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Lively raises $6.5M to bring its comfortable and inclusive lingerie to brick-and-mortar stores
Roy Raymond opened a little store called Victoria’s Secret, now one of the most popular lingerie businesses in the world, because he was embarrassed to buy lingerie for his wife in department stores.
The brand was founded on the premise that men needed a safe space to buy lingerie for women and women needed a larger variety of sexy, angelic bras and other intimates to wear for men.
But it’s 2018. Women, today, buy lingerie for themselves. They want to be comfortable and functional and beautiful all at the same time.
“[Victoria’s Secret] was always about the angel and the fantasy and a lot of push up and wire so women’s bodies could conform to a marketing campaign,” said Michelle Cordeiro Grant, founder and CEO of direct-to-consumer lingerie startup Lively, and a former Victoria’s Secret senior merchant. “Inspiring women to be Candice Swanepoel is not feasible for most women in the world. I wanted to create a product that is for women and by women.”
Recognizing the gap in the market for bras that don’t stab you with underwire, she built Lively. To date, the company has raised $15 million in venture capital funding, including a $6.5 million Series A investment from GGV Capital, NF Ventures and former Nautica CEO Harvey Sanders announced today.
“Previously, women had two rows of products in their drawer. One row they wanted to be seen in … and the other row was ones that were more basic and comfortable — but no nobody wanted to be seen in them.”
Though she began work on Lively before the #MeToo movement, Cordeiro Grant says it pushed the business forward in a big way. In the last year, the size-inclusive startup has seen 300 percent growth. What began as a direct-to-consumer company selling $35 bras and underwear has expanded to offer swimwear, activewear and loungewear. Physical retail is next.
“Women have been ready for a conversation like ours,” she said.
The startup is using the capital to open brick-and-mortar stores, a trend among other e-commerce businesses. The first of several stores in the pipeline, a 2,700-square-foot location, opened in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood this July. Stores in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas are also on the docket, as is a partnership with Nordstrom that will have Lively selling a limited distribution of intimates across 11 stores beginning next week.
Lively competes with several other brands of direct-to-consumer lingerie and activewear, including ThirdLove, AdoreMe, TomboyX and Outdoor Voices.
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This tech (scarily) lets video change reality
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a method to turn one video into the style of another. While this might be a little unclear at first, take a look at the video below. In it, the researchers have taken an entire clip from John Oliver and made it look like Stephen Colbert said it. Further, they were able to mimic the motion of a flower opening with another flower.
In short, they can make anyone (or anything) look like they are doing something they never did.
“I think there are a lot of stories to be told,” said CMU Ph.D. student Aayush Bansal. He and the team created the tool to make it easier to shoot complex films, perhaps by replacing the motion in simple, well-lit scenes and copying it into an entirely different style or environment.
“It’s a tool for the artist that gives them an initial model that they can then improve,” he said.
The system uses something called generative adversarial networks (GANs) to move one style of image onto another without much matching data. GANs, however, create many artifacts that can mess up the video as it is played.
In a GAN, two models are created: a discriminator that learns to detect what is consistent with the style of one image or video, and a generator that learns how to create images or videos that match a certain style. When the two work competitively — the generator trying to trick the discriminator and the discriminator scoring the effectiveness of the generator — the system eventually learns how content can be transformed into a certain style.
The researchers created something called Recycle-GAN that reduces the imperfections by “not only spatial, but temporal information.”
“This additional information, accounting for changes over time, further constrains the process and produces better results,” wrote the researchers.
Recycle-GAN can obviously be used to create so-called Deepfakes, allowing for nefarious folks to simulate someone saying or doing something they never did. Bansal and his team are aware of the problem.
“It was an eye opener to all of us in the field that such fakes would be created and have such an impact. Finding ways to detect them will be important moving forward,” said Bansal.
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Paysend announces global account to compete with Revolut
Meet Paysend’s global account, a new way to hold, spend and send money in multiple currencies using a mobile app and a card. It looks a lot like Revolut’s basic features. But the company is trying to provide a more focused and robust experience from day one.
