Year: 2019

The modern office worker is heavily engaged with expenses. From buying SaaS products and purchasing team lunches to securing freelancers for outsourced work, employees need access to purchasing power on behalf of their companies on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, offering that purchasing power is fraught with difficulty. Companies want to manage their cash carefully to ensure audit compliance and prevent fraud, which often means that rather than empowering employees to spend what they need, they force them to work with byzantine “p-card” rules to make anything happen.

Teampay wants to change that calculus by giving every employee a beautiful platform to buy the goods, tools, and services they need while keeping them within defined company policy.

The New York City-based startup announced today that it raised a $12 million series A round from Jonathan Hsu of Tribe Capital . Existing investors Crosscut, Silicon Valley Bank, and Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures also participated.

When I chatted with the company last year, founder and CEO Andrew Hoag had just locked in a $4 million seed round and had recently launched the platform. Since then, “We brought in our first sales reps, brought in one marketing hire, and we’re growing by double digit percentages, month-over-month in 2018,” Hoag said.

He noted that Teampay has been carefully refining its pitch to customers. “Even comparing 2018 to 2019, I think we spend — no pun intended — a lot more time working with our customers on solutions, as opposed to talking now about the pain points, because they’re hyper aware of those pain points,” he said.

What Teampay discovered is that while the pain point for organizations is the actual purchase of a particular good or service, what companies are really looking for is better tools to manage expenses across the board, or what Hoag calls “distributed spend management.”

That includes the challenges of managing spend even outside of a company’s walls. With more and more businesses hiring freelancers these days, it can be challenging to offer contingent workers access to spending power without onerous bureaucratic systems that ultimately cost more in lost salary and productivity than savings in cost management.

In addition to hiring in sales and engineering, Teampay has also hired several senior executives over the past year. Peter Nesbitt joined as VP of Finance, and was formerly VP of Finance at Unified and director of finance at Bitly. Nicole Lindenbaum joined as VP of Marketing from PeopleDoc and Yodle, while Matt Petcoff joined as head of sales from Inturn and Movable Ink.

Spend management has heated up acutely in the past year, with Brex reaching unicorn status with its now ubiquitous cards targeting startups and Stripe announcing its Stripe Corporate Card along a similar vein.

Hoag emphasized that Teampay targets a different problem in several ways. First, “We don’t require a customer to switch their card program in order to be able to use Teampay,” he explained. Instead, Teampay acts as a sort of collaboration software layer on top of the existing card infrastructure that a company has to better manage spend across the organization.

Second, Teampay doesn’t focus on startups so much as larger enterprises where the needs around spend are different and more complicated. “Most of our customers are fairly large, and they have strong balance sheets,” Hoag said. “And so they’re not looking to optimize for working capital, they don’t have a problem of getting access to credit, they have a problem about controlling credit.”

The company noted that it has customers like Wistia, Chime, Mixpanel, and RiskIQ using the platform.

Hoag’s goal for the new round of capital is to continue to expand Teampay’s partnerships and integrations (for instance, expanding Teampay to work in concert with IT ticketing systems to make software and hardware procurement easier) as well as increasing sales and marketing. The company was founded in 2016.

Two of Africa’s powerhouse tech incubators will join forces. Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub has acquired Nairobi based iHub — CcHub CEO Bosun Tijani confirmed to TechCrunch.

The purchase amount is undisclosed, but Tijani said CcHub will finance the deal out of its real-estate project to build a new 10 story innovation center to replace its Herbert Macaulay Way building in Lagos.

Details are emerging on how the two entities will operate together, but Tijani noted some degree of autonomy.

“The names will stay the same…iHub will remain iHub…it is a strong brand…but iHub will be supported from the central CcHub, which will help them strengthen what they do,” he said.

Per the acquisition, Tijani becomes CEO of both organizations, while Nekesa Were continues as iHub Managing Director. iHub’s existing programs will remain, according to Tijani, but CcHub will extend some of its existing activities in education, healthcare, and governance to Kenya.

CcHub will also use the iHub addition to expand its investment scope. “We’ll now have access to pipeline in Nigeria, Kenya, and Rwanda,” he said.

