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Perlego raises $4.8M for its ‘Spotify for textbooks’

Published September 10, 2018

Perlego, which has been dubbed the ‘Spotify for textbooks,’ has closed $4.8 million in finding. Leading the round is ADV, with participation from existing angel investors, including Simon Franks (co-founder of Lovefilm), Alex Chesterman (founder of Zoopla), and Peter Hinssen.

Founded by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, Perlego provides students and professionals unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of academic and professional eBook titles for £12 a month.

To be able to do this, it works with 650 publishers, including big names like Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Macmillan Higher Education, and Cengage Learning. Publishers receive 65 percent of each subscription on a consumption basis.

“Textbook prices have increased more than fifteen-fold since 1970, or three times the rate of inflation,” Perlego co-founder and CEO Van Malderen tells TechCrunch. “In the U.K., the average university student spends £439 a year on textbooks. This is only exacerbating the cost of higher education and the debt burden on students, which is set to rise again this year in the U.K.”.

In turn, Perlego says it helps publishers monetise their content to a large segment of price-sensitive students that would otherwise buy their books from the used-books market or download pirated copies. It also supplies publishers with detailed data on the consumption of titles.

“We are true subscription model,” adds Van Malderen. “For £12 per month you get unlimited access to the best textbooks. We do not operate a complex leasing model and publishers benefit [through] data collection, reduced piracy, no cannibalization from second-hand print sales”.

Meanwhile, Perlego says it will use the new funding to grow the team and support the company’s growth across the U.K. and Europe. It will also further invest in developing its product for students and professionals.

In addition, Perlego has joined Founders Factory this month as part of its edtech accelerator programme, which is backed by Holtzbrinck Macmillan one of the world’s leading academic publishers.

Unmortgage scores £10M seed round to offer ‘part-own, part-rental’ housing

Published September 9, 2018

“Unmortgage enables everyone to live in the home they want to, that’s our mission,” Unmortgage co-founder and CEO Ray Rafiq-Omar tells me. “We do that by allowing people to buy as little as five percent of a home and rent the rest. So there’s no mortgage involved, hence the name Unmortgage”.

The burgeoning London startup, which aims to launch next year having just closed a hefty £10 million seed round, calls its model “part-own, part-rent”. However, unlike traditional shared ownership schemes, Unmortgage doesn’t want you to have to take out a mortgage to buy the first portion of your own, and it isn’t targeting new-builds.

Like a number of other fintech/proptech companies, such as Strideup and Proportunity, it is the latest attempt to solve the increasing difficulty first time buyers face trying to get on the housing ladder as rising house prices typically outstrip wages. If people rent, they often cannot save the large deposit required for a mortgage. It is this “vicious circle” that Unmortgage want to break: by helping families that can afford to rent gradually buy a home.

“The way we like to think about it is the security of home ownership with the flexibility of renting,” says Rafiq-Omar. “You find a home. If we like it too, we’ll but it together in partnership. You’ll own your bit and you’ll pay rent on our bit. Then you have the option to buy more of your home from as little as a pound at any time”.

To keeps things fair — Rafiq-Omar stresses that fairness is “our core value” — Unmortgage will revalue the property on a monthly basis so you’ll always have an up-to-date valuation when increasing your stake. And at any point you are free to either buy out Unmortgage with a mortgage or an inheritance or to give the company three month’s notice for it to buy you out so you can take your cash at market price and move on to your next home.

Likewise, the rent you pay on the part of the property you don’t own is pegged to rises to inflation. But in case inflation outpaces market rate rents, Rafiq-Omar says Unmortgage will allow the customer to ask for a rent review. “They have the ability to not have to worry about their rent but if they are worried they can have it reviewed,” he says.

Unmortgage will use institutional funding to finance its part of the homes it purchases, who Rafiq-Omar says would like to own residential property, and the secure income stream it brings, but don’t want to be landlords or end up in the media for behaving like a landlord. “Unmortgage gives them a way to invest in residential property while solving societal need, which is [that] people want to own their own homes and have security over their housing situation”.

