Year: 2018

Struggling smartphone maker HTC continues to struggle.

After offloading 2,000 engineers to Google as part of a $1.1 billion deal with the search giant, HTC is now laying off 1,500 staff, or nearly one-quarter of its total headcount, to cut more costs. That’s according to a report from Reuters which claims that the cuts are part of a move manage its resources more efficiently.

“Today HTC announces plan to optimize the manufacturing organizations in Taiwan. This plan will allow more effective and flexible resource management going forward,” HTC said in a statement to Reuters.

HTC representatives did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.

The cuts will be completed before October and they are said to be part of a move to centralize the leadership of HTC’s smartphone and Vive VR business.

The layoffs follow another poor quarter of business for the company. Back in May for its Q1 results, HTC posted a NT$5.2 billion ($170 million) operating loss as revenue dropped by 40 percent year-on-year to reach NT$8.8 billion ($290 million) during the three-month period. That followed a miserable quarter which continued a torrid stretch of poor financial results.

The all-you-can watch movie theatre subscription service MoviePass, now with 3 million paying users, continues to burn through cash, and today its majority owner announced one more way it might continue to finance operations and its growth as some investors and observers raise questions about its financial future. Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. (HMNY), which owns 92 percent of the shares of MoviePass, has filed an S-3 universal shelf registration statement to sell up to $1.2 billion in equity and debt securities over three years from the statement’s approval by the SEC.

This comes on the heels of the company issuing $164 million in convertible notes last month through the issuance of 20,000 extra shares.

To be clear, this is not a $1.2 billion raise. A shelf registration does not tie HMNY to any specific offerings, but it gives the group another flexible way of raising cash to finance operations and to invest in growth.

In addition to its majority ownership of MoviePass, HMNY has a movie investment subsidiary called MoviePass Ventures, an original content production operation called MoviePass Films, and Moviefone, which it acquired from TechCrunch’s parent Oath for up to $23 million (making Oath a shareholder in the company).

“HMNY will have the flexibility to publicly offer and sell from time to time common stock, preferred stock, debt securities, warrants, subscription rights, units or any combination of such securities,” the company notes in a statement.

“HMNY may periodically offer one or more of these securities in amounts, at prices and on terms announced, if and when the securities are ever offered. The specific terms of any potential future offerings, along with the intended use of proceeds of any such securities offered by HMNY, will be described in a prospectus supplement at the time of any such offering.”

It notes that it will still need to get stockholder approval for increasing its authorized common stock, or combining any outstanding common stock.

MoviePass and its owner have been through a rollercoaster in the last many months, with HMNY stock dropping precipitously on the back of negative prognostications about its finances. From a 52-week high of $38.86/share, it’s currently at $0.31 — a 99.2 percent drop.

Notwithstanding the economics of the all-you-can-eat business model — which providers users with movie passes to some 91 percent of all US cinemas in exchange for a flat fee, a model that has proven challenging for margins in many industries — the company’s flagship business, MoviePass, has also been through the ringer for how it handles user privacy.

Still, at a time when many consumers are opting to watch movies at home through services like Netflix and others, MoviePass represents a potential route for driving more people back into cinemas. The company says that it’s on track to pass 5 million users by the end of this year, and that it currently accounts for five percent of all U.S. box office receipts on average, with peaks of eight percent in some weeks, and 30 percent for specific movies when they are advertised on the company’s app.

Oden Technologies, the Industrial IoT startup that provides manufacturing data analytics, has closed $10 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by European venture capital firm Atomico, which appears to be revving up its “Industry 4.0” investment strategy following a recent investment in CloudNC. A number of existing investors also participated including EQT Ventures, and Inbox Capital. Noteworthy, Atomico founder and CEO Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype, has joined the Oden Technologies board.

Originally founded in London but now based in New York, Oden Technologies pitches itself as an Industry 4.0 company that has built its own industrial IoT hardware and “big data architecture” to offer a platform for manufacturers of any size to analyse and optimise factory production via the cloud.

Put simply, the Oden device plugs into almost any kind of manufacturing machine, while its “software adaptors” integrate data from existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and quality control software on the manufacturing line. This data is then uploaded to Oden’s cloud analytics platform in real-time to give manufacturers the full production picture, including real-time factory floor monitoring.