Tijani views the arrangement as a boost to the continent’s tech ecosystem. “It strengthens our ability to support innovation. iHub and CcHub…coming together makes us stronger; it gives us a chance to attract greater resources and talent,” he said.

The acquisition joins two of the Africa’s most recognized tech hubs. These innovation spaces, accelerators, and incubators—which tally 618 per GSMA stats—have become focal points for startup formation, training, and IT activity on the continent.

There aren’t official rankings for Africa’s most powerful tech hubs, but if there were, CcHub and iHub would arguably be up top. This would be based on the size of their membership networks, volume of tech related programs, startups incubated, partnerships, and global visibility.

Founded in 2011 in Lagos’ tech-synonymous Yaba suburb, the Co-Creation Hub has grown into a multi-faceted innovation center. The organization manages digital skills programs for entrepreneurs and school kids, startup incubation, and a portfolio of investments through its Growth Capital Fund.

CcHub is considered a go-to spot for any tech related visit to Nigeria. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s first public stop on his 2016 Africa trip. While leaving a CcHub event in 2018, I noticed the Vice President of Nigeria, Yemi Osinbajo, and his entourage packing into the elevator.

Tijani and team have mastered gaining partnerships with big global tech names. When Facebook launched its tech space in Nigeria—NG_Hub—CcHub was named lead partner. Google for Startups sponsored CcHub’s Pitch Drive, an African startup tour to Europe and Asia. CcHub also collaborated with the Government of Rwanda this year to open its Design Lab in Kigali, focused on innovating impact solutions in health, education, and governance.

The Design Lab launch extended CcHub’s West Africa reach further east and closer to iHub. The innovation center was co-founded by Erik Hersman in 2010 out of what he saw as a need in Africa’s emerging tech scene “for…creating community spaces…in major cities [for] young entrepreneurs. The nexus point for technologists, investors, [and] tech companies.”

iHub became that central spot in East Africa. Along with M-Pesa mobile-money and a vibrant startup scene, it is one of the pillars that inspired Kenya’s Silicon Savannah moniker.

iHub is also widely seen as giving rise to the Africa’s innovation center movement that inspired the upsurge in tech hubs across the continent.

Since 2010, 170  companies have formed out of iHub. It has 16,000 members and has played host to most major visitors to Kenya’s tech scene. After seeing CcHub in Nigeria in 2016, Zuck then headed to Kenya and toured iHub.

There’ll be plenty for continuing coverage on how these two prominent African incubators settle into becoming one big Africa mega-hub. That includes the sustainability question and what this all means to the continent’s tech scene.

At a high level, for now, the CcHub-iHub union creates a direct innovation link between two of Africa’s most active markets for VC and startup formation—Nigeria and Kenya.

In the past, both countries’ techies have shared a healthy rivalry. That could now turn to more  collaborations, as CcHub’s acquisition connects East and West in African tech.

 

 

 

New research by the Oxford Internet Institute has found that social media manipulation is getting worse, with rising numbers of governments and political parties making cynical use of social media algorithms, automation and big data to manipulate public opinion at scale — with hugely worrying implications for democracy.

The report found that computational propaganda and social media manipulation have proliferated massively in recently years — now prevalent in more than double the number of countries (70) vs two years ago (28). An increase of 150%.

The research suggests that the spreading of fake news and toxic narratives has become the dysfunctional new ‘normal’ for political actors across the globe, thanks to social media’s global reach.

“Although propaganda has always been a part of political discourse, the deep and wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raise critical public interest concerns,” the report warns.

The researchers go on to dub the global uptake of computational propaganda tools and techniques a “critical threat” to democracies.

“The use of computational propaganda to shape public attitudes via social media has become mainstream, extending far beyond the actions of a few bad actors,” they add. “In an information environment characterized by high volumes of information and limited levels of user attention and trust, the tools and techniques of computational propaganda are becoming a common – and arguably essential – part of digital campaigning and public diplomacy.”

Techniques the researchers found being deployed by governments and political parties to spread political propaganda include the use of bots to amplify hate speech or other forms of manipulated content; the illegal harvesting of data or micro-targeting; and the use of armies of ‘trolls’ to bully or harass political dissidents or journalists online.

