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Lime raises $310 million Series D round led by Bain Capital Ventures and others
Lime just announced it has raised a $310 million Series D round. Led by Bain Capital Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Ventures, GV and IVP, the round values Lime at $2.4 billion.
“This new investment demonstrates the fundamental strength of our business and the increasingly rapid adoption of Lime,” Lime CEO Toby Sun wrote in a blog post. “The new funds will give us the ability to expand into new markets, enhance our technology, strengthen the team and pilot new opportunities. We will also continue investing in two critical areas: rider safety and city collaboration.”
In May, Lime partnered with Segway to launch its next generation of electric scooters. These Segway-powered Lime scooters were designed to be safer, longer-lasting via battery power and more durable for what the sharing economy requires, Sun told TechCrunch last year.
But this partnership hasn’t been without its issues. In October, Lime recalled some of its scooters due to battery fire concerns. The next month, Lime put $3 million toward a new safety initiative called “Respect the Ride.” Safety, in general, is a major concern. In September, someone lost their life after a scooter accident.
This brings Lime’s total funding north of $800 million. Lime, which got its beginnings as a bike-share company, has deployed its scooters and bikes in more than 100 cities in the U.S. and 27 international cities. Since June, Lime has more than doubled the number of cities where it operates in the U.S. Lime has also partnered with Uber to offer Lime scooters within the Uber app.
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Uber Freight co-founders and top dealmakers join logistics startup Turvo
Last year, Charlie Bergevin and Brian Cristol, co-founders of Uber’s trucking logistics business Uber Freight, heard Reid Hoffman say Turvo had some of the best technology he had ever seen. Frustrated with the direction Uber Freight had taken, they called up Turvo’s founder and chief executive officer Eric Gilmore.
It wasn’t long before offers were on the table and now they’ve joined Turvo full-time. Cristol as head of enterprise partnerships and Bergevin as an enterprise partnerships executive. Bin Chang, a founding engineer at Uber Freight, is joining Turvo, too, a move I’m told Cristol and Bergevin were unaware of until they’d already accepted roles at the venture-funded startup. Chang begins February 11.
“Brian and Charlie … have contributed so much to incubate this business and scale it to where we are today,” Uber Freight chief Lior Ron wrote in an internal email to employees shared with TechCrunch. “They were always on the forefront of exploration and innovation and were able to constantly push themselves, and all of us, to the next frontier.”
Cristol and Bergevin were Uber’s first B2B sales hires when they joined the ride-hailing firm in 2016. Tasked with finding product market fit for Uber’s final-mile businesses under the “Uber Everything” initiative, they began learning about the truckload transportation and logistics industry. That’s when they linked up with Curtis Chambers, Uber’s long-time director of engineering. Together, the trio pitched their idea for a logistics business unit within Uber to then CEO Travis Kalanick.
Turvo’s real-time logistics platformToday, Uber Freight has roughly 750 employees and $1 billion in revenue. While the loss of two of its key dealmakers, who established relationships with Uber Freight’s Fortune 1000 customers, is cause for concern, Cristol and Bergevin suggested the unit is a rocket ship waiting to take off.
“Uber Freight has by far the biggest market size and is by far the newest and it was made from scratch,” Bergevin told TechCrunch in reference to other Uber-branded businesses. “Sure we had the brand but with Uber Eats we had drivers, too, this was starting from scratch.”
So why are they leaving? The pair told TechCrunch they simply don’t feel like they are solving enough of the key issues plaguing the industry, particularly legacy systems. Uber Freight, for its part, focuses on freight brokerage, optimizing for top-line revenue. The business automates the backend operations that exist in transportation and truckload brokerage today, aggregating trucking fleets via the Uber Freight app and connecting drivers with shippers.
Turvo, on the other hand, works across the supply chain. The company, which has raised a total of $88.6 million at a $435 million valuation, according to PitchBook, helps shippers, brokers and carriers work together in real time using a software interface on their desktops and mobile phones. Turvo emerged from stealth two years ago with a $25 million Series A led by Activant Capital, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Upside Partnership, Slow Ventures and more. In November, the startup closed a Series B funding of $60 million led by Mubadala Ventures.
