We’ve been extremely privileged to witness thousands of early stage startups launch and take flight at Disrupt over the past 10 years, and they just keep getting bettter. You’ll be hard-pressed to find more creative, game-changing startups than the ones that earned our TC Top Picks designation for Disrupt 2020.

The all-virtual nature of this Disrupt meant we received applications from startups around the world. Talk about a tough vetting process! Highly determined and highly caffeinated TechCrunch editors took on the task of narrowing the field to find the best of the best.

The TC Top Picks program showcases outstanding early-stage startups across these categories: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biotech/HealthTech, Education/Social Impact, Enterprise/SaaS, Fintech, Mobility, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/Hardware/IOT and Security/Privacy.

Each TC Top Pick will exhibit in Digital Startup Alley Package and have an exclusive, virtual interview with a TechCrunch writer. We record the interviews and promote them across our social media platforms. It’s terrific exposure and they make a killer long-term marketing tool, so consider applying to the TC Top Pick program next year.

It’s time to announce the Disrupt 2020 TC Top Picks cohort. Peruse these 26 impressive startups, buy your pass to Disrupt, and make a plan to connect with them in Digital Startup Alley. Opportunity knocks!

AI/Machine Learning

iLoF – Intelligent Lab on Fiber

Kings Distributed Systems

Resonance AI

 

Biotech/HealthTech

Nutrix

Parrots Inc.

SmartTab

 

Education/Social Impact

CPRWrap Inc

Platform Good

Rocky.ai

 

Enterprise/SaaS

Aurelius

Evertracker

 

FinTech

Crediverso

Kaoshi

Lizuna

 

Retail/E-commerce

ecosavers club

Patturn

Thelittleloop

 

Mobility

Bonnet

ConnectMyEV Inc.

Eambu

 

Robotics/Hardware/IOT

Kibus Petcare

LimeLoop

WATTS Battery

 

Security + Privacy

Allthenticate

Hummingbirds AI

WebTotem

Becoming a successful leader isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula. Each startup — depending on the industry and internal culture — has its own needs.

The hard part is figuring out what leadership style best suits the personality of the CEO or founder as well as the needs and culture of their startup and employees who work there.

This year at TechCrunch’s virtual Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18, we’ll talk to the people who with the expertise and insight to help startup founders and other C-suite level executives — as well as those who someday hope to be in that spot — find the right leadership style for their business. We’re excited to announced that joining us on the Extra Crunch stage to discuss leadership styles is Carolyn Childers, co-founder and CEO of women leadership network Chief, Melissa Bradley co-founder of SMB networking platform Ureeka and Jerry Colonna, co-founder and CEO of executive coaching firm Reboot.io.

The three speakers will dig into what makes a successful leader and how to find the right management style as well as tackle other challenges that founders, CEOs and other executives face while building a company.

Bradley’s company Ureeka gives small business access to the expertise needed to grow their business. She is also founder and managing partner of 1863 Ventures, a business development program, and serves as advisor to the New Voices Foundation and New Voices Fund, as well as the Halcyon Fund. Bradley is the former Co-Chair, National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and was recently named one of The Most Entrepreneurial Women Investors in 2018.

Chief, which Childers and partner Lindsay Kaplan launched in January 2019, is a private network to drive more women into positions of power and keep them there. The organization is designed for senior women leaders. Prior to founding Chief, Childers was senior vice president of operations at Handy, led the launch of the site Soap.com (Quidsi) and acted as its GM through its acquisition by Amazon. Childers’ work landed her on Inc.’s 2019 Female Founders 100 List.

Colonna’s company Reboot.io specializes in executive coaching and leadership development. Colonna, who has experience as an executive, venture capitalist, journalist and board member, is also the author of ‘REBOOT: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.’

You may have heard that we’re taking Disrupt virtual this year, a move that lets us make the event accessible to more people than ever before while keeping everyone safe. Disrupt 2020 is scheduled to run from September 14 through September 19. Buy the Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today and get access to all the interviews on our main Disrupt stage, workshops over on the Extra Crunch Stage where you can get actionable tips as well as CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform. As soon as you register for Disrupt, you will have access to CrunchMatch and can start connecting with people now. Use the tool to schedule one-on-one video calls with potential customers and investors or to recruit and interview prospective employees.

We’ll see you there!

“Teenage Bounty Hunters” has one of the most memorable — if not entirely appealing — titles of any new show on Netflix .

As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the series tells the story of Sterling (played Maddie Phillips) and Blair Wesley (Anjelica Bette Fellini), fraternal twins who end up working for bounty hunter/yogurt shop owner Bowser (Kadeem Hardison) in order to make some extra cash.

While the bounty hunting provides the initial hook for the show, the writers mostly use it as a comic counterpoint as they explore the culture of an affluent, evangelical corner of Atlanta, and then as Sterling and Blair’s relationships become increasingly complicated. The plotting in “Teenage Bounty Hunters” can occasionally feel a bit aimless, but in the end, we  ended up feeling impressed and — despite the show’s silly name —surprisingly invested in the characters.

In addition to “Teenage Bounty Hunters,” we also discuss the news that Netflix is making a series based on Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem” novels.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:39 “Three Body Problem” discussion
12:18 “Teenage Bounty Hunters” spoiler-free review
33:55 “Teenage Bounty Hunters” spoiler discussion

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. 

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

How one VC firm wound up with no-code startups as part of its investing thesis

Throughout all the chaos of 2020’s economic upheaval in the startup world, I’ve worked to pay more attention to low-code and no-code services. The short gist of chats I’ve had with investors and founders and public company execs in the past few weeks is that market awareness of no-code/low-code terminology is starting to spread more broadly.

