Year: 2019

WeWork, the co-working business once valued at $47 billion, is expected to announce significant layoffs this month, following reports the company was looking to slash as many as 5,000 roles, or one-third of its workforce, Bloomberg reports.

Now expected to go public in 2020 at a valuation as low as $10 billion, WeWork is also in negotiations with JPMorgan for a last-minute cash infusion to replace the capital expected from the now-postponed IPO, per reports. The company, now a cautionary tale, has been working with bankers in recent weeks to reduce the sky-high costs of its money-losing operation.

News of potential layoffs come about two weeks after co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Neumann resigned from his post and the 9-year-old company postponed its highly-anticipated initial public offering. Neumann is now serving as the company’s non-executive chairman, succeeded by WeWork’s former vice chairman Sebastian Gunningham and the company’s president and chief operating officer Artie Minson.

The embattled company has been struggling to satisfy Wall Street skeptics, who were floored by the company’s eye-whopping valuation. Since Neumann’s resignation, WeWork has begun several cost-cutting initiatives and is reportedly looking to sell off several of its acquisitions, including Managed by Q, Conductor and Meetup.

Layoffs are a natural next step for the business as it aims to carve out a clear path to profitability, now a requisite for a 2020 IPO. To float at any point in the future, after all, WeWork must prove elevating “the world’s consciousness” will eventually lead to profits.

WeWork revealed an unusual IPO prospectus in August after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. Despite financials that showed losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30, the company still managed to accumulate a valuation as high as $47 billion, largely as a result of Neumann’s fundraising abilities.

“As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade,” Neumann said in a statement confirming his resignation. “Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business.”

We’ve reached out to WeWork for comment.

Once you get up high enough, you don’t have to worry about a lot of the obstacles like pedestrians and traffic jams that plague autonomous cars. That’s why Sebastian Thrun, Google’s self-driving team founder turned CEO of flying vehicle startup Kitty Hawk, said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF today that we should expect true autonomy to succeed in the air before the road.

“I believe we’re going to be done with self-flying vehicles before we’re done with self-driving cars” Thrun told TechCrunch reporter Kirsten Korosec.

Why? “If you go a bit higher in the air then all the difficulties with not hitting stuff like children and bicycles and cars and so on just vanishes . . . Go above the buildings, go above the trees, like go where the helicopters are!” Thrun explained, but noted personal helicopters are so noisy they’re being banned in some places like Napa, California.

That proclamation has wide reaching implications for how cities are planned and real estate is bought. We may need more vertical takeoff helipads sooner than we needed autonomous car-only road lanes. More remote homes in the forest that have only a single winding road that reaches them like those in Big Sur, California might suddenly become more accessible and thereby appealing to the affluent since they could just take a self-flying car to the city or office.

The concept could also have wide-reaching implications for the startup industry. Obviously Thrun’s own company Kitty Hawk would benefit from not being too early to market. Kitty Hawk announced its Heaviside vehicle today that’s designed to be ultra quiet. If the prophecy comes true, Uber which is investing in vertical take-off vehicles could also be in a better position than Lyft and other ride-hailing player focused on cars.

To make sure its vehicles don’t get banned and potentially pave the way for more aerial autonomy, Kitty Hawk recently recruited former FAA Administrator Mike Huerta as an advisor.

Eventually, Thrun says that because cars have to navigate indirect streets but in the air “we can go in a straight line, we believe we will be roughly a third of the energy cost per mile is Tesla.” And with shared UberPool style flights, he sees the cost of energy getting down to just “$0.30 per mile”.

But in the meantime, Thrun is trying to get people, including me, to stop saying flying cars. “I personally don’t like the word ‘flying car’, but it’s very catchy. The technical term is called eVTOL. These are typically electrically propelled vehicles, they can take off and land vertically, eVTOLs, vertical takeoff landing, so that you don’t need an airport. And then they fly very much like a regular plane.” We’ll see if that mouthful catches on, and if the skies get more congested before the roads thin out.

Orbit Fab, one of the companies competing in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco this week, has closed a seed round of $3 million. The funding comes from Type 1 Ventures, TechStars and others, and will help Orbit Fab continue to build on the great momentum it has already bootstrapped with its space-based robotic refueling technology.