“Turvo’s platform is providing this solution to legacy logistics platforms and really maximizing all parts of the supply chain, not just pieces of it, which we were accustomed to at Uber,” Cristol told TechCrunch. “We were excited about how Turvo was innovating around the nucleus of logistics.”
Cristol and Bergevin officially began work at Turvo last week.
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NYC launches partnership network, ‘The Grid,’ to help grow urban tech ecosystem
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and CIV:LAB — a nonprofit dedicated to connecting urban tech leaders — have announced the launch of The Grid, a member-based partnership network for New York’s urban tech community. The goal of the network is to link organizations, academia and local tech leaders in order to promote collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and resources.
In addition to connecting member companies and talent, The Grid will host various events, educational programs and co-innovation projects, while hopefully improving access to investors as well as pilot program opportunities. The Grid is launching with more than 70 member organizations — approved through an application and screening process — across various stages and sectors.
In recent years, the tech and startup scene in New York has notably ballooned — evolving from the Valley’s obscure younger sibling to one of the top cities for talent, entrepreneurship and venture capital investment. And while the city has seen countless startups, VCs, accelerators and other entrepreneurial resources set up shop within its borders, getting the right tools in place is only part of the battle.
New York wants to prove its initiatives are more than just “show-and-tell” projects and city officials believe that building a truly sustainable innovation economy is dependent on all its local resources working in conjunction, allowing entrepreneurship to permeate every arm of commerce. With an institutionalized network like The Grid, New York hopes it can further fuse its pockets of innovation into one well-oiled machine, consistently producing transformative ideas.
“The Grid represents a promising new way for NYCEDC to work across sectors to strengthen collaboration and innovation, first in New York City and hopefully soon in many more cities across the country and around the world,” said NYCEDC president and CEO James Patchett in a statement. “It signals that New York City is leading with a new approach to technology and startup culture, with a real focus on diversity, inclusion, equity, and community.”
As one of the largest and most industrially diverse cities in the world, New York has naturally placed a heightened focus on the growing sector of “urban tech” — which has been broadly categorized as innovation focused on improving city functionality, equality or ease of living. According to NYCEDC, the urban tech space has seen nearly $80 billion in VC investment since 2016, with nearly 10 percent going to New York-based beneficiaries.
The launch of The Grid is part of an expansion of NYCEDC’s larger UrbanTech NYC program, which has already helped establish the New York innovation hubs New Lab, Urban Future Lab and Company. Alongside the membership network and a new site for UrbanTech NYC, NYCEDC is also launching The Grid Academy, an adjacent academic group with the mission of creating applied R&D partnerships between local academic institutions and corporate sponsors. The expansion of UrbanTech NYC represents the latest of several initiatives NYCEDC is pursuing to develop the broader ecosystem, coming just months after the EDC announced the launch of Cyber NYC, a $30 million investment initiative focused on growing New York’s cybersecurity presence and infrastructure.
The group will be led by a steering committee that will guide decisions related to strategic priorities, funding, events and communications. Members of the committee include some of The Grid’s largest government and corporate members, including the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Civic Hall, Company, New Lab, Urban Future Lab, Dreamit UrbanTech, URBAN-X, Urban.Us, Accenture, Samsung NEXT, Rentlogic, Smarter Grid Solutions, Civic Consulting USA and the World Economic Forum.
“Since its early days, innovation has been part of the DNA that is New York City,” said Jeff Merritt, head of IoT + Smart Cities at World Economic Forum. “Nowhere else in the world can you find an ecosystem that combines as many industries and nationalities. New York’s thriving urban technology community is a natural byproduct of what happens when you allow diversity, entrepreneurship and ambition to collide in one of the greatest cities in the world.”
The Grid’s first meeting will be held on February 19th at Samsung NEXT’s New York HQ. Membership applications for The Grid are accepted on a rolling basis and can be found here on the UrbanTech NYC website.