So, why is this significant? Essentially, the retrofittable Oden device and resulting data analytics makes the existing factory floor smarter. This includes the ability to spot manufacturing defects or aspects of a machine’s degrading performance that could lead to defects, and more broadly, ways to further optimise production throughput and uptime.

The result is a reduction in waste (think: products that need be discarded or are ultimately returned by customers), and an increase in efficiency more generally, helping tech-driven factories retain their competitive edge.

In a call with Oden Technologies co-founder and CEO Willem Sundblad, he said that the company’s mission is to help manufacturers achieve “perfect production,” in terms of not only making better products but also making them faster, cheaper and with much less waste.

Traditionally manufacturers haven’t had access to the right data and insights to make factories more efficient and productive. However, with the collision of big data, cloud services and new industrial IoT hardware, this is quickly changing and is the exact space that Oden operates in.

In terms of what data Oden’s device captures, Sundblad explained that it typically consists of metrics that relate to machine process, health, the processing of the part/product, and quality. “The raw data is mostly available in the machines but then we analyse it to provide answers,” he says.

In addition, Oden captures things like the melt pressure of the material, the temperature profile when the material melted, dimensional read outs to understand the quality of the product, and water temperatures from cooling tanks. Other data points include revolutions per minute on moving parts inside of a machine, the motor load of the motors, and the speed of production, to name just a few.

“We analyze and process that data so customers understand how much excess material they are putting on the product, was the quality Ok, and if not why, alerting for when things are bad or will be bad, and [doing] trends analysis for how the product can be optimised. It all comes back to ROI for customers, which always comes from more uptime, less scrap and more good quality output”.

Atomico’s Zennström echoes these sentiments, arguing that manufacturing has until now remained “relatively untouched” by digital technology. As a result, it still has major areas of inefficiency. “The combination of IIoT, Big Data analytics, cloud computing and machine learning marks a new era for industry,” he says. This will see Industry 4.0 technologies not only increase efficiency and reduce waste, but also enable smaller batch sizes, more personalised products and greater product innovation.

Meanwhile, Oden says it will use the new funding to further expand its R&D and engineering teams in New York, and to accelerate customer growth with new sales teams in the manufacturing hubs of Illinois, Ohio and Texas.

The company also recently hired Deepak Turaga, Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, as its VP of Data Science. He’ll be helping Oden with its machine learning and AI efforts, and has previously worked at IBM as the Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager of the AI First ML and Planning Group.

Quartz, the business and tech news organization owned by Atlantic Media, is moving to a new home after publicly listed Japanese business Uzabase acquired it in a deal worth up to $110 million.

The deal is expected to close within a month. Quartz said it won’t be making layoffs and it will maintain its brand and existing editorial leadership team. Co-president and editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney and co-president and publisher Jay Lauf will become Quartz co-CEOs reporting to Uzabase and founder and CEO Yusuke Umeda.

The deal forms part of Atlantic Media chairman and owner David Bradley’s plan to divest his family’s ownership of the organization’s assets. Last year, he sold a majority share of The Atlantic to Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective. Quartz was reported to be exploring acquisition options as far back as 2015, but Bradley wrote in a memo to staff that he “thought it would be a few years before we launched the search for a Quartz buyer.”

Launched in 2012, the Quartz vision has been to ‘The Economist of the digital era’ and it has found a niche for thoughtful storytelling. The company claims over 20 million monthly readers, and it has found interesting ways to use distribution methods such as chatbots and newsletters. Indeed, Quartz is reported to have posted a $1 million profit in 2016 on revenue on $30 million thanks to its advertising business.

The company said today that total sales this year are forecast to grow by 25-35 percent. That’s notable because it will affect the price that Uzabase ends up paying. Quartz said in a statement that the deal ranges from $75 and $110 million “depending on achievement of future financial and operating performance in 2018.”

The acquisition has surprised many with Uzabase hardly a household name. Despite that, though, it has a credible track record as a company.

Uzabase went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2016 and its current market cap is around $870 million. Its services include a business intelligence platform, a b2b marketing platform and, in the consumer space, a news app called NewsPicks.

The latter service is of particular interest in the context of the Quartz deal since it claims 64,000 subscribers who pay $15 per month. That gives NewsPicks nearly half of its revenue from paying users, which the company said is up 80 percent annually. The service is strongest in Japan (where it claims over 3.3 million registered users) but it launched in the U.S. last year in partnership with Dow Jones and is said to be growing rapidly there.

