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New tool uses AI to roll back problematic continuous delivery builds automatically

Published December 13, 2018

As companies shift to CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), they face a problem around monitoring and fixing problems in builds that have been deployed. How do you deal with an issue after moving onto the next delivery milestone? Harness, the startup launched last year by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, wants to fix that with a new tool called 24×7 Service Guard.

The new tool is designed to help companies working with a continuous delivery process by monitoring all of the builds, regardless of when they were launched. What’s more, the company claims that using AI and machine learning, it can dial back a problematic build to one that worked in an automated fashion, freeing developers and operations to keep working without worry.

The company launched last year with a tool called Continuous Verification to verify that a continuous delivery build got deployed. With today’s announcement, Bansal says the company is taking this to another level to help understand what happens after you deploy.

The tool watches every build, even days after deployment, taking advantage of data from tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic and Splunk, then using AI and machine learning to identify problems and bring them back to a working state without human intervention. What’s more, your team can get a unified view of performance and the quality of every build across all of your monitoring and logging tools.

“People are doing Continuous Delivery and struggling with it. They are also using these AI Ops kinds of products, which are watching things in production, and trying to figure out what’s wrong. What we are doing is we’re bringing the two together and ensuring nothing goes wrong,” Bansal explained.

24×7 Service Guard Console. Screenshot: Harness

He says that he brought this product to market because he saw enterprise companies struggling with CI/CD. He said the early messaging that you should move fast and break things really doesn’t work in enterprise settings. They need tooling that ensures that critical applications will keep running even with continuous builds (however you define that). “How do you enable developers so that they can move fast and make sure the business doesn’t get impacted. I feel that industry was underserved by this [earlier] message,” he said.

While it’s hard for any product to absolutely guarantee up-time, this one is providing tooling for companies who see the value of CI/CD, but are looking for a way to keep their applications up and running, so they aren’t constantly on this deploy/repair treadmill. If it works as described, it could help advance CI/CD, especially for large companies that need to learn to move faster and want assurances that when things break, they can be fixed in an automated fashion.

Keepsafe launches My Number Lookup so you can see the public data tied to your mobile number

Published December 13, 2018

Ever wonder how much of your personal information is accessible to marketers? Well, there’s a new service called My Number Lookup that makes it easy (and free) for you to check the data that’s publicly available and tied to your mobile phone number.

The service was created by Keepsafe, maker of privacy-centric products. While there is a My Number Lookup website, the service actually operates over SMS — you just text HELLO to (855) 228-4539 and it will start sending you a report.

Keepsafe co-founder and CEO Zouhair Belkoura said that while marketers are able to access this information with relative ease, it’s difficult for consumers to check.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we make it super easy?’” he said. “Here’s a number you can text that tells you what information is publicly available.”

My Number Lookup

Specifically, My Number Lookup will tell you whether it was able to find a name, home address, age, gender, mobile carrier and associated people tied to your mobile number. It will even show you the data (several of the data points about me were missing, out-of-date or flat-out wrong), then point you toward Keepsafe Unlisted, a service for creating “burner” phone numbers (so you don’t have to share your real number widely), and also toward a Keepsafe blog post that outlines how someone can try to remove their personal information from various data brokers.

Belkoura admitted that even though you’ve got the report, you won’t necessarily be able to scrub the data from the internet. Instead, he sees it as more of “a wake-up call” that people need to be more careful about giving out their phone numbers. And if it leads them to use Keepsafe Unlisted, even better.

“Once information is out there, it’s very difficult to delete,” he said. “The internet is a place that just doesn’t forget.”

As for why the service operates over SMS, Belkoura said My Number Lookup will only provide data about the number you’re texting from. Hopefully that means users will only check on their own data, not someone else’s: “We don’t actually want to create a service where people who don’t have a legitimate interest can pay to look up information.”