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Meditation app Calm hits unicorn status with fresh $88 million funding
Calm, the meditation and wellness app that launched back in 2012, has today announced the close of an $88 million Series B financing with a valuation of $1 billion. (We have not been able to clarify whether the valuation was post- or pre-money.)
The funding was led by TPG Growth, with participation from CAA and existing investors Insight Venture Partners and Sound Ventures.
As meditation grows in popularity across the U.S. — the CDC says it tripled from 4.1 percent in 2012 to 14.2 percent in 2017 — Calm has capitalized on the craze by offering a suite of mindfulness and wellness tools, from guided meditation sessions to a product called “Sleep Stories,” via a subscription.
But Calm is also meeting stress where it lives. For example, the company invested $3 million in XPresSpa late in 2018. XPresSpa is a chain of quick spa stores found in airports. Meanwhile, Calm partnered with American Airlines to offer Calm content within AA’s in-flight entertainment system.
The growth of Calm is hard to deny. The company says that it has topped 40 million downloads worldwide, with more than one million paying subscribers. Calm also says that it quadrupled its revenue in 2018 — the company is now profitable — and is on track to do $150 million in annual revenue.
With the new financing, Calm’s total amount raised comes to $116 million.
Moreover, Calm’s valuation has soared from $250 million at the beginning of 2018, on the heels of a $27 million Series A, to now hit $1 billion.
Here’s what co-founder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith had to say in a prepared statement:
We started as a meditation app, but have grown far beyond that. Our vision is to build one of the most valuable and meaningful brands of the 21st century. Health and wellness is a $4 trillion industry and we believe there is a big opportunity to build the leading company in this fast growing and important space.
Co-founder and co-CEO Alex Tew said that the funding will predominantly go toward international growth and increased investment in content.
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vArmour, a security startup focused on multi-cloud deployments, raises $44M
As more organizations move to cloud-based IT architectures, a startup that’s helping them secure that data in an efficient way has raised some capital. vArmour, which provides a platform to help manage security policies across disparate public and private cloud environments in one place, is announcing today that it has raised a growth round of $44 million.
The funding is being led by two VCs that specialise in investments into security startups, AllegisCyber and NightDragon.
CEO Tim Eades said that also participating are “two large software companies” as strategic investors that vArmour works with on a regular basis but asked not to be named. (You might consider that candidates might include some of the big security vendors in the market, as well as the big cloud services providers.) This Series E brings the total raised by vArmour to $127 million.
When asked, Eades said the company would not be disclosing its valuation. That lack of transparency is not uncommon among startups, but perhaps especially should be expected at a business that operated in stealth for the first several years of its life.
According to PitchBook, vArmour was valued at $420 million when it last raised money, a $41 million round in 2016. That would put the startup’s valuation at $464 million with this round, if everything is growing at a steady pace, or possibly more if investors are keen to tap into what appears to be a growing need.
That growing need might be summarised like this: We’re seeing a huge migration of IT to cloud-based services, with public cloud services set to grow 17.3 percent in 2019. A large part of those deployments — for companies typically larger than 1,000 people — are spread across multiple private and public clouds.
This, in turn, has opened a new front in the battle to secure data amid the rising threat of cybercrime. “We believe that hybrid cloud security is a market valued somewhere between $6 billion and $8 billion at the moment,” said Eades. Cybercrime has been estimated by McAfee to cost businesses $600 billion annually worldwide. Accenture is even more bullish on the impact; it puts the impact on companies at $5.2 trillion over the next five years.
The challenge for many organizations is that they store information and apps across multiple locations — between seven and eight data centers on average for, say, a typical bank, Eades said. And while that may help them hedge bets, save money and reach some efficiencies, that lack of cohesion also opens the door to security loopholes.
“Organizations are deploying multiple clouds for business agility and reduced cost, but the rapid adoption is making it a nightmare for security and IT pros to provide consistent security controls across cloud platforms,” said Bob Ackerman, founder and managing director at AllegisCyber, in a statement. “vArmour is already servicing this need with hundreds of customers, and we’re excited to help vArmour grow to the next stage of development.”
vArmour hasn’t developed a security service per se, but it is among the companies — Cisco and others are also competing with it — that are providing a platform to help manage security policies across these disparate locations. That could either mean working on knitting together different security services as delivered in distinct clouds, or taking a single security service and making sure it works the same policies across disparate locations, or a combination of both of those.
In other words, vArmour takes something that is somewhat messy — disparate security policies covering disparate containers and apps — and helps to hand it in a more cohesive and neat way by providing a single way to manage and provision compliance and policies across all of them.
This not only helps to manage the data but potentially can help halt a breach by letting an organization put a stop in place across multiple environments.
“From my experience, this is an important solution for the cloud security space,” said Dave DeWalt, founder of NightDragon, in a statement. “With security teams now having to manage a multitude of cloud estates and inundated with regulatory mandates, they need a simple solution that’s capable of continuous compliance. We haven’t seen anyone else do this as well as vArmour.”
Eades said that one big change for his company in the last couple of years has been that, as cloud services have grown in popularity, vArmour has been putting in place a self-service version of the main product, the vArmour Application Controller, to better target smaller organizations. It’s also been leaning heavily on channel partners (Telstra, which led its previous round, is one strategic of this kind) to help with the heavy lifting of sales.
vArmour isn’t disclosing revenues or how many customers it has at the moment, but Eades said that it’s been growing at 100 percent each year for the last two and has “way more than 100 customers,” ranging from hospitals and churches through to “8-10 of the largest service providers and over 25 financial institutions.”
At this rate, he said the plan will be to take the company public in the next couple of years.
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Showing the power of startup women’s health brands, P&G buys This is L
The P&G acquisition of This is L., a startup retailer of period products and prophylactics, shows just how profitable investing in women’s healthcare brands and products can be.
A person with knowledge of the investment put the price tag at roughly $100 million — a healthy outcome for investors and company founder Talia Frenkel. But just as important as the financial outcome is the deal’s implications for other mission-driven companies.
This is L. launched from Y Combinator in August 2015 with a service distributing condoms in New York and San Francisco and steadily expanded into feminine hygiene products.
Frenkel, a former photojournalist who worked for the United Nations and Red Cross, started the company in 2013 — roughly three years after an assignment in Africa revealed the toll that HIV/AIDs was taking on women and girls on the continent.
“I didn’t realize the No. 1 killer of women was completely preventable and I think that really inspired me to action,” Frenkel told TechCrunch at the time of the company’s launch.
Now the company has distributed roughly 250 million products to customers around the world.
“Our strong growth has enabled us to stand in solidarity with women in more than 20 countries,” said Frenkel in a statement following the acquisition. “Our support has ranged from partnering with organizations to send period products to Native communities in South Dakota, to supplying pad-making machines to a women-led business in Tamil Nadu. Pairing our purpose with P&G’s expertise, scale and resources provides an extraordinary opportunity to contribute to a more equitable world.”
The company is available in more than 5,000 stores across the U.S. and is working with women entrepreneurs in countries from Uganda to India and beyond.
“This acquisition is a perfect complement to our Always and Tampax portfolio, with its commitment to a shared mission to advocate for girls’ confidence and serve more women,” said Jennifer Davis, president, P&G Global Feminine Care. “We feel this is a strong union and together we can be a greater force for good.”
For investors with knowledge of the company, the P&G acquisition is a harbinger of things to come. The combination of a non-technical, female founder operating in the consumer packaged goods market with a mission-driven company was an anomaly in the Silicon Valley of four years ago, but Frenkel’s success shows what kind of opportunities exist in the market.
“With this acquisition investors need to update their patterns,” said one investor with knowledge of the company.
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Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3 billion valuation
Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. Depending on how much follow-on cash Reddit drums up from Silicon Valley investors and beyond, its post-money valuation could reach an epic $3 billion.
As more people seek esoteric community and off-kilter entertainment online, Reddit continues to grow its link-sharing forums. Indeed, 330 million monthly active users now frequent its 150,000 Subreddits. That warrants the boost to its valuation, which previously reached $1.8 billion when it raised $200 million in July 2017. As of then, Reddit’s majority stake was still held by publisher Conde Nast, which bought in back in 2006 just a year after the site launched. Reddit had raised $250 million previously, so the new round will push it to $400 million to $550 million in total funding.
It should have been clear that Reddit was on the prowl after a month of pitching its growth to the press and beating its own drum. In December Reddit announced it had reached 1.4 billion video views per month, up a staggering 40 percent from just two months earlier after first launching a native video player in August 2017. And it made a big deal out of starting to sell cost-per-click ads in addition to promoted posts, cost per impression and video ads. A 22 percent increase in engagement and 30 percent rise in total view in 2018 pushed it past $100 million in revenue for the year, CNBC reported.
The exact details of the Series D could fluctuate before it’s formally announced, and Reddit and Tencent declined to comment. But supporting and moderating all that content isn’t cheap. The company had 350 employees just under a year ago, and is headquartered in pricey San Francisco — though in one of its cheaper but troubled neighborhoods. Until Reddit’s newer ad products rev up, it’s still relying on venture capital.
Tencent’s money will give Reddit time to hit its stride. It’s said to be kicking in the first $150 million of the round. The Chinese conglomerate owns all-in-one messaging app WeChat and is the biggest gaming company in the world thanks to ownership of League of Legends and stakes in Clash of Clans-maker Supercell and Fortnite developer Epic. But China’s crackdown on gaming addiction has been rough for Tencent’s valuation and Chinese competitor ByteDance’s news reader app Toutiao has grown enormous. Both of those facts make investing in American newsboard Reddit a savvy diversification, even if Reddit isn’t accessible in China.
Reddit could seek to fill out its round with up to $150 million in additional cash from previous investors like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator or YC’s president Sam Altman. They could see potential in one of the web’s most unique and internet-native content communities. Reddit is where the real world is hashed out and laughed about by a tech-savvy audience that often produces memes that cross over into mainstream culture. And with all those amateur curators toiling away for internet points, casual users are flocking in for an edgier look at what will be the center of attention tomorrow.
Reddit has recently avoided much of the backlash hitting fellow social site Facebook, despite having to remove 1,000 Russian trolls pushing political propaganda. But in the past, the anonymous site has had plenty of problems with racist, misogynistic and homophobic content. In 2015 it finally implemented quarantines and shut down some of the most offensive Subreddits. But harassment by users contributed to the departure of CEO Ellen Pao, who was replaced by Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder. Huffman went on to abuse that power, secretly editing some user comments on Reddit to frame them for insulting the heads of their own Subreddits. He escaped the debacle with a slap on the wrist and an apology, claiming “I spent my formative years as a young troll on the Internet.”
Investors will have to hope Huffman has the composure to lead Reddit as it inevitably encounters more scrutiny as its valuation scales up. Its policy choice about what constitutes hate speech and harassment, its own company culture and its influence on public opinion will all come under the microscope. Reddit has the potential to give a voice to great ideas at a time when flashy visuals rule the web. And as local journalism wanes, the site’s breed of vigilante web sleuths could be more in demand, for better or worse. But that all hinges on Reddit defining clear, consistent, empathetic policy that will help it surf atop the sewage swirling around the internet.
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Workwell wants to be the companion app for your office building
French startup Workwell has released a major update to its platform. The company now provides an app to manage as many things related to your office building as possible from your phone.
The company started with a sort of intranet replacement. You could book meeting rooms, get a map of the office and contact your co-workers from the app. Workwell now wants to create a more flexible platform that expands beyond your company and beyond a single office building.