“We are quite different from both a technical infrastructure and consumer offering viewpoint. We own and control our own processing and this gives tremendous ability and flexibility to deliver a wide variety of services whilst controlling the entire consumer journey,” Head of Product Alex Murashko told me.
“But for me an important distinction is that we have a different approach to designing the product. We believe in simplifying the consumer experience so that instead of feeling like they are bombarded with a long list of features they have available a focused group of benefits.”
And it’s true that Revolut has launched so many different features that it’s hard to keep track of what you can do with your Revolut account. For instance, you can insure your mobile phone, save money using vaults, buy cryptocurrencies, subscribe to a travel insurance package and more.
So Paysend went back to the drawing board to focus on the essential. The company lets you top up and hold money in EUR, GBP, USD, Russian rubles and Kazakhstani tenge. Paysend is partnering with Bitstamp so that you can buy and hold cryptocurrencies in the app as well.
You can then covert your money into any of those currencies at interbank exchange rates with a 1 percent markup. Revolut adds between 0.5 percent and 2 percent markup depending on the currency.
What if you’re traveling to another country? You can use your Paysend card to spend money and withdraw cash in 125 currencies. You decide in the app the backup currency that you want the company to use.
When it comes to sending money, you can send money for free to other Paysend user, or send money instantly for €1 or £1.5. The company doesn’t initiate regular bank transfers. Paysend has worked on card-to-card transactions instead. You enter the card number of your friends and family members to send money to their card directly.
Sometimes, you need to send money to someone you don’t know that well. You don’t have to ask them for their card number. You can generate a payment link and send the link. The recipient can then enter their own card number to receive the payment.
This card-to-card transfer feature has already been live for a while as a standalone product. Going forward, global accounts will become the flagship product, but standalone transfers will remain available.
Paysend has already raised $20 million and there are 130 people working for the company. Global accounts are still in beta and should roll out to European users soon.
While Paysend is still a young and intriguing product, it’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves. In addition to card-to-card transfers, the company will differentiate its product from its competitors even further over time.
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The Winklevoss stablecoin is one small step toward crypto acceptance
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged 1-to-1 with another “stable” currency. In most cases, these coins are pegged to the US dollar and, as such, allow for true transfers of actual fiat currencies between parties using the blockchain. If you’re nodding off right now thinking about this, I would posit that these moves, however minor right now, are an important step forward in cryptocurrency acceptance.
The latest stablecoin to hit the virtual streets is the Gemini Dollar. This coin comes on the heels of the much-ridiculed Tether, a stablecoin created in 2014 that has been the the brunt of much criticism including suggestions that the team has been artificially pumping the currency with wash trades.
The new currency by Winklevoss-run Gemini is pegged directly to the US dollar on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that for every Gemini Dollar there is one actual dollar in a bank account. The Gemini Trust Company holds the deposits and has been officially accepted by the New York Department of Financial Services, the regulatory body associated with banking and finance.
The GD, in other words, is the first stablecoin to gain a truly official imprimatur.
“As the financial technology marketplace continues to evolve, New York is committed to fostering innovation while ensuring responsible growth. These approvals demonstrate that companies can create change and strong standards of compliance within a strong state regulatory framework that safeguards regulated entities and protects consumers,” said Department of Financial Services Superintendent Maria T. Vullo.
From the release:
DFS issued a limited purpose trust company charter to Gemini in October 2015 to operate a virtual currency exchange through which it offers customers services for buying, selling, sending, receiving, and storing virtual currency. DFS issued a limited purpose trust company charter in May 2015 to itBit, now Paxos Trust Company, which operates the itBit exchange, to offer services for buying, selling, sending, receiving, and storing virtual currency.
The NYDFS requires that the Gemini dollars “are fully exchangeable for a U.S. dollar” and that Gemini will maintain records of their movement. The requirements also include controls including AML and OFAC controls to present money laundering or terrorist financing. An independent accountant will examine the fiat-holding bank account to ensure that all of the stable coins are accounted for. You can convert and withdraw Gemini Dollars directly onto the Ethereum blockchain.
