Tesla vehicles are getting Stardew Valley

Published December 20, 2019

Tesla owners have seen a bunch of games added to their car’s in-dash display over the last few months, from a handful of Atari classics to the painfully hard Cuphead. Next up? The oh-so-sweet farm-living RPG, Stardew Valley.

In addition to just being kind of cool, the in-dash games (playable only when parked, because duh) are meant to help Tesla owners kill time while at superchargers. Stardew Valley is… sort of the perfect game for this. Beyond being so charming that it hurts, it’s an absolutely incredible way to burn 30 minutes in the blink of an eye. Oh, you’ve got 10 minutes to waste? Why not tend to your crops? Or explore the mines? Or catch some fish?

Word of the addition comes from a Musk tweet:

Tesla holiday software update has FSD sneak preview, Stardew Valley, Lost Backgammon & a few other things

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2019

Musk also mentions a full self-driving (FSD) “sneak preview”… which would normally be a headline on its own, except that no one really knows exactly what it’ll entail, or just how much the “preview” will actually include. But it’s coming!

The tweet also mentions “Lost Backgammon,” which I can only assume is a game of backgammon where JJ Abrams continuously throws in all sorts of mysterious new stuff only to end the whole thing without really explaining 90% of it.

Musk doesn’t get specific about when this update will land. Seeing as he calls it the “holiday” update, though, it’ll presumably be sometime soon.

The unbrandening

Published December 20, 2019

Josh Gross
Contributor

Josh Gross is the managing partner at digital product studio Planetary and its child company, Regular, the low-cost, high quality studio for small businesses.

Do you remember as a kid going to the grocery store with your parents and being just totally overwhelmed by the bright, loud packaging of products on shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle?

I certainly do. Each product had a brand — you’d recognize the Kix by its bright red box and Tide by its loud orange bottle. Every package screamed its brand name at you.

Branded packaging as we know it hasn’t been around that long. While people have been packaging goods for millennia, trademarked printed boxes, tins and shrink-wrapped containers were only invented in the late 1800s — less than 150 years ago, beginning with Uneeda Biscuits around 1896.

When branded packaging was invented, and up until very recently, its purpose and value to nearly every industry made a ton of good sense. The average consumer would shop in a catalog, browsing ads and offerings, or in a store, perusing shelves of products. The more a product stood out and set itself apart, the more memorable it would be and the more likely it would be purchased. Good packaging made products easy to recommend and spread by sharing visually.

And then, the internet came along.

Our team recently launched our new studio product, Regular, a service directed at small businesses hitting their growth inflection point. As we began to design our own website and work on branding, we did a lot of research into branding trends for consumer packaged goods, and what we uncovered was surprising.

We found was that there is a surprising movement towards “unbranding” — specifically choosing not to create a strong association between a product and its maker. Instead of bright packaging, large logos and stamped products, many companies are now going the other direction by operating without logos and offering minimal (or no) packaging.

Pens from MUJI (Photo: Michael/Flickr)

One of the earliest companies to adopt this mindset was Japanese home goods store MUJI, whose name literally means “No Brand” (it doesn’t get more literal than that). Most of its products come unpackaged with just a small price tag, or in minimal packaging with a single informational label (e.g., “lotion,” “body soap”) to identify its contents.

But MUJI has been since the 1980s, so why are we talking about this now?

Robocall-crushing TRACED act passes Senate and heads to Oval Office

Published December 19, 2019

Somehow during all the partisan furor of the last few days, the Senate found a moment to vote some bipartisan legislation into law — presuming, of course, it survives the president’s desk. The TRACED act pushes carriers to kill robocalls before they ring, and gives the FCC some extra juice to pursue the wicked ones perpetrating them.

“We’re delighted the Senate acted quickly to pass this legislation to shutdown illegal robocalls,” wrote the bill’s co-sponsors in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement. “We’re working hard to help the American people get real relief from these relentless and illegal calls. We look forward to the President signing this overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation into law very soon.”

The House and Senate finally agree on something: Robocalls

Unlike many things called bipartisan, this one really is. Two different versions of the bill originated in the House and Senate and were passed individually with overwhelming majorities. The pertinent committees put their heads together and created a unified version of the bill they could both live with. Amazingly, that was just last month, and now the bill is off to the White House for the Executive signature.