“The goal is to become the digital layer of every building,” co-founder and CEO Marie Schneegans told me. “We consider Workwell as an infrastructure product for buildings, just like water, electricity and internet. Workwell provides an interface to interact with the building, its services and people.”
Instead of a traditional service-based interface, Workwell is now organized by actions. If you want to book something, you tap on the booking button to book a meeting room, a parking spot or a gym class for instance. Similarly, the inbox has been unified to interact with both people and services in a single messaging interface.
Each person belongs to multiple circles. For instance, you can be part of a company with multiple offices around the world, part of a building and part of a co-working space. Each entity can have its own sets of services and features. It creates a more cohesive experience for the end user. It’s like being able to sign in to multiple Slack workspaces.
This way, you can use the app to badge in when you’re traveling to another city for some meetings with colleagues working in another city.
Eventually, Workwell wants to collaborate with real estate developers to integrate its app from day one. Imagine there’s a new office tower in town. Workwell could integrate with the AC system, elevators and parking sensors to improve the experience for all the companies working in that new building.
Real estate developers can integrate Workwell for free and hand it out to companies working in the building. Companies can then choose to add their own services by becoming a paid Workwell customer. Workwell is already partnering with Hines, Mirvac and Grand Paris Aménagement for new buildings.
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Bots are cheap and effective. One startup trolls them into going away
Bots are ruining the internet.
When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.
Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t working.
“Until now you just had to suck it up as a cost of doing business,” said Johnny Xmas, director of field engineering at Kasada, an anti-bot startup that strikes at the heart of the bot economy itself by frustrating bots with complex tasks.
Their system is simple enough. Bots, said Xmas, are the “white noise” of the internet. Once a bot is started, they keep going until they’re told to stop or their job is done. Kasada tricks bots into thinking that their job is never done. By serving up a small but difficult math puzzle before the site even loads, it tricks the bot into spending its time solving the puzzle and not scraping the site as it thinks it’s doing.
Weeks earlier, Xmas tweeted a photo of Kasada’s proprietary platform Polyform. A single bot made close to four million requests to a website in a single day. Instead of loading the target website, Kasada pushed its randomly generated JavaScript code that loads silently in the browser to the bot instead. For more than 24 hours, the bot was sinking all of the cloud processing resources into trying to solve an impossible math challenge.
“This guy’s [cloud] bill is going to be nuts,” he tweeted.
We troll bots for a living. This one made 3.7M unsuccessful HTTP requests in 24 hrs, and we responded to each with a js cryptographic challenge, which effectively tarpits the bot by sucking up CPU resources. Expensive, Lambda CPU resources. This guy’s AWS bill is going to be nuts pic.twitter.com/erfuvvQmru
— Johnny Xmas @Kasada_io (@J0hnnyXm4s) January 4, 2019
The company’s aim isn’t to defeat the bot, but the reason for starting it in the first place, said Sam Crowther, Kasada’s co-founder, in a call with TechCrunch. “We cost them money, making their projects not fiscally viable,” he said.
Here’s how it works. Each time someone — or something — visits a website, Kasada accurately fingerprints the requester, using several methods to determine if it’s a bot or not. If not, the site loads as if nothing happened, taking only a few milliseconds off the load time. If it’s a bot, Kasada throws the bot the puzzle, keeping it busy. The bot thinks the website has loaded and doesn’t trigger any warnings on the back-end, all while busily plunging its resources into trying to understand and solve the math problem. “You don’t want to alert the person behind the bot, or they’ll just keep trying,” said Crowther. That’s when the bot starts churning more and more of its resources, and eventually topping out. “The human launches the bot and walks away,” he said. “Often the account maxes out and runs out of money long before the human comes back.” Even if the bot is automatically adding more resources, it won’t ever solve the puzzle. All while the processor usage is spiking, the bots don’t have the resources to target other sites — whether it’s a paying customer or not, said Crowther.
“We’re cleaning up the internet,” said Xmas. “We want to disenfranchise bots from operating to begin.”