Keepsafe launches a privacy-focused mobile browser

Robinhood launches no-fee checking/savings with Mastercard & the most ATMs

Published December 13, 2018

Robinhood is undercutting the big banks by forgoing brick-and-mortar branches with its new zero-fee checking and savings account features. With no overdraft or monthly fees, a juicy 3 percent interest rate and a claim of more U.S. ATMs than the five biggest banks combined, Robinhood is using the scalability of software to pass impressive perks on to customers. The free stock trading app already used that approach to attack brokers like E*Trade and Charles Schwab that charge a per-trade fee. Now it’s breaking into the larger financial services market with a model that could put the squeeze on Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America.

Today Robinhood launches checking and savings accounts in the U.S. with a Mastercard debit card issued through Sutton Bank that starts shipping December 18th. Users earn 3 percent on all the dough they keep with Robinhood, yet there’s no minimum balance or fees for monthly membership, overdrafts, foreign transactions or card replacements. That’s a pretty sweet deal compared to the other leading banks that all charge for some of that or offer much lower interest rates. The trade-off is that while customers get 24/7 live text chat support, they won’t be able to walk into a local bank branch. Users who want early access can sign up here.

Robinhood expects to turn a profit thanks to a lean 300-employee operation, earning a margin on investing your money in U.S. treasuries and a revenue share with Mastercard on interchange fees charged to merchants when you swipe. The launch could be critical to keeping Robinhood worthy of its $5.6 billion valuation from when it took a $363 million Series D in March just a year after raising at a $1.3 billion valuation. The 6 million-user app invested in launching a free cryptocurrency trading exchange early this year only to see coin prices plummet and mainstream interest fall off. But with banks hammering users with surprise fees and mediocre user experience, there’s a huge opportunity for a mobile-first startup to disrupt how we store money.

“Brick-and-mortar locations are costly. Our goal with this product was to build a completely digital experience so we can reduce our overhead so we can pass more of the value back to customers,” Robinhood co-CEO Baiju Bhatt tells me. [Disclosure: I know Bhatt and co-CEO Vlad Tenev from college.] “Saving accounts in the U.S. pay on average 0.09 percent and we all know the banks are making far more than that from the deposits. With Robinhood you earn 3 percent off all of your money. Mental math is hard, so if you look at the median U.S. household that has about $8,000 in liquid savings, they’d earn $240 a year.”

Robinhood will be sending invites to users in January for the new feature that they can use exclusively or alongside their existing bank. Anyone approved to use Robinhood’s stock brokerage is eligible, but users can also sign up directly for checking and savings with no obligation to trade stocks. Robinhood claims signing up won’t impact your credit score. Users get to customize a Robinhood-branded debit card that’s accepted wherever Mastercard is. Because the feature is run within Robinhood’s brokerage, it’s ensured by the SIPC instead of the FDIC, but you still get the same insurance on up to $250,000 cash.

One of the most appealing features of Robinhood checking and savings is getting access to 75,000 free-to-use ATMs in places like Target, Walgreens and 7-Eleven. Users won’t be able to tell just by looking at an ATM whether it’s in the network, but the Robinhood app features a map for finding the nearest one. You can deposit checks via Robinhood’s app too, and if you need to send a check, you can just tell the startup how much to deliver to whom and it will mail the check for you.

“These fees like overdraft fees — they’re not fees millionaires are paying. It’s ordinary folks paying. It’s actually more expensive for those that have less money and it’s cheaper for those that have more money. We think that isn’t right and we think that’s bad business,” Bhatt gripes. Because Robinhood built its own clearing house for moving money, and it lacks the overhead of traditional banks, it’s able to save enough money to make its no-fee structure work. “We want to build a financial services company that democratizes America’s financial system.”

Robinhood will have to convince users it’s worthy of their trust, as a security breach could be disastrous. There’s also the question of whether people are ready to ditch their bank branch. “Behaviors about and going into a branch are definitely changing,” says Bhatt. My biggest concern was not having any consistency in who I talk to when I need banking help. Bhatt tells me the company plans to roll out more personalized customer service features in the coming months, but there may always be edge cases that make the lack of in-person support annoying.