You can read a summary of what the bill does here, but I’ll summarize further:

Extends FCC’s statute of limitations on robocall offenses and increases potential fines
Requires an FCC rulemaking helping protect consumers from spam calls and texts (this is already underway)
Requires annual FCC report on robocall enforcement and allows for it to formally recommend legislation
Requires adoption on a reasonable timeline of the STIR/SHAKEN framework for preventing call spoofing
Prevents carriers from charging for the above service, and shields them from liability for reasonable mistakes
Requires the Attorney General to convene an interagency task force to look at prosecution of offenders
Opens the door to Justice Department prosecution of offenders
Establishes a handful of specific cutouts and studies to make sure the rules work and interested parties are giving feedback

Overall it seems like a good bill and quite focused on this specific issue — no weird pork attached. Here’s hoping the TRACED act is signed into law quickly.

Gift Guide: 14 gifts for the gamer in your life

Published December 19, 2019

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2019 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here.

To those who are in it, gaming is more than just a hobby. It’s a way to connect with others, an outlet for competition and, for the most talented, a potential career path. But as far as hobbies (or more-than hobbies) go, it can become really expensive.

So this holiday season, surprise your beloved gamer with gear that will keep their wallet full and their fingers engaged.

Before you dive in, make sure to double check your recipient’s preferred gaming platform. While things like a massive USB hard drive will generally work regardless of whether they’re on PC or Xbox, even the best Xbox headset probably won’t work with PS4. We’ve got suggestions for each platform below, plus a few games for each.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

Logitech G502 Hero (or Lightspeed)

PC

If they’ve been gaming for years, your giftee might already have a mouse they love. If they’re just starting to get into gaming on a PC, though, upgrading to a really good mouse is a solid first step. You don’t have to worry too much about compatibility with their existing hardware, and it should last them years.

The Logitech G502 Hero and the Logitech G502 Lightspeed are great options here. The Hero, a wired and more budget-friendly version of the Lightspeed, comes with 11 customizable buttons, weight customization, LED lights and the namesake HERO sensor can scale between 100 and 16,000 DPI — allowing them to find their exact sensitivity comfort zone. The Lightspeed, meanwhile, adds two big features to the Hero with the Lightspeed wireless tech (super-low latency for a wireless mouse) and wireless charging via the optional $100 PowerPlay mouse pad.

Price: G502 Hero (Wired), $42 on Amazon | G502 Lightspeed (Wireless), $150 on Amazon

Razer Huntsman Elite

PC

Though this keyboard is on the pricey side, it’s worth it. The Huntsman Elite has super-fancy hybrid keys, using both mechanical and optical sensor inputs for super-consistent, ultra-fast key presses. The opto-mechanical switch gets rid of debounce and promises a much longer lifespan (100 million keystrokes) than much of the competition, so it’ll last. It has built-in storage for profiles, letting you quickly swap in customizations you’ve made for different games. It’s got a comfortable wrist rest, and, of course, RGB lighting.

Price: $175 on Amazon

Astro A50

PC + PS4 + Xbox

Having a good headset can feel like cheating, and the Astro A50s are pretty damned great. With Dolby Headphone 7.1 Surround Sound, and 5GHZ wireless transmitter for low latency, I honestly feel like they make me a better player. The headset has controls for mixing voice chat and game sound, and the battery lasts up to 15 hours. It comes in two versions: one for Xbox/PC, and one for PS4/PC; sadly, no version works with all three platforms.

Price: $300 on Amazon

SteelSeries Arctis 7

PC + PS4

If dropping $300 on a headset seems a bit too much, the SteelSeries Arctis 7 will get the job done at less than half the price. It offers Lossless 2.4GHz wireless audio (low latency) and a fantastic Clearcast bidirectional mic. SteelSeries says it has up to 24 hours of battery life, though I’ll admit that I’d never have the stamina to test that.

Price: $110 on Amazon

Astro C40 TR Gaming Controller

PS4 + PC

As gaming gets more and more competitive, controller players have historically been at a bit of a disadvantage. While most console shooters have systems like aim assist to try and make up for the gap, console controllers inevitably have fewer inputs than a PC gamer with their full-blown keyboard/mouse setups.

The Astro C40, my personal go-to PS4 controller, helps counter that a bit. With re-mappable panels on the back, trigger stops and both wired and wireless capabilities, the C40 is a controller that can up your game. It also has a 12-hour battery life; I’ve never managed to actually kill this controller between charges.

(I have noticed a bit of aim drag on one of the joysticks from time to time. That said, the controller has a removable panel for changing out joysticks, and Astro sells the C40 with a six-month warranty.)

