Author: azeeadmin

After teasing the launch of their new startup last year, e-commerce veteran Julie Bornstein and her technical co-founder, Amit Aggarwal, are today launching The Yes, a women’s shopping platform that they’ve been quietly building for 18 months and they say will create tailor-made experiences for each user, courtesy of its sophisticated algorithms.

Bornstein’s experience and vision alone attracted $30 million in funding to the venture last year from Forerunner Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and True Ventures, among others. To learn more about how it breaks through in a world rife with e-commerce companies, we talked yesterday with Bornstein, who previously spent four years as COO of the styling service Stitch Fix and before that spent years as a C-level executive at Sephora. We wondered specifically how The Yes differs from Stitch Fix, given that both companies use data science to discover clothing for shoppers based on their size, budget and style.

Aside from the fact that The Yes is taking an app-only approach (unlike Stitch Fix), and doesn’t have a subscription model, Bornstein says that The Yes is very much focused on people “who want to shop” versus those who want their shopping done for them. Yet that’s just the start of what makes The Yes different than its other predecessors, said Bornstein in a conversation that follows below, edited lightly for length.

TC: You’re building what you call a store around each user, who downloads the app, answers questions that provide a lot of “signal” about that person’s style and brand preferences and size and budget, and that’s adaptive, meaning the algorithm is always re-ranking products as it learns better what a person likes. What demographic are you targeting?

JB: It’s women of a really a very broad age range, from 25 to 75, who care about fashion, whether they’re sort of an in-the-know-on-everything fashionista or they just want to look great. And you can shop high/low, which is how most women shop these days. So it depends what you’re looking for.

TC: It sounds like you’re selling women’s apparel exclusively to start. Are you also selling handbags? Jewelry? Accessories?

JB: We’re focused on fashion and footwear, and we have accessories and handbags. A lot of our brands have great handbags. Then we will be expanding more to jewelry and other accessory categories over time.

TC: What brands can shoppers find on the platform?

JB: We have 145 brands at launch, ranging from Gucci, and Prada and Erdem, to contemporary brands like Vince and Theory to direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and La Ligne to everyday brands like Levis. When a brand integrates with The Yes, the platform sells each brand’s full digital catalog.

TC: Why go app only?

Most of the e commerce sites that have mobile presence really feel like a website converted to a small screen. We [thought if we] challenged ourselves to leverage the technology of the native app environment, [we] could build a much slicker experience for the user. We also know that mobile is growing. It’s about 50% of total purchases now in fashion and growing faster, so while we know that web will be important to add, we really felt like mobile and iOS were the places to start.

TC: Stitch Fix uses machine learning to analyze customer tastes, but it ultimately relies on human stylists to choose items. What new advances have been made in AI that can allow The Yes to actually pick products using artificial intelligence? Isn’t fashion, like music, a ‘noisy’ problem, with consumers often not knowing what they want?

JB: It’s such a nuanced area and really hard to do in the form of recommendations, but there are a number of reasons that enable us to do it. One is we had to build the most extensive taxonomy that exists in fashion. We did think a lot about the music genome project that Pandora did and all the work that Spotify has done. Music is definitely one of our inspirations. And if you look at what they did, they had some human expertise in the beginning, creating these categories, and then the machine learned on top of it, and we have done the same in fashion. So we had fashion expertise build our initial taxonomy.

Then we leveraged both machine learning and computer vision to train models to understand how to absorb all pieces of data related to a product, as well as the image itself and how to read images. And it gave us a really strong understanding of 500 dimensions for every single item. [Meanwhile] to understand what the consumer cares about, we spent a lot of time testing and learning which questions [to ask] when it comes to brand and price and things like color and style and size and fit, were the best questions to get has signal data.

TC: Because of your background, a lot comparisons are probably going to be made between The Yes and Stitch Fix. What was the impetus for this new business? Was it a matter of eliminating that personal touch?

JB: I had such a great experience at Stitch Fix, and I’m still a shareholder and a big fan of the company and the team. And I think what they’re doing what, they continue to do, is terrific in really pushing the boundary on this concept of shopping-as-a-service.

What I am working on, and our team is really focused on, is the actual consumer shopping experience for consumers who want to shop. There’s a strong percent of the population who really loves to shop and wants agency in their own selection, and that is really the consumer we’re going after.

TC:  You’re launching with roughly 150 brands. What is your relationship with them? Are you taking like a cut of a transaction? Are you ever taking possession of their products? Do you have a warehouse or warehouses?

There were two things coming into this business that I wanted to avoid based on my personal experience, which was one, owning inventory, and two, reshooting every item for its own new photographs on the site. Pinterest and Instagram and all these other visual sites have shown us that the brands spend a lot of money shooting images to look a certain way to help communicate what their brand is all about. So leveraging those assets has been terrific.

[Regarding inventory], there’s no reason to ship the product from the brand to another warehouse and then to the consumer. We’re cutting out that stuff and it shipping direct from the brand. From a consumer standpoint, you order on our app, and everything is one-click, and you are charged by [us]. But then the order is placed through the brand and is shipped from the brand to you. Then we will communicate to you when it’s shipped when it’s arriving, and if you have any customer service issues, we take care of it.

And we take a flat commission [on sales].

TC: Returns are free. But isn’t that a huge cost center, and might it deter people from returning items if you charged something for returns?

JB: My feeling is that free shipping and free returns is a baseline requirement to offer a great service. And it’s our job to help match [shoppers] to product that you’re not going to return. We have an enormous goal to have the lowest return rate in the industry. It will obviously take us some time to get there. But we believe that by making sure that we understand what works for you and what doesn’t, we can get [there].