Getting into banking could open a lucrative revenue stream for Robinhood as it charts its path to IPO. The startup recently hired Jason Warnick, a 20-year veteran of Amazon, to be its CFO and get it prepped to go public. Wall Street will want to see a more robust business that’s not as vulnerable to foes like stock brokerage Charles Schwab, which is already lowering fees to stay competitive with Robinhood. Not only will checking and savings see users move more money into their Robinhood accounts that it can invest to earn a profit, but it also poises the startup to tackle more financial services in the future. More lucrative products like loans could make paying 3 percent much easier for Robinhood to handle.

NYC’s Work-Bench announces $47M enterprise investment fund

Published December 13, 2018

Work-Bench, an early-stage enterprise startup venture capital firm based in New York City, announced its $47 million Fund II today. It follows their initial $10 million fund.

Work-Bench is itself like a venture capital investment startup. A scrappy operation run by just five enterprise industry veterans, it defies convention in a number of ways, including setting up shop in New York City. While it’s based in New York, the company will invest anywhere in the country, writing checks for $1.5 million for Seed 2 and Series A investments.

Work-Bench’s philosophy centers around a sales approach and giving their startups entrée into some of the biggest companies in the country, many of which, not coincidentally, are based near their offices.

The company starts by trying to understand specific enterprise customer pain points, even before they send a founder in to pitch an executive. The startup founders are judged and guided by their ability to sell. In fact, one of the founders, Jonathan Lehr, says even before they invest in a company they will send them to pitch a couple of customers and take advantage of that two-way feedback channel as a way to understand the startup’s selling skills.

“Instead of starting with whiz-bang tech like a lot of West Coast VCs do, by starting with the problem and where budget dollars are being allocated, when we’re looking at companies from an investment perspective it really helps us connect all the dots a little a lot better. That’s because on the one hand the corporate executive is getting a solution to a pain point from the startup, and the startup founders are getting an introduction to the right stakeholder at the right time for them at the right organization,” Lehr told TechCrunch.

Work-Bench Team. Photo: Work-Bench

Work-Bench has set up their headquarters as space for hosting regular events that help introduce founders to key people in the community and learn about different subjects, such as writing a successful RFP, negotiating contracts and setting up a successful proof of concept (PoC). They also have work spaces where founders from the portfolio companies can interact on a daily basis and get direct feedback from the Work-Bench principals, who run a truly hands-on operation.

It seems to have worked. Among the enterprise startups funded with their initial fund were Dialpad, Tamr, Cockroach Labs and CoreOS, which was sold to Red Hat for $250 million in January. In all, they invested in 17 companies in the first fund.

The second fund is already under way with nine investments so far, including Scytale, a security and identity protocol startup; Algorithmia, which is working on DevOps for AI; and Catalyst, a customer success platform.

Fund II investors include co-anchors Industry Ventures and an unnamed Chicago family office. Corporate backers include Wipro, Schneider Electric and CA Technologies. Other investors include Fund I founders Craig Walker from Dialpad, Andy Palmer from Tamr and Tim Eades from vArmour.

Postmates unveils Serve, a friendlier autonomous delivery robot

Published December 13, 2018

San Francisco partially banned delivery robots because they obstructed pedestrians, so Postmates built one with eyes, turn signals and a mandate to yield. Serve is Postmates’ new cooler-meet-autonomous-stroller that it hopes can cut costs and speed up deliveries. The semi-autonomous rover uses cameras and Lidar to navigate sidewalks, but always has a human pilot remotely monitoring a fleet of Serves who can take control if there’s a problem. There’s even a “Help” button, touchscreen and video chat display customers or passers-by can use to summon assistance.

Serve will be rolling out in various cities over the next year, starting in Los Angeles. It does deliveries to customers that unlock its cargo hatch with their phone or a passcode, but it also can grab food from restaurants in congested areas and bring them to a Postmates dispatch hub from which delivery people can take packages the last mile. That could save Postmates money on delivery labor, but the company didn’t provide any information on how it might help transition couriers to other roles or careers.

“Somehow as a society we’re OK with moving a 2-pound burrito with a 2-ton car. All the energy is used to move the car, not the burrito, and there’s all the congestion it introduces” says Ali Kashani, VP of Postmates X special projects. So Postmates spent the last couple of years piloting autonomous rovers built by Starship and Robby before deciding only it had the on-demand experience to build the right bot.

