailers power suggestions and related items on their websites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’m not in the habit of getting naked during meetings at startup offices, but this time it felt appropriate. Nebia, a shower startup that has attracted investments from the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s foundationis back with some new cash (though it won’t divulge how much) and a new generation of its thoughtfully designed shower heads that aim to dramatically reduce the amount of water people use while cleaning up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s true that DoorDash offsets the amount it pays its drivers with customer tip, according to an FAQ page on its own site. “For each delivery, you will always receive at least $1 from DoorDash plus 100% of the customer tip,” DoorDash states on a Dasher FAQ page.“Where that sum is less than the guaranteed amount, DoorDash will provide a pay boost to make sure you receive the guaranteed amount. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The founders of Glide, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, had a notion that building mobile apps in the enterprise was too hard. They decided to simplify the process by starting with a spreadsheet, and automatically turning the contents into a slick mobile app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did anyone else listen to season one of StartUp, Alex Blumberg’s OG Gimlet podcast? I did, and I felt like a proud mom this week reading stories of the major, first-of-its-kindSpotify acquisition of his podcast production company, Gimlet. Spotify also bought Anchor, a podcast monetization platform, signaling a new era for the podcasting industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Where seed and early-stage funding is growing, contracting or holding steady Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools For years, decades even, startup names have been getting weirder. This isn’t a scientific verdict, but it is how things have seemed to someone who spends a lot of hours perusing this stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve ever seen a lamp or chair that you liked and wished you could just take a picture and find it online, well, GrokStyle let you do that — and now the company has been snatched up by Facebook to augment its own growing computer vision department. GrokStyle started as a paper — as AI companies often do these days — at 2015’s SIGGRAPH. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb made it easier for travelers to find a place to crash. Now it wants to make it easier for them to get around. The $31 billion home-sharing giant has hired Fred Reid as its first-ever global head of transportation. Reid served as the founding chief executiveofficer of Virgin America from 2004 to 2007 after a three-year stint as the president of Delta Airlines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ticketing app Gametime is taking its last-minute approach about as far as it can go, with the launch of a new feature called LastCall. This allows users to purchase tickets through Gametime until 90 minutes after an event has started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

UK home health analysis kit startup Thriva is adding three more products to its range later this month: A saliva-based cortisol stress test and two female hormone kits. The Seedcamp-backedUK startup has been offering blood-prick-based health monitoring kits since 2016, and says it’s had more than 50,000 customers sign up to stab their own finger with its spring-loaded plastic lancet and massage a drop of blood into a tube to post away for lab-based analysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ike, the autonomous trucking startup founded by veterans of Apple, Google and Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s self-driving truck program, has raised $52 million in a Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Redpoint Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Basis Set Ventures and Neo also participated in the round.Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal has joined Ike’s board. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bird’s electric scooters were on full display at the Upfront Summit in Malibu last week, a two-day event that brings togetherthe likes of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC’s elite. Not only were a dozen or so brand spanking new scooters available to ride throughout the event but Upfront general partner Mark Suster, an investor in the startup, was seen riding a Bird on stage to the tune of Chamillionaire’s ‘Ridin’ Dirty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bots are ruining the internet. When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Solar installations are becoming a no-brainer for anyone with a roof in much of the country. But getting an estimate on how much it would cost and how much juice it would generate can be complicated and time consuming. Aurora Solar has made an automated process for doing this, and attracted $20 million in funding as a result. A big part of the uncertainty anyone has about getting solar installed is the upfront cost and return on investment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mary Ann Azevedo Contributor Share on Twitter Mary Ann Azevedo covers startups and tech at Crunchbase News. 2019 has been good to the Austin startup scene so far. Combined, Austin startups have raised $240.3 million in January. That’s not much less than the nearly $300 million raised inall of Q4 2018. And since the beginning of the year, the Texas capital has seen a number of double-digit funding rounds and a nearly quarter of a billion dollaracquisition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s a big day for Timescale, makers of the open source time series database, TimescaleDB. The company announced a $15 million investment and a new enterprise version of the product. The investment is technically an extension of the $12.4 million Series A it raised last January, which it’s referring to as A1. Today’s round is led by Icon Ventures with existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Two Sigma Ventures also participating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the early 2000s, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt was frustrated with the roles he was being offered. Instead of starring in critically acclaimed indies, he was typecast as “the funny kid on TV” due to roles like Tommy from “3rd Rock from the Sun.” So like anyone who matured alongside the internet, he created a website where he could ideate, produce and share his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new mobile banking startup called Step wants to help bring teenagers and other young adults into the cashless era. Today, cash is used less often, as more consumers shop online and send money to one another through payment apps like Venmo. But teenagers in particular are still heavily burdened with cash — even though they, too, want to spend their money on things that require a payment card, like Amazon.com purchases or mobile gaming, for example. That’s where Step comes in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you are a web developer, you know how complex many of the traditional web content management systems have been. One of the big problems has been managing the underlying infrastructure for the system. Cosmic JS, a member of the Winter 2019 Y Combinator class, wants to simplify that by taking care of the infrastructure part for you, while providing a flexible front end for content creators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, that was short-lived: Just 36 hours after Curve, the London fintech that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card, re-instated support for Amex, the feature has once again been unceremoniously blocked by American Express. This time, however, the context feels very different from 2016 when the startup was barely off the ground, with Curve telling customers in an email this morning that it intends to “fight Amex’s decision with our full might”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Few things are easy in our financial system if you don’t have regular employment. It’s hard to prove (regular) income, which makes applying for a credit card or personal loan much more difficult and time-consuming. That’s particularly tough, since freelancer income is variable, and these sort of income smoothing tools can be critical to make ends meet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Parsley Health has just opened up a new, fully redesigned space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, marking the first true Parsley Health Center. Since launch, the startup has been operating out of clinics in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But TechCrunch got the chance to check out Parsley’s new Fifth Ave location, which marks the company’s first space designed from the ground up as Parsley Health. Founded by Dr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite its “unsexy” reputation, the logistics industry is attracting massive investment from venture capitalists. With a fresh $97 million in Series C funding, NEXT joins a fleet of heavily funded logistics platforms, including Flexport, Huochebang and Convoy. The company, which connects shippers and carriers through an online marketplace, raised the capital fromBrookfield Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and logistics solutions provider GLP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Verizon stealthily launched a new startup called Visible last year, it operated under a bring-your-own-device model — to sign up, you needed to already have an unlocked iPhone, and Visible would send you a new SIM card. Today, however, Visible is announcing that it’s partnering with Affirm and Apple to sell iPhones with 0 percent APR financing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Munchery’s vendors claim the food delivery startup took advantage of them in its final hours, knowingly allowing them to continue making deliveries it couldn’t pay for. Earlier this week, Munchery surprised customers with an email announcing it wouldcease operations, effective immediately. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re nearing 1,000 submissions from startup founders and leaders in Silicon Valley and across the world about the best early-stage tech lawyers to work with. As we’ve sorted through survey responses and begun scheduling interviews with the first qualified nominees, we’ve gotten a bunch of questions. We love questions. First of all, why are we creating a living list of great tech startup lawyers?Lawyers don’t create startups, but they can help great startups succeed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Through telemedicine and direct-to-consumer sales platforms, startups are streamlining the historically arduous process of accessing contraception. The latest effort to secure a significant financing round is The Pill Club, an online birth control prescription and delivery service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices