Month: September 2020

Though TikTok is in the middle of fighting off the Trump administration’s attempt to ban its app in the U.S. over data privacy concerns, the company today is launching a new feature focused on the 2020 U.S. elections. TikTok announced this morning it’s introducing an in-app guide to the elections offering its 100 million U.S. users with information about the candidates, details about how to vote, and educational videos about misinformation, media literacy, the elections process and more.

The company, however, is not producing this content itself. It’s leaving that up to partner organizations, including the National Association of Secretaries of State, BallotReady, SignVote, and several others.

BallotReady, for example, will power the elections guide with detailed information about the candidates at the federal, state and local level, in both English and Spanish. Details about how to vote in every state are offered by National Association of Secretaries of State. MediaWise will provide the educational videos about spotting misinformation and the elections process, as well as how to vote.

The effort will also include resources for voters in different circumstances, TikTok says. This includes information about voting as a person with disabilities, from SignVote; as someone overseas, through the Federal Voting Assistance Program; as a student with help from Campus Vote Project; and as a person with past convictions, with help from Restore Your Vote.

TikTok will feature this elections guide starting today in the U.S., where it will be accessible both on the TikTok Discover page and on election-related search results. It will also feature the guide at the bottom of videos relating the elections and on videos posted by verified political candidates, it says.

The company preemptively explains it only verifies accounts to indicate the authenticity of the account ownership, but the verified badge does not indicate TikTok’s endorsement. The issue around what it means to be verified on a social network is a problem Twitter has faced for years, as it doled out its coveted verified badges to controversial figures, like white nationalists.

Though TikTok is working with established partners to put its elections guide together, the mere act of involving itself in any way in American politics right now is a fairly bold choice on the company’s part. As users interact with the new elections guide, they could be sharing additional signals about their political leanings.

In theory, these signals could be used to tweak their personalized recommendations, like those shown on TikTok’s For You page, for example. But TikTok could also store this signal data with the user’s TikTok account for future use. That’s not all that different from how Facebook is able to identify your leanings by parsing your profile information or the Pages you’ve “liked.”

TikTok, however, says it won’t be collecting any users’ personal information with the launch of the guide, nor will it use the signals to customize your experience.

“…A user must visit the website for a state or a non-profit for anything that involves sharing their information, including registering to vote,” the company stated, in an announcement. “Interactions with this guide in our app have no bearing on future TikTok experiences, such as recommendations or ads.”

Despite the controversies surrounding TikTok’s ownership, many social networks today are offering voter guides or running “get out the vote” campaigns in their apps.

Facebook rolled out voting resources to U.S. users this August, and Twitter debuted its Elections hub earlier this month. Snapchat said it helped 400,000 people get registered to vote. YouTube, meanwhile, recently began adding vetted information about mail-in voting to counter misinformation along with a few features that encourage users to register to vote.

Even Tinder is running a promotion in the U.S. to drive voter registration through the use of in-app cards that direct users to online resources.

However, TikTok’s voter registration efforts could be impactful because of its younger, Gen Z user base. For decades, youth voters fail show up at the polls. And every election year, reports wonder if this year will be any different.

But TikTok users, in particular, have been politically motivated in recent months. Some helped to prank the Trump campaign by registering for tickets to Trump’s Tulsa rally, which they didn’t intend to use. They also trolled the official Trump campaign app to the point that it finally had to reset its App Store ratings. And many went on the app to troll their parents’ political choices.

To what extent TikTok’s young users will transition from being armchair activists to real-world voters –if they’re even of age — remains to be seen. And though news coverage has focused on left-leaning TikToker’s, the app can easily direct you to the pro-Trump bubble where you’ll find plenty of MAGA hat-sporting teens. Like the rest of the U.S., teens on TikTok have their own political divides. That means even if TikTok is successful in boosting youth voter turnout, there’s no reason to believe it will necessarily help sway the vote one way or the other.

The venture capital world is rapidly changing, and thank heavens we have two of the smartest VCs on the future of investing, productivity tools, and remote work joining us today to make sense of all the noise.

On Extra Crunch Live today, Sarah Cannon and Nina Achadjian, two VC partners based in Index Ventures’ SF office, will talk about these subjects and more. Plus, we will be taking questions from the audience, so come prepared. Login details are below the fold for EC members, and if you don’t have an Extra Crunch membership, click through to signup.