The researchers looked at computational propaganda activity in 70 countries around the world — including the US, the UK, Germany, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Australia (see the end of this article for the full list) — finding organized social media manipulation in all of them.

So next time Facebook puts out another press release detailing a bit of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” it claims to have found and removed from its platform, it’s important to put it in context of the bigger picture. And the picture painted by this report suggests that such small-scale, selective discloses of propaganda-quashing successes sum to misleading Facebook PR vs the sheer scale of the problem.

The problem is massive, global and largely taking place through Facebook’s funnel, per the report.

Facebook remains the platform of choice for social media manipulation — with researchers finding evidence of formally organised political disops campaigns on its platform taking place in 56 countries.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to the report and the company sent us a laundry list of steps it says it’s been taking to combat election interference and coordinated inauthentic activity — including in areas such as voter suppression, political ad transparency and industry-civil society partnerships.

But it did not offer any explanation why all this apparent effort (just its summary of what it’s been doing exceeds 1,600 words) has so spectacularly failed to stem the rising tide of political fakes being amplified via Facebook.

Instead it sent us this statement: “Helping show people accurate information and protecting against harm is a major priority for us. We’ve developed smarter tools, greater transparency, and stronger partnerships to better identify emerging threats, stop bad actors, and reduce the spread of misinformation on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. We also know that this work is never finished and we can’t do this alone. That’s why we are working with policymakers, academics, and outside experts to make sure we continue to improve.”

We followed up to ask why all its efforts have so far failed to reduce fake activity on its platform and will update this report with any response.

Returning to the report, the researchers say China has entered the global disinformation fray in a big way — using social media platforms to target international audiences with disinformation, something the country has long directed at its domestic population of course.

The report describes China as “a major player in the global disinformation order”.

It also warns that the use of computational propaganda techniques combined with tech-enabled surveillance is providing authoritarian regimes around the world with the means to extend their control of citizens’ lives.

“The co-option of social media technologies provides authoritarian regimes with a powerful tool to shape public discussions and spread propaganda online, while simultaneously surveilling, censoring, and restricting digital public spaces,” the researchers write.

Other key findings from the report include that both democracies and authoritarian states are making (il)liberal use of computational propaganda tools and techniques.

Per the report:

• In 45 democracies, politicians and political parties “have used computational propaganda tools by amassing fake followers or spreading manipulated media to garner voter support”
• In 26 authoritarian states, government entities “have used computational propaganda as a tool of information control to suppress public opinion and press freedom, discredit criticism and oppositional voices, and drown out political dissent”

The report also identifies seven “sophisticated state actors” — China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — using what it calls “cyber troops” (aka dedicated online workers whose job is to use computational propaganda tools to manipulate public opinion) to run foreign influence campaigns.

Foreign influence operations — which includes election interference — were found by the researchers to primarily be taking place on Facebook and Twitter.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update this article with any response.

A year ago, when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, he said it was considering labelling bot accounts on its platform — agreeing that “more context” around tweets and accounts would be a good thing, while also arguing that identifying automation that’s scripted to look like a human is difficult.

Instead of adding a ‘bot or not’ label, Twitter has just launched a ‘hide replies’ feature — which lets users screen individual replies to their tweets (requiring an affirmative action from viewers to unhide and be able to view any hidden replies). Twitter says this is intended at increasing civility on the platform. But there have been concerns the feature could be abused to help propaganda spreaders — i.e. by allowing them to suppress replies that debunk their junk.

The Oxford Internet Institute researchers found bot accounts are very widely used to spread political propaganda (80% of countries studied used them). However the use of human agents was even more prevalent (87% of countries).

Bot-human blended accounts, which combine automation with human curation in an attempt to fly under the BS detector radar, were much rarer: Identified in 11% of countries.

While hacked or stolen accounts were found being used in just 7% of countries.

In another key finding from the report, the researchers identified 25 countries working with private companies or strategic communications firms offering a computational propaganda as a service, noting that: “In some cases, like in Azerbaijan, Israel, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, student or youth groups are hired by government agencies to use computational propaganda.”

