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Only 5 days left for super savings on passes to Disrupt SF 2019
We know you’re hard at work bringing your early-stage startup dreams to fruition, but allow us to offer this hot tip. Super-early-bird-pass pricing for Disrupt San Francisco 2019 pulls a disappearing act on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Buy your pass now and depending on the pass you buy you can save up to $1,800. You can even select the payment plan option during checkout and pay for your pass over time. Viva la budget!
If you’re serious about realizing your startup dreams, and we’ve never met a startupper who wasn’t, Disrupt SF is a giant incubator for opportunity and success. More than 10,000 people from around the world will converge in San Francisco on October 2-4 for three programming-packed days focused on the early-stage startup community.
Some of the tech and investment world’s top names, minds and makers will join us onstage. With a mind-blowing line-up, and more announced every week, make sure to keep an eye on the growing list of speakers.
Here’s a prime example. David Krane, the CEO and managing partner of investing powerhouse GV (Google Ventures), will join us for an in-depth conversation. His fund has invested in hundreds of tech companies, including Uber, Nest and Blue Bottle Coffee. Learn more about GV, its processes and what might be on Krane’s shopping list. You won’t want to miss this rare public appearance.
Be sure to bear witness to Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition. Or better yet, why not apply to Startup Battlefield? It’s one heck of a launching pad, with a grand prize of $100,000. If you’re ready to show your startup to the world, don’t wait — the application deadline expires on June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Dive into Startup Alley, the expo floor, where you’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups displaying their talent, products, platforms and services. It’s networking at its best, and connecting with the right people is easier than ever. Yes, there’s an app for that. It’s CrunchMatch, the free business connecting service. Disrupt that pesky needle-in-a-haystack scenario and easily find and connect with the people you want to meet.
Speaking of the people everyone wants to meet… TechCrunch is searching for outstanding startups to apply to the TC Top Picks program at Disrupt SF. If selected, you get a free Startup Alley Exhibition package, a VIP experience and tons of investor and media attention. You’ll also be interviewed by a TechCrunch editor live on the Showcase Stage, and we promote that interview across all TechCrunch’s social media platforms.
On top of all of the above, there’ll be a slew of workshops, Q&A Sessions, demos and the Disrupt Hackathon. There’s so much opportunity to grow, connect and create. Join us at Disrupt SF 2019. Save your hard-earned money and buy a super early-bird pass before June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Enterprise healthcare platform Collective Health raises $205M led by SoftBank
SoftBank’s Vision Fund may be facing some challenges when it comes to restocking its massive reserves, but the firm famous for cutting big checks is leading a sizeable round for Collective Health. This startup focused on enterprise employee healthcare management announced a $205 million Series E raise today, bringing its total funding to $434 million since its founding in 2013. Its last raise was a $110 million round in February, 2018.
Collective Healths’ client list includes Red Bull, Pinterest, Zendesk and more, and it counts GV, NEA, DFJ Growth and Sun Life among its financial backers. Its platform is an integrator for the various insurance and benefit providers that large employers offer to their employees, and provides access to info, as well as claims filing, eligibility checks and data sharing across vendors. The funding will also help with additional engineering hires to continue to build out the platform.
The funding will help the company add more partner providers, a process that’s key to continued growth as it seeks to expand its footprint and ensure that it can serve customers and their employees across the U.S. In addition to the Vision Fund, this round included new investors PSP Investments, DFJ Growth and G Squared, as well as new participation from existing investors.
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Early-bird pricing extended one week for TC Sessions: Mobility 2019
Procrastinate much? Then give thanks to Saint Expeditus, the patron saint of speedy causes, because now you have an extra week to save $100 on your pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 on July 10, in San Jose, Calif.
Do not shillyshally, dillydally or otherwise drag your feet on this last-chance opportunity. Buy your ticket right now before the early-bird clock runs out at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on Friday, June 21.
TC Sessions: Mobility, a day-long intensive experience, explores the current and future states of mobility and transportation. More than 1,000 attendees — founders, technologists, thinkers, makers and investors — will explore the potential gains and the growing pains inherent with revolutionary technology and rapidly evolving industries.