As I wrote when we announced the slate last week:

First, we have Nina Achadjian, who officially joined Index Ventures several years ago out of the firm’s SF office and was promoted to partner earlier this year. Achadjian has been searching for and investing into some of the most interesting new collaborative companies that are rebuilding the enterprise from the ground up (which happens to have been a brilliant move given our remote-work world this year). Her investments include such companies as product-management service productboard, sales performance platform Gong, executive assistant marketplace Double and real estate services platform ServiceTitan.

Second, we have Sarah Cannon, who joined Index in 2018 from CapitalG, and who is also based officially out of SF. Cannon made a splash earlier this year with her bullish bet on note-taking and team productivity wunderkind Notion, and has also invested in productivity tools like collaborative presentation software Pitch and smart team messaging app Quill.

Join us today at 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 6pm GMT.

Event Details

As machine learning has grown, one of the major bottlenecks remains labeling things so the machine learning application understands the data it’s working with. Datasaur, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch, announced a $3.9 million investment today to help solve that problem with a platform designed for machine learning labeling teams.

The funding announcement, which includes a pre-seed amount of $1.1 million from last year and $2.8 million seed right after it graduated from Y Combinator in March, included investments from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman.

Company founder Ivan Lee says that he has been working in various capacities involving AI for seven years. First when his mobile gaming startup, Loki Studios was acquired by Yahoo! in 2013, and Lee was eventually moved to the AI team, and most recently at Apple. Regardless of the company, he consistently saw a problem around organizing machine learning labeling teams, one that he felt he was uniquely situated to solve because of his experience.

“I have spent millions of dollars [in budget over the years] and spent countless hours gathering labeled data for my engineers. I came to recognize that this was something that was a problem across all the companies that I’ve been at. And they were just consistently reinventing the wheel and the process. So instead of reinventing that for the third time at Apple, my most recent company, I decided to solve it once and for all for the industry. And that’s why we started Datasaur last year,” Lee told TechCrunch.

He built a platform to speed up human data labeling with a dose of AI, while keeping humans involved. The platform consists of three parts: a labeling interface, the intelligence component, which can recognize basic things, so the labeler isn’t identifying the same thing over and over, and finally a team organizing component.

He says the area is hot, but to this point has mostly involved labeling consulting solutions, which farm out labeling to contractors. He points to the sale of Figure Eight in March 2019 and to Scale, which snagged $100 million last year as examples of other startups trying to solve this problem in this way, but he believes his company is doing something different by building a fully software-based solution

The company currently offers a cloud and on-prem solution, depending on the customer’s requirements. It has 10 employees with plans to hire in the next year, although he didn’t share an exact number. As he does that, he says he has been working with a partner at investor Initialized on creating a positive and inclusive culture inside the organization, and that includes conversations about hiring a diverse workforce as he builds the company.

“I feel like this is just standard CEO speak but that is something that we absolutely value in our top of funnel for the hiring process,” he said.

As Lee builds out his platform, he has also worried about built-in bias in AI systems and the detrimental impact that could have on society. He says that he has spoken to clients about the role of labeling in bias and ways of combatting that.

“When I speak with our clients, I talk to them about the potential for bias from their labelers and built into our product itself is the ability to assign multiple people to the same project. And I explain to my clients that this can be more costly, but from personal experience I know that it can improve results dramatically to get multiple perspectives on the exact same data,” he said.

Lee believes humans will continue to be involved in the labeling process in some way, even as parts of the process become more automated. “The very nature of our existence [as a company] will always require humans in the loop, […] and moving forward I do think it’s really important that as we get into more and more of the long tail use cases of AI, we will need humans to continue to educate and inform AI, and that’s going to be a critical part of how this technology develops.”

D-Wave today announced the launch of its new Advantage quantum computers. These new systems, with over 5,000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, are now available in the company’s Leap cloud computing platform. That’s up from about 2,000 qubits in the previous system, which featured six-way connectivity. Using Leap’s hybrid solver, which combines classic CPUs and GPUs with the company’s quantum system, users can now solve significantly more complex problems, thanks to both the higher qubit and connection count.

“With over twice the number of qubits, with over twice the connectivity, with over five times the number of devices on the superconducting chip, we’re still able to program it in the same amount of time, read out in the same amount of time, run it at the same temperature — which means we’re able to continue scaling the technology,” said D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz, who is never afraid to compare his company’s systems against the competition. “This is a really important point because, over the years, there have been various so-called experts who have said that the D-Wave technology just wouldn’t scale. And yet, we’re the only quantum computing technology that has scaled.”

Some of D-Wave’s competitors, who have scaled up their systems over time, will likely take offense with this, but it’s worth noting that D-Wave’s quantum annealing approach is quite different from what competitors are using.