Commenting on the report in a statement, professor Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “The manipulation of public opinion over social media remains a critical threat to democracy, as computational propaganda becomes a pervasive part of everyday life. Government agencies and political parties around the world are using social media to spread disinformation and other forms of manipulated media. Although propaganda has always been a part of politics, the wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raises critical concerns for modern democracy.”

Samantha Bradshaw, researcher and lead author of the report, added: “The affordances of social networking technologies — algorithms, automation and big data — vastly changes the scale, scope, and precision of how information is transmitted in the digital age. Although social media was once heralded as a force for freedom and democracy, it has increasingly come under scrutiny for its role in amplifying disinformation, inciting violence, and lowering trust in the media and democratic institutions.”

Other findings from the report include that:

• 52 countries used “disinformation and media manipulation” to mislead users
• 47 countries used state sponsored trolls to attack political opponents or activists, up from 27 last year

Which backs up the widespread sense in some Western democracies that political discourse has been getting less truthful and more toxic for a number of years — given tactics that amplify disinformation and target harassment at political opponents are indeed thriving on social media, per the report.

Despite finding an alarming rise in the number of government actors across the globe who are misappropriating powerful social media platforms and other tech tools to influence public attitudes and try to disrupt elections, Howard said the researchers remain optimistic that social media can be “a force for good” — by “creating a space for public deliberation and democracy to flourish”.

“A strong democracy requires access to high quality information and an ability for citizens to come together to debate, discuss, deliberate, empathise and make concessions,” he said.

Clearly, though, there’s a stark risk of high quality information being drowned out by the tsunami of BS that’s being paid for by self-interested political actors. It’s also of course much cheaper to produce BS political propaganda than carry out investigative journalism.

Democracy needs a free press to function but the press itself is also under assault from online ad giants that have disrupted its business model by being able to spread and monetize any old junk content. If you want a perfect storm hammering democracy this most certainly is it.

It’s therefore imperative for democratic states to arm their citizens with education and awareness to enable them to think critically about the junk being pushed at them online. But as we’ve said before, there are no shortcuts to universal education.

Meanwhile regulation of social media platforms and/or the use of powerful computational tools and techniques for political purposes simply isn’t there. So there’s no hard check on voter manipulation.

Lawmakers have failed to keep up with the tech-fuelled times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how many political parties have their own hands in the data and ad-targeting cookie jar, as well as pushing fakes. (Concerned citizens are advised to practise good digital privacy hygiene to fight back against undemocratic attempts to hack public opinion. More privacy tips here.)

The researchers say their 2019 report, which is based on research work carried out between 2018 and 2019, draws upon a four-step methodology to identify evidence of globally organised manipulation campaigns — including a systematic content analysis of news articles on cyber troop activity and a secondary literature review of public archives and scientific reports, generating country specific case studies and expert consultations.

Here’s the full list of countries studied:

Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Myanmar, Netherlands, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.

As any CFO can attest, corporate finance is extraordinarily complicated. From tax preparation, to financial controls, to cash flow estimation and more, the finance department of any major company often has to turnaround sophisticated analyses with extreme attention to detail — and quick.

Most of the time, businesses outsource at least part of those financial functions to the big four accounting firms or to smaller firms, but as with all consulting firms, getting contracts signed and work underway can take significant time and effort.

That’s where Paro comes in. The Chicago-based expert marketplace wants to provide corporate clients with on-demand sophisticated expertise across a range of financial functions.

The company announced today that it has raised a $10 million series B venture capital round led by Mark Fernandes of Sierra Ventures. Existing investors Revolution Ventures, KGC Capital, and Tom Williams also participated.

When we last checked in with Paro 18 months ago, it had just raised a $5 million series A from Clara Sieg at Revolution. Since that time, the marketplace has continued to expand, and CEO and co-founder Michael Burdick says that the company is increasingly zero-ing in on the types of clients that best match the platform’s offerings.

“The cognitive load is huge,” Burdick explained for companies trying to find this talent on existing marketplaces. “You’re posting project descriptions, you’re wading through all these mountains of unfiltered proposals, you’re having to shortlist candidates.” That often leads CFOs right back to the incumbent accounting firms, since they are much more plug-and-play.