Meanwhile, investors in Unmortgage’s seed round are fintech venture capital firms Anthemis Exponential Ventures, and Augmentum Fintech plc. “”We’re grateful to our investors for believing in us and our social mission and excited to be working with them – especially Tee Pruitt [of Anthemis], who was instrumental through much of this process,” adds Rafiq-Omar.

Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong: ‘I’d love to run a public company’

Published September 7, 2018

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, wants to take his company public — maybe on the blockchain.

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, Armstrong dished on his ambitions for the future of Coinbase.

“We are self-sustaining,” Armstrong said. “You know, we’ve been profitable for quite a while. We don’t have any plans to raise additional capital at this point, but never say never … Someday I’d love to run a public company.”

Armstrong didn’t rule out going public on the blockchain. He said he’s even considered going public on his own platform.

“I think it would be very on mission for us to do that because, of course, we are creating an open financial system,” he said. “Companies could list their stock, which are really tokens, and instead of a cap table, you tokenize the cap table. But I don’t have any decisions on that to share at the moment.”

Coinbase now supports buying and selling Ethereum Classic

An innovative exit would be very on-brand for Coinbase. As one of the earliest players in crypto-mania, the company has certainly had to make things up as it goes. It’s worked, as Armstrong said; the company is profitable and was the first-ever cryptocurrency startup to garner a billion-dollar valuation.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is backed by IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32, Draper Associates and more. The company was valued at $1.6 billion in August 2017 with a $100 million Series D last year. The financing was reportedly the largest-ever for a crypto startup.

Watch the full interview with Brian Armstrong below.

And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2018 is… Forethought

Published September 7, 2018

At the very beginning, there were 21 startups. After three days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.

Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.

After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: CB Therapeutics, Forethought, Mira, Origami Labs and Unbound.

These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Cyan Banister (Founders Fund), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Jeff Clavier (Uncork Capital), Kirsten Green (Forerunner Ventures), Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).

And now, meet the Startup Battlefield winner of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018.

Winner: Forethought

Forethought has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.

Read more about Forethought in our separate post.

Runner-Up: Unbound

Unbound makes fashion-forward vibrators, and their latest is the Palma. The new device masquerades as a ring, offers multiple speeds, and is completely waterproof. And the team plans to add accelerometer features.

Read more about Unbound in our separate post.

Deep-linking startup Branch is raising more than $100M at a unicorn valuation

Published September 7, 2018

Branch, the deep-linking startup backed by Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, will enter the unicorn club with an upcoming funding round.

The four-year-old company, which helps brands create links between websites and mobile apps, has authorized the sale of $129 million in Series D shares, according to sources and confirmed by PitchBook, which tracks venture capital deals. The infusion of capital values the company at roughly $1 billion.

In an e-mail this morning, Branch CEO Alex Austin declined to comment.

The Redwood City-based startup closed a $60 million Series C led by Playground in April 2017, bringing its total equity raised to $113 million. It’s also backed by NEA, Pear Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Madrona Ventures. Rubin, for his part, is a co-founder of Android, as well as the founder of Essential, a smartphone company that, though highly valued, has had less success.

Branch’s deep-linking platform helps brands drive app growth, conversions, user engagement and retention.

Deep links are links that take you to a specific piece of web content, rather than a website’s homepage. This, for example, is a deep link. This is not.

A Brief History Of Deep Linking

Deep links are used to connect web or e-mail content with apps. That way, when you’re doing some online shopping using your phone and you click on a link to an item on Jet.com, you’re taken to the Jet app installed on your phone, instead of Jet’s desktop site, which would provide a much poorer mobile experience.

Branch supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users. The company counts Airbnb, Amazon, Bing, Pinterest, Reddit, Slack, Tinder and several others as customers.