Why? Again, summarizing aggressively, it seems that the gap between what different business units need (marketing, say) and what in-house or external engineering teams are capable of providing is widening. This means there is more total pain in the market, hunting for a solution, often with a tooling budget in hand.

Enter no-code and low-code startups, and even big-company services alike that can help non-developers do more without having to beg for engineering inputs.

I spoke with Arun Mathew this week. He’s a partner at Accel, a venture firm that has invested in all sorts of companies that you’ve heard of — including Webflow, which raised a $72 million Series A last August that Mathew led for his firm. (More on the round here, and notes from TechCrunch on Webflow’s early days here, and here, if you are curious.)

More interesting than that single round is how Accel wound up building a thesis around no-code startups. According to Mathew, Accel had made large investments into companies like Qualtrics, for example, when they were already pretty big and had found product-market fit. That same general approach led to the Webflow deal last year.

At the time, Webflow “wasn’t really defining what they were doing as n- code, they just said ‘we have a very simple drag and drop UI, to build websites, and soon full web applications, very simply,’ ” he told TechCrunch. But, according to Mathew, what Webflow was doing “lined up really well” with the “rising movement of no-code.”

From there, Accel “made a couple [more no-code] investments in Europe where [it has] an early-stage team and a growth team,” along with a few more in India. In the investor’s view, some of the investing activity was “thesis driven because we think [no-code is] a really interesting theme,” but some of the deals “happened opportunistically” where Accel had found “really talented founders in the space that we thought was interesting, executing on a vision that we found appealing.”

In the “span of a year, year-and-a-half,” Accel totted up “seven or eight companies in this no-code space,” which over the last five or six quarters became “a real thesis” for the firm, Mathew said. Accel now has “a global team” of around a dozen people “spending a lot of our time in and around no-code” he added.

Apologies for the length there, but what Mathew said makes me feel a bit less behind. After dipping a toe into learning more about no-code services and tooling (and, yes, low-code as well) it felt somewhat like I was playing catch-up. But as I covered that Webflow round and have since started paying more attention to no-code as well, perhaps you and I are right on time.

(We also recently ran an investor survey on the no-code topic, so hit it up if you want more VC scribbles on the topic.)

Market Notes

For Market Notes this week, we have four things. First, riffs from chats with two public company execs about the software market, some public market stuff and then some neat Airbnb spend data by which I am confounded:

• I spoke with Apple MDM company Jamf’s CFO Jill Putman this week, after her company reported its first set of earnings as a public company. I wanted to know a bit more about the education market — a hot topic here at TechCrunch, given outsized rounds and huge market demand — and the medical world.
• Regarding the software market for education, Putman noted that schools are buying lots of hardware, and that software sales should follow. Our read from that is that the boom in education software is not going to slow for some time as schools work on reopening.
• Ditto the medical market, where Jamf has found uptake as hospitals roll out hardware to patients and families thereof to facilitate all sorts of demand that COVID has engendered. (Hardware needs software, enter Jamf!)
• Chatting with the CFO our key takeaway was that there are still sectors that could generate a continued COVID tailwind, even if not all Jamf customers fit that bill. For startups that did catch a wave, this is probably good news.
• And then there was Yext, a company that helps other companies’ customers find accurate information about them around the Web, and has recently gotten into the search game. Yext launched at a TechCrunch conference back in 2009, which is a neat bit of history. Anyway, Yext is public company now and we wanted to chat about which industries are driving growth for the former startup, and how the general climate for software is for the company, so we got on Zoom with its CEO, Howard Lerman.
• So, which sectors are accelerating from Yext’s perspective? Government, education (again), insurance and financial services. Let that guide your take on the health of various startups.
• Turning to the business climate, Lerman had some notes: “I will tell you in Q2,” he said, “things came back a bit from Q1.” In what sense? Retention rates, for one, according to the CEO. A return to form is welcome, but Lerman did caution that some companies were slower to “pull the trigger on big deals.”
• Lerman also said that his perspective on the macro-climate has bounced back as well from a local-minima set around 30 days ago.

Public company execs are pretty guarded in how they talk because they have to be. But what Putman and Lerman seemed to intimate is that economic damage — provided you are selling to business, and not individuals — seems more contained on a per-sector basis than I would have anticipated. And that there are some good things ahead, at least in a handful of hot sectors.

Opening our aperture a bit, some SaaS companies struggled this week to meet investor expectations, even as more companies added themselves to the IPO queue. It’s going to be very busy for a few quarters. (Speaking of which, you can find the good and bad from the new Sumo IPO filing here.)

The economy is still garbage for many, but at least for companies it’s improving. And on that note, some data regarding Airbnb. According to the folks over at Edison Trends, things are going better for the home-booking site than I would have guessed. Per the group:

• Airbnb’s bookings recovery outstripped its traditional rivals, growing “32% week-over-week” from late April into early June.
• And, most critically: “Airbnb spending in July was up 22% over the previous July, and spending the week of August 17 was 75% higher than the equivalent week in 2019.”

Wild, right? Perhaps that’s why Airbnb has filed to go public.

Various and Sundry

We’re a tiny bit short on space, so I’ll keep our V&S dose short this week to respect your time. Here’s what I couldn’t not share:

• Read this a16z post on the IPO market. It does a great job pulling the Twitter-bullshit out of regular IPO complaints to make some salient points about what is actually good, and bad, about the venerable initial public offering.
• And then read this Fred Wilson piece on SPACs, and how he thinks about them today.
• Fast made a bunch of noise this week, launching its checkout product after a lot of hype. I thought they were doing something more than a product launch, given the sheer number of tweets I kept seeing. Not sure how I feel about the final thing, but I covered their raise earlier this year, so wanted to flag this all the same.
• And, finally, Palantir. In a new S-1 filing, Palantir kinda fessed up to the fact that its structure makes it look like a controlled company. Danny did the digging on the matter here. And then I shouted about it here.
• We got data on Boston’s venture capital results in 2020, broken down by month. Hot damn, that wasn’t really what we expected.
• The JFrog IPO pricing dance is going to tell us how much profits are worth in the SaaS world.
• And Zoom’s insane, bonkers, hell-yeah quarter.