Check out just some of the presentations and demos we have waiting for you. Don’t forget to check out the day’s jam-packed agenda:
- Demo with Jay Giraud: Damon Motorcycles CEO and founder Jay Giraud will bring a motorcycle onstage to demonstrate the company’s rider protection system that combines radar, camera and other sensors to track the speed, direction and velocity of up to 64 objects at a time.
- Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility? Leading early-stage investors, Michael Granoff, Ted Serbinski and Sarah Smith will debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.
- Building Mobility-First Cities: What does moving around the city of the future look like? We’ll talk with Avery Ash, head of autonomous mobility at INRIX and Seleta Reynolds, GM of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to figure it out.
Things get even more interesting when you demo your early-stage startup at TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. Display your genius in front of the most targeted, influential audience you could possibly hope to find — mobility-minded founders, investors, technologists and media.
TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place on July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Don’t disappoint Saint Expeditus. Act now and buy your ticket. Your chance to save $100 ends on Friday, June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Decentralized video infrastructure platform Livepeer raises $8M Series A
Video is the core entertainment medium of the web. Platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Netflix and more deliver millions of hours of videos to hungry consumers every day, and those deliveries will only intensify as video games move increasingly to streaming models.
Yet, delivering all of that content remains an expensive and challenging endeavor. The largest platforms employ hundreds of video-encoding specialist engineers to optimize the transcoding and delivery costs of their product, while also paying millions either for their own cloud infrastructure or to AWS or Google Cloud. Yet, few affordable options exist for startups — such as live-streaming apps like Houseparty (which was bought last week by Epic Games) — or even for large enterprises with streaming needs but without access to specialized hardware.
That’s where Livepeer comes in. The brainchild of multi-time founder duo Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang, Livepeer offers a decentralized platform for video encoding centered on the Ethereum network. Its early success has attracted the attention of media VCs, and the company announced today that it has raised an $8 million Series A venture capital round led by Northzone. Houseparty founder Ben Rubin joined the round as well, and video infrastructure behemoth Brightcove’s former CEO David Mendels also joined as an advisor to the company.
Livepeer is essentially a marketplace between encoding providers (the supply side) and app developers who need video-streaming services (the demand side). Today, developers can integrate Livepeer inside their apps by downloading the node, running the Livepeer media server and funding their account with Ethereum. So far, more than 100 events have streamed their videos using the platform, although Petkanics admits that they have been an “early-adopter, philosophically-aligned crowd.”
At this point in the life cycle of crypto and blockchain, it can be easy to be skeptical of next-generation technologies built on these platforms. But Petkanics believes there is a unique opportunity in video that connects well with this market.
In addition to the absolutely stupendous increase in video streaming across the web, there is a unique compute market for encoding: the millions of GPUs bought by crypto miners over the past few years. Those GPUs calculate the hashes required to make money in crypto, but in many cases according to Petkanics, leave idle the other processing units on those chips that actually handle video encoding. Livepeer sees an opportunity — at least early in the company’s growth cycle — to essentially bootstrap on top of that excess capacity for processing power.
Right now, Petkanics told me the company has more than 30 providers of compute power on the platform, and that the “supply side of the network is running, and it is the last thing that keeps me up at night.”
That excess compute power is driving significantly lower prices for encoding. Petkanics said that Livepeer is 10 times cheaper than incumbent streaming providers, and with additional development work in the coming years, he believes he can further improve that cost advantage. Today, he said that the platform can handle two streams for roughly 70 cents per day, compared to $3 per stream per hour of incumbents (a number that surely varies across companies with different levels of negotiation leverage).
Having compute power is one thing — getting customers to use it is another. The goal of the Series A funding, along with the company’s new Pilot Partner Program, is to begin implementing applications outside of the crypto-fans and enter the enterprise. The company is offering six months free for new participants as an inducement to try the platform.
Ultimately, Petkanics sees Livepeer creating a “token coordinating network” that incentivizes more compute power to join and match the needs of customers. Even more interestingly, the increasing need of particular video-encoding algorithms means there is an incentive for developers to add new functionality to the company’s open-source media server, creating a novel way to improve open-source sustainability.
Petkanics and Tang have previously worked together with Jordan Cooper on Wildcard, a redesign of the mobile browser that had previously raised $10 million, led by General Catalyst. Before that, they worked together at Hyperpublic, which developed databases of local information with an API for developers that sold to Groupon in 2012. Livepeer has 12 employees, with half based in New York City, and half distributed.