You might remember the name Orbit Fab from a milestone accomplishment the young company achieved earlier this year: Becoming the first startup to supply water to the International Space Station, itself an achievement but also a key demonstration of the viability of its technology for use in orbital satellite refueling. Refueling satellites could have tremendous impact on the commercial satellite business, extending the operating life of expensive satellites considerably, which translates to better margins and more profitable businesses.

Thanks to co-founders Daniel Faber and Jeremy Schiel’s connections in the space industry, from more than 15 years working in space technology businesses in a leadership capacity, the company was able to demonstrate its technology working in space less than a year after Orbit Fab was actually founded. Faber, Orbit Fab’s CEO, and Schiel, the startup’s CMO, met when both were working at Deep Space Industries – Faber as CEO and Schiel as a contractor.

Orbit Fab’s first space payload, the ISS water resupply robot.

“We ended up reconnecting later on and really looking at a few different business models on how to push the industry forward,” Schiel said in an interview. “The one that really landed with customers, and the one that resonated with the industry was refueling satellites. Elon [Musk] has been making rockets reusable – we thought it’s time that we make satellites reusable as well.”

Starting from this realization, the pair founded the company in January 2018. They then secured their first round of pre-seed investment from Bolt in San Francisco in June that year, and also landed two contracts –  including one with NASA, and one with the International Space Station National Laboratory.

“Basically in four-and-a-half months, we got flight-qualified and human-rated from NASA our two tanker test beds that we flew to the International Space Station in December 2018, and March of 2019,” Shield said.

How did they do it with that speed? Faber credits their rapid progress largely to lead engineer James Bultitude, an accomplished space engineer with five payloads on the International Space Station already.

“He took [the project] from a napkin through to flight hardware in four-and-a-half months,” Faber said. “All qualified to NASA human-rated safety standards, which was quite the feat. We really had to push hard on NASA.”

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Faber said that the company’s ability to spur the U.S. space agency into action has been a key driver of its success. In fact, he relayed a story in which their National Lab demonstration payload was actually left off of its intended flight, but the team was able to get its cargo approved by top NASA decision-makers over the course of a weekend and just barely made the cut as a result.

As for working with NASA as a startup, Faber said that it’s become a very different affair, with the agency eager and adapting to working more with younger companies and startups bringing a different pace of innovation to the field.

“The change is almost palpable on the phone with NASA – you can almost hear them changing,” he said.

At Disrupt, Orbit Fab demonstrated their robotic connector for refueling on stage for the first time. The idea is that satellite makers will build their standard nozzles into their designs, and then a robotic refueler will be able to seek out the nozzle, open and then close on to the coupler, forming a solid connection to allow propellant transfer.

Already, Orbit Fab is talking to partners, including Northrop Grumman, and it’s a member of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), an industry group that aims to make robotic service and maintenance of satellites a viable reality.

CES parent the Consumer Technology Association created a public relations disaster in January when it unceremoniously revoked an award from sex tech startup, Lora DiCarlo and its product Osé.

“Vela [now Osé] does not fit into any of our existing product categories and should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program,” the organization wrote at the time. “CTA has communicated this position to Lora DiCarlo. We have apologized to the company for our mistake.”

The CTA would go on to apologize and reinstate the award. During a panel today at TechCrunch Disrupt, founder and CEO Lora Haddock told the audience, that in hindsight, “I think they actually did us a pretty big favor.”

Back in May, we noted that the CTA’s apology serendipitously coincided with a $2 million funding raise for the company’s advanced sex toy. Haddock noted that, while the CTA’s initial move was understandably both “disheartening” and “devastating,” the startup’s decision to push back on historical biases, including booth babes and the underrepresentation of female speakers, ultimately became a win.

“We started to really look at some of their policies and recent procedures in the last few years,” Haddock said. “A lot of booth babes products that were on the floor are geared towards male sexuality, but apparently something geared towards a female gaze was frowned upon. So, we fought it, and eventually we ended up winning, we ended up on an international press circuit, we got a ton of ton of coverage.”