Price: $180 on Amazon

Scuf Gaming Prestige Xbox Controller

Xbox

If your Xbox gamer isn’t happy with the included Xbox controller, a solid option is the Scuf Gaming Prestige controller for Xbox. It has four mappable paddles on the back, and is fully customizable. That means you can tailor the color, the length and shape of the joysticks, and the feel of the controller. One caveat: It’s worth noting that in my experience, Scuf controllers don’t stand up to a lot of wear and tear, especially considering the $160 price tag.

Price: $160 from Scuf

Seagate Game Drive 4TB

PS4/Xbox One

The game you’ve been dying to play is finally out… aaaaand now you’ve got to pick which of your existing games to delete to make it fit. Or you could just plug in a monster hard drive and forget about all that for a while.

The Seagate GameDrive 4TB will immediately bump up your console’s storage capacity, adding space for another 50+ games. It uses USB 3.0, which means it doesn’t need an extra power source and transfers at good speeds. It’s a spinning disc rather than solid state — the upside of which is that it keeps things cheap, the downside being that the read(/load) times tend to be a bit slower.

(Tip: Pretty much any USB 3.0 hard drive bigger than 256GB will work with PS4 or Xbox One, though you’ll need to wipe/format it for each console the first time you plug it in.)

Price: 4TB Game Drive for PS4, $114 | 4TB Game Drive for Xbox, $120

A big ol’ microSD card

Switch

As with the Xbox/PS4, most people will probably eventually want way more storage than the 32GB that comes built into the Nintendo Switch. Unlike the Xbox/PS4, however, the Switch taps microSD cards rather than external USB drives.

Fortunately, microSD cards have seen drastic price drops over the last few years. You can get cards as big as 512GB for less than $100 these days. Two things to be aware of: you’ll want a card that supports transfer speeds of at least 60-95 MB/s, and you probably want to buy from a brand you recognize from a retailer you trust. Bootleg cards with mislabeled capacities are a thing.

Price: Sandisk 512GB microSDXC, $80

Games:

Giftee already got things covered on the hardware front? Get’ em some games! No game is one-size-fits-all, so here’s a smattering of choices across genres and platforms.

(Trying to figure out if a game seems right for someone? Look for “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube, or watch a Twitch stream. It’ll take a few more minutes than just watching a trailer, but they’re often much better representations of what a game is really like.)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)

Shooter, PC + PS4 + Xbox

Call of Duty has been a staple in any gamer’s diet for the past decade. Though the franchise has had a bumpy few years, the community has been re-energized with the recent launch of Modern Warfare*, the sequel to one of the franchise’s most popular titles. This boots-on-the-ground FPS game should be a welcome gift to most gamers, as long as they don’t already have it!

(*Confusingly, this one is officially just called “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” without any number following it, despite it being the fourth CoD game to share the “Modern Warfare” name. Make sure you’re getting the one made in 2019, not 2007, 2009 or 2011.)

Price: $45 on Amazon

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Action/Adventure, PC + PS4 + Xbox

The upcoming release of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” makes this 2019 title an excellent option for your gamer, who may wish to continue on in a galaxy far, far away the moment they leave the theater. This action-adventure games follow the story of Cal Kestis, a Jedi Padawan, who is looking to finish his training and restore the Jedi Order, all while thwarting the Empire’s attempt to hunt him down. It’s a true Star Wars tale.

Price: $40 on Amazon

The Last of Us (Parts 1 & 2)

Action/Adventure, PS4

The Last of Us initially launched a few years ago, but the title has been remastered for PS4. The title follows Joel and Ellie, two survivors of a Zombie apocalypse as they try to survive warring factions, the military and the zombies themselves. It’s a cinematic adventure that your gamer could end up playing for hours without even noticing. And the affordable part 1 is a great way to prime for the 2020 release of part 2, which you can pre-order now.

Price: Last of Us 1 (Remastered), $17 | Last of Us 2 (Pre-order)

The Outer Worlds

Action RPG, PC+ PS4 + Xbox

The Outer Worlds is a first-person RPG that is sure to please classic sci-fi fans. The relatively complex game allows players to make decisions as they move to new worlds and meet new NPCs, all the while participating in combat situations with hostiles. The game is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox, with a Switch version set to launch in 2020.

Price: $35 on Amazon

Untitled Goose Game

Puzzler, PC + Mac + PS4 + Xbox + Switch

Anyone interested in a super-lightweight, lean-back sort of game will appreciate the Goose Game. Essentially, the player is a very annoying goose, and completes tasks that make the lives of surrounding humans more difficult. It’s cute, it’s fun and it’s affordable.