And with that, we are out of room. Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes, and thank you so much for reading this little newsletter on the weekends. It’s a treat to write, and I hope you like it.

Hit me up with notes at alex.wilhelm@techcrunch.com. (I don’t know if you reply to this email if I will get the response. But try it so that we can find out?)

Alex

No matter how you celebrate Labor Day weekend, we urge you to mask up, keep your distance when grilling burgers and dogs and — most of all — take advantage of our flash sale on Digital Pro passes to Disrupt 2020. Right now, you can save $100 on your pass — whether you observe the holiday or not. We don’t judge.

This sweet deal won’t last long. Buy your Digital Pro pass before Monday, September 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) when this sale disappears in, well, a flash.

A Digital Pro pass provides access to everything Disrupt 2020 offers from September 14-18. Our virtual venue makes it easy to explore Digital Startup Alley and discover hundreds of new startups from all around the world. That’s also where you’ll find this year’s TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors hand selected this cohort of stellar startups from hundreds of applications. These startups span the tech spectrum, and you won’t want to miss an opportunity to connect and see their demos.

Don’t miss the one, the only, the always-epic Startup Battlefield. It’s the OG of pitch competitions, and we have roughly 20 international contenders ready to throw down hard. They’ll pitch and demo to this impressive list of judges until only one team remains to claim bragging rights, the storied Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in equity-free cash.

As always, we bring the top experts, leaders and visionaries to the Disrupt stages, and this year is no different in that respect. And since virtual equals global, we have time zone-friendly programming for Europe and Asia. Here’s a taste of the Disrupt 2020 agenda.

Looking into the Future: Roelof Botha is the U.S. head of Sequoia Capital. It’s a powerful position but it also comes with great responsibility, including to help steer the company’s portfolio companies through the pandemic and its ripple effects. Hear how Botha is advising founders and why, even in trying times, he expects startup founders to reshape the world.

Live Q&A with Mette Lykke: Come to this live Q&A prepared with your questions for Endomondo’s CEO and co-founder (11:00 AM, CET)

Looking Toward the Future of Tech in China and Silicon Valley: Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital and the creator of the China Internet Report, has invested in over 50 startups including Lightyear/Stellar, Silk Labs, Chirp and Fleksy. Join us in a conversation about which emerging technology trends in China and the United States will leave an impact (1 p.m. HKT).

We can’t fit five days of Disrupt 2020 into one post. You need to see and experience it for yourself, and this is your chance to save $100 off the price of a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass. The sale ends Monday, September 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) — now, go fire up that grill.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here.

The malls and grocery stores of the 20th century are being converted into industrial conveyor belts of goods and services traveling from the internet to your home. The customer is no longer even allowed inside, as Connie Loizos details this week in a closer look at Amazon and other online-first companies taking over commercial spaces near you.

Americans sort of knew this was coming. Still, the pace at which buildings of all sizes are being either built or converted into e-commerce fulfillment centers — and closer to city centers — has become a bit breathtaking. According to the commercial real estate services firm CBRE, since 2017 at least 59 projects in the U.S. have centered on converting 14 million square feet of retail space into 15.5 million square feet of industrial space, and that trend is “absolutely going to continue,” says Matthew Walaszek, an associate director of industrial and logistics research at CBRE.

Some huge portion of existing retail space is disappearing from public life. Meanwhile, remote work is simultaneously gutting office demand, the even more lucrative part of commercial real estate.

No doubt there will be wonderful new in-real-life experiences that commercial spaces provide for work and any other function. But the sector is taking massive systemic cuts and destroying landlords in one of the historically slowest moving industries in the world. This alone makes it incredibly exciting as a topic for TechCrunch to cover. The impact on startups makes the changes today profound. Will superstar cities and startub hubs retain the pull they’ve had in recent decades? Even if you want to be remote-first, what if you want to get out of the house and your team does too? What if you don’t want to live in a house, actually? 

To get more answers at the bleeding edge, Kirsten Korosec and your faithful correspondent did a fresh survey of 9 of the top investors in real estate and proptech (based on our TechCrunch List and other research). Extra Crunch readers can check out what they think will happen to startups soon in the middle of pandemic changes, and where they see proptech going along with the rest of the trends longer term. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts, from Brad Griewe of Fifth Wall:

We don’t believe that abandonment of central business districts will remain an issue following the pandemic. Because the concentration of startup and entrepreneurial activity occurring in cities such as San Francisco and New York is on the decline, we can expect smaller metro areas throughout the U.S. to benefit from a surge in innovation, and the pandemic only stands to accelerate this trend, with many entrepreneurs and knowledge workers having already discovered the benefits of remote work and life outside of high-density areas. While this will not alter our investment strategy, we’re spending time with the office landlords in our network considering alternative spaces for work (e.g., flexible workplace solutions, flex passes, smaller and scattered HQs, cross-purpose retail and dynamic food venues), advances in collaboration technology and the ways in which physical assets can accommodate strong connectivity.

Stay tuned for part two of survey responses coming next week, looking at specific trends that investors are seeing now, like the ongoing growth of coliving.

As markets adjust to Softbank, will we see a slowdown in tech IPOs?