Ready to share the sidewalk with this little guy?

Serve can carry 50 pounds of goods for 25 miles on a single charge — enough to make around a dozen deliveries per day. Thanks to a low center of gravity achieved by building the battery into the bottom of the chassis, it’s less likely to get cow-tipped. It uses Velodyne Lidar and a NVIDIA XAVIER processor to tell where it’s going. A Postmates spokesperson tells me, of the scalability and efficiency of the rovers, that “ultimately we believe that there will be a world where goods move rapidly at almost zero cost to the consumer.”

“We took time to figure out what is the language for the rover and pedestrians to interact with each other. If a robot is at a sidewalk and wants to be able to cross the street, it needs to show its intent to cross,” Kashani tells me. Thanks to a light ring around the top with turn signals and eyes that can indicate where it’s trying to go, Kashani believes Serve can be a respectful and natural part of the urban environment.

Postmates could offer Serve not only to its customers, but to companies like Instacart for which it handles outsourced deliveries. That business could pit Serve against delivery robot startups like $42 million-funded Starship, $10 million-funded Marble and $5 million-funded Robby.

A good robo-citizen

Avoiding becoming an obstacle to seniors, children and people in wheelchairs will be critical if cities are going to allow robots like Serve to operate. In December, San Francisco nearly banned the bots by limiting companies to three robots each with only nine total in the city that are relegated to low-population areas, can’t travel more than three miles per hour and must be supervised remotely by humans.

Postmates tells me it’s been working with the SF board of supervisors, including Norman Yee, and a coalition of logistics companies to develop a regulatory framework for issuing permits allowing limited autonomous deliveries. Postmates’ permit application is under review by the City of SF. Postmates is working with SF’s Emerging Technology Working Group, local merchant associations and pedestrian safety groups to figure out how to balance innovative tools that could increase local retail sales and reduce traffic with the public’s need for right of way on the sidewalks.

San Francisco made things much tougher for robotic delivery startups this week

There’s also the question of what happens to the labor Serve replaces. A Postmates spokesperson claims that Serve is about augmenting its fleet with super powers rather than replacing its fleet. The company does 4 million deliveries per month total in more than 550 cities, and some might not ever be within the scope of robots. But it’d be nice to see Postmates spin up some training courses or offer transitions to behind-the-scenes operations and customer service roles to deliverers that eventually feel the squeeze.

Interestingly, Kashani hinted at how Postmates might end up moving to an “Uber X, Uber Black Car” model where you’d pay more to have a human take your delivery upstairs and directly to your door, while you might pay less if you’re willing to grab your order from the Serve robot out on the curb. Essentially, Postmates Serve is poised to turn human delivery into a luxury.

Chorus.ai rings up $33M for its platform that analyses sales calls to close more deals

Published December 13, 2018

Chorus.ai, a service that listens to sales calls in real time, and then transcribes and analyses them to give helpful tips to the salesperson, has raised $33 million to double down on the current demand for more AI-based tools in the enterprise.

The Series B is being led by Georgian Partners, with participation also from Redpoint Ventures and Emergence Capital, previous investors that backed Israeli-founded, SF-based Chorus.ai in its $16 million Series A two years ago.

In the gap between then and now, the startup has seen strong growth, listening in to some 5 million calls, and performing hundreds of thousands of hours of transcriptions for around 200 customers, including Adobe, Zoom, and Outreach (among others that it will not name).

Micha Breakstone, the co-founder (who has a pretty long history in conversational AI, heading up R&D at Ginger Software and then Intel after it acquired the startup; and before that building the tech that eventually became Summly and got acquired by Yahoo, among other roles), says that while the platform gives information and updates to salespeople in real time, much of the focus today is on providing information to users post-conversation, based on both audio and video calls.

One of its big areas is “smart themes” — patterns and rules Chorus has learned through all those calls. For example, it has identified what kind of language the most successful sales people are using and in turn prompts those who are less successful to use it more. Two general tips Breakstone told me about: using more collaborative terms like we and us; and giving more backstory to clients, although there will be more specific themes and approaches based on Chorus’s specific customers and products.