When T4 co-founder and CEO Maks Khurgin was working at Bain and Company, he ran into a common problem for analysts looking for market data. He spent way too much time searching for it and felt there had to be a better way. He decided to build a centralized market data platform himself, and T4 was born. This week the company competes in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield.

What he created with the help of his long-time friend and CTO, Yev Spektor, was built on a couple of key components. The first is an industry classification system, a taxonomy, that organizes markets by industries and sub-industries. Using search and aggregation tools powered by artificial intelligence, it scours the web looking for information sources that match their taxonomy labels.

As they researched the tool, the founders realized that the AI could only get them so far. There were always pieces that it missed. So they built a second part to provide a way for human indexers to fill in those missing parts to offer as comprehensive a list of sources as possible.

“AI alone cannot solve this problem. If we bring people into this and avoid the last mile delivery problem, then you can actually start organizing this information in a much better way than anyone else had ever done,” Khurgin explained.

It seems simple enough, but it’s a problem that well-heeled companies like Bain have been trying to solve for years, and there was a lot of skepticism when Khurgin told his superiors he was leaving to build a product to solve this problem. “I had a partner at Bain and Company actually tell me, “You know, every consulting firm has tried to do something like this — and they failed. Why do you think you can do this?””

He knew that figuring out the nature of the problem and why the other attempts had failed was the key to solving the puzzle. He decided to take the challenge, and on his 30th birthday, he quit his job at Bain and started T4 the next day — without a product yet, mind you.

This was not the first time he had left a high-paying job to try something unconventional. “Last time I left a high paying job, actually after undergrad, I was a commodities derivatives trader for a financial [services company]. I left that to pursue a lifelong dream of being in the Marine Corps,” Khurgin said.

T4 was probably a less risky proposition, but it still took a leap of faith that only a startup founder can understand, who believes in his idea. “I felt the problem first-hand, and the the big kind of realization that I had was that there is actually a finite amount of information out there. Market research is created by humans, and you don’t necessarily have to take a pure AI approach,” he said.

The product searches for all of the related information on a topic, finds all of the data related to a category and places it in an index. Users can search by topic and find all of the free and paid reports related to that search. The product shows which reports are free and which will cost you money, and like Google, you get a title and a brief summary.

The company is just getting started with five main market categories so far, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking, data centers and eSports. The founders plan to add additional categories over time, and have a bold goal for the future.

“Our long-term vision is that we become your one-stop shop to find market research in the same way that if you need to buy something, you go to Amazon, or you need financial data, you go on Bloomberg or Thomson. If you need market research, our vision is that T4 is the place that you go,” Khurgin said.

Nonprofits employ 10% of the U.S. workforce and generate some $2 trillion in revenue each year and yet, many charitable organizations are still using pen and paper to track their volunteers.

Civic Champs, a startup that presented onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, has developed a platform that aims to give non-profits the tech tools they need to better manage volunteers.

“The nonprofit market is underserved by technology companies,” co-founder and CTO Mike Jeffery told TechCrunch.

Civic Champs is initially focusing on volunteer management. However, the mobile app, which was built with React Native for Android and iOS, can be broadened over time.

For instance, the company recently launched a micro-donations feature that automatically converts volunteers to donors. The feature will integrate a number of payment options, including Stripe, Apple Pay, and Plaid/Dwolla for ACH donations.

The Civic Champs platform uses geolocation and geofences to automate volunteer-hour tracking. The seemingly simple task of checking volunteers into events and tracking their time can take a small nonprofit 10 hours per month to manage, according to the company. Civic Champs co-founder and CEO Geng Wang says their platform can slash that task down to an hour per month.

Civic Champs designed a mobile-first platform. However, the company’s co-founders say they understood that not all volunteers will have smartphones or want to use the app. So they developed three ways to use the platform.

Volunteers can use the Civic Champs mobile app to check in at events and track their hours. The platform has also been adapted to web-based kiosks, which nonprofits can use to make it easier for tech-averse volunteers to check in. A volunteer’s hours can also be tracked through a nonprofit’s administrative features on both the app and the web. All three tracking methods — mobile, web kiosk, or by administrator — synchronize volunteer tracking across platforms and between users and potentially multiple organizations.