What all this means is that there is now a stable, regulated coin that should offset some of the traditional volatility of crypto. It’s an interesting – if limited – move by a big player in the crypto space.
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Global M&A activity is flat so far in 2018
U.S. tech companies continue to be the most active acquirers in the world, says a new report from Crunchbase and Mind the Bridge.
The pair crunched data on 22,000 startup exits since 2010, recording about 4,200 so far this year. U.S. companies, though less active this year than last, have acquired approximately 2x more startups than their European counterparts.
Overall, 2018 is a flat year for M&A activity, despite a record-setting 2017. 
Here are a few key takeaways from the report, which you can read in full here.
- There was a slight decrease in activity in the U.S., but Europe has really pulled back. European companies have completed 11 percent fewer M&A deals YoY.
- U.S. and European companies continue to make up the bulk of M&A deals. More than three-quarters of the transactions and the money spent involved startups from North America and Europe.
- Twenty-two of the top 30 world acquirers are from the U.S., which remains the most active acquirer of European startups, though Europe is closing the gap.
- Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are the world’s most active acquirers.
- The most active European acquirer is Paris-based Publicis Groupe, which is 20th on the list of top global acquirers. That’s a step up from last year, when the most active European acquirer was Germany’s SAP — 33rd on the list.
- European companies are increasingly buying more of their European counterparts. This year, 81 percent of European acquisitions were domestic versus 75 percent last year.
- Of the startups that exited, 55 percent were between five and 15 years old and had raised between $10 million and $100 million.
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TiDB developer PingCAP wants to expand in North America after raising $50M Series C
PingCAP co-founder and CEO Max Liu
PingCAP, the company behind MySQL-compatible distributed database TiDB, said today that it plans its global operations after raising a $50 million Series C. The round was led by Chinese venture capital firms Fosun and Morningside Venture Capital, with participation from returning investors including China Growth Capital, Yunqi Partners and Matrix Partners.
Based in Beijing, the company says it will also use the new capital to build more cross-cloud products. PingCAP is focusing on the North American market since it is the most mature cloud market, said Kevin Xu, the company’s general manager of U.S. strategy and operations, in an email.
Founded in 2015 by Dylan Cui, Edward Huang and Max Liu, PingCAP has raised about $72 million so far, including its $15 million Series B announced in June 2017. TiDB is an open-source hybrid transactional and analytical database targeted at companies that need to handle large volumes of data and plan to scale up quickly, but still want to be able to use the same database. Many of its users come from the financial, e-commerce, gaming and travel industries and currently include Mobike, Bank of Beijing, Hulu, Lenovo and Ele.me.
In terms of other distributed databases, TiDB is often compared to CockroachDB and FoundationDB. Xu says one of the main things that differentiatese TiDB from CockroachDB is its ability to handle hybrid transactional and analytical processing workloads at scale, in addition online transaction processing. It is also MySQL compatible, while CockroachDB is PostgreSQL compatible. He adds that FoundationDB is more comparable to TiKV, the key-value storage layer developed by PingCAP that recently became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, because FoundationDB is not a relational database like TiDB with a SQL interface.
In a press statement, Morningside Venture Capital managing director Richard Liu said “The database industry has always been a competitive arena, and PingCAP has secured a prominent spot in this crowded field by becoming the go-to solution for many large-scale Internet companies and financial services enterprises in China. Thus, we are glad to grow with PingCAP and continue building the TiDB ecosystem together.”
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Instacart brings on Mark Schaaf as Chief Technology Officer
Instacart has brought on Mark Schaaf as Chief Technology Officer.
Schaaf previously held positions at AdMob, which was acquired by Google in 2009 for $750 million. From there, he went on to build and lead a team at Google within the mobile display ad business. In 2015, Schaaf left Google to join Thumbtack as CTO.
Schaaf has been working on marketplace businesses since 2006, and explained that Instacart represents a particularly interesting marketplace to continue scaling.