Price: $20

Pokémon Sword/Shield

RPG, Switch

The first original Pokémon game for Switch is a great jumping on point for those new to the franchise. The Pokémon company changed some key elements of gameplay to make repetitive actions less punishing, and created a great, engaging story. There are also dozens of new Pokémon to discover on the fastest-selling Switch game ever, and a thousand+ from past generations.

As with most main series Pokémon titles, there are two versions of this game — Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. They’re slightly different — each one has a handful of unique Pokémon you can’t get in the other, some visual differences, etc. — but there’s not really a wrong choice.

Price: Pokémon Sword, $60 | Pok é mon Shield, $60

HaptX grabs $12 million to build a glove crammed with sensors

Published December 19, 2019

A company building a very high-tech glove has just gotten its hands on some new money.

HaptX is building a sensor-packed glove for VR and robotics applications that simulates haptic and resistance feedback for enterprise users.

The Seattle startup has raised $12 million in new funding from Mason Avenue Investments, Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, Upheaval Investments, Votiv Capital, Keiretsu Forum, Keiretsu Capital, NetEase and Amit Kapur of Dawn Patrol Ventures. HaptX has now raised $19 million to date.

The company says this funding will go toward the company’s next generation of glove hardware.

I got a chance to demo the company’s glove last year and there are certainly some bizarre experiences that are enabled by the product, which uses an external pneumatic box to expand and contract air pockets inside a glove form factor to make it feel like the virtual object you’re holding onto in VR is actually in your hand.

HaptX is bringing touch to VR with a pair of scary-looking gloves and a pneumatic suitcase

Needless to say at this point, the virtual reality industry’s consumer ambitions haven’t quite panned out as expected. The enterprise space has found slightly more enduring success, though much of the enterprise use hasn’t expanded too far beyond “internal innovation hubs” and pilot programs. HaptX seems to have zeroed in on the same enterprise customer base as other VR startups, with a lot of its customers using the gloves in design and visualization processes. HaptX has moved away from marketing itself as a VR-only company and has expanded into robotics, reshaping its offering into a solution framed by real-world input and real-world output.

Alongside the funding announcement, HaptX is sharing that it has partnered with Advanced Input Systems to collaborate on “product development, manufacturing, and go-to-market.”

The company is focused on enterprise and unfortunately doesn’t seem to be building a mech suit for Jeff Bezos, although they sent me a great gif of him demoing the technology earlier this year at a conference.

Daily Crunch: Facebook acquires a cloud gaming startup

Published December 19, 2019

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook acquires Madrid-based cloud gaming startup PlayGiga

Facebook is building out its gaming business — earlier this year, the company added its Gaming hub to the main navigation menu. And last month, it agreed to buy Beat Games, developer of popular virtual reality title Beat Saber.

PlayGiga, meanwhile has been working with telcos to create streaming game technology for 5G. It also developed a gaming-as-a-service platform, using Intel’s Visual Cloud platform, that will enable telcos and communication service providers to offer streaming games to their customers.

2. TiVo merges with technology licensor Xperi in $3 billion deal

Earlier this year, TiVo said it was preparing to split itself into two — a product and IP business — in order to make itself more attractive to buyers. Today, the company announced those plans have been put on hold as it has instead merged with technology licensor Xperi Corporation, in a $3 billion deal.

3. Spotify prototypes Tastebuds to revive social music discovery

Tastebuds (discovered by reverse engineering master Jane Manchun Wong) is designed to let users explore the music taste profiles of their friends. It will live as a navigation option alongside your Library and Home/Browse sections.

4. Uber’s ride-hailing business hit with ban in Germany

In Germany, Uber’s ride-hailing business works exclusively with professional and licensed private-hire vehicle companies — so the court ban essentially outlaws Uber’s current model in the country.

5. Snackpass snags $21M to let you earn friends free takeout

Sending people Snackpass rewards became a new way to flirt or show gratitude at Yale. And through the Venmo-esque Snackpass social feed, users could keep up with a fresh form of gossip while discovering restaurants.

6. PayPal completes GoPay acquisition, allowing the payments platform to enter China

Though China’s payment market today is led by local players, including eWallet providers like AliPay and WeChat Pay, there’s room for PayPal to grow in a market where digital payments per year are counted in the trillions, not billions, of dollars.