False positives are rare — just 0.07 percent of all requests are mistakenly flagged. The team often found that more often than not it’s an old, legacy browser that’s mistakenly flagged its fingerprinting, or that the browser is exhibiting bot-like behaviors through a malicious Chrome extension, for example. Xmas said the service sends a CAPTCHA puzzle to solve in case, allowing the human through.
Bot authors take weeks or even months to develop code that will target specific kinds of sites hoping for a big eventual payoff, Crowther explained. Retail outlets, hotels, major financial institutions and realty listings — all revenue-making customers in the company’s portfolio — are at risk of bots that, if successful, could reap a huge reward.
“One bot targeted a betting company we protected, grabbing odds so that the most cost-effective bets are being placed at the micro-level — like stock trading,” said Xmas. “They’ll put months into a bot that’ll defeat every bot detection system.”
But already the team is finding some bot owners meeting their match.
In one case, Crowther and Xmas — both based in the company’s Chicago office — said they had one company, which they declined to name, was the target of account fraud and scraping. The company came in and stopped the automated logins and scraping of identity documents — preventing a wider attack hitting some 30,000 consumers from identity theft.
“One case we had a betting site where 95 percent of the traffic were bots,” said Xmas. “Think of that. You’re paying for tons of servers, tons of bandwidth because you think you’re doing a ton of business — and you’re making a lot of money so it seems rational,” he said. “Then you find out that 95 percent of that was trash.”
“At first we thought, ‘oh shit, what did we break?’,” he said. “It turns out we broke an insane botnet.”
The two recalled how one suspected bot operator was so frustrated by the company’s anti-bot countermeasures, he sent an abusive note to the company.
“The guy who was running some bots figured out it was us who was stopping them,” said Xmas. “And he went to our website, hit the contact us button, and wrote a very angry letter.” Crowther said that the company caught the bot controller’s IP address because he submitted the “not very nice email” through its contact form. “We found out that he was located in Sydney,” where one of the company’s offices is located. Xmas joked that he told Crowther, knowing who the bot operator was, to “send him a t-shirt.”
Or, better yet, Xmas said, “take that angry email, blow it up, and make it the wallpaper in our Sydney office.”
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Little Spoon gets $7M for its organic baby food delivery service
Little Spoon, a startup producing modular packages of nutritional, direct-to-consumer baby food, has raised a $7 million round of funding lead by Vaultier7.
The subscription-based service delivers meals — a fixed $3 apiece — to customers’ doorsteps. To date, Little Spoon said it has delivered 1 million meals. Other investors in the round include Kairos, Chobani’s executive vice president of sales Kyle O’Brien, Tinder founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Interplay Ventures, the San Francisco 49ers and SoGal Ventures.
Among the business’s co-founders are Michelle Muller, chief executive officer Ben Lewis, chief product officer Angela Vranich and chief marketing officer Lisa Barnett, a former partner at Dorm Room Fund and Sherpa Foundry. The four launched the company a little over a year ago out of New York. Today, the site offers a rotating menu of 50 different recipes and 80 different ingredients.
“Our success is a testament to what we are seeing more broadly in the parenting space,” Barnett told TechCrunch. “There are a lot of demands for brands from this generation of parents.”
As an investor privy to rising trends within the technology and entrepreneurship space, Barnett became interested in the growing parenting tech sector.
“There has definitely been an eruption in the space,” she said. “I think there’s going to be the next big brand in this parenting space and I think that is what Little Spoon can be and is working toward becoming.”
Little Spoon members are given a personalized meal plan when they register with the service. The startup’s packaging is 100 percent recyclable, spoon included, which they say is a “developmentally advantageous form factor that promotes improved motor skills and mindful eating habits.”
The startup plans to use the capital to expand its line of baby meals.
And if you’re wondering why the 49ers invested in a baby food startup… “The 49ers were looking to partner with startups that drive innovation in and access to healthier lifestyles,” Lewis told TechCrunch. “They look for companies making it easier for the average American to live a healthier life, and we found a shared passion in our vision to make quality nutrition accessible to children everywhere.”
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