“Thumbtack is a more consumer-focused marketplace with local service professionals and consumers, but Instacart gets even more complex,” said Schaaf. “It’s a four-sided marketplace, and then you overlay it with logistics. The goal is to make the physical world better with technology, and to build a tech core that solves a problem in the physical world.”
Though the company wouldn’t disclose current numbers around engineers, Schaaf plans to double the size of the engineering team by the end of 2019. According to Schaaf, there are a number of different marketplace dynamics at play to keep the engineering team busy: balancing supply and demand, logistics and routing, efficient batching and routing, and overlaying geography to all of that.
“When you think of all that, it brings up the classic engineering problem of the traveling salesman,” said Schaaf. “This will take a lot of data science modeling and algorithmic work, a lot of AI and machine learning, to make Instacart as efficient as possible.”
Instacart has been on a bit of a hiring spree lately, bringing on David Hahn as Chief Product Officer and Dani Dudeck as its first Chief Communications Officer. TechCrunch also learned that Instacart’s Chief Growth Officer Elliot Shmukler made plans to leave last month, which may signal that another C-Suite hire is imminent.
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As biological manufacturing moves to the mainstream, Synvitrobio rebrands and raises cash
The pace at which the scientific breakthroughs working to bend the machinery of life to the whims of manufacturing have transformed into real businesses has intensified competition in the biomanufacturing market.
That’s just one reason why Synvitrobio is rebranding as it takes on $2.6 million in new financing to pursue opportunities in biopharmaceutical and biochemical manufacturing. Under its new name, Tierra Biosciences, the company hopes to emphasize its focus on agricultural and biochemical products.
The company is one of several looking to commercialize the field of “cell-free” manufacturing — where biological engineers strip down the cellular building blocks of life to their most basic components to create processes that ideally can be more easily manipulated to produce different kinds of chemicals.
There’s a standard way to create these cell-free processes (described quite nicely in The Economist).
Grab a few quarts of culture with some kind of bacteria, plant or animal cells in it. Then use pressure to force the cells through a valve to break up their membranes and DNA. Give the goo a nice warm environment heated to roughly the average temperature of a human body for about an hour. That activates enzymes that will eat the existing DNA.
Put all of it in a centrifuge to separate out the ribosomes (which are the important bits). Take those ribosomes and give them a mixture of sugars, amino acids, adenosine triphosphate (the molecular compound that breaks down to provide energy for all biological functions) and new DNA with a different set of instructions on what to make and voila! Micro-factories in a test tube.
Along with co-founders Richard Murray of the California Institute of Technology and George Church, one of the living legends of modern genetics, chief executive officer Zachary Sun designed Tierra to be an engine for new biochemical discovery.
“Everything floats in the cytoplasm… We keep that internal stuff and that allows us to run reactions where a cell wall isn’t necessary. I want to reduce the complex system down to its component parts,” says Sun. “We look at this as a data collection problem. We want to use cell-free to tell you what to put either in a cell or in cell-free systems… We can collect more data faster using our cell-free system.”
The startup is already working with the Department of Energy research institution at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop processes to create vanillin (vanilla extract) and mevalonate (turpentine) from biomass.
It’s an approach that is already showing the potential for investment returns in life sciences and pharmaceuticals. For inspiration, Tierra can look to the South San Francisco-based Sutro Biopharma.
That company has signed a drug discovery agreement with Merck to develop new immune-modulating therapies (that bring the immune system into check) for cancer and auto-immune disorders, in a deal worth up to $1.6 billion if the company hits certain milestones — in addition to a $60 million upfront payment. Sutro raised more than $85 million in new funding in July (from investors including Merck) and just filed to go public on the Nasdaq.
According to Sun, the newly named Tierra has its own partnerships with global 2,000 companies in the works. “We’re looking to scale those commitments. We see the application space as being this natural products environment,” he says.
There’re multiple avenues to pursue, with the technology widely applicable to everything from pesticides to pharmaceuticals, flavorings and even energy.