With the launch of Civic Champs, Wang, who co-founded the startup with Jeffery and Ryan Underdahl, is now solidly in serial entrepreneur territory. Wang’s first startup, RentJungle, was an apartment search engine, which was acquired in 2014 by The Rainmaker Group. Wang’s second startup, a social media marketing firm called Community Elf that has since been rebranded as Cosmitto, was acquired in 2017 by private equity firm Topanga Partners.

For his third go around, Wang told TechCrunch he wanted to do something more mission-driven. The original idea was to create a mobile game for volunteering. This “Pokemon Go” of volunteering would let users contribute in small ways — like helping cities collect data on physical assets, such as traffic lights and fire hydrants using GPS and photo uploads.

But that idea quickly morphed into something larger when Geng started talking to volunteer organizations and learned the challenges were far more basic and widespread.

“Essentially, nine out of the 10 organizations we talked to still track their volunteers on pen and paper forms,” Geng said. “As a former consultant, I thought well that’s sort of crazy. That’s a lot of time that you’re spending on paperwork that you could direct back to the community and in certain, more impactful ways.”

The co-founders pivoted away from gamification and started developing a mobile platform that nonprofits can use to track volunteers. The company officially launched in January 2019.

Civic Champs has raised $312,000 in a pre-seed round and also received $29,000 in non-dilutive grants through the Indiana University CLAPP competition and the Indiana Technical Assistance Program.

The company is still figuring out its pricing structure. Civic Champs does have 34 customers, 24 of which are paid clients. The remaining 10 are pilots. The business model, which is set up like a Software-as-a-Service product, charges between $25 a month for its smallest customer up to $450 a month for its largest client.

The founders of Vise AI met when they were 13, a couple of teenagers more interested in applied artificial intelligence than English class. Fast-forward several years and the pair has relocated from the Midwest to San Francisco to raise money for a financial technology business they’ve been self-funding since 2016.

As teenagers with an inordinate amount of AI knowledge, Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra proved to be quite useful to large businesses, investment bankers and other financiers. Leveraging their AI know-how, they were paid $700 per hour by a consulting firm to teach financial “experts” about AI. Mehrotra, according to Vasavada, is a mathematical prodigy: “And that translates extremely well to AI, right, because what underlies AI is math,” Vasavada, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vise AI, tells TechCrunch. “We had the ability of articulating what AI is to investment bankers in a way that they would understand. Whereas most expert explanations would be really complex and very technical.”

Meanwhile, school was on autopilot. “I was taking phone calls in English class,” Vasavada said. “It wasn’t very good but we were making a lot of money.” Ultimately, that money funneled into the early makings of a real business, Vise AI, which automates portfolio management using AI and machine learning. Launching onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today, the SEC-registered investment advisor will begin customer on-boarding next week. In short, the platform analyzes clients’ investment needs and builds them a personalized portfolio of stocks, bonds and other assets, then provides investment manager tools to automate management.

“It’s an unsexy industry that makes all of the money in finance,” said Mehrotra, co-founder and chief technology officer of Vise AI.

For now, the team is going after independent advisory shops, those without a flock of analysts available at their beck and call and who need outsourced investment management. Ultimately, they plan to pursue the big wealth managers. The business has also been approved as a subadvisor by TD Ameritrade Institutional, which has thousands of independent RIAs on its platform.

“The icing on the cake is what we refer to as portfolio intelligence,” Vasavada explains. “We can provide unique insights, justifications and logic as to why specific investment decisions were made — talking points to make the advisor look smarter with the clients because it’s a relationship game with these advisors, so tools that will help build their relationships and help empower their relationships, while still delivering a better portfolio to the client is the type of solution that really needs to be built in this space.”

“We are literally giving them bite-sized portfolio intelligence,” adds Mehrotra. “Because most of them aren’t really doing the investment management themselves, right? So they’re either using some ETF allocation tool, like Betterment for Advisors, or something like that, where it’s just a standard set of ETFs and there really isn’t any personalization.”

Vasavada, hailing from Cleveland, and Mehrotra, raised just outside Detroit, met years ago at a Northwestern University summer research program. The two have since established themselves as AI experts, supporting high-profile clients (who they can’t name due to non-disclosure agreements) as consultants and completing the fintech conference circuit a few times over. But when it came to raising venture capital to exit the era of self-funding and launch their AI-enabled portfolio manager, they were clueless.