“I’d say we are super attuned to our customers and what they need and want,” Breakstone said. Which makes sense given the whole premise of Chorus.

It also creates smart “playlists” for managers who will almost certainly never have the time to review hundreds of hours of calls but might want to hear instructive highlights or ‘red alert’ moments where a more senior person might need to step in to save or close a deal.

There are currently what seems like dozens of startups and larger businesses that are currently tackling the opportunity to provide “conversational intelligence” to sales teams, using advances in natural language processing, voice recognition, machine learning and big data to help turn every sales person into a Jerry Maguire (yes, I know he’s an agent, but still, he needs to close deals, and he’s a salesman). They include TalkIQ (which has now been acquired by Dialpad), People.AI, Gong, Voicera, VoiceOps, and I’m pulling from a long list.

“We were among the very first to start this, no one knew what conversational intelligence was before us,” Breakstone says. He describes most of what was out in the market at the time as “Nineties technology” and adds that “our tech is superior because we built it in the correct way from the ground up, with nothing sent to a third party.”

He says that this is one reason why the company has negative churn — it essentially wins customers and hasn’t lost any. And having the tech all in-house not only means the platform is smarter and more accurate, but that helps with compliance around regulations like GDPR, which also has been a boost to its business. It’s also scored well on metrics around reps hitting targets better with its tools (the company claims its products lead to 50 percent greater quota attainment and ‘ramp time’ up by 30 percent for new sales people who use it).

“Chorus.ai has helped us become a smarter sales organization as we’ve scaled. We have visibility into our sales conversations and what is working across all of our offices”, said Greg Holmes, Head of Sales for Zoom Video Communications, in a statement. “We’ve seen a drastic reduction in new hire ramp times and higher sales productivity with even more reps hitting quota. Chorus.ai is a game changer.”

Chorus has raised $55 million to date and Breakstone said he would not disclose its valuation — despite my best attempts to use some of those sales tips to winkle the information out of him. But I understand it to be “significantly higher” than in its last round, and definitely in the hundreds of millions.

As a point of reference, after its Series A two years ago, it was only valued at around $33 million post-money according to PitchBook.

“Maintaining high-quality sales conversations as you scale a sales organization is hard for many companies, but key to delivering predictable revenue growth. Chorus.ai’s Conversation Intelligence platform solves that challenge with a market-leading solution that is easy-to-use and delivers best-in-class results.” said Simon Chong, Managing Partner at Georgian Partners, in a statement. (Chong is joining the board with this round.) “Chorus.ai works with some of the best sales teams in the world and they love the product. We are very excited to partner with Chorus.ai on their next phase of growth as they help world class sales teams reach higher quota attainment and efficiency.”

Glose raises $3.4 million for its collaborative reading app

Published December 13, 2018

French startup Glose just raised a $3.4 million funding round (€3 million) for its reading app on iPhone, iPad and Android. The company wants to make reading books more social.

If you’re an avid book reader, chances are you always carry a pencil with you to write some notes in the margins. Or maybe you have a tiny notebook with important quotes. But that experience hasn’t worked well with e-books.

Sure, you can highlight text on your e-reader, in the Kindle app and other e-book apps. But it’s hard to do anything with them down the road. Glose wants to leverage your phone to let you do more with the book you’re currently reading.

OneRagTime, Expon Capital, Kima Ventures and Bpifrance participated in today’s funding round, as well as business angels, such as Sébastien Breteau, Patrick Bertrand and Julien Codorniou.

Glose has its own bookstore and lets you read your own DRM-free e-books. The app then keeps you motivated with reading streaks and other gamification aspects. But my favorite feature is that you can highlight text, write annotations and share them with your friends.

When your friends read the same book six months later, they can open the annotations in the margin to see what you wrote. You can follow booklists, create private reading groups and see the progress of your friends; 600,000 people have downloaded the app.

Up next, Glose wants to release a separate service called Glose Education. This version will be tailored for universities and high schools. Teachers will be able to create reading groups, assign homework, write down annotations for the class and more. This seems like a natural use case for a social reading app.