Cyclotron Road team photos. 2016. Zachary Sun.
“Synthetic biology at its core is about applying engineering best practices to speed up the ‘design-build-test’ cycles in the reprogramming of existing or construction of new biological systems. By component-izing and modularizing the cell they can radically increase the speed of those cycles,” says Seth Bannon, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Fifty Years, which invests in startups commercializing “frontier” science.
For the investors, entrepreneurs and reporters who witnessed the birth of the cleantech bubble a decade ago and then tracked its implosion in subsequent years, the excitement this kind of technology elicits is another of history’s rhymes.
Technologies like Tierra’s aren’t new. San Diego-based Genomatica has been working on biological manufacturing for the past 18 years. The company is now exploring a cell-free system to grow chemicals that are used in the manufacture of materials like Lycra. Since 2008, Medford, Mass.-based GreenLight Biosciences has been working to bring its own biologically based zero-calorie sugar substitute to market.
What may be different now is the maturity of the technologies that are being commercialized and the perspective of the startups coming to market — who have the benefit of avoiding the missteps made by an earlier generation.
Investors led by Social Capital with participation from Fifty Years, KdT Ventures and angel investors seem to see a difference in these companies. And large research institutions are also marshaling resources to support the vision laid out by Sun, Murray and Church. DARPA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, Cyclotron Road and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and the Gates Foundation have all backed the company, as well.
“So many therapeutic molecules come from nature. As the DNA of plants, animals and microbes is read in exponentially increasing volume, we expect to find useful and game-changing chemistry encoded by it. Tierra’s platform will allow us to look for molecules which might otherwise be buried in the complexity of cells’ metabolism,” says Louis Metzger, chief scientific officer of Tierra, who comes from a background of drug discovery.
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The ambitious real estate ‘unicorn’ Opendoor just made its first acquisition, snapping up Open Listings
Opendoor, a four year-old, San Francisco-based company, has from the outset intended to make it possible to buy and sell residential real estate with a few key strokes. It seemingly gets closer to that audacious vision by the day. The company closed on $325 million in new funding in June in a round that brought its total equity funding to $645 million to date — and its valuation to more than $2 billion. The company has also raised $1.75 billion in debt, and two sources tell us more funding from SoftBank is imminent.
Opendoor’s cofounder and CEO, Eric Wu, who previously cofounded two other companies, won’t answer questions about SoftBank when asked. But there’s no question the company is one of the most capital-intensive startups on the scene currently. Opendoor bids on homes sight unseen, agrees to buy them, then — contingent on an inspection to verify the quality of the home (“sometimes customers aren’t aware of things like foundation issues,” explains Wu) — it sells them, charging a fee of “about 6 percent,” he says. (Recent reports claim this number can reach as high as 13 percent.)
To date, the company has largely been working with people who need to sell their homes quickly because of a new job or other life event. By using Opendoor, goes the pitch, they don’t get stuck paying for two mortgages when they can’t afford it. Yet Opendoor increasingly wants to help them buy that next house, too. Toward that end, the company has just acquired Open Listings, a four-year-old, L.A.-based startup that has aimed to make it easier and cheaper for buyers to purchase homes by automating much of what an agent would do, thus reducing the fee an agent would traditionally take.
Opendoor isn’t saying what it’s paying for Open Listings, which had raised $7.6 million from investors over the years, including Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Arena Ventures, and Initialized Capital. But all of Open Listings’ 45 employees will join the 900 employees of Opendoor, and the move gets Opendoor into a handful of new cities in which it wasn’t already operating, including San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, L.A., and Chicago.
The deal was also a very natural fit, suggests Wu. He says he met Open Listings cofounder and CEO Judd Schoenholtz in 2015, when Schoenholtz — through YC’s alumni network — approached Wu, whose last company had passed through YC’s program. Schoenholtz “reached out and wanted to share what they were trying to solve in real estate, so we met up and talked about problems we saw and our respective approaches . . . Judd was starting with the buyer side, and we were starting with the sales side, and we continued to share notes on how we were solving both.”