Paro has taken a different tact, focusing instead on recruiting and retaining the highest-quality financial talent on its marketplace. The company has built out and continues to improve tools to help the marketplace’s experts focus on the work that makes them unique rather than the drudgery that can come as part of their jobs. We’re “automating a lot of their back office functions [and] giving them workflow automation tools to make them more productive and efficient and earn more,” Burdick said. He dubbed this the “freelancer operating system.”

Sieg of Revolution also noted that the pursuit of quality has been beneficial for Paro’s bottom line. “Unlike a consulting gig, where it’s a one-time analysis and a sort of lumpy engagement, you need monthly financials, you need annual tax reporting, you need audit work, and so these are really ongoing relationships,” she said. That “gets us away from some of the informal problems that you’ve seen in labor marketplaces, which is really high customer acquisition costs, and relatively low take rates, and not very much recurring business.”

As Paro scales, Burdick sees an opportunity to leverage the firm’s data network effects to build a moat around its business. “There is inherently a wealth of data at our fingertips that we’re leveraging, giving back to the freelancers and the clients,” he said.

Online labor marketplaces targeting business functions have grown dramatically in popularity in recent years, with companies like Pilot raising large rounds of venture capital. Burdick says that Paro differentiates from bookkeeping services like Pilot by focusing on elite financial talent which ultimately leads to higher margins.

The company intends to use the capital to continue expanding its product and sales staffs.

Calling all code poets. It’s time to strut your stuff at the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019. Are you ready to test your physical, mental and technical limits in this intense, high-pressure code-a-thon for cash, prizes and bragging rights? Then apply to compete right here.

How does the Hackathon work? First of all, it’s free. And we give each participant a free Innovator pass. The Hackathon takes place during the Disrupt conference in a dedicated section of Arena Berlin. We’re limiting participation to 500 participants who will have just 36 hours to form teams, choose one of several sponsored contest hacks and complete their project.

We’ll announce the specific sponsors and challenges in the coming weeks. But you’ll get a good sense of what to expect by looking at the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from the Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2018.

Your skill and talent will be put to good use because, regardless of which hack challenge you select, sponsors are looking for working products that address real-world problems. Do your very best to impress, and you could take home thousands of dollars.

Judges will review the completed projects science-fair style, and they’ll choose 10 teams for the final round on day two. Each (very) tired team gets two minutes to present and pitch their project on the Extra Crunch Stage.

In addition to the cash and prizes from individual sponsors, TechCrunch’s panel of judges will select one team for the best overall hack — and they’ll take home a $5,000 cash prize.

Cash, prizes, bragging rights, free food, drink, caffeine and a free Innovator’s pass — yowza! Need more reasons to apply? Think networking. If you’re this good under pressure, imagine the impression you’ll make on potential partners or employers.

TC Hackathon takes place during Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Don’t miss your chance to dazzle us with your physical, mental and technical capabilities — and build something great in the process. Apply to the Hackathon today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Despite the inexorable rise of social media influencers, several problems remain when it comes to brands trying to use these stars to push their products. The marketing tools and processes are fragmented (read: chaotic). Attaining some level of authenticity, quality and creativity in influencer-driven campaigns is tough, to say the least. And the whole thing has to look like the influencers are only promoting brands that they truly believe in, whether they are or not.

Perhaps that’s unkind? Some social influencers really do try and ‘curate’ the products they are charing to push. Plenty just do it only for the money, and it shows. The whole thing is largely a shitshow, to use a technical term. Some startups are trying to bring order to this tedious state of affairs.

Influencer, is a social media influencer marketing platform, which has now announced the close of a £3million (± $3.6million) Series A round led by Puma Private Equity.

Its platform claims to simplify the influencer marketing process for both advertisers and creators, giving advertisers access to a network of “macro and micro creators” pre-vetted for authenticity, quality and creativity based on first-party data. This unites “creator discovery, creator relationship management, campaign management and campaign reporting along with actionable insights” they say.

Key competitors include Whalar, Tribe, Takumi, Influential.co and FameBit.

But Influencer says it differentiates from these companies in that it puts a lot of the elements needed onto one platform for self-service and managed campaigns. It also has a white label solution.

Influencer has so far worked with brands including Boohoo, Alibaba, Pepsi, Starbucks, Pantene, Uber Eats, PrettyLittleThing and Apple Music, to get them in front of audiences via social media influencers.