As Baratz explained, this new processor was designed from the ground up, using a new fabrication stack.

Coming next month, D-Wave is also launching a major update to its solver, the discrete quadratic solver.

“Up until now our hybrid solver has worked on binary quadratic problems, problems where the variables were binary variables — zero or one, or plus and minus one, if you’re a physicist,” Baratz explained. You can scale this up by adding more variables, but that only lets you go so far. Now, with this new system, developers can use discrete variables with up to a billion variables that D-Wave argues will expand the set of problems developers can tackle with its systems. Scheduling, for example, which is a sweet spot for D-Wave’s systems, is one area where companies can now solve significantly larger problems. Baratz also noted that protein folding is another area where users can now look at solving larger real-world problems, too.

One of the companies using the system today for protein design is Menten AI.

“We are using quantum to design proteins today. Using hybrid quantum applications we’re able to solve astronomical protein design problems that help us create new protein structures,” said Hans Melo, the co-founder and CEO of Menten AI. “We’ve seen extremely encouraging results with hybrid quantum procedures often finding better solutions than competing classical solvers for de novo protein design. This means we can create better proteins and ultimately enable new drug discoveries.”

As for other real-world usages, Volkswagen, for example, is now using D-Wave’s hybrid solver to run its paint shop scheduling application, while Canada’s Save-On-Foods is piloting it to optimize some of its processes and speed up those calculations.

The other new product the company is launching is D-Wave Launch, a new white-glove service to help enterprises get started with quantum computing. D-Wave will pair up businesses with experts in a given area — and from partners like Accenture — to ensure that these users are successful.

“Up until now, a lot of the developers and customers of quantum computing have been the research part of the company that really just wanted to play with the systems, do some research and experimentation. But as you start moving into the part of the business that wants to build real business applications, those are the ones that we are looking for now,” Baratz explained.

 

 

Google has offered a second round of concessions to try to persuade European regulators to clear its acquisition of wearables maker Fitbit .

The deal has been stalled by concerns over its impact on consumer privacy and competition in the wearables market.

Last week the deadline for EU regulators to take a decision was extended for another couple of weeks — potentially pushing it out to almost the end of the year.

However a report by Reuters today claims the acquisition is set to be greenlit after the latest round of ‘commitments’ from Google — with the news agency citing ‘people familiar with the matter’.

The European Commission declined to comment on the report.

Google confirmed it has sent a new set of commitments to the European Commission — reiterating an earlier pledge not to use Fitbit health and wellness data for advertising, which it said it has now strengthened by providing for additional monitoring of the data separation requirements. 

It also said it’s committing to support third-party wearable manufacturers as part of the Android ecosystem (via Android APIs for wearable devices), and maintain third-parties’ existing access to Fitbit users’ data via APIs with user consent. 

“This deal is about devices, not data. The wearables space is highly crowded, and we believe the combination of Google and Fitbit’s hardware efforts will increase competition in the sector, benefiting consumers and making the next generation of devices better and more affordable,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

“We have been working with the European Commission on an updated approach to safeguard consumers’ expectations that Fitbit device data won’t be used for advertising.  We’re also formalizing our longstanding commitment to supporting other wearable manufacturers on Android and to continue to allow Fitbit users to connect to third party services via APIs if they want to.”

In the middle of a pandemic when customers are often wearing plastic gloves to stores alongside their face masks, Amazon’s physical retail team is introducing a new biometric device that will allow shoppers to pay at Amazon Go stores using their palm. The company on Tuesday introduced its purportedly “contactless” Amazon One, a scanner where you first insert your credit card, then hover your palm over the device to associate your palm signature with your payment mechanism. Once your card is on file, you’ll be able to enter the store in the future just by holding your palm above the Amazon One device for a second or so.

While you’re not actually supposed to press your palm down on the device itself, it’s a new technology that will require user education — and that could be a problem, at least in the short-term.

Today, consumers are familiar with the idea of pressing a finger down to unlock an iPhone with TouchID, for example, or using a thumbprint to open a secure lock. It’s likely that many will assume you are to also mash your palm down on Amazon One’s flat surface, too.

At any other time, that wouldn’t be much of a concern. But given that the device is being introduced in the U.S. which is still dealing with the COVID-19 health crisis, now may not be the best time to put another potential touchpoint at the store’s entry.

Amazon stresses that the device is “contactless” which is something customers will appreciate. But unless store staff stands at the entry wiping the device regularly, it will likely be touched a lot as customers get up to speed on how exactly the thing works. Eventually, it may achieve the goal of being “contactless.” But in the meantime, the device should be staffed, wiped and demonstrated to everyone who walks in.