In addition to the numerous other reasons for real and unreal enthusiasm in the stock market, Softbank has been buying up huge shares of tech stocks, and propelling the market further upwards — until this information become clearer in the last few days and the market dropped below what had been surprising peaks. Here’s Alex Wilhelm summing up how the week ended and what’s next:

Tech stocks are taking the worst hits. And inside of tech stocks, SaaS and cloud stocks are enduring even bigger declines. As we’ve noted that some tech shares have taken lumps when their growth has underwhelmed investors, perhaps we’re seeing the entire SaaS sector see their growth expectations slip?

Bulls may say that the above declines are merely a few weeks’ gains and that the accelerated digital transformation is still a key tailwind for SaaS. Bears may say that this is the start of a real correction in the value of tech shares that had become simply too expensive for their fundamentals. What we can say with confidence is that software shares are in a technical correction, and other equities cohorts that we care about are not far behind.

Monday is an off day for stocks. Let’s see what happens Tuesday and if the bleeding stops or simply keeps on letting.

With this update in mind, here’s our ongoing coverage of the busy return (to date) of the IPO market after the pandemic:

The IPO parade continues as Wish files, Bumble targets an eventual debut

What happens when public SaaS companies don’t meet heightened investor expectations?

In amended filing, Palantir admits it won’t have independent board governance for up to a year

An IPO expert bats back at the narrative that traditional IPOs are for ‘morons’

Frugal startups should pay attention to how JFrog’s IPO prices

Everybody is racing to an IPO — even Laird Hamilton’s young ‘superfood’ company

Zoom’s Q2 report details some of the most extraordinary growth I’ve ever seen

The good and the less-good from Sumo Logic’s updated IPO filing

Snapchat a winner so far from TikTok ban threat

As the September 15 deadline looms for Bytedance, and the likelihood of either a full shutdown or hollow acquisition seem to grow, TikTok users are moving. Even if you’re not working on a consumer startup, the future may be getting rewritten now for your marketing plans on hot social platforms. Nearly every company these days needs to have a public brand presence and a growing number sell direct, after all. So get ready for… Snapchat.

Our resident app expert, Sarah Perez, writes that Snap’s app has a massive 28.5 million new app installs over August, a 29% year-over-year growth rate nearing or beating its past records, and well above July’s (pre-ban announcement) 9%. What about other platforms? It’s harder to track the impact on larger social sites like Facebook and Instagram, as she notes. But my guess is you’ll probably still be buying those Facebook ads well into the future, and probably for more videos too.

The bans probably aren’t done, either. India, which was first to ban TikTok, has added dozens more apps from China, as those two countries continue an armed face-off in real life. Manish Singh, our startup reporter in India, has been following the story closely, and writes for Extra Crunch that so far, TikTok replacements have not been emerging so clearly.

Investing in startup hubs around the world

Speaking of the uncertain future of startup hub cities versus the world, the EC team took a different angle to the question this week, by considering the question of how geography-focused investors remain by today? Here’s a blisteringly spicy take from resident former VC Danny Crichton:

It should never have mattered before, of course, but then, sometimes idiots Harvard Business grads need a global pandemic to prove that they can actually do their jobs in novel ways. The arbitrage that existed for geographical-focused venture funds is gone, and there is now functionally a nationwide market for VC investments compared to the archipelago of local regions that existed before.

There is still room for the absolute earliest capital in these regions, accelerators and pre-PMF funds that will invest in founders with no idea for a startup yet. For all other funds larger than a few million though, the transition is clear: they will likely build upon a successful portfolio company or an area of interest and become vertical-focused. The knowledge arbitrage for an industry vertical is much more defensible than knowledge that the 279 should be avoided at certain times of the day in downtown Pittsburgh or that Tomukun is the best Korean BBQ in Ann Arbor.

Editor-at-large Mike Butcher has also been getting at this question through a series of Extra Crunch surveys with investors across key European startup cities. This week he talked to dozens of investors across Paris and Berlin. The unsurprising theme is that basically everyone is investing across the Continent already, and maybe well beyond. At the same time, many investors in each city expressed a strong belief in the particular city where they are located. Maybe the future unicorns coming out of Europe won’t have massive headquarters in their home cities, but these companies will still be arising from the ether of local people who work in technology — so it won’t end up feeling that different? Here’s how Berlin-based Mathias Ockenfels of Vienna-headquartered Speedinvest explains it:

How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less?
The Network Effects team works from Speedinvest offices in Vienna, London, Berlin and Munich. We’ve made about 75% of our investments within these hubs, and more than half specifically in London and Berlin. While a local focus is very important to us, we do not shy away from making investments in what other investors may consider “fringe” locations, such as Utah in the U.S., Helsinki or Warsaw.

Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not, long term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not)? Which founders?
Berlin continues to be a major hub for fintechs  — despite not having a strong finance ecosystem. It also has a strong base of consumer tech companies, such as Zalando, Lieferando/TakeAway and Delivery Hero, but has seen a surge in more B2B-oriented startups in recent years.

I believe the startup ecosystem in Berlin will continue to grow and become even more diverse, as it attracts great talent from across the world and becomes a go-to “playground” for entrepreneurs. As the first batch of successful B2B founders are exiting their companies and inspiring other entrepreneurs, I expect more opportunities in the B2B space in the future.

Madrid and Barcelona-based investors, Mike is heading your way next — tell him your views on your cities and your own plans via this link.