The startup was launched in 2017 by 23 year old Ben Jeffries who leads the company as CEO, and 25 year old YouTuber and creator Caspar Lee.

It’s now brought on Adam Ludwin, co-founder of search intelligence company Captify and growth marketing agency Inflecto Media as Director of the Board.

The company will open its first US office in New York, led by CEO Ben Jeffries, with expansion planned to the West Coast over the next year.

It’s also released a mobile app, which “allows brands and content creators to create meaningful relationships claims Jeffries.

Caspar Lee says: “At Influencer we pride ourselves in being by creators, for creators, with a team who embody this new era of creativity and enjoy unrivaled relationships with the world’s leading creators.”

$1.5 trillion. That’s the amount of outstanding student loan debt held by American citizens according to the New York Fed. It is an astronomical sum, and has led to much hand-wringing about whether there is a coming bubble in U.S. higher education.

What’s even worse than the scale of the debt load though is the fact that for millions of borrowers, they literally don’t have to pay some of those dollars. Thanks to the complexity of the loan system in the U.S., borrowers often qualify for repayment programs that can lead to loan forgiveness, that is, if they can figure out the terms, apply correctly, and actively follow the rules to net the write-off.

Enter Summer. The public benefit corporation is on a mission to act as a “trusted advisor” to student loan borrowers. Through its platform, borrowers can get a full 360-degree view of their current student loan situation, and begin exploring options for how to repay it in the most financially efficient way possible.

The company’s early traction has brought it a new round of venture capital. The company announced this morning that QED Investors, one of the leading early-stage fintech investors out there, led a $10 million series A round in the company. Recent partner addition Matt Burton led the deal, who joined QED about a year ago after selling his lending data startup Orchard to Kabbage.

Co-founder and CEO Will Sealy analogized Summer to how tax accountants help filers handle the complexities of doing their taxes. “We’re trying to create the software that democratizes [student loan] expertise, that gets the expertise into the hands of the end consumer, who might not be able to afford an accountant that doesn’t even unfortunately exist in the student loan space at this current moment,” he said.

He noted that the company is building out support for 120 loan forgiveness programs and their complicated rules, and has its eyes on more than a hundred other student loan proposals that are sitting in state legislatures across the country.

The company was started at Yale by Sealy and co-founders Paul Joo and Vincent Tran, and the trio eventually migrated to New York City while building the team to 13 according to its staffing page. Sealy previously worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in DC in the Office of Students, where he worked on precisely the challenges of getting students better access to quality information around student loan programs.

So far, Summer, which launched in 2017, has helped 10,000 borrowers to date, and “just in this year, we have helped borrowers save $8 million,” Sealy said. “A critical metric is not just how many people we are engaging, but how much money we’re saving them.”

Summer does not charge end users to use its product. Instead, it sells through enterprises and other types of organizations to offer the product as a benefit to employees. Sealy gave the example of medical associations, who could offer Summer to recent medical school graduates, or companies who want to entice recent grads with a simple tool that can improve their financial lives.

Summer currently works retrospectively, in that it targets users who are post-grads. I asked why Summer didn’t focus prospectively on helping borrowers think through their student loan products before they take them on. Sealy replied that “In many ways, it feels like the house is on fire. So before we would ever go about trying to create a better smoke detector and build a new home, we want to save the people who are currently struggling.”

Burton of QED explained his rationale for leading the round. “QED, like the rest of the investors like General Catalyst and Story Ventures, we put a pretty big round into this company on the belief that there’s an urgent problem facing these student loan borrowers and we’re working hard to … scale to meet the needs of tens of millions of student borrowers.” With 10,000 users and $8 million saved, you can start to project out the potential impact Summer could have for many borrowers.

In addition to QED, the round had participation from General Catalyst, Greycroft, NextView Ventures, and Story Ventures.

If you’re a cricket fan, you will be visiting Facebook way more often in the coming months and years. The social juggernaut announced on Thursday it has partnered with the International Cricket Council (ICC), the global governing body of cricket, to secure exclusive digital rights until 2023 to stream global ICC events in the Indian sub-continent.