Their first infusion of outside capital came in the form of a $20,000 uncapped note from Dorm Room Fund. A little something to help them through the daunting fundraising process. But their first real pitch meeting was with none other than Vinod Khosla, the billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures. Khosla’s son, Neal Khosla, had worked on the investment team at Dorm Room Fund and made the introduction.

Khosla passed and the Vise team realized they had no idea what they were doing. They began refining their pitch. After reaching out to roughly 1,000 different investors (Vasavada created a detailed CRM to track all their cold pitches) they raised $2 million from co-leads Keith Rabois, a co-founder at PayPal and a partner at Founders Fund, and Ben Ling of Bling Capital, two investors who were, ironically, former general partners at Khosla Ventures. Great Oaks Ventures, Flatiron Health co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, Future Advisor founder John Xu, NFX’s Pete Flint and Contrary Capital also participated. Vasavada and Mehrotra said that once they had tapped two high-profile leads, offers came flooding in, including from VCs who had rejected them just weeks before.

“This was our first round of fundraising ever,” says Mehrotra. “So in the beginning, a lot of it was just like, figuring out how things worked and learning how to best pitch the company because it is a niche market. I think once we got the momentum … We felt like we were turning away tons of money.”

Once they reach $50 million in assets under management, Vise plans to raise a much larger round of funding to help the team expand and open an office in New York.

Vise is targeting a market worth trillions in one of the most valuable industries in the world. To succeed in the long term, the startup will have to infiltrate a decades-old network relying on legacy technology, as well as battle Silicon Valley’s narrative that robo-advisors will soon make the financial advisory space obsolete. According to their thesis, companies like Betterment and Wealthfront are successful with tech-rich millennials, but once one accumulates “real wealth,” it’s a conversation with a human being they’re looking for, not an easy-to-use app.

“We want to empower advisors to be better at their jobs, so they can focus on actually building better relationships and holding their clients’ hand,” said Mehrotra.

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle startup, is expanding to Las Vegas, CTO Jesse Levinson said at TechCrunch Disrupt ST.

The startup, which has raised $800 million and has been testing on public roads in San Francisco, said Las Vegas is a target market for its autonomous driving fleet and service. Las Vegas will serve as an anchor market for Zoox. The company plans to test, validate and refine its autonomous vehicle technology with future plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service there, Levinson said.

Zoox received permission from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to drive autonomously on state roads in early 2019. The startup is currently mapping and test-driving new routes in the greater Las Vegas region.

For now, Zoox, is doing strategic testing to keep costs in line, CEO Aicha Evans told TechCrunch during Disrupt. That means, Zoox will send its retrofitted Toyota Highlander autonomous vehicles to Las Vegas for blocks of time, maybe six weeks or so. The company has now completed five of these deployments.

Over time, Zoox will expand its time and footprint in the city. Eventually, Zoox will bring its built-from-the ground-up autonomous vehicles to the city, although the company didn’t share when that might be.

Zoox says it selected Las Vegas because the region offers an opportunity to extend learning in a second dense urban environment and one that has diverse and unique use cases compared to driving in San Francisco. For instance, Las Vegas has reversible lanes, complex pick-up and drop-off zones, high temperatures and more night-time activity, the company said.

A new startup is clearing the way for other companies to better monitor and manage their risk and compliance with privacy laws.

Osano, an Austin, Texas-based startup, bills itself as a privacy platform startup, which uses a software-as-a-service solution to give businesses real-time visibility into their current privacy and compliance posture. On one hand, that helps startups and enterprises large and small insight into whether or not they’re complying with global or state privacy laws, and manage risk factors associated with their business such as when partner or vendor privacy policies change.

The company launched its privacy platform at Disrupt SF on the Startup Battlefield stage.

Risk and compliance is typically a fusty, boring and frankly unsexy topic. But with ever-changing legal landscapes and constantly moving requirements, it’s hard to keep up. Although Europe’s GDPR has been around for a year, it’s still causing headaches. And stateside, the California Consumer Privacy Act is about to kick in and it is terrifying large companies for fear they can’t comply with it.