In addition to Northzone, Digital Currency Group, Libertus, Collaborative Fund, Notation Capital, Compound, North Island and StakeZero joined the round.
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India’s Bounce raises $72 million to grow its electric scooters business
Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that offers thousands of electric scooters for rent in India, has raised $72 million to accelerate its bid to impact how people navigate India’s traffic-clogged urban areas.
The Series C funding round for the five-year-old startup was led by B Capital — the VC firm founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin — and Falcon Edge Capital. Chiratae Ventures, Maverick Ventures, Omidyar Network India, Qualcomm Ventures and existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners India also participated in the round.
This new money means that the startup has raised $92 million to date. The current round valued it at more than $200 million, a person familiar with the matter said.
Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, operates in Bangalore. Its app allows users to pick up a scooter and, when their ride is finished, drop it off at any parking spot. It charges customers based on the time and model of electric scooter they choose. An hour-long ride could cost as little as Rs 15 (21 cents). The startup claims it has already clocked two million rides.
Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and CEO of Bounce, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup plans to use the fresh capital to add more than 50,000 electric scooters to its fleet by the end of the year, up from its current mix of 5,000 electric and gasoline scooters. Additionally, Bounce, which employs about 200 people, plans to enter more cities in India and invest in growing its tech infrastructure and head count.
“We have about 10 metro and non-metro cities in mind. Starting next quarter, we will start to expand in those cities,” he said. The startup also aims to service one million rides in the next year.
Hallekere said Bounce, which currently offers IoT hardware and design for the scooters, is also working on building its own form factor for scooters.
The rise of Bounce comes as it bets that shared two-wheeler vehicles — already a common mode of transportation in the nation — will play an important role in the future of ridesharing, with electric vehicles replacing petrol ones.
This bet has gained more momentum in recent years. Startups such as Yulu, which partnered with Uber earlier this year to conduct a trial in Bangalore; Vogo, which raised money from Uber rival Ola; and Ather Energy have expanded their businesses and gained the backing of major investors.
Their adoption, though still in their nascent stages, is increasingly proving that for millions of people, rides from Uber and Ola are just too expensive for their wallets. Besides, in jam-packed traffic in Bangalore and Delhi and other cities in India, two wheels are more efficient than four.
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Clockwise nabs $11M Series A to make your calendar smarter
Almost every organization, regardless of size, is inundated with meetings, so much so it’s often hard to find dedicated time to do actual work. Clockwise wants to change that by bringing machine learning to the calendar to help employees free up time. Today, it announced an $11 million Series A investment, and made the product, which had been in beta, generally available.
The round was co-led led by Greylock and Accel . Other investors included Slack Fund, Michael Ovitz, Ellen Levy, George Hu, Soraya Darabi, SV Angel and Jay Simons. The company has raised a total of $13 million.
Matt Martin, CEO and co-founder at Clockwise, says the company’s mission is to help employees make time for what matters, and they are doing that by applying machine learning to the calendar to free up blocks of time to concentrate on work. Calendars have tended to be pretty static, and this provides a way to bring a level of intelligence to automatically shift meetings to a better time when it makes sense.
After you download Clockwise you can set parameters for which meetings can be moved and which are set in stone, and other preferences. As Martin wrote in a blog post announcing the new tool, this gives employees “uninterrupted blocks of time to focus, think and innovate.” For now, it’s available for G Suite users.
Gif: Clockwise
You may think this is a one-trick pony that will be hard to scale, but Martin says in the past few months, Clockwise has recovered thousands of hours, and as they gain more data, the tool will get even more intelligent about meeting shifting.
Certainly his investors see the potential. John Lilly, who is leading the investment at Greylock, believes Clockwise is filling a huge unfilled need inside organizations. “Clockwise is focused on helping individuals and teams retake ownership of their time. This is not an easy feat — building the Clockwise product requires a sophisticated understanding of machine learning, user interaction and systems design breakthrough,” Lilly said.
Clockwise founders were part of the team at RelateIQ, a company Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. Since leaving RelateIQ they decided to put that experience to work on making the calendar more efficient.