Around TechCrunch

Triller CEO Mike Lu to talk taking on TikTok at Disrupt 2020

Fabletics’ Adam Goldenberg and Kevin Hart to talk D2C at Disrupt 2020

Laura Deming, Frederik Groce, Amish Jani, Jessica Verrilli and Vanessa Larco are coming to Disrupt

How to craft the right pitch deck for your company at Disrupt 2020

Submit your pitch deck to Disrupt 2020’s Pitch Deck Teardown

Learn how to raise your first dollars at Disrupt 2020

Some of the brightest minds in Europe are joining us at Disrupt

Welcome to the most important panel on product development in the history of Disrupt

Across the week

TechCrunch

On the matter of who was really behind @VCBrags

Banks aren’t as stupid as enterprise AI and fintech entrepreneurs think

There’s a growing movement where startup founders look to exit to community

The startup world needs a ‘Black Minds Matter’ awakening

Building paths to funding for Black female founders

Dear Sophie: Can we sponsor an H-1B university researcher for an EB-1B green card?

Extra Crunch

Edtech startups find demand from an unlikely customer: Public schools

Your first sales hire should be a missionary, not a mercenary

Jeff Lawson on API startups, picking a market and getting dissed by VCs

What does GPT-3 mean for the future of the legal profession?

Media Roundup: Patreon joins unicorn club, Facebook could ban news in Australia, more

Venture capital LPs are the missing link to solving Silicon Valley’s diversity problem

#EquityPod: Edtech is the new SaaS

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

The whole crew was back, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself chattering, with Chris Gates behind the scenes making it all work. An extra shout-out to Natasha this week as we spent a lot of time talking about edtech, a category that she spearheads for us and has brought to the show. It’s a big deal!

We’re on YouTube now, don’t forget, and with that, let’s get into the news:

• Climax Foods raised $7.5 million to help fuel its work to develop alt-foods that are not animal-based. The Equity crew votes that this is a tasty deal. And, Capchase has raised $4.6 million to help cash-out SaaS contracts ahead of their real revenue accrual. Our read is that more financing options for SaaS companies will lead to lower costs of capital for those startups that want it. And, the Envision Accelerator made it through batch one and is on to batch two.
• Then we chatted about edtech, with Natasha talking us through Owl Ventures raising huge new funds, Course Hero extending its Series B, Juni hitting $10 million ARR and raising about as much and Unacademy raising tons of cash from Vision Fund 2.
• Next up, Patreon also got a new check, which means that it eventually has to go public at some point, given that it is now a fancy unicorn.
• And speaking of IPOs, Bumble is thinking about going public in 2021, Wish has filed, albeit privately, and GoodRX is going public as well. And it makes money.
• What else? This a16z post on IPOs that we fangirl/fanboy’d over, as it is good. And we forgot to mention this Fred Wilson post, but it is also good.

And with that, we are nearly at the weekend, which is a long one thanks to a holiday, so expect Equity Monday to be, in fact, Equity Tuesday next week. Hugs and good vibes from the Equity Crew!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

As this pandemically perverse year draws to a close, there’s one thing that’s certain. Everything has changed — at least a little bit.

The U.S. is still grappling with a virus that it has yet to control and a vaccine, once it’s discovered and proven to be effective will take months to be distributed throughout the population. That means the virtual, socially distanced reality that has become the new normal will remain that way for at least a little bit longer.

But what does that mean for startup entrepreneurs who traditionally needed to pound the pavement, shake hands, pass out decks and run the gauntlet of Sand Hill Road or South Park to get financing for their new companies?

Well, if you’re coming to Disrupt (and you should) you’ll hear some fundraising tips and tricks from Y Combinator’s Anu Hariharan, Initialized’s Garry Tan, and GGV’s Hans Tung on how to raise money during these interesting and nerve-wracking times.

The advice is coming from some of the best investors in the industry.

Hariharan most recently worked at Andreessen Horowitz before joining the Y Combinator investment team as a general partner in the Continuity Fund, where she led investments in Boom, Brex, Convoy, Gusto, and Instacart.

And Garry Tan, who co-founded Initialized Capital with Alexis Ohanian in 2013, has backed early stage companies like Coinbase, Flexport, Instacart and Cruise. Before Initialized, Tan was a partner at Y Combinator where he advised and invested in over 1,000 companies. In a previous life, Tan co-founded the YC-backed company Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter, and was an early engineer at Palantir — even designing the company’s logo.

Rounding out our panel is Hans Tung. He’s currently sitting at number ten on the Forbes Midas list, is ranked as one of the top venture capitalists by The New York Times and CB Insights, and has a decades-long career investing in technology companies on at least three continents. At GGV Hans has invested in 16 unicorns including: Affirm, Airbnb, Bytedance, Coinbase, Lime, Meili, OfferUp, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, SmartMi, StockX, Udaan, Wish, Xiaohongshu, and Xiaomi.

These folks can navigate the choppiest of investment waters and certainly have thoughts on how to access capital that can douse the dumpster fire of these terrible economic times.

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 through September 18 and will be 100% virtual this year. Get your front row seat to see O’Brien live with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. We’re excited to see you there.

After Beijing unilaterally imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong on July 1, many saw the move as an effort by Beijing to crack down on dissent and protests in the semi-autonomous region.

Soon after, a number of tech giants — including Microsoft, Twitter and Google — said they would stop processing requests for user data from Hong Kong authorities, fearing that the requested data could end up in the hands of Beijing.

But Apple was noticeably absent from the list. Instead, Apple said it was “assessing” the new law.

When reached by TechCrunch, Apple did not say how many requests for user data it had received from Hong Kong authorities since the new national security law went into effect. But the company reiterated that it doesn’t receive requests for user content directly from Hong Kong. Instead, it relies on a long-established so-called mutual legal assistance treaty, allowing U.S. authorities to first review requests from foreign governments.

Apple said it stores iCloud data for Hong Kong users in the United States, so any requests by Hong Kong authorities for user content has to be first approved by the Justice Department, and a warrant has to be issued by a U.S. federal judge before the data can be handed over to Hong Kong.