7. Tesla’s record stock price shows its investment in energy storage is finally paying off

A little over a year after sparking a legal firestorm for musing that he would take Tesla private for $420, Elon Musk is probably glad he didn’t. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Despite winter’s chill, the Northeast’s tech ecosystem is white-hot

Published December 19, 2019

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

Today, we’re digging into a host of data concerning the East Coast venture capital scene, specifically looking into the performance of its two key startup markets.

It’s 12 degrees Fahrenheit as I write this in my office situated between Boston and New York City — a perfect vantage point for studying these vibrant tech ecosystems. Let’s see what the data tells us.

The information we’re examining today comes from White Star Capital (often via CBInsights), a venture capital firm that describes itself as “transatlantic” and takes part in seed, Series A and Series B rounds around the globe. The group last raised a $180 million fund that TechCrunch covered here, noting at the time that capital pool was “oversubscribed from an initial target of $140 million” and would be invested into “around 20 new companies from the new fund, writing opening cheques of between $1 million and $6 million.”

With boots on the ground in New York, White Star cares about the East Coast, so the fund’s put dossier on the region isn’t unexpected. What it includes, however, is.

We’ll start with NYC and its surprising 2019 before turning to Boston, digging into its super-giant venture totals and hearing from Founder Collective’s Eric Paley on the state of things in urban Massachusetts.

New York City

White Star’s report details record-breaking figures for NYC’s current year. Off of effectively flat deal volume (New York City sees around 775 venture deals per year at the moment, or a little more than two per day), the overgrown town should set record venture dollar volume in 2019.

Observe the following, astounding chart detailing the abnormality of 2019 from a comparative venture dollar perspective:

By smashing 2017’s local maximum, 2019 appears set to crush the city’s record — and rich — venture investment totals. The graphic also manages to point out (somewhat embarrassingly) that Gotham will manage to best a number of European countries’ aggregate venture dollar investments by itself this year.

That’s is a useful bit of context as in the United States, New York City is always Number Two to Silicon Valley. But, this chart argues, being number two in the number-one market is still a hell of a lot of capital.

Putting New York City’s venture into even sharper comparative perspective, observe the following table:

Google buys game developer Typhoon Studios

Published December 19, 2019

Google seems to be shopping for game studios as it courts consumer interest for its Stadia game-streaming platform, announcing Thursday that they had acquired Montreal-based Typhoon Studios.

The young studio with 26 employees hasn’t released its first title yet, after being founded nearly three years ago, but their upcoming game “Journey to the Savage Planet” will be released in late January. The title is being developed for “multiple platforms,” so for those looking forward to the title, it seems it will not be morphing into a Stadia exclusive at the last second.

A screenshot from the studio’s upcoming title

The studio will be joining a Stadia team in Canada led by former Ubisoft exec Sébastien Puel.

Google has been pretty vocal about its internal development efforts, including Stadia Studios led by former EA exec Jade Raymond. In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, the exec detailed that Google was hoping to build out multiple first-party studios to release content on the platform.

“We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners,” Raymond told the publication.

Levelset raises $30 million to improve money management for contractors in construction

Published December 19, 2019

Scott Wolfe, chief executive officer of Levelset, the New Orleans-based money management and payment startup for contractors in the construction industry, always thought he’d be in the grocery business.

His family owned a number of grocery stores around New Orleans and he was readying himself to go into the family business when Hurricane Katrina hit.

As the family business faced significant losses in their stores, the construction and contracting service they’d built to develop the land the stores were on had a tremendous opportunity. Within the span of a year, Wolfe had pivoted the family’s operations to focus on renovations and restorations and launched fully into construction.

It was during that time that Wolfe saw the need for some sort of software service that could manage cash flow and payment for the tens to hundreds of small business contractors involved in getting a project done.

So he built Levelset to be that service.

Now the company has closed on $30 million in financing from Horizons Ventures, the investment firm backed by Li Ka-shing, who is one of the world’s wealthiest billionaire property developers.

When Bart Swanson, an advisor to Horizons, met Levelset through a mutual friend who did some investing around the New Orleans-based Tulane University ecosystem, he immediately felt it was an opportunity that the Horizons investment committee would understand.

“This is a global issue,” says Swanson. “Sixty-four percent of construction businesses fail in their first five years because they have nowhere to turn for help,” when it comes to ensuring payment.

For now, Levelset is focused on digitizing billing and payments and providing insights into who is actually on a job site and the responsibilities that those workers have on site, according to Wolfe.