Amazon says the device uses computer vision technology in real-time to create the unique palm signature — a choice the company made because it believes palm recognition is more private that some other means of biometric authentication. That is, you can’t determine someone’s identity just by looking at the image of their palm, Amazon says. That may be true, but given that the palm signature is associated with a payment card, it’s more important that the data is secured rather than how recognizable it is.

Amazon also says the images are encrypted and sent to a secure area in the cloud where customers’ palm signatures are created.

The device doesn’t require you to have Amazon account to enter the store — just a palm and phone number — but customers can associate their account to see their usage history on the Amazon website. They can also add a second palm print, if they choose.

The device is being trialed at two Seattle-area stores, including the original Amazon Go store at 7th & Blanchard and the store in South Lake Union at 300 Boren Ave. North. It won’t replace the other ways to enter the stores, however. Customers can still enter using the Amazon Go app, Amazon app, or with associate assistance if they want to pay in cash.

Amazon notes the device doesn’t have to be used only for entry to retail stores. It envisions the Amazon One being used by third-parties including stadiums and office building, as well as other non-Amazon retailers.

The company says discussions are underway with some interested parties, but it has nothing to announce at this time. It’s unclear to what extent a third-party retailer would trust Amazon to host its customer transaction data, however, given Amazon’s history in using third-party data in an anti-competitive fashion. 

 

 

When people ponder the investment opportunity around collectibles, they probably think about things like wine auctions, sales of very expensive, old cars or baseball cards, or maybe a pocket watch that made an unlikely appearance on an antiques TV show, hoping that their piece of treasured tat might one day also be worth millions. But a startup announcing some funding today is hoping that you might add another kind of more realistic kind of collectibles investment into the mix: taking equity in an objet that you might not own outright, but might still prove to give you good dividends.

New York-based Rally, which has built a platform for owners to list rare collectibles, and for others to take investments in them starting at $1, has raised $17 million in an investment of its own, on the back of reaching 200,000 users investing in some 120 “IPOs”, equivalent to more than $15 million worth of assets, according to the startup.

Along with the investment, Rally is also announcing a new leader. George Leimer, who has previously worked at Disney/ESPN, Apple & eBay, is taking on the role of CEO. Christopher Bruno, founding CEO, will take on a new role as president.

Rally got its start in 2017 with a focus on class cars — its full name is Rally Rd. (and, boo for us plus disclaimer, the person who first wrote about it here at TechCrunch, the lovely Fitz Tepper, eventually got poached to work there). Since then it has expanded beyond that to a wider set of categories including wine, sports memorabilia, comic books, watches and more, with the average investment per user hovering at around $300 per offering.

Co-founder and chief product officer Rob Petrozzo said in an interview that new funding round will be used in part to invest further in technology and growing the business, and in part to bring in a wider set of collectibles categories into the mix, in particular through partnerships with other companies.

Which, he would not disclose, but you could imagine how Rally might work as an interesting complement to those who specialize in sales of collectibles, using Rally as an alternative to outright big-ticket sales to meet customer interest in cases when those customers might not want to sink thousands or millions of dollars into a single item, but — as they would with other kinds of investments — spread their smaller amount of money across a wider number of assets.

Rally’s investment is coming from an interesting group of backers, both strategic and financial. They include Porsche Ventures, the Raptor Group (founded by Jim Pallotta, the investor who has owned a number of sports teams), Japanese firm Global Brain and Alexis Ohanian.

The round was actually closed this summer, Petrozzo said. Of the investors, Porsche has an obvious car connection, and was specifically interested in the company because of its connection to younger users, who are less likely to ever be able to buy classic cars, and might never, given changing tastes and consumer behavior.

“We want to have a front-row seat in the alternative investment space, and Rally is the perfect partner, as the average investor on Rally is just 27 years old, we will be able to increase our engagement with younger target groups. We will continue to learn about digital communities and explore business opportunities in FinTech,” said Stephan Baral, Head of Porsche Ventures US, in a statement.

But the other backers are also key, added Petrozzo. “It’s about bringing in a group of investors connected to sports teams and investing in them, and Alexis of course who knows how to build a community,” he said.

It brings the total raised by Rally to $27 million, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.

The company — which interfaces with customers by way of a handy mobile app, or via the web — has seen some significant growth in the last year, which is an interesting by product, I’m guessing, of a wave of people spending more time at home, and staring at screens, and looking for interesting alternatives for where to put their money.