Following the deal, Quartz will pick up the slack for running the English version of NewsPicks but the companies look like they will also work more closely about subscription-based content.

“We’ll quickly be developing paid products for the loyal audience Quartz has accrued over the past six years, building on and learning from the success that NewsPicks has had with community and paid content,” co-CEOs Delaney and Lauf wrote in a memo to staff.

“While high-quality advertising will continue to represent the lion’s share of Quartz’s revenue in the coming years, we expect that the biggest source of growth in Quartz’s next chapter will come from reader revenue,” the duo added.

As for how the deal came about, Bradley — the Atlantic Media chairman and owner — recalled that Uzabase and founder and CEO Umeda met Quartz about a potential partnership last year and that led to further discussions that became an acquisition. Umedia, Bradley said, wants to make Quartz “the leading global business news brand in the world.” (As a measure of his confidence, Bradley said he will take 33-50 percent of his exit in Uzabase stock.)

In fact, the Japanese company’s stock may be a key part of how the deal happened.

While the price is down four percent following the announcement of the Quartz deal, it has risen in value significantly this year. It started the year at 1,588 JPY on January 1 and it closed last week at 3,275 JPY, up more than double. That appreciation made a deal to purchase Quartz increasingly cheaper, particularly with a major chunk done with stock.

There is some precedent for acquisitions of notable U.S. tech companies by Japanese suitors. Back in 2015, The Nikkei bought the Financial Times for $1.3 billion in another unexpected piece of media M&A, while more recently job hunting service Glassdoor was bought by Japan’s Recruit for $1.2 billion.

Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country.

TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents. According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the company’s team and tech to work on combatting fake news and to tackle other content issues.

Bloomsbury is an alumni of Entrepreneur First, the company builder that invests in technical and domain expertise talent and helps those individuals start companies. The startup is also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the U.K. tax payer-funded London Co-investment Fund.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, who was instrumental in the development of Amazon’s AI-powered digital assistant Alexa, is also an angel investor in Bloomsbury.

Multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI, in a deal that will see a mixture of cash and stock change hands. In one scenario, the startup’s investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsbury’s founding team in line for the remaining $17.5 million, paid in restricted Facebook stock. Either way, this represents a modest return for the bulk of investors, although EF — given that it invests pre-seed — is likely to have had a larger multiple.

Given the price and the stage Bloomsbury AI were at, the acquisition also has more than a whiff of acqui-hire to it, although there is some IP in the deal. I understand from one source that Bloomsbury AI’s CTO/Head of Research, Sebastian Riedel, was the biggest draw. He is considered to be a leading expert in the area of NLP, and is a professor at UCL. According to his LinkedIn, he also co-founded and is an advisor to Factmata, the U.K. startup that purports to have developed tools to help brands combat “fake news”.

Which brings us to the possible reason for why Facebook is acquiring Bloomsbury AI, a startup that I’m told was phenomenally strong when viewed as a group of researchers, but less so when it comes to getting a commercially viable product out of the door. The company’s sole product is an API called Cape that lets developers add question & answer functionality to websites and other documents.

Indeed, a source who claims to have some knowledge of Facebook’s intentions says the U.S. tech giant may be planning to put the Bloomsbury AI team on the task of helping it develop technology to fight fake news on the platform and solve other aspects of its glaring moderation problem.

Other areas of Facebook’s product that might benefit from the Q&A technology that powers Cape include being used as a workplace tool for companies to discover content in documents, or on Facebook’s consumer offering as a way of significantly improving its search and knowledge-base functionality.

It is also understood that Bloomsbury AI being based in London was a factor, as Facebook aims to have an AI presence in the U.K. capital city and is thought to be sourcing further acquisitions here.