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After Loot runs out of cash, founder and 17 team members join RBS’ digital bank Bó
Ollie Purdue, the founder of Loot, the current account aimed at millennials that went into administration last month after running out of cash, is joining Bó, the digital bank being developed by RBS-owned Natwest, TechCrunch as learned.
He’ll take up the position of chief product officer and will lead product development for the new brand, reporting to Bó CEO Mark Bailie. I understand that Purdue is also to be joined by 17 other ex-Loot team members, spanning product, marketing and design functions.
Echoing a crop of fast-growing independent U.K. challenger banks, the yet-to-launch Bó is being built on a new technology stack, operating as a separate unit and tech platform from RBS’ legacy operations. In other words, a startup within but supported by an incumbent bank. I’m hearing from my own sources that the digital bank is already up and running and is almost ready to go live, with around 1,000 RBS employees actively testing the product before a public launch this year.
Meanwhile, that Purdue and almost one-third of the Loot team is joining the RBS venture is particularly intriguing, given that RBS was an investor in Loot and was thought to be close to acquiring the startup before ultimately pulling out of the deal. This led to Loot scrambling for additional funding, which it was unable to obtain in time before running out of cash entirely after existing investors decided not to follow on.
Specifically, Royal Bank of Scotland Group indirectly owned a 25% stake in Loot via an investment by Bó! In January this year, RBS announced that Bó had invested £2 million in Loot following an initial investment of £3 million in July 2018.
It was also presumed by many fintech insiders that Loot had been white-labeled and was powering the Bó product. Clearly that was never the case, leaving questions unanswered around why RBS/Natwest would invest in a competitor, only to see its demise six months later. Now we know that it wasn’t for a lack of talent at Loot, as there appears to be little bad blood between Purdue and RBS. There are always multiple parties and dynamics involved in an acquisition.
To that end, one source tells me that Bailie was the main champion for Loot within RBS and that he was likely a draw for the Loot founder and other members of the Loot team. I also understand that Purdue and team feel they have unfinished business within the consumer digital banking space and that with the full resources of RBS they’ll have an opportunity to continue what they started at Loot.
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Meet Hatch Baby’s portable, Wi-Fi-enabled sleep device Rest+
Menlo Park-based Hatch Baby has prided itself on introducing “smart” nursery devices — including Grow, a changing pad with a built-in scale and Rest, a device doubling as a sound machine and night light.
Now, the company is introducing an updated version of Rest, with Rest+ as part of an effort to help further establish Hatch Baby in the family sleep space.
The Rest+ device will still have the sound machine, night light and a “time to rise” feature found in the original. But, with feedback from many customers and Amazon reviews, Hatch Baby has now included the addition of an audio monitor and a clock.
The audio monitor is essential for letting parents check in on baby while they sleep without going into the room and potentially waking the baby.
The clock is also a fantastic addition, in my opinion, especially for those with toddlers who can read numbers. These little people are big enough to get out of their beds but not mature enough to know moms and dads need to sleep at 4 a.m. Often advice passed from parent to parent is to put a clock in the baby room and tell kids not to come out until it shows a certain number.
It also helps establish healthy sleep habits in little ones. Most toddlers (ages one to three) need about 12 to 14 hours of sleep in a day, spread out between nighttime and naps, according to the National Sleep Foundation. However, as any parent knows, the older a baby gets, the harder it is to get them to want to go to bed.
Rest+ features include:
- Audio monitor: Parents can now check in on their child in their room without the risk of disrupting their little one’s sleep, right from their phone — no extra gadgets necessary.
- Sound machine: Parents can choose from a range of sound options, from white noise to soft lullabies. They can simply crank up the volume remotely when the dog barks or the neighbors throw a party.
- Night light: This feature, which stays cool to the touch, provides soft and soothing lighting for midnight feeding sessions or bright and reassuring light when the dark feels scary for older kids. Parents and kids can choose from a rainbow of colors to make it their own, but the optional patented toddler-lock setting makes sure that parents are the only ones in control, when needed.
- Time-to-Rise: Green means go! This feature enables parents to teach toddlers and preschoolers to stay in bed until it’s time to rise once the light changes color (and enjoy those extra minutes of sleep).