The company said it now has some 200,000 users, with transaction growing some 195% in the last 12 months. Sports memorabilia, Petrozzo said that sports memorabilia has been the most successful and popular category in recent months.

Again, this is probably unsurprising: given how many professional and amateur sports have had to pause and only restart in very controlled circumstances, a platform like Rally provides an outlet for armchair sports fans to indulge in some activity to while away the time.

Typical items include things like a 1937 Heisman Trophy (valued: $460,000) and a Mike Trout Rookie Autograph Card ($225,000: a variant of it was the most expensive baseball card ever sold), but shareholders on the Rally platform can take stakes for under $50 per share.

It turns out that Ohanian’s interest isn’t based on “community building” but on collectibles, as a Rally customer.

“I’ve been investing in collectibles on Rally for nearly two years. It’s the first platform that has made investing in my passions as easy as buying/selling stock,” he said in a statement. “I’m excited to now also be an investor in the company, and am looking forward to watching Rally continue to grow.”

Under Rally’s model, Petrozzo said that the consigner keeps “ownership” of the collectible, the idea being that if the owner decides to sell it, it’s reached a new valuation by way of Rally’s trading platform. Investors can then cash out if the item is sold, or continue trading their shares with other investors, as you would on the stock market. Rally takes on custodianship of the item when it’s being traded on its platform.

“We manage the asset, which is insured and stored by us,” he said, adding that the company also has dabbled in showing off some of the collection at a store in Manhattan, although that project seems to be on pause for now.

Zuleyka Strasner didn’t set out to become an advocate for zero-waste consumption.

The former manager of partner operations at Felicis Ventures had initially pursued a career in politics in the UK before a move to San Francisco with her husband. It was on their honeymoon on a small island in the Caribbean that Strasner says she first saw the ways in which plastic use destroyed the environment.

That experience turned the onetime political operative into a zero-waste crusader — a transformation that culminated in the creation of Zero Grocery, a subscription-based grocery delivery service that sells all of its goods in zero-waste packaging.

Strasner returned from Corn Island with a purpose to reduce her plastic use and found inspiration in the social media posts and work of women like Anamarie Shreves, the founder of Fort Negrita; Lauren Singer, who became known for her TedX Teen talk on living waste free and launched Package Free; and Bea Johnson, who became a social media celebrity for her work reducing consumption and living waste-free.

Following in the zero-waste footsteps of others eventually led Strasner from her home in Redwood City, Calif. to San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery, a food co-op dedicated to sustainable business practices. That 45 minute drive and hour spent in a store juggling jars, bottles, and shakers to perform basic shopping tasks convinced Strasner that there had to be a better way to shop zero-waste — especially for busy parents, professionals, and singles.

So she built one.

“I may have had no team and no money, but I had data. I spent 6 months alpha testing the early version of Zero. I was working from my apartment (cue cliché) getting real sign-ups, servicing real customers and doing a lot of growth hacking,” Strasner wrote in a post on Medium about the company’s early fundraising efforts. “It was really janky, but going between research reports, market data and the data I was collecting from real-people, I had something tangible to put under investors noses to back up how Zero looks at scale.”

Living through COVID-19 is a literal trash heap 

Strasner’s push to create alternatives to single-use plastic in grocery delivery comes as the use of single use plastics skyrockets and grocery delivery services surge — putting her new company in the enviable position of solving an obvious problem that’s becoming more apparent to everyone.

An August study from the investment bank Jefferies on single-use plastic identified the surge in plastic use and laid the blame at the feet of the pandemic.

“Bans and taxes have been rolled back, physical and chemical recycling activity has decreased, and virus concerns may have reduced consumers’ desire to minimize consumption of single-use plastics,” said the report, entitled “Drowning in Plastics,” which was quoted in Fortune.

While much of the use in home delivery and consumer goods has been offset by reductions in the use of plastics in manufacturing as industries slowed down production, the reopening of international economies means that there’s the potential for renewed industrial use even as consumers renew their love affair with plastic.

Companies like Strasner’s present a way forward for consumers willing to pay a premium for the waste reduction — and she’s not alone.

Changing the supply chain for food and consumer packaged goods 

Lauren Singer was already two years into operating her (profitable and cash-flow positive since “day one”) Brooklyn-based and e-commerce stores when she raised $4.5 million for her plastic free and zero-waste wares last September.

The image of the years worth of waste she claimed to be able to fit into a single jar had made her a viral sensation on Instagram and she’d managed to turn that post, and her celebrity, into a business. She wasn’t alone. Bea Johnson, another star of the zero-waste movement wrote the book on going zero waste and has turned that into a business of her own.