The acquisition is the very first for Opendoor, though one senses it’s just the beginning of similar tie-ups. In a call yesterday, Wu referred to other initiatives that Opendoors is exploring, including a kind of financing business, which Wu has been talking about for years but that sounds closer now to fruition. “We’re doing some things around mortgages that will integrated into the shopping experience,” says Wu, without wanting to elaborate further. Home improvement loans may also be on the horizon. (Wu says Opendoor “also wants to enable home buyers to personalize their experience.”)
Opendoor is also working more closely with developers, forming partnerships with “19 of the 25 largest home builders in the country over the last 18 months,” says Wu. The idea is for Opendoor’s customers to put down a deposit on a new home, with Opendoor operating quietly in the background to both help choose a closing date, as well as to sell those customers’ previous homes.
The big question, as always, is what Opendoor does in a sustained market downturn. The company is reportedly on pace to spend more than $2.5 billion on home purchases over the next year. Yet buying homes is a complicated affair. For starters, after Opendoor acquires each home, it has to ensure the home is up to code in order to resell it. Indeed, though the company is willing to buy homes built after 1960, Wu says a growing amount of its inventory was built no earlier than 1990.
Hanging on to its inventory, which Opendoor does for 90 days on average, would seem to pose an equally big risk, particularly given that the housing market is highly sensitive to interest rates and other macroeconomic factors that could prompt a market cool-off. We may even be seeing early signs of one right now.
Wu doesn’t seem concerned, focused as he is on creating a kind of virtuous cycle of home buying. Asked about housing market slowdowns, he shrugs off the question. Maybe he needs to operate that way, given the ambitious vision of Opendoor.
Says Wu when talk turns to rising mortgage rates and growing new home inventory, “We have a world-class pricing team to track data on a national and subdivision level that informs [what we do].” As for the condition of the housing market, “we aren’t commenting,” he says.
Pictured above, left to right: Eric Wu and Judd Schoenholtz.
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Packet hauls in $25M Series B as customized cloud vision takes shape
In a world where large hyperscale companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate the public cloud, it would seem foolhardy for a startup to try to carve out a space, but Packet has an alternative customized cloud vision, and investors have taken notice. Today, the company announced a $25 million Series B led by Third Point Ventures.
An interesting mix of strategic and traditional investors joined the round including Battery Ventures, JA Mitsui Leasing and Samsung Next. Existing investors SoftBank Corp. and Dell Technologies Capital also participated. The company has now raised over $36 million.
The company also showed some signs of maturing by bringing in Ihab Tarazi as CTO and George Karidis as COO. Tarazi, who came over from Equinix, likes what he sees in Packet .
He says they offer several advantages over the public providers. First of all, customers can buy whatever hardware they want. “We offer the most diverse hardware options,” he said. That means they could get servers equipped with Intel, ARM, AMD or with specific nVidia GPUs in whatever configurations they want. By contrast public cloud providers tend to offer a more off-the-shelf approach. It’s cheap and abundant, but you have to take what they offer, and that doesn’t always work for every customer.
Another advantage Packet bring to the table, according to Tarazi, is that they support a range of open source software options, letting customers build whatever applications they want on top of that custom hardware.
They currently have 18 locations around the world, but Tarazi said they will soon be adding 50 more, also adding geographic diversity to the mix.
Finally, each customer gets their own bare metal offering, providing them with a single tenant private option inside Packet’s data center. This gives them the advantages of a privately run data center but where Packet handles all of the management, configuration and upkeep.
Tarazi doesn’t see Packet competing directly with the hyperscale players. Instead, he believes there will be room for both approaches. “I think you have a combination of both happening where people are trying to take advantage of all these hardware options to optimize performance across specific applications,” he explained.
The company, which launched in 2014, currently has about 50 employees with headquarters in New York City and offices in Palo Alto. They are also planning on opening an operations center in Dallas soon. The number should swell to 100 employees over the next year as they expand operations.
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