The company said that it received a limited number of non-content requests from Hong Kong related to fraud or stolen devices, and that the number of requests it received from Hong Kong authorities since the introduction of the national security law will be included in an upcoming transparency report.

Hong Kong authorities made 604 requests for device information, 310 requests for financial data, and 10 requests for user account data during 2019.

The report also said that Apple received 5,295 requests from U.S. authorities during the second half of last year for data related to 80,235 devices, a seven-fold increase from the previous six months.

Apple also received 4,095 requests from U.S. authorities for user data stored in iCloud on 31,780 accounts, twice the number of accounts affected during the previous six months.

Most of the requests related to ongoing return and repair fraud investigations, Apple said.

The report said it received 2,522 requests from U.S. authorities to preserve data on 6,741 user accounts, allowing law enforcement to obtain the right legal process to access the data.

Apple also said it received between 0-499 national security requests for non-content data on between 15,500 and 15,999 users or accounts, an increase of 40% on the previous report.

Tech companies are only allowed to report the number of national security requests in ranges, per rules set out by the Justice Department.

The company also published two FBI national security letters, or NSLs, from 2019, which the company petitioned to make public. These letters are subpoenas issued by the FBI with no judicial oversight and often with a gag order preventing the company from disclosing their existence. Since the introduction of the Freedom Act in 2015, the FBI was required to periodically review the gag orders and lift them when they were no longer deemed necessary.

Apple also said it received 54 requests from governments to remove 258 apps from its app store. China filed the vast majority of requests.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, a handful of top stories lead our coverage. TikTok deal talks this week got hung up over whether or not TikTok can export the app’s algorithms as part of any acquisition of its U.S. operations by an American firm. Apple also made headlines for delaying the rollout of a potentially disastrous iOS 14 change that’s been panicking the advertising community. It also announced that it will no longer ban apps from pushing out security updates and bug fixes, even when App Review has blocked their app updates over policy non-compliance.

Top Stories

Apple delays the mobile ad apocalypse

Apple this week announced it would delay a controversial change that would impact how ads are targeted to iOS and iPadOS mobile users. In a move aimed at protecting consumer privacy, Apple was poised to introduce a new, in-app prompt in iOS 14 that would ask users whether they would like to allow targeted ad tracking or not. Because most consumers generally don’t like the stalker-ish nature of digital ads, you know what they’d choose!

The change involves an identifier known as IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) that allows advertisers to track how well their ad performs, including which channels drove what quality of users. This lets advertisers make better, more informed choices on their digital ad spend. It’s a key part of app marketing today.

Overall, we’re talking about a massive industry being disrupted. According to eMarketer, the U.S. mobile advertising reached $87.3 billion in 2019. Globally, app install ad spend was $57.8 billion in 2019 and was poised to grow to $118 billion in 2022, per AppsFlyer data. And yet, Apple doesn’t really participate here. Instead, it only offers Search Ads in its App Store. But to promote apps, Apple relies on editorial — like curated collections in the App Store and stories about apps on the Today tab. These can help direct traffic to apps, as can outside press, but the most efficient way to acquire users is paid spend on app install ads.

The mobile ad industry built itself up around the IDFA, offering tools focused on making it easier to measure ad performance and optimize ad spend. Apple was ready to wipe that industry out of existence. And marketers, as you can imagine, were panicking. Even calling it an apocalypse.

As an alternative, Apple was offering SKAdNetwork, introduced in 2018. But it lacked a lot of the information marketers rely on, like attribution or information on impressions, creative, remarketing, in-app events, lookback windows, user lifetime value, ROI, retention or cohort analysis.

Last week, Facebook spoke up about how serious the change would be to its own business, saying that, in testing, it found that without targeting and personalization, mobile app install campaigns brought in 50% less revenue for publishers. “The impact to Audience Network on iOS 14 may be much more,” the company noted, referencing the ad network that uses Facebook data to target ads on publishers’ websites and apps.

A few days later, Apple announced the change was being put on hold, saying:

We believe technology should protect users’ fundamental right to privacy, and that means giving users tools to understand which apps and websites may be sharing their data with other companies for advertising or advertising measurement purposes, as well as the tools to revoke permission for this tracking. When enabled, a system prompt will give users the ability to allow or reject that tracking on an app-by-app basis. We want to give developers the time they need to make the necessary changes, and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year.

It’s unclear if Apple plans to respond to any of the industry’s concerns during this delay, or if it’s just given mobile marketers more time to figure out how to proceed in a data-less future. But at the very least, it’s the latter. Apple only announced the change to IDFA at WWDC this year — not enough time for an entire industry to retool itself around SKAdNetwork or implement other workarounds. The bigger question has to do with Apple’s long-term goals? It’s rewriting the rules to give itself a seat at the table, after all.

Apple puts an end to App Store Jail…for bug fixes

Apple often put iOS users at risk when it blocked developers from publishing their apps to the App Store over policy violations. In some cases, developers have urgently needed to release security patches and other bug fixes that could cause major problems for their users.

As Apple has increasingly begun to crack down on App Store violations, including those that require apps to use Apple Pay for in-app purchases, more developers have been caught in desperate situations. Apple put Basecamp’s new email app on ice almost immediately after it launched, and even temporarily rejected the free WordPress app, because in some web views, users could make their way to a page where they could upgrade to a paid plan:

WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg took to Twitter looking for help as a last alternative, after realizing the company couldn’t even ship its bug fixes until the issue had been resolved. The move caught Apple’s attention, and the situation was addressed. Apple even apologized.