“There’s a ton of investment that has gone into the field,” says Wolfe. “What has seen a lack of as prolific an investment are things behind the scenes outside of the field that happen in the office. This is the accountants and administrative workers who have to take the information that’s in the field and turn it into money.”

For developers like Cheung Kong Holdings, Li’s development business, the promise of Levelset’s software is a huge boon. The construction industry runs on small businesses that lack software and services to process payments quickly. The time it takes to deal with paperwork can delay a project and ultimately cost developers money.

Horizons was joined in the new round by S3 Ventures, Operating Venture Capital, Altos Ventures and Darren Bechtel of Brick & Mortar Ventures. As a result of the investment, Swanson will take a seat on the company’s board.

In a recent survey of contractors by Levelset and T-Sheets by Quickbooks, more than half of contractors stated they were not paid on time and had significant cash flow challenges, and more than 75% craved more transparency in the payment process. This is no surprise, given PWC’s working capital studies in the past decade demonstrating that construction industry payment speeds are the slowest of all (83+ days).

“The effort required to get paid, and the cash stress put on contractors is unbelievable,” said Wolfe, in a statement. “The world’s biggest industry is full of small and medium businesses who are the fabric of our economy. It’s crucial that they can do their work without worrying about cash.”

Leapfin raises $4.5M to help companies track revenue while keeping its own profitability in view

Published December 19, 2019

Leapfin, a startup selling corporate finance tooling, announced a $4.5 million round this morning. The funding event was led by Bowery Capital, and included dollars from a number of former technology executives.

Before its newly announced investment, the company had raised just a small seed round. The small capital amounts may seem inconsequential, but they’re more strategic than anything. According to Leapfin CEO Raymond Lau, the company is running lean and keeping an eye on profitability.

After being founded in 2015 and starting commercialization of its product in 2018, the company is stepping a bit further out of the shadows this morning. Let’s talk about what it does, and why both its product and business philosophy are neat.

What it does

Leapfin helps companies track their revenue and cost of revenue expenses.

In more human terms, Leapfin helps companies track sales, and how much it costs to create and distribute its goods and services to customers. “Cost of revenue,” also known (roughly) as “cost of goods sold,” may sound like a jargony accounting term, but in reality it’s a bedrock business concept that anyone involved with startups needs to understand.

Let’s explain why. Once you deduct costs of revenue from revenue itself, you’re left with gross profit. That’s what businesses use to cover their operating costs. And, crucially, the larger a company’s gross profit is in relation to its revenue, the higher margin its revenue is; investors love high gross margin revenue.

In part, their high gross margins are why software startups are worth so much.

Back to Leapfin, its product is a shot at making business a more limpid process. In a call with TechCrunch, Leapfin’s Lau explained that many companies only have “one-in-thirty” visibility into their operations; that business owners only manage to fully collate their revenue and cost of revenue results monthly, meaning that the rest of the time they are flying at least partially blind.

The goal of Leapfin, according to Lau, is to provide a “single source of truth” for ongoing business results, using “robotic process automation” to help companies cut down on repetitive work. So Lepafin does two things: helps companies know where they stand financially, and saves them time on rote tasks that tend to come with accounting.

The company is pretty happy with its ability to sell its product so far. Lau told TechCrunch that it has found “very, very strong product market fit,” for example. Asked to describe when he felt that Leapfin had gelled with the market, Lau explained that in his view, product market fit is more “process” than a “tipping point,” but that he was confident in Leapfin’s product-market harmony when its customers began referring other companies (to a product that costs six-figures annually), and its sales cycle tightened.

Why the company is cool

Leapfin is run a bit differently from most SaaS companies that we cover. Instead of raising lots to invest in blow-out sales and marketing expenses, Leapfin is running pretty lean.

TechCrunch asked Lau why he only raised $4.5 million in the new round, which, given the product progress his company has made, felt modest. He said that the Leapfin staff “are outsiders in a way,” and that while his “peers are raising tens of millions,” his company could be profitable by the third quarter of next year. So Leapfin doesn’t need more money, and selling shares ahead of growth is an expensive way to raise capital.

Lau also said, however, that his company’s small raise “doesn’t mean that [it] won’t raise more down the road.” Another check in 2020 to ward off any downturn fears would make some sense. But Leapfin probably won’t sweat a crash too much, as the company keeps profitability and cash flow positivity “in sight,” according to its CEO.

Despite that, the company expects to hire quickly, expanding from around 20 people today to 50 by the end of next year. What we need next from Leapfin is an ARR number so we can vet just how much product market fit it really has.