- Clock: Rest+ features an easy-to-read clock so parents can stay on track with their busy schedules and can help teach children to read numbers.
Any one of these features could cost parents a good amount of dough when purchased separately. A Philips Avent audio monitor runs just under $100 on Amazon, for example. However, Rest+ is just $80 (slightly more than the original $60 price tag for the Rest device), for all five features.
Something else that may make the Rest+ attractive to parents — it is Wi-Fi-enabled and portable so you can take it with you when you travel.
Whipping a sound machine, nightlight, audio monitor and clock all into one portable, Wi-Fi-enabled device can also save precious space in the nursery, and makes this a must-have item for many parents hoping for just a little bit more sleep.
Hatch Baby co-founder Ann Crady Weiss tells TechCrunch the Rest+ will only be available on the Hatch Baby site and is part of a plan to launch a full line of products aimed at getting parents — and their children — more precious sleep. Though she wouldn’t say what the company was working on next, she did mention we’d hear something about it in the coming months. So stay tuned!
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PayFit raises $79 million for its payroll service
French startup PayFit is raising a new $79 million funding round (€70 million) from Eurazeo and Bpifrance. The company first started with a payroll service for small and medium companies in France. It has evolved into a full-fledged HR solution for multiple European countries.
PayFit uses a software-as-a-service approach so that small companies can easily manage payroll and HR information from a web browser. Everything stays up-to-date and compliant with labor regulation.
After you enter information about your employees, PayFit automatically generates pay slips every month. Your employees receive an email when their pay slips are ready. If somebody is getting a raise, you can connect to your PayFit account and modify an amount for all pay slips going forward.
When it comes to payroll taxes, the service automatically reminds you when you have to pay them and how much you’re supposed to pay. You also can generate exports for your accountant, see reports about your staff, etc.
And PayFit doesn’t want to stop at payrolls. You also can manage absences and leaves, expense reports and shifts. It makes sense to build those tools in-house as they have a direct effect on your payroll.
In order to approve expense reports and vacation days, you also can build an organizational chart in PayFit and decide who’s managing who.
While it’s easy to build an HR giant in the U.S., it’s a bit more complicated in Europe, as labor laws vary so much from one country to another. But the startup has managed to launch its service in France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. — Italy is coming soon.
The company says that it has developed its own programming language called Jetlang in order to transform labor code into computer code.
There are 3,000 companies relying on PayFit and 300 people working for the company. With today’s funding round, PayFit plans to double its workforce by 2020.
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Shyp is preparing for a comeback under new management
Fifteen months after shutting down, Shyp is getting ready to launch again. The startup tweeted today that “We are back! We’re hard at work to rebuild an unparalleled shipping experience. Before we begin operations again, we’d love to hear your feedback in this quick survey. We look forward to working with you and can’t wait to change the future of shipping!”
We are back!
We’re hard at work to rebuild an unparalleled shipping experience. Before we begin operations again, we’d love to hear your feedback in this quick survey.
We look forward to working with you and can’t wait to change the future of shipping!https://t.co/VqyxGOMrIG
— Shyp (@shyp) June 14, 2019
Most of the survey questions focus on online shopping returns, asking how easy or difficult it was to package the product for return, print the prepaid label, purchase postage or ship the product. The last question offers a hint about what direction the rebooted Shyp might take, asking “When returning a product, how likely would you be to use a service that picked up and shipped the product instead of having to ship it yourself?”
Shyp’s website doesn’t say when it will be back or what services it will offer, but it does mention that Shyp restarted in January 2019 under new management and backed by angel investors “with plans to disrupt the industry with what it does best: cutting-edge technology and a superior customer experience.”
Once one of the hottest on-demand startups, Shyp shut down in March 2018 after missing targets to expand to cities outside of San Francisco. When it first launched in 2014, Shyp initially offered on-demand service for almost anything customers wanted shipped, charging $5 plus postage to pick up, package and bring the item to a shipping company. Eventually it introduced a pricing tier in 2016 as it tried to find new approaches to its business model, before closing down two years later.
If the new Shyp does focus on making online returns easier, it will be bringing back one of its most popular services. The company expanded into online returns in 2015 after noticing that many customers used the app to return products they had purchased online.
TechCrunch has emailed Shyp for more information.
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