A change to App Review, now live, will give developers caught in similar situations a way to keep pushing out their most critical updates, but not other app improvements. Apple’s plans had been previously announced at WWDC, but the rollout is timely as Apple steps up its policing of the App Store. However, making these rejections less of a potential disaster for developers may also see fewer developers talking publicly about their rejections or running to the press. With the urgency of a critical bug fix to drive them, the everyday rejection may go unnoticed.

Developers in the past had been scared of punitive actions for talking to the press about their troubles. But in the new antitrust era, more have begun to speak up when they feel Apple is unfairly punishing their business. That’s been good for U.S. regulators, at least. Congress has been collecting testimonies from developers that could ultimately impact the government’s decision to regulate the App Store. One has to wonder why Apple thinks the fight is worth it. It’s battling in the courtroom with Epic Games and it’s risking regulation, when the whole problem could have gone away with a small cut to its commission structure. Guess “services” really is the future of Apple’s business if it’s willing to take this sort of risk.

TikTok deal gets more complicated

Everyone is waiting for the next shoe to drop on the topic of TikTok’s fate. One of the world’s biggest mobile apps, TikTok is going to be banned in the U.S. if it fails to get a deal by the September 20 deadline. China has now thrown a wrench in deal negotiations, when it issued new restrictions over the export of AI technology. The order could possibly complicate a TikTok deal, as it could mean that TikTok needs to get Chinese government approval to transfer TikTok’s algorithms along with other IP to any potential U.S. acquirer.

That leaves buyers to either pursue a deal without the algorithms in order to meet the deadline, or try to negotiate some sort of transition period for the deal with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The latter would take some of the pressure off by dialing back on the immediacy required by the Trump E.O. Buyers could also try to get China to approve the export (which isn’t a timely option, really) or maybe license the algorithm from TikTok parent ByteDance.

Anyone who downplays the success of the continued success of TikTok without its algorithm has clearly not spent enough time on the app. While it now has the reach, its addictiveness comes from its eerily accurate algorithm that learns exactly what you want to see by way of using more than just basic signals. It’s non-trivial to spin that up again from scratch, but not an insurmountable hurdle, either, given the right investment and talent. Still, that’s not what buyers were looking for. Walmart engineers rebuilding TikTok? Can you imagine?

Weekly News

• Snapchat had a big August amid TikTok uncertainty. The continual uncertainty around TikTok’s future may have provided a big boost to Snapchat in August. The app saw approximately 28.5 million new installs last month — its single largest month for first-time downloads since May 2019, according to Sensor Tower, when it had then seen 41.2 million new installs. The only other month, besides May 2019, where Snapchat had seen more monthly downloads than it did in August was December 2016. Downloads were up 29% year-over-year in August 2020, compared with 9% growth in July. (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
• India bans PUBG Mobile, and over 100 other Chinese apps.Geopolitical tensions between India and China again spilled over into the app economy this week, as India banned 118 more Chinese apps that it deemed “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.” The country had banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, in June. Newly banned apps include Baidu, WeChat Work, Tencent Weiyun, Rise of Kingdoms, APUS Launcher, a VPN for TikTok, Mobile Taobao, Youko, Sina News, Cam Card, PUBG Mobile and many others. (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
• Pakistan blocks five dating apps including Tinder and Grindr. Pakistan said on Tuesday it had blocked Tinder, Grindr and three other dating apps for not adhering to local laws around “immoral content.” (Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam/Reuters)
• Fortnite leaves a $1.2 billion hole in the market. Fortnite has picked up slightly more than $1.2 billion in player spending since launching in March 2018, according to Sensor Tower estimates. On Google Play, it has generated $9.7 million following its release on the storefront in April 2020. In 2020, Fortnite generated $293 million in player spending, with close to $283 million spent on the App Store alone. (Craig Chapple/Sensor Tower)
• Robinhood faces SEC probe for not disclosing deals with high-speed traders. Stock-trading app popular with millennials Robinhood is facing a civil fraud investigation over its failure to fully disclose its practice of selling clients’ orders to high-speed trading firms. (Dave Michaels; Alexander Osipovich/The Wall Street Journal).
• Amazon’s big redesign on iOS to reach all US users by month-end. Amazon has given its iOS app a significant makeover featuring new colors, updated navigation, a floating quick access bar and other changes designed to make it easier to browse the app using one hand. The rollout will reach 100% of U.S. iOS users by the end of September 2020. The changes come at a time when more consumers are shopping online due to health concerns around the coronavirus outbreak. (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
• Apple launches COVID-19 ‘Exposure Notification Express’ with iOS 13.7 — Android to follow later this month. Apple and Google are introducing new tools that make it easier for public health authorities to implement digital exposure notification, without the need for developing and maintaining their own individual apps. The iOS 13.7 update launched this week, with Android 6.0 arriving this month. (Darrell Etherington/TechCrunch)
• Introducing Game IQ. App Annie introduced a new game analytics product, Game IQ, that uses data science to create and maintain a customizable taxonomy that automates game analysis at scale. Game IQ will deliver visual reports that include answers to questions like market size, class, genre, subgenre, tags and more. (App Annie)
• Google launches Google Kids Space, a ‘kids mode’ feature for Android, initially on Lenovo tablets. The feature offers a dedicated kids mode on Android tablets which will aggregate apps, books and videos for kids to enjoy and learn from. Kids Space will launch first on the Lenovo Smart Tab M10 HD Gen 2, but Google aims to bring Kids Space to more devices in time. (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
• Play Store, App Store revenue may be capped at 20% in Russia. A lawmaker in Russia submitted draft legislation that would cut the app store revenue of Apple and Google. If enacted, the law would limit commissions to 20% on both app stores, including paid downloads and in-app purchases. (Rei Padla/Android Community)
• Apple-Epic row being closely watched by German antitrust chief. Germany’s Federal Cartel Office said the Apple-Epic lawsuit in the U.S. “has most certainly attracted our interest,” and is considering opening its own inquiry into Apple. “We are at the beginning, but we are looking at this very closely,” said Andreas Mundt, head of the Federal Cartel Office. (Douglas Busvine/Reuters)

