Year: 2018

To Clark Valberg, the screen is the most important place in the world. And he’s not the only one who thinks so. It isn’t just tech companies spending their money on design. The biggest brands in the world are pouring money into their digital presence, for many, the first step is InVision.

InVision launched back in 2011 with a simple premise: What if, instead of the back-and-forth between designers and engineers and executives, there was a program that let these interested parties collaborate on a prototype?

The first iteration simply let designers build out prototypes, complete with animations and transitions, so that engineers didn’t spend time building things that would only change later.

As that tool grew, InVision realized that it was in conversation with designers across the industry, and that it hadn’t yet fixed one of their biggest pain points. That’s why, in 2017, InVision launched Studio, a design platform that was built specifically for designers building products.

Alongside Studio, InVision also launched its own app store for design programs to loop into the larger InVision platform. And the company also launched a fund to invest in early-stage design companies.

The idea here is to become the Salesforce of the design world, with the entire industry centering around this company and its various offerings.

InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500. We’re absolutely thrilled to have Clark Valberg, InVision cofounder and CEO, join us at Disrupt SF in September.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the Early-Bird rate until July 25 here.

Google is hosting its big cloud conference, Google Cloud Next, this morning over at the Moscone center in San Francisco. Obviously it’s not quite as large as its flagship event I/O earlier this year, but Google’s cloud efforts have become one of its brightest points over the past several quarters.

With heavy investments in Google Cloud’s infrastructure, its enterprise services, as well as a suite of machine learning tools layered on top of all that, Google is clearly trying to make Google Cloud a core piece of its business going forward. Traditionally an advertising juggernaut, Google is now figuring out what comes next after that, even as that advertising business continues to grow at a very healthy clip.

The keynote starts at 9 a.m. Pacific time, and the TechCrunch team is on the ground here covering all the newsiest and best bits. Be sure to check out our full coverage on TechCrunch as the keynote moves forward.

Reward miles are nice if you fly a lot but what if you bike or take Lyfts or just like to wander around town? A new app called Miles aims to give you rewards for all of those things, bringing the concept of rewards out of the air and onto the ground.

Miles, co-founded by Jigar Shah, Paresh Jain and Parin Shah, is a San Jose-based company that looked at the problem of reward miles outside of airlines as well as the problems associated with city planning and traffic data generation. The app, which is now in the iOS App Store, can see when you walk, ride a bike, take the bus, drive yourself, or even hop in a Lyft or an Uber. It then rewards you on a sliding scale depending on how eco-friendly your trip is. Biking, for example, is worth more than driving or even taking the bus.

“Mobility today is a universal behavior that goes largely unrewarded,” said Jigar Shah. “To date, travel rewards have been siloed and limited to one form of travel – with consumers facing exclusions when comes to earning and redeeming rewards. Miles solves for this gap in market by allowing anyone to earn rewards – simply by traveling and commuting how they do every day.”

What can you get with your miles? Just for signing up you can get 2,000 miles which is enough for a $5 Starbucks, Target, or Whole Foods gift card, among others. There are also “nearby” that bring up deals from merchants in your area but right now most of the deals are online. More miles gets you better deals.

“In contrast to rewards programs in the market today, Miles delivers value for every mile traveled, across every mode of travel, anywhere in the world. Whether by car (as a driver, passenger or rideshare), plane, train, subway, bus, boat, bicycle, or on foot, the Miles app effortlessly awards users’ travel – regardless of where their journey takes them. Miles can be saved or redeemed at any time – with the value increasing every month as more merchants accept them as a form of payment,” said Shah.

Because the app tracks your movement on multiple types of transport the Miles team foresees connecting with city governments to supply traffic and usage data for various forms of transport. Further, because miles can be redeemed locally, they could also increase foot traffic.

The company raised $3 million from Porsche Digital, Scrum Ventures, and others. Former TechCruncher Keith Teare also worked with the team on the raise.

Interestingly, the platform can also work to create predictive recommendations based on your position and past likes and dislikes.

“By leveraging the Miles’ predictive AI platform, business and brands can deliver value to customers by offering to meet their near future needs as they travel, such as when someone needs a meal, a fill-up at the gas station, or a ride,” wrote the team. “Annoying marketing can become true customer service by enabling hyper-targeted rewards related to immediate need. This not only leads to increased customer loyalty and repeat visits, but also increased sales.”

“We saw an opportunity to deliver more value to people as transportation continued to evolve,” said Shah.

Multiple city governments are looking to implement the technology locally and the Contra Costa Transportation Authority will “offer rewards as an incentive to promote alternative and sustainable mode of transportation through the Miles platform.” Seattle is next and maybe some day soon you’ll be earning miles for walking and driving in your home town. At least it will get us out of the house.

For many people, their workplaces become like a second family. More companies are recognizing this with better benefits such as longer family leave and wellness programs. But when an employee needs to take a break or is going through a hard time, they can feel alienated–sometimes enough to seek a new job. MentalHappy wants to help them stay connected to their companies with care packages, called Cheerboxes, designed for people experiencing a major life event. Founded in 2016 by CEO Tamar Lucien and CTO Kwame Ampem, the Las Vegas-based startup is currently participating in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.

Cheerboxes help signal that employers care about their workforce’s mental health and also fill a gap in the “corporate wellness” space. Even though companies can now offer a wide range of benefits ranging from meditation apps to better insurance plans, there still aren’t a lot of ways for them to express interest in employees when they take time off. Customized for a wide range of life events, from positive ones like the arrival of a new baby to difficult experiences such as bereavement or illness, Cheerboxes are filled with tools for self-care, including journals and healthy snacks.

So far, MentalHappy has sent more than 10,000 Cheerboxes. The startup makes it simple for companies to personalize packages, no matter how many employees they have, and has handled orders of up to 500 Cheerboxes at a time.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Lucien worked in human resources and managed more than 200 field employees. Cheerboxes were inspired by her own experiences with depression and the emotional tolls of entrepreneurship, which she says many founders are reluctant to talk about until they have achieved success. To cope, Lucien began practicing positive psychology and mindfulness techniques.

“I wished I could share everything I learned about easing anxiety and panic attacks. I told my co-founder and CTO that if I could put everything into a box, so someone else could take care of themselves through the journey and not just at the end when things are fine, I would want to do that,” Lucien tells TechCrunch. “And he was like, what would you call it?”

MentalHappy founders Kwame Ampem and Tamar Lucien.

At the beginning, MentalHappy sold Cheerboxes to consumers, but then they noticed many of their buyers were taking the boxes to work. Employers wanted to purchase them as a benefit, while employees sent them to clients, colleagues or remote workers.

MentalHappy began focusing on enterprise customers, enabling them to purchase customized boxes frequently or in bulk. They realized that even though companies were providing more innovative benefits to attract employees, they still fell back on bouquets or fruit baskets when workers went through a hard time.

Cheerboxes, on the other hand, include items based on positive psychology practices. MentalHappy’s founders say they look for items that are unique and not easily found on sites like Amazon. These may include simple games to distract people from anxiety and give them an alternative to staring at their phones, bracelets with positive affirmations, essential oils to aid with sleep or relaxation, “open when” envelopes with supportive notes to help recipients through particularly low points, and bite-sized snacks, since Lucien says many people lose their appetite when they are sad.

For recipients experiencing specific issues, like injury or trauma, the packages also include self-care guides MentalHappy created with psychologists.

“In the beginning, customers used to tell us this person is going through a hard time and they didn’t know what to say. So we reached out through our networks and found people who are really great with learning and motivational things,” Lucien says. “Some customers want to include a small note, so we allow them to circulate a link throughout their organization to include personalized notes in a Cheerbox.”