Following its previous round of venture capital funding, Austin told TechCrunch that the company had seen “tremendous growth” ahead of the raise.

“[We] have been fortunate enough to become the clear market leader,” he said. “There’s so much more we can accomplish in deep linking and this money will be used to fund Branch’s continued platform growth.”

Rigetti announces its hybrid quantum computing platform — and a $1M prize

Published September 7, 2018

Rigetti, a quantum computing startup that is challenging the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Google in this nascent space, today at our TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 event announced the launch of its new hybrid quantum computing platform.

While Rigetti already offered API access to its quantum computing platform, this new service, dubbed Quantum Cloud Services (QCS), offers a combination of a cloud-based classical computer, its Forest development platform and access to Rigetti’s quantum backends. Thanks to this, developers will be able to write and test their algorithms significantly faster than with the company’s previous approach.

In addition to the new platform, which is now in private testing, Rigetti also announced a $1 million prize for the first team that manages to show quantum advantage on this hybrid platform. Quantum advantage, at least according to Rigetti’s definition, is the milestone where a quantum system will be able to solve a real problem that is beyond the reach of classical computers. The company plans to announce more details around this prize at the end of October.

As Rigetti founder and CEO Chad Rigetti told me, the reason the hybrid approach is faster is simply because the two systems are closely integrated — and you will likely always need a classical computer in parallel with a quantum computer for solving virtually any problem. And the company expects that this hybrid approach — and likely the 128-qubit machine that Rigetti plans to launch next year — will allow for running an algorithm that demonstrates quantum advantage. The current API Rigetti makes available to developers features 8-qubit and 19-qubit machines. Those machines are nowhere near powerful enough to show quantum advantage, but they do give developers the ability to start experimenting with using quantum computers.

On the old platform, Rigetti also noted, the kind of loops you need to run to use the quantum machine for machine learning, for example, had a latency on the order of a second or more. “A lot of these algorithms require thousands and tens of thousands of iterations,” Rigetti said. “And now we have reduced this down to the order of milliseconds.”

Rigetti also today announced that it is partnering with a number of leading quantum computing startups (the kind that work on the software, not the hardware side of this ecosystem). These startups, including Entropica Labs, Horizon Quantum Computing, OTI Lumionics, ProteinQure, QC Ware and Riverlane Research, will build and distribute the applications through the Rigetti QCS platform.

Starry wants to put high-speed 5G internet in reach of everyone

Published September 7, 2018

Starry, a Boston startup, wants deliver high-speed 5G internet in major cities at a reasonable price. Today, it announced it is expanding service from its initial launch in Boston to New York City. The company also announced a deal with Related Companies, a large national affordable housing owner, to host Starry equipment on its buildings and offer Starry service to its tenants.

The Starry solution consists of three parts: The beam sits on a high roof. The point sits on a lower roof and the consumer gets a Starry Station, which acts as a modem of sorts to deliver the internet service to the home. As they put it, internet access becomes an extension of the property.

Diagram: Starry

While the hardware solution is impressive in itself, it allows Starry to offer high-speed internet to consumers at a more affordable price point than traditional large providers. Company founder and CEO Chet Kanojia says his company can provide up to 200 Megabits per second service, up and down, for just $50 a month with no data caps or long-term contracts. Installation is free and the company includes 24/7 customer care at no additional cost.

While it’s hard to compare pricing across services, Starry should appeal to cord cutters, who have dropped cable TV for more affordable streaming alternatives and have been looking for a way to free themselves from large internet service providers. It’s fair to say that no other provider offers this kind of speed up and down for that price.

The solution requires high rooftops to place the enabling infrastructure and the arrangement with Related is particularly interesting in this context. The deal is good for both parties, giving Starry the infrastructure it needs to place its equipment in major cities, while providing Related tenants with low-cost internet access starting later this year.