As part of the four-year deal, financial details of which were not disclosed, Facebook will also show post-match recaps of the matches in the rest of the world.

In a statement, Ajit Mohan, VP and Managing Director Facebook India said, “We are excited to partner with the ICC to bring the most exciting moments in cricket to Facebook Watch and to chart the next stage of technology led transformation in cricket. With Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the ICC has an exceptional opportunity to leverage our family of apps to serve current sports fans as well as bring in an entirely new generation of fans. Every day, people come to our platforms to talk about, and form friendships around, cricket. With this partnership, we will be able to serve these fans with the kind of premium content that can ignite new conversations, new connections and new followership.”

He added, “the future of AR and VR is being charted by Facebook and we are excited about the possibility of bringing the best of our innovations to fans around the world.”

Law firms have to parse thousands of pages a week to figure out if everything makes sense and there’s no anomaly. And Luminance wants to make that work much less tedious by using artificial intelligence to review documents and minutes instead of hours. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Luminance CEO Emily Foges will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

If you know someone who has ever done an internship for a law firm, they may have told your horrific stories about endless nights working on an important contract.

Instead, Luminance clients can start by uploading a document to the platform. Luminance then tries to understand the contract or legal document. It can pick up the most obvious anomalies and surface important information, which should help you save time.

The goal isn’t necessarily to replace lawyers altogether — you need a human behind the machine to understand what Luminance tells you after all. But it can greatly enhance their productivity.

And it’s been working incredibly well. There are now 150 law firms across 40 countries using the product. Some of them are among the biggest law firms in the world.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

On-demand video streaming giant Netflix, which is increasingly expanding its footprint in developing markets, now has a new competitor in Indonesia: Gojek.

The Indonesian ride-hailing giant on Thursday launched a video streaming service called GoPlay that features exclusive access to “hundreds of movies and TV shows” as well as snackable short clips.

The service, which Gojek began testing with select users in June, focuses on local content, Edy Sulistyo, CEO of GoPlay said. Gojek, which was valued at $9.5 billion in its last financing round, said it has partnered with major local production houses such as Base Entertainment, Kalyana Shira Films, and Wahana Kreator for production of original titles. The firm said it has also tied up with some international studios to source foreign content.

“Despite a rise in demand for local content and a growing number of mobile audiences in Indonesia, access has still been limited especially for consumers living outside of urban areas. With GoPlay, we aim to enable all Indonesian consumers to enjoy high-quality on-demand entertainment at their convenience, while providing a platform for local content producers to showcase their creative work,” said Sulistyo in a statement.

Gojek is offering the video streaming service through two aggressively priced monthly plans: IDR 89,000 ($6.27), which offers access to the full catalog in HD; and IDR 99,000 ($7), which will additionally also provide users with access to GoFood delivery vouchers.

GoPlay will compete with a range of streaming services such as Netflix, iFlix, and Hooq. Netflix last year began testing a low-cost mobile-only plan in some developing markets including Indonesia to boost its presence in those nations. The global giant eventually launched the affordable tier in India earlier this year. A Netflix spokesperson told TechCrunch this week that it currently has no plans to expand the low-cost tier to other markets.

Like many other major firms in Southeast Asia, Gojek is increasingly bulking up its ride-sharing platform to enter additional categories. Today, it offers an online payments service and a gaming platform. The firm began working on its video streaming service last year after it set up an in-house content studio.

Grab, Gojek’s arch rival in Southeast Asian markets, and India’s Ola, have also expanded their offerings in recent years. While Grab, like Gojek, offers everything including a video streaming service, Ola launched a credit card in May.

Grab has a partnership with Hooq for its video streaming service. In the run up to GoPlay’s launch, Hooq CEO Peter Bithos told TechCrunch in an interview that Gojek lacks the reach Hooq maintains in Southeast Asian markets. “Gojek hasn’t been able to get to anything like the scale or reach that we’ve got,” he said.

About 125 million people in Indonesia, or half of the nation’s population, is currently online. Sulistyo said Gojek sees a lot of potential for GoPlay’s growth in the country.

Indonesia has emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in Asia in recent years. According to a study conducted by Google and Singapore’s Temasek, Indonesia’s internet economy is estimated to be worth $100 billion by 2025.