MentalHappy has worked with many large tech companies, which Lucien describes as “by far the most open to sending happiness to employees as part of their cultural mission and as an employee benefit,” as well as schools and non-profits. Its client list includes SAP Concur, Gusto, Silicon Valley Bank, Pepperdine University, Exclusive Resorts, Cura HR and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

Even though many of MentalHappy’s users are human resources and employee engagement managers, the majority of Cheerboxes are still ordered by coworkers for each other.

“Many of the school districts we work with are gifting them to teachers and at hospitals, we see them gifted to doctors or nurses, especially people who work in some of the harder areas like neonatal care or intensive care,” says says Lucien. Companies have also given Cheerboxes to people in areas affected by a natural disaster or tragedy. For example, some of MentalHappy’s clients sent Cheerboxes to employees in Texas after Hurricane Harvey and Las Vegas after the October 2017 mass shooting.

Though it’s clear how MentalHappy can boost morale, it might be a little less obvious how it’s a tech company. Ampem explains that data is key to creating Cheerboxes at scale, while making sure they still have a personal touch. MentalHappy’s clients get access to a dashboard to manage orders, see when sending Cheerboxes would be the most beneficial and gather information about recipients to customize their packages. The company also provides its corporate customers with a unique subdomain, so anyone in the company can send a Cheerbox.

“We really want to companies to have that visibility and make it part of their culture to access this resource, especially when it comes to benefit programs they already offer,” says Ampem.

The feed has become the all-powerful determiner of success for creators. Facebook, Patreon, Medium, and other platforms have amassed considerable power over creation, determining what gets seen, by who, as well as the options creators have to get paid. Larger media companies struggle to stay independent against these platforms, complicating their relationships with readers and viewers.

There once was a wholly different vision of the web, one that was far more decentralized and independent. The feed wasn’t sponsored by a company, but rather was an open protocol known as RSS — one that has died, or perhaps has become undead. Yet, that vision of an open, decentralized world still animates some people, including Julien Genestoux.

Genestoux has worked for years to empower creators to spread their content and get paid in the process. He previously founded Superfeedr, which developed a “Feed API” that built upon RSS and Atom to make feeds more useful and real-time. The company was eventually acquired by Medium, which Genestoux joined as well. He also conceived the WebSub protocol, which has been recommended by the W3C, the international standards body behind the world wide web.

Now, he wants to rethink the ways that creators get paid through a new protocol called Unlock. His mission has quickly attracted the attention of venture capitalists, with the New York-based company behind the protocol announcing today that it has raised $1.675 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.

Unlock’s protocol provides creators the ability to add “locks” (aka smart contracts) to their creations by adding a snippet of JavaScript to their website, similar to how one would add Stripe as a payment option today. The audience for that content then buys “keys” (aka tokens) to the lock. Creators control the economy around keys — whether they expire, how much they cost to buy, and more through their settings on the lock.

This basic framework has a couple of interesting properties. First, keys are tradable — they can be sold to other people. This creates a secondary market for content on the web, which is tough to build using today’s existing paywall technology. Like used books, Unlock’s keys allow users to get delayed access to content for perhaps a more affordable price.

Genestoux also envisions Unlock being the future syndication layer of the web. Here, you might have to stretch a bit to see it, but the idea is that if locks and keys are how access to content gets shared, then Unlock has the opportunity to be the core protocol for all sharing and distribution.

To accelerate that vision, Unlock allows a creator’s supporters to reclaim some of the value of their tokens when others buy keys on there recommendation, creating a referral economy. The hope is that the incentives encourage more sharing of high-quality content, avoiding some of the fake news and other opprobrium that has hit Facebook so hard in the past two years.

Perhaps the most powerful point though is that Unlock is not a centralized platform, but rather just a protocol. Anyone can implement it on the web, and there aren’t any gatekeepers or filters between a producer and a consumer of a creative work. In this way, Unlock tracks back to RSS and other open feed protocols.