Multiple sources have confirmed the deal to us, although Facebook declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Ingrid Lunden

TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF (Sept. 5-7) is our most ambitious event ever. And if we’re sure of one thing, it’s that people in the startup scene will extract more insights and inspiration from this Disrupt than any before. Here’s why…

1. More, better programming. For the first time ever at Disrupt, we have two stages, plus two additional off-stage “Q&A” areas where Disrupt attendees can ask questions directly to speakers. Sequoia’s Doug Leone, Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd, Sinovation’s Dr. Kai-Fu Lee,  23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki are just a few of the stellar interviews TechCrunch editors will conduct on stage. Disrupt will be live streamed, but only Disrupt pass holders will be able to catch sessions they missed via video-on-demand.
2. Precision-guided networking. We spent years refining CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s founder-investor matching and meeting system, and we’ve got it down to a science that has already produced thousands of meetings. Investors, use the CrunchMatch/Brella app to find the the founders and startup ideas you’re looking for, request a meeting, get the thumbs up, and boom you have a time and an assigned meeting table in the CrunchMatch meeting area.
3. Startup Battlefield and Startup Alley. We’ve already selected the 20 startups that will compete in Startup Battlefield, and though the list is under wraps until the start of Disrupt, trust us it’s an amazing field of contestants – the fruits of a very deep, global recruitment effort. And Startup Alley will have more than 1,000 companies exhibiting across a dozen tracks – AI, mobility, blockchain, fintech – and each has Top Picks – the standouts that TechCrunch’s editors chose to exhibit free of charge. (Learn more about exhibiting in Startup Alley.)
4. Comfortable digs. We built past Disrupts in pier warehouses, but this year we’re moving to the glistening, super comfortable Moscone West, where we have 3x the floorspace, which means spacious, sunny lounge areas where attendees can relax, charge gear and catch up with fellow attendees.
5. The right pass for you. For the first time, Disrupt is offering passes with features and prices designed to suit different attendees, like founders, investors, all around innovators and more. Plus, passes come with access to discounted San Francisco hotel rooms. Right now, early birds prices apply, so do don’t wait. Get your pass now.

These days, it seems like everyone with extra cash has some kind of pricey drinking habit. It might be fine wine, craft beer or cocktails. Or it could come in the form of coconut water, cold-pressed juice or the latest frothy caffeinated concoction.

No matter what your preference, startups and their backers likely have you covered.

In a follow-up to our story earlier this month about food startups gobbling up venture funding, Crunchbase News is taking a look at beverage companies guzzling capital. We found that while drinkables receive a smaller portion of funding than edibles, it’s still a sector that draws hundreds of millions of dollars in annual investment.

Where are investors pouring all that money? Some unlikely places. For instance, it appears the largest funding recipient so far this year is a China-based chain called Hey Tea that’s well known for a specialty called cheese tea. (An unfortunately named, slightly salty iced drink that a Crunchbase News team sampling determined was actually pretty tasty.)

Besides cheese tea, we found startups are also raising millions to bottle deep ocean water, customize instant coffee and make your party punch more portable.

Bottom line: So long as there are profit margins to squeeze out, the quest continues for new ways to get you drunk, hydrated or caffeinated. Below, we look at what’s trending on all these fronts.

Hydrate

Venture investors and startup entrepreneurs are betting there are highly scalable businesses to be built in doling out more exotic varieties of water, coconut-based beverages and other drinks to hydrate calorie-conscious consumers.

An analysis of Crunchbase data unearthed at least a dozen companies developing new varieties of water and fitness drinks that have raised funding in recent quarters.

Funding data reveals that investors still see the potential for significant returns from coconut water. The largest round in the hydration category went to Harmless Harvest, a seller of fair trade, organic coconut water and probiotic drinks that recently raised $30 million. The funding comes as the sector is on a tear, with the U.S. spending alone on coconut water projected to reach $2 billion next year.

We also saw a couple of deals involving startups offering alternatives to bottled or tap water. The most heavily capitalized one to receive funding in the past couple of years appears to be FloWater, a Denver-based startup that provides pure water refill stations and has raised about $8 million to date. Meanwhile, bottled water is still generating attention, too, as evidenced by the $5.5 million round late last year for Kona Deep, a bottler of deep ocean water.

Intoxicate

You may need water to survive, but if you’re looking to secure venture capital, it helps to throw in a bit of alcohol.

Since last year, venture investors have poured more than $300 million into an assortment of companies providing alcoholic beverages, drinking gadgetry and services to connect consumers with booze. Crunchbase News highlighted about a dozen that raised sizable rounds, along with one hangover cure startup.

Some of the larger funding rounds are for companies that don’t make alcohol; instead, these startups offer easier ways to select and buy it. These include Vivino, a popular wine rating app, as well as Drizly and Saucey, two ordering and delivery services.