“Our first strategic partnership is with Related’s properties, which is a big property ownership company in all the major cities. It allows us to basically extend our network using their infrastructure, rooftops and buildings,” Kanojia said.

The startup plans to provide service to other New York City residents starting in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn this fall, and expanding to other parts of the city over time. They also available in Washington and LA with 18 other cities coming on board in the next year.

The company launched in 2014 and spent a couple of years developing the hardware part of the solution. It has raised $163 million, according to data supplied by the company. The most recent round was $100 million Series C in July. It’s worth noting that their new partner, Related joined that most recent investment.

Kanojia helped launched Aereo, a startup that wanted to deliver low-cost television by placing antennas on rooftops and letting consumers view broadcast TV over the internet. That idea was shot down by the US Supreme Court when broadcasters sued for copyright violations, and the company went out of business soon after. Starry could be seen as an extension of that idea, but delivering internet instead of the TV signals themselves.

Sonatype raises $80 million to build out Nexus platform

Published September 7, 2018

Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open-source company, has raised $80 million from investment firm TPG.

The company said the financing will help extend its Nexus platform, which it touts as an enterprise ready repository manager and library, which among other things tracks code and helps to keep everything in the devops pipeline up-to-date and secure.

It’s that kind of technology that Sonatype says can prevent another Equifax -style breach of over 147 million consumers’ data. Earlier this year, the company found over dozens of Fortune Global 100 companies that downloaded outdated and vulnerable versions of Apache Struts, which Equifax failed to patch or update.

Sonatype’s chief executive Wayne Jackson his company can help prevent those type of breaches.

“We monitor literally millions of open source commits per day,” he told TechCrunch. “Last year hundreds of billions of components were downloaded by software developers, 12 percent of which had known security defects.”

The funding will go to extend the company’s Nexus platform, Jackson said.

The company said it’s had an 81 percent increase in year-over-year sales in the first-half of the year, and 1.5 million users added to its flagship Nexus platform since January. In all, the company has more than 10 million software developers and 1,000 enterprises on Nexus worldwide.

Sonatype’s last round of funding was in 2016, led by Goldman Sachs, snagging $30 million.

Managing the music business from a mobile phone, Jammber is making the industry sing

Published September 7, 2018

The music business is littered with stories about songwriters or studio contributors and session musicians who never get the credit — or money — they’re often due for their work on hit songs.

And for every storied session musician in “The Wrecking Crew” there are perhaps hundreds of other contributors who aren’t getting their just desserts.

That’s where Jammber comes in. The five-year-old company co-founded by serial entrepreneur Marcus Cobb has developed a suite of tools to manage everything from songwriting credits and rights management to ticketing and touring all from a group of apps on a mobile phone. And has just raised $2.4 million in funding to take those tools to a broader market.

Jammber “Muse” gives collaborators a single platform to exchange lyrics and song ideas, while the company’s “Splits” app tracks ownership and credits of any eventual product from a collaboration. The company’s nStudio tracks songwriting credits to assist with chart and Grammy submission — through a partnership with Nielsen Music — and its “PinPoint” helps organize touring. The recording applications even have a presence feature so session musicians, songwriters and artists can actually be tagged in the studio while they’re working.

“I think we need to get attribution and monetization closer to the creators,” Cobb has said. “Why aren’t we doing that? The industry is growing and thriving. Are we making sure that performers and creators of all different tiers are being equally compensated?”

The answer, sadly, for many in the music industry is no. In fact, while Cobb had originally set out to make a networking tool for creatives with Jammber he wound up shifting the service to the management toolkit after visiting the offices of a music label.

Jammber chief executive Marcus Cobb

“I saw stacks and stacks of payroll checks that were returned to sender,” Cobb, told Crain’s Chicago Business. “These checks were taking three months to two years to print, and they were wrong addresses, or there were stage names instead of legal names.”