It’s an ambitious vision, and one that up until now relied pretty much exclusively on Genestoux to see it through. Unlock also announced today that it has hired its first employee, Ben Werdmuller, who was formerly an engineer at Medium and then Director of Investments at Matter., the digital media accelerator. Unlock has also published the code for its protocol on Github.

In addition to GC and Cherry, Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, and Coinbase Ventures also joined the round.

UK based, Europe focused early stage VC firm Mosaic Ventures — which bills itself as “a Silicon Valley-style venture capital firm based in London” — looks to be raising a second, larger fund, four years after closing its debut $140M fund.

According to a Form D filing, submitted yesterday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Mosaic Ventures is aiming to raise $150M for the second fund.

The filing also states that Mosaic intends to incorporate the fund in the Cayman Islands — a popular location for investment funds.

Although, given political upheaval and business uncertainty in the UK on account of Brexit, you do have to wonder whether the decision to incorporate the fund in a British Overseas Territory isn’t at least partly related to the ongoing domestic fog.

We reached out to Mosaic Ventures about its intentions for the second fund but at the time of writing the firm had not responded.

Mosaic was co-founded in 2014 by veteran investors Simon Levene, Mike Chalfen and Toby Coppel.

The firm focuses at the Series A end of early stage startup investment, and counts the likes of Clue, InfoSum and Blockstream in its current portfolio.

In a bit of a twist this March, Chalfen announced he was leaving to focus on investing in a solo investor capacity — and on what he dubbed a “streamlined professional life”.

He remains on the boards of his Mosaic portfolio companies, and at the time of his departure also said he planned to invest in future Mosaic funds.

The fields of computer vision and VR are difficult. But a new company, Send Reality, is entering the race. The Y Combinator-backed company is looking to offer full 3D-modeling for virtual walkthroughs of real estate listings.

Founder and CEO Andrew Chen said he was the kid back in middle school and high school that spent hours walking around the streets of Paris, NYC and SF on Google Streetview.

“The thing I always wanted was to walk through the inside of all the interesting places of the world,” said Chen. “90 percent of the world’s most interesting physical content is inside, but I couldn’t do that.”

Chen explained that the field of computer vision has been able to make substantial technical breakthroughs, now allowing companies like Send Reality to create a videogame-style replica of the world.

For now, however, Send Reality is focused on luxury residential real estate.

Here’s how it works:

Send Reality sends photographers out to the listing with an iPad, a $250 commodity depth sensor, and a specialized Send Reality app. These photographers take hundreds of thousands of photos, and the Send Reality technology stitches those photos together to create a complete 3D model, as shown in the above .gif.

Chen says that what makes Send Reality tech special is how efficiently it’s able to stitch together these photos, explaining that the company can put together over 100K photos in the same time it takes for top academic labs in the world to put together 5,000.

“What this means is that the 3D models we create are so much more realistic than anything else anyone else has made,” said Chen.

For the luxury residential market that Send Reality is currently targeting, most listings are put up on their own website. Given this is still in beta, the numbers on Send Reality demoes are still rough. But Chen says that listing websites that include the Send Reality product see a 5x to 10x increase in the amount of time people spend on the website, with 75 percent to 80 percent of that extra time spent directly in the Send Reality viewer.

Send Reality sells directly to realtors, offering the product for $500 to $800 depending on the size and complexity of the home. In the future, the company can bring down that price point by allowing realtors to scan the home themselves from their own smartphone.

Send Reality has received funding from Y Combinator .

Just returned from São Paulo and Mexico City, where last week we had dozens of meetings with founders, accelerators and investors, in addition to well attended meet ups at Estação Hack in São Paulo and MassChallenge in Mexico City. The startup community is really pumped about TechCrunch’s first ever  Startup Battlefield Latin America,  which will be held on Nov. 8 in São Paulo.  This week, TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber and Anna Escher are in Buenos Aires and Santiago with the same message: early stage startups, don’t miss a huge opportunity to get on the global radar with investors, partners and media. Apply now to compete; the deadline for applications is Aug. 6.