Wandelbots raises $6.8M to make programming a robot as easy as putting on a jacket

Published December 13, 2018

Industrial robotics is on track to be worth around $20 billion by 2020, but while it may have something in common with other categories of cutting-edge tech — innovative use of artificial intelligence, pushing the boundaries of autonomous machines that are disrupting pre-existing technology — there is one key area where it differs: each robotics firm uses its own proprietary software and operating systems to run its machines, making programming the robots complicated, time-consuming and expensive.

A startup out of Germany called Wandelbots (a portmanteau of “change” and “robots” in German) has come up with an innovative way to skirt around that challenge: using software built by the company, a person wearing a jacket fitted with dozens of sensors can now program the actions of robots from the 12 most popular industrial robotics makers.

“We are providing a universal language to teach those robots in the same way, independent of the technology stack,” said CEO Christian Piechnick said in an interview. Essentially reverse engineering the process of how a lot of software is built, Wandelbots has created a Linux-like underpinning to all of it.

With some very big deals under its belt with the likes of Volkwagen, Infineon and Midea, the startup out of Dresden has now raised €6 million ($6.8 million), a Series A to take it to its next level of growth and specifically to double down on its operations in China. The funding comes from Paua Ventures, EQT Ventures and other unnamed previous investors. (It had previously raised a seed round around the time it was a finalist in our Disrupt Battlefield last year, pre-launch.)

Paua has a bit of a history backing transformational software companies (it also invests in Stripe), and EQT, being connected to a private equity firm, is treating this as a strategic investment that might be deployed across its own assets.

Piechnick — who co-founded Wandelbots with Georg Püschel, Maria Piechnick, Sebastian Werner, Jan Falkenberg and Giang Nguyen on the back of research they did at university — said that typical programming of industrial robots to perform a task could have in the past taken three months, the employment of specialist systems integrators, and of course an extra cost on top of the machines themselves.

Someone with no technical knowledge, wearing one of Wandelbots’ jackets, can bring that process down to 10 minutes, with costs reduced by a factor of ten.

“In order to offer competitive products in the face of the rapid changes within the automotive industry, we need more cost savings and greater speed in the areas of production and automation of manufacturing processes,” said Marco Weiß, Head of New Mobility & Innovations at Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH, in a statement. “Wandelbots’ technology opens up significant opportunities for automation. Using Wandelbots offering, the installation and setup of robotic solutions can be implemented incredibly quickly by teams with limited programming skills.”

Wandelbots’ focus at the moment is on programming robotic arms rather than the mobile machines that you may have seen Amazon and others using to move goods around warehouses. For now, this means that there is not a strong crossover in terms of competition between these two branches of enterprise robotics.

However, Amazon has been expanding and working on new areas beyond warehouse movements: it has, for example, been working ways of using computer vision and robotic arms to identify and pick out the most optimal fruits and vegetables out of boxes to put into grocery orders.

Innovations like that from Amazon and others could see more pressure for innovation among robotics makers, although Piechnick notes that up to now we’ve seen very little in the way of movement, and there may never be (creating more opportunity for companies like his that build more usability).

“Attempts to build robotics operating systems have been tried over and over again, and each time it’s failed,” he said. “But robotics has completely different requirements, such as real time computing, safety issues and many other different factors. A robot in operation is much more complicated than a phone.” He also added that Wandelbots itself has a number of innovations of its own currently going through the patent process, which will widen its own functionality too in terms of what and how its software can train a robot to do. (This may see more than jackets enter the mix.)

As with companies in the area of robotic process automation — which uses AI to take over more mundane back-office features — Piechnick maintains that what he has built, and the rise of robotics overall, is not going to replace workers, but put them on to other roles, while allowing businesses to expand the scope of what they can do that a human might never have been able to execute.

“No company we work with has ever replaced a human worker with a robot,” he said, explaining that generally the upgrade is from machine to better machine. “It makes you more efficient and cost reductive, and it allows you to put your good people on more complicated tasks.”

Currently, Wandelbots is working with large-scale enterprises, although ultimately, it’s smaller businesses that are its target customer, he said.

“Previously the ROI on robots was too difficult for SMEs,” he said. “With our tech this changes.”