At Package Free, products range from a line of plastic-free and zero-waste lifestyle products like bamboo toothbrushes and mason jars, to natural tooth powder alongside natural pacifiers, and a dog shampoo bar. The company’s packaging is composed of 100% up-cycled post-consumer box with paper wrapping and paper tape, according to the company.

Meanwhile, another New York-based startup, Fresh Bowl, raised $2.1 million in January to bring zero-waste packaging and circular economic principles to the bowl business. The company, founded by Zach Lawless, Chloe Vichot and Paul Christophe, uses vending machines around New York that could hold roughly 220 prepared meals with a five-day shelf-life. Those meals were distributed in reusable containers that customers could return for a refund of a deposit.

Before the pandemic hit in the early months of the company’s financing each of its machines were on track to bring in $75,000 in revenue — and roughly 85% of the company’s containers were being returned for re-use according to a January interview with chief executive officer Zach Lawless.

Roughly 40% of landfilled material is food or food packaging, Lawless said. “For consumers it’s hard to make that trade-off between convenience and sustainability,” he said. Companies like Fresh Bowl and Strasner’s Zero Grocery are each trying to make that tradeoff a little easier.

Designing a zero-waste delivery service

Zero Grocery currently counts around 850 unique items in stock and expects to be over 1,000 items at the end of the year — and all delivered in reusable or compostable packaging, according to Strasner.

“Our aim is to not create anything that would go into the landfill and really limit what would need to be recycled. For the products that are single use… they are banded toilet rolls and they’re wrapped in a single sheet of paper. It’s all compostable,” said Strasner. 

Zero Grocery’s current operations are confined to the Bay Area, but the company has seen its growth triple when the pandemic hit in March and then grow twenty times over the ensuing months, according to Strasner. And unlike companies like Singer’s and Lawless’, Strasner didn’t have the luxury of reaching out to a handful of investors for a small cap table.

“I have continuously raised throughout this period to get to this moment in time. Initially i believed that we would have a more typical round structure, maybe myself misunderstanding that I’m an atypical founder,” Strasner said. As a Black, trans, woman, the path to “yes” from investors involved over 250 pitches and an undue amount of “no’s”. 

An early champion was Charles Hudson, the founder of Precursor Ventures, who helped lead a seed round for the company back in 2019. Hudson’s investment allowed the company to launch its first service, an exclusive, á la carte, home delivery service. It was basically Strasner wheeling a cart brimming with produce, grains and compostable items into customers’ homes and filling their own jars.

Ultimately untenable, the first service gave Strasner a view into the ways in which grocery delivery worked, and allowed her to create the second version of the service.

That was more like a latter day milkman service, where the company would deliver next-day, door-to-door delivery of over 100 zero-waste products. These were pre-packaged goods that the company just dropped off and then had customers return (a similar thesis to Fresh Bowl’s retail strategy).

That was around November 2019, when the company launched publicly across the Bay Area with our new offering. The initial traction allowed Strasner to raise another $500,000 from existing investors and new firms like Chingona Ventures and Cleo Capital.

“At that point we had sixty members on the platform and had done four figures of revenue of that month,” Strasner said.

Then COVID-19 hit the Bay Area and sales started soaring. To meet the needs of a strained supply chain — since the company doesn’t use any third-party services for delivery and involves a heavy bit of sanitization of containers so they can be re-used — Zero Grocery raised another $700,00 from Incite.org, Gaingels, Arlan Hamilton and MaC Ventures.

As Strasner wrote in a Medium post:

When COVID-19 hit the US, our team was among the first companies to go into lockdown. By late February, only essential personnel were on the warehouse floor for order preparation and delivery in head-to-toe PPE. Soon after that, the Bay Area went into full shelter-in-place.

Much like other companies in the grocery delivery space, our demand skyrocketed. To keep up, we grew our team in half the time we anticipated and launched features that were half-baked. Customer experience is tantamount, and our underdog team fought tooth-and-nail to preserve that despite long hours, little sleep, and no time for planning. We abandoned our notions of roles and split up the responsibilities of customer service, order packing, feature development, and more.

Strasner’s experiences as an immigrant, Black, trans founder mean that she thinks about sustainability not just in environmental terms, but also social sustainability. That’s why she works with the staffing service R3 Score to provide opportunities for people who had criminal records. The service provides a risk analysis for employers of job applicants who have a criminal record, to give employers a better sense of their viability as an employee.,

As she told Fast Company, “This is a highly capable, untapped labor force who is ready to work and is actively looking for opportunities… This is not merely a COVID stopgap measure for us; it’s something we’re incorporating into our business for the long-term.”