Osano mixes tech with its legal chops to help companies, particularly smaller startups without their own legal support, to provide a one-stop shop for businesses to get insight, advice and guidance.

“We believe that any time a company does a better job with transparency and data protection, we think that’s a really good thing for the internet,” the company’s founder Arlo Gilbert told TechCrunch.

Gilbert, along with his co-founder and chief technology officer Scott Hertel, have built their company’s software-as-a-service solution with several components in mind, including maintaining its scorecard of 6,000 vendors and their privacy practices to objectively grade how a company fares, as well as monitoring vendor privacy policies to spot changes as soon as they are made.

One of its standout features is allowing its corporate customers to comply with dozens of privacy laws across the world with a single line of code.

You’ve seen them before: The “consent” popups that ask (or demand) you to allow cookies or you can’t come in. Osano’s consent management lets companies install a dynamic consent management in just five minutes, which delivers the right consent message to the right people in the best language. Using the blockchain, the company says it can record and provide searchable and cryptographically verifiable proof-of-consent in the event of a person’s data access request.

“There are 40 countries with cookie and data privacy laws that require consent,” said Gilbert. “Each of them has nuances about what they consider to be consent: what you have to tell them; what you have to offer them; when you have to do it.”

Osano also has an office in Dublin, Ireland, allowing its corporate customers to say it has a physical representative in the European Union — a requirement for companies that have to comply with GDPR.

And, for corporate customers with questions, they can dial-an-expert from Osano’s outsourced and freelance team of attorneys and privacy experts to help break down complex questions into bitesize answers.

Or as Gilbert calls it, “Uber, but for lawyers.”

The concept seems novel but it’s not restricted to GDPR or California’s upcoming law. The company says it monitors international, federal and state legislatures for new laws and changes to existing privacy legislation to alert customers of upcoming changes and requirements that might affect their business.

In other words, plug in a new law or two and Osano’s customers are as good as covered.

Osano is still in its pre-seed stage. But while the company is focusing on its product, it’s not thinking too much about money.

“We’re planning to kind of go the binary outcome — go big or go home,” said Gilbert, with his eye on the small- to medium-sized enterprise. “It’s greenfield right now. There’s really nobody doing what we’re doing.”

The plan is to take on enough funding to own the market, and then focus on turning a profit. So much so, Gilbert said, that the company is registered as a B Corporation, a more socially conscious and less profit-driven approach of corporate structure, allowing it to generate profits while maintaining its social vision.

The company’s idea is strong; its corporate structure seems mindful. But is it enough of an enticement for fellow startups and small businesses? It’s either dominate the market or bust, and only time will tell.

Maisie Williams, best known as ‘Arya’ on Game of Thrones, is preparing to take her startup Daisie to the next stage. Right now, the app works to connect creators with one another to work on each others’ projects, but now Williams wants to help those projects find an audience.

On the app, creators establish a profile, similar to other social networks, but the focus is not on gaining fans and likes, but rather on helping creators find collaborators for their art — whether that’s film, music, photography, or art, or anything else.

The actress-turned-entrepreneur spoke this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt SF about the decision to make Daise less focused on traditional “popularity” metrics.

“We didn’t want follower counts — I think that rewarding people for these typical kinds of metrics can be quite damaging, and can make you feel like just because you’re not popular then maybe you’re not talented. And that’s just not true. The thing about creative endeavors is that the things that are popular aren’t necessarily like the best things and just because something that you do isn’t liked by many people it doesn’t mean it’s not incredible.”

The startup passed 100,000 members earlier this year, and raised a seed round of $2.5 million. Now Daisie is looking to raise again, Williams said in passing, noting the startup would begin the fundraising process “soon.”

She also briefly touched on the plans to help creators take the next step in their journeys.

“It’s actually where the company is heading right now,” said Williams. “We want to work on partnerships where our users can have like a real brief from a real client, and pitch their ideas, then get them made — and have a budget and be paid for their work which is — one of the most difficult things within the creative industry is to get paid for what you’re doing,” she said.

“At the moment we’ve got a really wonderful community that’s thriving and creating these amazing projects. But in terms of transferring that into the real world and helping people actually get jobs — these partnerships are going to be really really great for that,” she said.