“Wandelbots will be one of the key companies enabling the mass-adoption of industrial robotics by revolutionizing how robots are trained and used,” said Georg Stockinger, Partner at Paua Ventures, in a statement. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen a steep decline in robotic hardware costs. Now, Wandelbots’ resolves the remaining hurdle to disruptive growth in industrial automation – the ease and speed of implementation and teaching. Both factors together will create a perfect storm, driving the next wave of industrial revolution.”

Revolut gets European banking license in Lithuania

Published December 13, 2018

Fintech startup Revolut is now officially a bank. While the startup initially expected to get its European banking license during the first half of 2018, the company has finally come out of the regulatory tunnel with a license in hand.

As expected, Revolut applied for a license through the Bank of Lithuania and is leveraging passporting rules to operate in other European countries. Users will see some changes over the coming months.

First, the company expects to roll out new features in the U.K., France, Germany and Poland. Right now, Revolut is more like an e-wallet that you can top up in many different ways. Users in those countries will get a true current account and a non-prepaid debit card in a few months.

After transferring your money to Revolut’s own infrastructure, funds will be covered up to €100,000 under the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. It should convince more users to switch to Revolut for their salaries and big sums of money.

Eventually, the startup expects to be able to offer overdrafts and loans. All fintech startups end up offering credit at some point as it’s a good way to generate revenue.

There are currently 8,000 to 10,000 people opening a Revolut account per day. Users generate $4 billion in monthly transaction volume.

It’s going to be interesting to see if current accounts will affect growth. It’s currently quite easy to open a Revolut account as users don’t need to go through a lot of KYC processes. This is going to change once the startup starts opening current accounts.

Bowery, an indoor farming startup, raises $90 million more, including to counter a SoftBank-funded rival

Published December 12, 2018

When in July of last year, SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a whopping $200 million round in the Silicon Valley startup Plenty, investors behind a competing indoor farming startup across the country, New York-based Bowery, were left reeling. Just one month earlier, they’d closed on a round that brought Bowery’s total funding to $31 million. As one of Bowery’s backers told us in the immediate aftermath of Plenty’s enormous round, SoftBank’s involvement “definitely gives you pause.”

Its involvement has not, however, prompted investors to give up. On the contrary, Bowery just today announced that it has raised $90 million in fresh funding led by GV, with participation from Temasek and Almanac Ventures; the company’s Series A investors, General Catalyst and GGV Capital; and numerous of its seed investors, including First Round Capital.

It’s easy to understand investors’ unwavering interest in the company and the space, given the opportunity that Bowery, and Plenty, and hundreds of other indoor farming startups, are chasing. As Bowery outlined in a post this morning, “traditional agriculture uses 700 million pounds of pesticides annually, and fresh food takes weeks” and sometimes longer to land on the dinner table. Along the way, terrible things sometimes happen, including E.coli outbreaks, like the kind recently linked to the sale of romaine lettuce in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Bowery, which is growing crops inside two warehouses in New Jersey, can promise people in New York that their bok choy didn’t travel far at all.

Bowery also appears to be gaining the kind of momentum that VCs want to see. According to the company, it started life with five employees three years ago; today its staff has ballooned to 65 people. It has established a distribution partnership with Whole Foods. It has partnered with sweetgreen, the fast-food chain known for its farm-to-table salad bowls, and Dig Inn, a New York- and Boston-based chain of locally farm-sourced restaurants.

Unsurprisingly, the company says it plans to partner with new retail, food service and restaurant partners in the new year, too.

Bigger picture, Bowery says it plans to build a “global distributed network of farms” that are connected to each other through a kind of operating system, and that it has already begun work on the first of these outside the tri-state area.

Whether it succeeds in that vision is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s hard to know how big an impact that Bowery, or Plenty (which plans to build 300 indoor farms in or near Chinese cities) or any of its many competitors will ultimately have. But given that we’ll need to feed two billion more people by 2050 without overwhelming the planet, it’s also easy to understand from a humanitarian standpoint why investors might be keen to write these companies big checks. In fact, the rest of us should probably be rooting them on, too.