That experience convinced Cobb of the demand, but it was Nashville that gave the serial entrepreneur the crucible within which to develop the full suite of tools that now make up Jammber’s soup-to-nuts platform.

Cobb likes to say that Jammber was conceived in Chicago (where the company spun up from the city’s massively influential 1871 entrepreneurship center) and born in Nashville — the home of the multi-billion-dollar American country music industry. All of the tools in Jammber, Cobb says, were created with input from a local musician, producer, artist and repertoire person or a label executive.

In 2015, the company came down to Nashville as part of the first batch of companies in Project Music, a joint venture between the Country Music Association and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center meant to encourage the development of technology for the music industry.

For the 41-year-old Cobb, programming and entrepreneurship has literally been a life saver. Growing up in Texas and Nevada with an abusive, drug-addicted stepfather took a toll on Cobb and programming became an outlet — thanks to a particularly well-equipped computer lab at his high school. “I had moved 24 times,” Cobb said in an interview. “My stepfather was a full-blown crack addict. He would disappear with money; we got evicted a lot.”

But the experience with computers led to an early job out of high school, which launched Cobb’s tech career. He sold his first company, Eido Software in 2007 a year after launching it and has used that money to pursue other endeavors.

And while Cobb is a gifted programmer, that’s not his only interest. His next big foray into business was as the owner and lead designer of Marc Wayne Intimates, a boutique lingerie company that also provided the business-savvy Cobb with his first window into the music business — outfitting dancers in music videos for artists like Pitbull.

Cobb has invested $300,000 of his own money into Jammber and raised roughly $400,000 in early seed funding. The $2.3 million that the company raised in its most recent round came from a who’s who of music executives, including former Sony Nashville chief executive Joe Galante; Hootie and the Blowfish manager Clarence Spalding; and Kings of Leon manager Ken Levitan.

These investors know the tension at the heart of the music business better than anyone, Cobb says — which is that the creative act of making music can often be at odds with the mundanity of organizing and running an effective business to ensure that the music getting made is actually heard by an audience that then pays the musician for their work.

“The irony about making a living in a copyright industry like the music industry is you have to be very organized to make money in a timely manner or even get credit for your work,” said Cobb. “Over 40 percent of the money creators are owed is tied up by bad or wrong data because it’s very difficult to be organized while you create. These tools finally change that.”

Jammber’s services are currently in a closed, invite-only beta that will be capped at 10,000 users. There’s a basic set of services that will be available for free, with pricing for “unlimited” access to the toolkit starting at $10 per month. In addition to the applications, the company also has an online platform that integrates with the mobile suite. Pricing for that service starts at $25 per month.

“This is an ecosystem play for us. I’ve been in software for a long time and the realization for me is that it’s not just mobile-first or cloud-first anymore, it’s simplicity-first. Independent artists and record labels generated $5.2 billion in revenues last year and the sector continues to grow — all while largely using paper and spreadsheets for their back office tools,” said Cobb. “This is a massive, underserved market and we believe we’ve figured out how to provide the value they’ve been waiting for.”

Meet the five Startup Battlefield finalists at Disrupt SF 2018

Published September 7, 2018

Over the past two days, 21 companies have taken the stage at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield. We’ve now taken the feedback from all our expert judges and chosen five teams to compete in the finals.

These teams will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges and answer even more in-depth questions. Then one startup will be chosen as the winner of the Battlefield Cup — and they’ll also take home $100,000.

Here are the finalists. The competition will be livestreamed on TechCrunch starting at 1:35pm Pacific on Friday.

CB Therapeutics

CB Therapeutics is a new biotech company that aims to change the game with cannabinoids produced cleanly and cheaply in the lab, out of sugar. What it’s done is bioengineer microorganisms — specifically yeast — to manufacture cannabinoids out of plain-old sugars.

Forethought

Mira

Mira is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they’re fertile.

Origami Labs

Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphone’s built-in assistant – whether that’s Google Assistant or Siri – in an all-new way.