There are emerging brands in the mix, too, including BeatBox Beverages, a purveyor of party punch in portable packages; Milestone Brands, a producer of organic tequilas and other spirits; and Plum, which has a gadget for dispensing good wine by the glass.

Caffeinate

If too much drinking makes you sleepy, let caffeine come to the rescue. Venture investors, known to be heavy consumers of caffeine, also seem to like investing in the stuff.

Using Crunchbase data, we highlighted more than a dozen companies in the coffee and tea space that have secured good-sized rounds in roughly the past year. They range from fast-growing chains, like China’s Hey Tea, to packaged drinks, like non-dairy blended drink maker Willow Cup, to instant beverage innovators, like Sudden Coffee. We even found a blockchain company in the mix, Crypto N Kafe, which aims to connect coffee farmers and consumers directly.

It’s not a bad area for exits, either. The most recent significant exit was Blue Bottle Coffee, a venture-backed brand known for really, really strong brews that sold a majority stake to Nestlé last September at a valuation of over $700 million.

Nourish

One additional beverage category in which we saw a high level of activity was in meal-replacement and nutrition drinks. Overall, we found at least a half-dozen companies developing nutritional drinks that have raised funding in recent quarters.

In this sector, probably the best-known startup name is Soylent, which has raised over $70 million for a line of drinks marketed to consumers who don’t have the time or inclination to sit down for a traditional meal. We also found a potential rival, meal-replacement beverage maker Ample, which secured angel funding last month.

The biggest round in the past couple of months for the space, however, went to REBBL, a startup that raised $20 million in May for its line of bottled drinks featuring health-promoting herbs, protein and coconut.

Mix it all up: Caffeinated, full and buzzed

Beverage investments, like everything else, aren’t always a home run for VCs. The demise of juicer startup Juicero last year offers a cautionary tale that large rounds don’t always translate into compelling business models.

That said, beverage purveyors don’t have to worry much about demand drying up. People will always be thirsty. And while we typically quench our thirst with simple tap or filtered water, where’s the fun (or the massive exit potential) in that?

Methodology

Our analysis focused primarily on companies that have secured funding in the past year; however, we also included some rounds outside those parameters that were exceptionally large or noteworthy in other ways.

TechCrunch is excited to announce that the Startup Battlefield Latin America is coming to São Paulo on November 8 this year. This is the first event TechCrunch has ever held in Latin America, and we are all in to make it a memorable one to support the fast-emerging startup ecosystem in the region.

The Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, which over the past 12 years has placed 750 companies on stage to pitch top VCs and TechCrunch editors. Those founders have gone on to raise more than $8 billion and produce more than 100 exits. Startup Battlefield Latin America aims to add 15 great founders from Latin America to those elite ranks.

Here’s how the competition works. Founders may apply now to participate in Startup Battlefield. Any early stage (pre-A round) company with a working product headquartered in an eligible Latin American country (see list below) may apply. Applications close August 6. TechCrunch editors will review the applications and, based on which applicants have the strongest potential for a big exit of major societal impact, pick 15 to compete on November 8. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team will work intensively with each founding team to hone their six-minute pitch to perfection.

Then it’s game day. The 15 companies will take the stage at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute in front of a live audience of 500 people to pitch top-tier VC judges. The judges and TechCrunch editors will pick five for a finals round. Those lucky finalists will face a fresh team of judges, and one will emerge as the winner of the first-ever Startup Battlefield Latin America. The winner takes home $25,000 and a trip for two to the next Disrupt, where they can exhibit free of charge in the Startup Alley and may also qualify to participate in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt. Sweet deal. All Startup Battlefield sessions will be captured on video and posted on TechCrunch.com.

It’s an experience no founder would want to miss, considering the opportunity to join the ranks of Battlefield greats from years past, including Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, CloudFlare, Vurb and many more.

Get that application started now.

Here’s the need-to-know about qualifying to apply:

• Have an early-stage company in “launch” stage
• Headquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama (Caribbean – including dependencies and constituent entities), Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.
• Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by Aug. 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Tickets to attend Startup Battlefield Latin America will go on sale soon. Interested in sponsoring the event, contact us here

In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Unconference & Awards, features smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups, followed by a glittering awards show for the hottest startups in Europe, based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. Plus loads of networking opportunities with investors, and the super-fun Pitch Rolette pitch competition. See below for your special discount offer!