More money, fewer problems? 

Zero Grocery now counts many thousands of customers on its service and has just raised another $3 million, led by the investment firm 1984, to grow the business. The company charges $25 for a membership that includes free deliveries and collects empty containers. Non-members pay a $7.99 delivery free for groceries priced competitively with Whole Foods and other higher end grocery options.

Right now, Zero Grocery occupies the as the only fully zero-waste online grocery store in the U.S., and its numbers are growing quickly.

But that kind of success can breed competition, and there are certainly no shortage of would-be competitors waiting in the wings.

Already some of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the U.S. have rolled out a version of zero-waste delivery services for their products. These are companies like Procter & Gamble and Froneri, the owner of ice cream brand Haagen Dazs (and others). In April, their reusable, no-waste delivery service Loop launched nationwide to provide customers across the country with recyclable and reusable packaged containers.

The commercialization of new kinds of packaging technologies from companies like NotPla, Varden, and Vericool mean that compostable material packaging could become a wider solution to the waste dilemma.

Still, these solutions to packaging waste come with their own issues, like the sustainability of the supply chain used to make them and the carbon footprint of the manufacturing processes. In instances like these reducing the need to manufacture new material is likely the most sustainable option.

And, in many cases, companies like Zero Grocer help their vendors do a lot of the work to reduce the footprint of their own supply chains.

“A lot of work is to enable them to exist within a plastic free supply chain using our technology,” said Strasner of the work she’d done with vendors. 

“I started Zero to make zero-waste grocery shopping effortless and empower people to protect the planet while shopping conveniently,” she said. That’s a notion everyone can treasure. 

Rolling funds, the rise of solo capitalists, crowd syndicates, and team-based seed funds all scream one thing in unison: venture capital is growing and getting unbundled at the same time.

While the asset class remains largely exclusive and skewed white and male, innovation does have the potential to usher in a new, far more inclusive generation of investors. The question is how to ensure that these newer investors survive and thrive and are able to scale their operations in much the way that their predecessors in the industry have.

Oper8r hopes to fill in the gap between what it takes to be an occasional investor and become a full-time VC who is backed by institutional dollars. The program, which just completed its debut cohort, describes itself as Y Combinator for funds and emerging fund managers. The goal is to teach investors who want to build an institutional fund about the rules and oh-so-many regulations of the game.

Oper8r was started by Winter Mead, who worked as an institutional investor for years at Sapphire Ventures and Hall Capital Partners, and Welly Sculley, who operated at venture capital-backed fintech companies Ripple and Boku. The friends saw that there was no organization focused on next-gen fund managers. Instead of raising capital to create a program, the friends started a program, free of charge, to train investors.

“For VCs, barriers to entries were going down. Starting a VC fund was becoming easier. But it wasn’t easier to know various parts of building and scaling a VC firm,” Mead tells TechCrunch.

The program spans 10 weeks with 6 to 10 hours of instructional material per day. Oper8r’s curriculum covers the nuts and bolts of how to put together a scalable fund, but Mead says that they stay away from teaching investors how to invest since that information is already accessible. For example, VC University is a joint initiative between Berkeley Law, NVCA, and Venture Forward to teach venture finance.

“There’s a lot to firm building that isn’t just investing,” he said. “Having that knowledge can save you a lot of time, save you a lot of cost, save you a lot of headaches.”

Oper8r views its core benefit for aspiring fund managers as demystifying the world of limited partners.

“VCs come in here and think of the LP world as a monolith,” he said.” Oper8r helps VCs segment out the LP market, understand the difference between a family office and university, and understand “who will actually invest into a fund 1 or fund 2.”

To help navigate the LP world, Oper8r gives participants access to over 50 institutional investors, such as Hamilton College, Northern Trust, Legacy Ventures, and Investure, who will speak on their investment appetite and cadence. It doesn’t hurt that those same partners benefit from access to funds they find especially noble.

“[Limited partners] want to invest into these next generation of VCs, but they’re just having a hard time really understanding this market right now,” Mead said.

Unlike Y Combinator, Oper8r does not currently take a stake in the funds that participate in its program. However, Mead tells me that he and his co-founder are planning to capitalize the program and build an investment platform atop of Oper8r. In the future, they will function as LPs in graduated funds.

Oper8r’s first cohort was launched in June 2020. Out of 125 applications, only 18 VC fund teams were chosen. In terms of diversity, 11 of those teams were from underrepresented backgrounds including 6 women-led general partner teams and 5 black and person of color-led teams. Half of the teams also included immigrants.