Here are some of the most common questions we heard at the meet ups last week:

What stage of company can apply? (1) Must have a working product ready for market by time of show or very recently in market, but with limited publicity to date.  If the timing works, we encourage founders to launch on the Battlefield stage. (2) Should be pre-series A; seed or pre-seed is fine.

Does TechCrunch take fees or equity in exchange for participation? No. We ask nothing from the founders except hard work to prepare to be on stage.

What companies are eligible? Startups headquartered in most Latin countries are eligible. See See full list here.

What is the criteria for winning Startup Battlefield? We instruct the judges to pick the startup that they believe will have either a) the biggest exit in the years ahead or b) the largest overall impact, including social impact.

What is the competition format? Top VCs, founders and TechCrunch editors serve as judges. Each founder team has six minutes to pitch and six minutes to answer questions.

Is it required that founders pitch in English? Yes, but there will be translation assistance if needed for Q&A.

We’ve been holding Startup Battlefield competitions for the past 12 years, and we’re pretty proud of the results our participants have achieved. More than 750 companies have stepped on stage to pitch top VCs and TechCrunch editors. Those founders have gone on to collectively raise more than $8 billion and produce more than 100 exits. You might recognize names like Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, Cloudflare, Vurb — just to name a few.

If you want to join that esteemed group of Battlefield alumni, here’s what you need to know. Our seasoned TechCrunch editors will scrutinize every eligible application (more about eligibility in a minute). It’s a highly competitive process, and our editors have a very discerning eye. They’ll select 15 startups to compete, and their decision will be based, in large part, on which applicants have the strongest potential for a big exit or major societal impact.

Before the chosen founders ever step on the stage at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute, they’ll receive expert — and free — pitch coaching from TechCrunch editors. Founders will be primed and ready to roll when the big day arrives.

Startup Battlefield Latin America begins with three preliminary rounds. Five startups per round will each have just six minutes to pitch their company and present their product demo to a panel of top-tier VC judges. The entire event takes place in front of a live audience of 500 people.

Following each team’s pitch, the judges have six minutes to ask the team probing questions. Of the 15 startups, only five will move on to the finals to pitch a second time — in front of a fresh set of judges. The judges will confer and ultimately declare one finalist to be the Startup Battlefield champion and Latin America’s best early-stage startup.

Along with that glorious title, winning founders receive US$25,000 in non-equity cash, a boatload of investor and media attention, plus a trip for two to the next TechCrunch Disrupt, where they can exhibit for free in Startup Alley. While there, they might even qualify to participate in that Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield.

Even the startups that don’t win the day still reap big benefits — like massive media and investor exposure. And remember those 750 Startup Battlefield alumni we mentioned? The founders of all 15 Startup Battlefield Latin America participants join that esteemed network. That’s some fine company to keep.

Startup Battlefield Latin America takes place on November 8, 2018 in São Paulo.  Don’t wait. Apply today. We can’t wait to see the companies in this region’s fast-emerging startup ecosystem.

Ebay announced this morning it will begin accepting Apple Pay on its marketplace starting this fall, and has also teamed up with Square Capital on seller financing. The changes come following eBay’s further distancing from longtime partner PayPal, which included the company’s switch to Adyen as its primary payments processing partner, announced earlier this year.

At the time, eBay said PayPal would continue to be an option at checkout, by Adyen would become the default over time.

Now eBay is adding one more option to the mix with support for Apple Pay – something the company refers to as “the first step” in offering its tens of millions of buyers more choice in terms of their payment options. eBay’s statements indicate Apple Pay is one of several options still to come, as it’s referred to as being “among the first forms of payment” the marketplace has planned.

The Apple Pay rollout will begin this fall in the U.S. on a limited scale, allowing buyers to purchase using Apple Pay in iOS and Safari in order to check out both on the mobile web and in eBay’s app.