Just some of the investors coming to The Europas this Tuesday, July 3, in London include:

Alliott Cole, Octopus Ventures

Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel Partners

Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp

Damir Bandolo, Columbus Capital

Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital

Eze Vidra, Reimagine Ventures

George McDonuagh, KR1 (Blockchain/Crypto)

Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures (Blockchain/Crypto)

Jason Ball, Qualcomm Ventures

Jeremy Yap, Angel Investor

Joe White, Entrepreneur First

Maria Wagner, Beringea

Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital Partners

Nancy Fechnay, Angel Investor (Blockchain/Crypto)

Paul Dowling, Dreamstake Ventures

Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures (Blockchain/Crypto)

Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners

Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures

Stephanie Hospital, OneRagtime

Suzanne Ashman, LocalGlobe

Thomas Graham, TLDR Capital

Tugce Ergul, Angel Labs

Vishal Gulati, Draper Esprit

Wendy Tan White, BGF

Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with a selected 800 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.

Here’s the agenda.

And here’s 14 reasons to attend The Europas:

• Ultra-high quality Investors, speakers & featured guests

• New startup founders brought into the eco-system

• New deal-flow for investors

• Our “Diversity Matters” Free pass bringing in more women and POC

• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A

• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics

• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking

• Convivial, relaxed atmosphere conducive to networking

• Key press including WSJ, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, attending

• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene

• Content independently curated by journalists

• The only truly independent, industry-backed awards in Europe

• Percentage of profits will be donated to charity

• All on one day to maximize your time in London

Plus, as a special offer for TechCrunch readers, we have discounted tickets of up to 60% off:

• Daytime conference plus evening awards tickets (£250, 60% discount) (valid all day, July 3rd) – this ticket includes the daytime conference and the awards dinner with ceremony and after party. It includes refreshments and lunch during the conference, and the awards drinks reception and dinner.

• Daytime only, Unconference tickets (£75, 60% discount) – this ticket includes the afternoon Unconference only.

• Evening Awards-only tickets (£195, 60% discount) – this ticket is for the awards dinner with ceremony and after party. It includes the awards drinks reception and dinner.

If you wish to sponsor the events or to purchase a table for 10 or 12 guest or a half table for 5 guests, please contact petra@theeuropas.com

The conference and awards are supported by TechCrunch, the official media partner. Attendees, nominees, and winners will get deep discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.

Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, who has served on Snap’s board of directors since December 2012, is not expected to stand for re-election to Snap’s board of directors and will thus be stepping down, according to a report by The Information.

Early investors stepping down from the board of directors — or at least not seeking re-election — isn’t that uncommon as once-private companies grow into larger public ones. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton did not seek re-election for Twitter’s board of directors in April last year. As Snap continues to navigate its future, especially as it has declined precipitously since going public and now sits at a valuation of around $16.5 billion. Partners with an expertise in the early-stage and later-stage startup life cycle may end up seeing themselves more useful taking a back seat and focusing on other investments. The voting process for board member re-election happens during the company’s annual meeting, so we’ll get more information when an additional proxy filing comes out ahead of the meeting later this year.

Benchmark is, or at least was at the time of going public last year, one of Snap’s biggest shareholders. According to the company’s 424B filing prior to going public in March last year, Benchmark held ownership of 23.1% of Snap’s Class B common stock and 8.2% of Snap’s Class A common stock. Lasky has been with Benchmark since April 2007, and also serves on the boards of a number of gaming companies like Riot Games and thatgamecompany, the creators of PlayStation titles flower and Journey. At the time, Snap said in its filing that Lasky was “qualified to serve as a member of our board of directors due to his extensive experience with social media and technology companies, as well as his experience as a venture capitalist investing in technology companies.”

The timing could be totally coincidental, but an earlier Recode report suggested Lasky had been talking about stepping down in future funds for Benchmark. The firm only recently wrapped up a very public battle with Uber, which ended up with Benchmark selling a significant stake in the company and a new CEO coming in to replace co-founder Travis Kalanick. Benchmark hired its first female general partner, Sarah Tavel, earlier this year.

We’ve reached out to both Snap and a representative from Benchmark for comment and will update the story when we hear back.