Its first cohort included operator angels, investors who recently spun out of big firms, founders, and rolling fund managers, all looking to take a more institutional approach to investing.

Heather Harnett, the founder of NYC startup studio Human Ventures, was looking for a way to take advantage of the access she was getting from the platform she built. She turned to Oper8r to learn procedural and operational consistencies on how to create a fund, while also cross-referencing with other managers in the batch.

“What First Round Capital did to standardize the early financing rounds for startups and build community among founders, Oper8r is doing for emerging fund managers,” she said.

Open8r isn’t entirely without competitors. Plexo Capital, which is both a venture firm and an outfit that backs other venture funds, is also spinning up a program to help educate young investors on the mechanics of back-office administration an other pieces of the venture fund puzzle.

Of course, an even bigger potential rival is AngelList, which takes care of the hassle, rules, and regulations that can up an up-and-coming fund manager and that charges a fee in return.

Mead doesn’t view Open8r’s methodology as competitive with AngelList, saying that “there’s room for more than one organization that supports a merchant just because of the size of [venture capital] right now.” The firm is also focused on teaching new investors how to manage their businesses themselves. It’s a top-down versus ground-up approach.

Mead further adds that while AngelList’s rolling fund product has grown accessibility, some limited partners still only invest in venture capitalists who’ve raised capital from institutions previously. Thus, new fund managers might be comfortable raising a $10 million micro-fund via a rolling method, but when it comes time to get a $150 million early-stage investment vehicle with institutional LPs, it might not be as easy.

Ultimately, Oper8r and AngelList could co-exist as they both strive for similar goals: increase representation within venture capital, even if it’s through nontraditional routes.

“Most institutions see only one way to make money in VC, which is invest in the top brand-name VC firms,” Mead said. “We are trying to change that perception.”

Axis Security launched last year with the idea of helping customers to enable contractors and third parties to remotely access a company’s systems in a safe way, but when the pandemic hit, they saw another use case, one which had been on their road map: helping keep systems secure when employees were working from home.

Today, the company announced a $32 million Series B investment led by Canaan Partners with participation from existing investors Ten Eleven Ventures and Cyberstarts. Today’s round brings the total raised to $49 million, according to Axis.

Gil Azrielant, co-founder and CTO says that the company was able to make the shift to a work from home security scenario so quickly because it had built the product from the ground up to support this vision eventually. The pandemic just accelerated that approach.

“We decided to focus on third parties and contractors at first, but we saw where the puck was going and definitely [designed] the infrastructure to become a full-blown, secure access product. So the infrastructure was there, and we just had to add a few things that were planned for later,” Azrielant told TechCrunch.

He says that the company’s product uses the notion of Zero Trust, which as the name suggests assumes you can’t trust anyone on your system, and work from there. Using a rules-based engine, customers can create a secure environment based on your role.

“What you can see, or what you can do, or what you can download or get to is fully controlled by our Application Access Cloud. This is based on what device you’re using, where you are, who you are, what role you’re in, and what you usually do and don’t do to determine the level of access you are going to get,” he said.

As the startup emerged from stealth last March just three days after the pandemic shut down began in California, it had two main customers — a hotel chain and a pharmaceutical company — and CEO Dor Knafo says that as COVID took hold, “necessity became the mother of adoption.”

He added, “Both accounts came to us and asked us to start pursuing all these employee access use cases, and to us that was incredible because that gave them the push they needed to see the [remote access] vision just as vividly as we do,” he said. Today it has added to that initial pair and while it wouldn’t share it an exact number, it reports it has tens of customers.

Today, the startup has 38 employees almost evenly split between San Mateo, California and Tel Aviv in Israel with plans to accelerate hiring to reach 100 people next year. As the company scales, Knafo says that he is trying to build a more diverse group as it moves to hire more people in the coming year.

“Today, we have incentive internally to help us hire in a more diverse way. We invest heavily in that, and we continue to [keep that at top of mind] for everyone in the company,” Knafo said.

Azrielant added that the pandemic has shown employees don’t have to be located near the offices, which have been closed for much of this year, and that opens up more possibilities to build a more diverse workforce because they can hire from anywhere.

With a product that has much utility right now, the company will be using the new influx of cash to help build out its sales and marketing operations and expand sales outside of North America.

“With COVID accelerating and with a shift to work from anywhere, we’ll definitely focus on bringing our products to more enterprises, which are facing this urgent challenge of working from home,” Knafo said.