Apple Developer Round-up

• Apple introduces ‘offer codes’ to entice app users with free and discounted subscriptions. These one-time-use codes can be used digitally or printed out for use at offline events, allowing developers to more easily distribute either free or discounted subscriptions to customers. (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
• Upcoming tax and price changes for app and in-app purchases. Tax changes in Chile, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Turkey rolled out this week. (Apple)
• Apple details new figures on app economy jobs. The news was distributed as part of Apple’s PR strategy in hopes of avoiding regulation. The company says the App Store now supports 2.1 million jobs across the U.S. and created 300,000 since April 2019. (Apple)

Funding and M&A (and IPOs)

• Bambuser raises $45 million for its live video shopping platform. The company’s offering, which works on mobile similar to Instagram Live, has been used H&M, Motivi, Moda Operandi, Frame, LUISAVIAROMA and Showfields.
• Toss Lab raises $13 million for its cross-platform collaboration platform, JANDI, the ‘Slack of Asia.’
• San Francisco-based Skillz will IPO at a $3.5 billion valuation. The company offers a platform for making mobile games competitive, allowing users to play with friends or strangers for cash, prizes or points. It also enables esports tournaments.
• Dating app Bumble reportedly talking to bankers about a 2021 IPO at a valuation of $6 to $8 billion.
• Shopping app Wish submitted its draft registration to the SEC for an IPO. The company has raised $1.6 billion from investors to date, and was worth $11.2 billion as of last summer’s financing round.
• Bangalore-based online learning startup Unacademy announced it has raised $150 million in a new financing round that valued the Facebook-backed firm at $1.45 billion (post-money).

Downloads

The Last Campfire

Apple in 2018 approached Hello Games, the studio behind the hit title No Man’s Sky, to ask about titles that would work on Apple Arcade. The Last Campfire is the result of those talks. The game offers an artistic story of a lost ember trapped in a puzzling place, searching for meaning and a way home. The game supports controllers in addition to native touch controls,

Yesterday the four employees (pictured) of US-headquartered enterprise startup PandaDoc were arrested in Minsk by the Belarus police, in what appears to be an act of state-led retaliation, after the company’s founders joined protests against the 26 year-long regime of President Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko is widely believed by international observers to have rigged the country’s recent elections in his favor, preventing the election of opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

PandaDoc — which has raised $51.1M and is now headquartered in San Francisco after debuting at a TechCrunch Meetup in Berlin in 2013 — issued a statement saying their Minsk development office was raided by police and the ‘Financial Investigation Department’ yesterday morning.

PandaDoc has released a statement on a new web site, SavePandaDoc, outlining the incident, saying employees had been prevented from leaving the office, refused access to lawyers, and a director was taken away by Police.

One of the founders of the company, Mikita Mikado, who lives in the US, has also released a statement to this effect on his Instagram and Youtube.

Four of the arrested PandaDoc employees have been charged with embezzling 107,000 BYR ($41,000) from company and therefore avoiding tax. The employees have been detained for two months.

However, PandaDoc released a statement saying: “We declare that this accusation is completely untrue and has no basis whatsoever. All activities of the company were carried out in full compliance with the legislation, which is confirmed by repeated international audits and inspections.”

Now held in custody are (also pictured):

Yulia Shardiko, Chief Accountant
Dmitry Rabtsevich, Director
Victor Kuvshinov, Product Director
Vladislav Mikholap, HR

Although the company HQ is in San Francisco, it has a large office on the Belarusian High Technologies Park, which was set up by the government supposedly to support the tech industry.

PandaDoc said the police raid was likely linked to the fact that the founders of PandaDoc, in particular Mikado, have protested publicly against the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters by Lukashenko, but have done so strictly in a personal capacity.

Mikado recently became a leading voice in the protest movement. He set up an initiative, ProtectBelarus.org, offering Belarusian police officers who had decided to disobey orders to beat and torture protesters financial aid and re-training in the tech industry.

Belarussian police officers are effectively ‘indentured employees’ because they are paid in large sums at the beginning of their contract, but this immediately becomes a debt to the state the moment they decide to break leave their contract.

In a statement, Mikado said that as of August 29th, the platform had received more than 6,000 messages and almost 600 requests for help. The platform is run by volunteers and has no relation to PandaDoc, the company.

Mikado said in a statement: “We are asking international tech community to support PandaDoc by sharing this message and reaction to it with a #SavePandaDoc tag.”

“There is no more law. The authorities do not even try to act according to the law, they simply fabricate cases for political orders that come from above. And if you thought that this would not affect you, then we can safely assure you of the opposite – it has already affected everyone,” the statement reads.

“We will not be silent anymore! The country is full of legal chaos. The actions of the authorities cannot be called anything except genocide and repression. The further it goes, the longer the road back. And soon there will be a cliff. We demand to immediately release our colleagues, close the criminal case, let the company work normally and bring benefits and income, including to the state.”

The company now says it will be forced to close the company in Belarus and “will begin to establish an alternative to the Park of High Technologies outside the Republic of Belarus.”

PandaDoc only recently raised $30 million in a Series B extension from One Peak, Microsoft Venture Fund M12 and EBRD Venture Fund.

After the Belarusian presidential election on August 9th (which was not recognized as free and fair by the EU, the UK and the US due to widely reported and documented vote-rigging in favor of Lukashenko) the police violently cracked down on peaceful protests, leading to six reported deaths and 450 UN-documented cases of police torture.