“Apple Pay is one of the most ubiquitous forms of payments and provides users with an easy, fast and secure way to pay,” said Steve Fisher, Senior Vice President of Payments at eBay, in a statement. “Offering Apple Pay as a form of payment on eBay is the first step in providing more choice and flexibility in payment options to our tens of millions of buyers.”

The company’s shift to its new payments experience will continue in 2019, and it expects to have the majority of its marketplace shifted by 2021. Along the way, Apple Pay will become available to more customers across more inventory and in more regions worldwide.

Related to this, eBay also announced today a new partnership with Square Capital to help U.S. sellers with financing to grow their businesses.

Sellers will be able to apply for $500 up to $100,000 of financing for any business need, including things like payroll, inventory, marketing, or equipment, among other things. eBay stresses the importance of offering selling working capital, citing a small business survey that found 70 percent of small businesses didn’t receive the funding they wanted.

Square Capital’s system for offering financing only involves a few steps, instead of filling out longer loan forms. And once approved, the funds can reach sellers in as little as one business day. Meanwhile, the borrowing cost never changes during the life of the loan, so sellers know what they can expect in terms of payments.

Square has been offering loans since 2014, facilitating $2.8 billion to over 180,000 businesses in the process. In 2016, it began offering loans to businesses outside of Square’s own ecosystem, through its partnership program.

“Expanding access to capital, including to those who have been underserved when seeking funding, is core to Square’s purpose of economic empowerment,” said Jacqueline Reses, Head of Square Capital . “Square Capital understands the needs of small businesses and facilitates a simple, seamless funding experience. We’re proud to partner with eBay and enable more sellers across the U.S. to invest in growing their business.”

Ebay says select sellers will begin to receive emailed invitations to apply for Square Capital loans starting in the third quarter of 2018.

PayPal spun out from eBay in 2015, to become its own publicly traded company – a move eBay’s board said would benefit both companies, allowing them to grow in their respective markets.

PayPal, as of late, has been making a huge push for international growth and other expansions, with the acquisitions of iZettle, the “Square of Europe” and Hyperwallet, while also shoring up its product with AI, thanks to the acquisitions of AI-based prediction platform Jetlore and AI-based fraud and risk management firm Simility.

Ebay, meanwhile, has been making changes of its own, with its switch to Adyen. The hope is now that adding a suite of other payment options will give customers more ways to pay, which in turn would increase conversions and therefore eBay’s bottom line.

The marketplace giant recently posted a slight miss on second quarter revenues – $2.64 billion instead of the estimated $2.66 billion, but sales were up 9 percent over the year-ago quarter. In addition, eBay said its user base of active buyers was growing, having reached 175 million up from 171 million in the first quarter, and up from 167 million in the year-ago quarter. That leaves room for the company to capitalize on these payments changes going forward.

You can now buy and sell bitcoin for over $8,000 on all exchanges, and even for over $8,150 on some of the most popular ones. $8,000 is an important milestone for bitcoin after some complicated weeks.

When you compare the price of bitcoin today with what it used to be back in December of last year, it’s quite disappointing. From December 1st until January 31st, one bitcoin was worth over $10,000. At some point, a single bitcoin was worth nearly $20,000.

It’s been a lot more boring since then. After reaching rock bottom on February 6th at $6,465 per bitcoin, the cryptocurrency bounced back over $10,000 but never really recovered completely. It’s been a slow and steady downhill slope since then.

The good news is that bitcoin has performed a little bit better for a couple of weeks. Today’s performance represents a two-month high, with bitcoin reaching prices that we haven’t seen since May 22nd.

To put this into perspective, bitcoin is back to its price of November 22nd 2017. In other words, everybody who has bought bitcoins before November 2017 is still in the black. According to CoinMarketCap, people have traded the equivalent of $6.5 billion over the past 24 hours.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.