TC: You raised $30 million last year. Are you in the market for a Series B? What will you have to show investors toward that end?

JB: The logic behind the dollar amount that we raised was: how much do we need to build what we want to build, and then bring it to market and get traction? And so that is our goal that starts tomorrow. . .

TC: How has this current reality altered your plans? Launching during a pandemic isn’t what you’re imagining, obviously.

JB: No, it is not. I don’t know that any of us could have possibly. We did delay our launch; we were originally launching in March, and once COVID hit, we needed to make sure we could see straight and understand the impact. I think as time has passed, we have felt more and more compelled to get out there to help our brands, all of whom are feeling the impact of the retail stores closing, or orders being cancelled by their retail partners. They’re all businesses and many of them small businesses, so we want to help them.

It’s also an interesting time because we all need a little bit of levity and escape. And the app really is a fun escape.

Directly, a startup whose mission is to help build better customer service chatbots by using experts in specific areas to train them, has raised more funding as it opens up a new front to grow its business: APIs and a partner ecosystem that can now also tap into its expert network. Today Directly is announcing that it has added $11 million to close out its Series B at $31 million (it raised $20 million back in January of this year).

The funding is coming from Triangle Peak Partners and Toba Capital, while its previous investors in the round included strategic backers Samsung NEXT and Microsoft’s M12 Ventures (who are both customers, alongside companies like Airbnb), as well as Industry Ventures, True Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Northgate. (As we reported when covering the initial close, Directly’s valuation at that time was at $110 million post-money, and so this would likely put it at $120 million or higher, given how the business has expanded.)

While chatbots have now been around for years, a key focus in the tech world has been how to help them work better, after initial efforts saw so many disappointing results that it was fair to ask whether they were even worth the trouble.

Directly’s premise is that the most important part of getting a chatbot to work well is to make sure that it’s trained correctly, and its approach to that is very practical: find experts both to troubleshoot questions and provide answers.

As we’ve described before, its platform helps businesses identify and reach out to “experts” in the business or product in question, collect knowledge from them, and then fold that into a company’s AI to help train it and answer questions more accurately. It also looks at data input and output into those AI systems to figure out what is working, and what is not, and how to fix that, too.

The information is typically collected by way of question-and-answer sessions. Directly compensates experts both for submitting information as well as to pay out royalties when their knowledge has been put to use, “just as you would in traditional copyright licensing in music,” its co-founder Antony Brydon explained to me earlier this year.

It can take as little as 100 experts, but potentially many more, to train a system, depending on how much the information needs to be updated over time. (Directly’s work for Xbox, for example, used 1,000 experts but has to date answered millions of questions.)

Directly’s pitch to customers is that building a better chatbot can help deflect more questions from actual live agents (and subsequently cut operational costs for a business). It claims that customer contacts can be reduced by up to 80%, with customer satisfaction by up to 20%, as a result.

What’s interesting is that now Directly sees an opportunity in expanding that expert ecosystem to a wider group of partners, some of which might have previously been seen as competitors. (Not unlike Amazon’s AI powering a multitude of other businesses, some of which might also be in the market of selling the same services that Amazon does).

The partner ecosystem, as Directly calls it, use APIs to link into Directly’s platform. Meya, Percept.ai, and SmartAction — which themselves provide a range of customer service automation tools — are three of the first users.

“The team at Directly have quickly proven to be trusted and invaluable partners,” said Erik Kalviainen, CEO at Meya, in a statement. “As a result of our collaboration, Meya is now able to take advantage of a whole new set of capabilities that will enable us to deliver automated solutions both faster and with higher resolution rates, without customers needing to deploy significant internal resources. That’s a powerful advantage at a time when scale and efficiency are key to any successful customer support operation.”

The prospect of a bigger business funnel beyond even what Directly was pulling in itself is likely what attracted the most recent investment.

“Directly has established itself as a true leader in helping customers thrive during these turbulent economic times,” said Tyler Peterson, Partner at Triangle Peak Partners, in a statement. “There is little doubt that automation will play a tremendous role in the future of customer support, but Directly is realizing that potential today. Their platform enables businesses to strike just the right balance between automation and human support, helping them adopt AI-powered solutions in a way that is practical, accessible, and demonstrably effective.”

In January, Mike de la Cruz, who took over as CEO at the time of the funding announcement, said the company was gearing up for a larger Series C in 2021. It’s not clear how and if that will be impacted by the current state of the world. But in the meantime, as more organizations are looking for ways to connect with customers outside of channels that might require people to physically visit stores, or for employees to sit in call centres, it presents a huge opportunity for companies like this one.

“At its core, our business is about helping customer support leaders resolve customer issues with the right mix of automation and human support,” said de la Cruz in a statement. “It’s one thing to deliver a great product today, but we’re committed to ensuring that our customers have the solutions they need over the long term. That means constantly investing in our platform and expanding our capabilities, so that we can keep up with the rapid pace of technological change and an unpredictable economic landscape. These new partnerships and this latest expansion of our recent funding round have positioned us to do just that. We’re excited to be collaborating with our new partners, and very thankful to all of our investors for their support.”

Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon Communications, is a busy man. He’s also a business man. He’s a busy businessman, but has graciously made time to join us for an episode of Extra Crunch Live, our ongoing speaker series for Extra Crunch members.

We’re thrilled to have Vestberg as a guest on the show! The episode will air on May 26 at 2pm ET/11am PT.

Full disclosure: Verizon is the parent company to TechCrunch, which means that Vestberg is our boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.

Vestberg was previously CEO at Ericsson and joined Verizon as chief technology officer and EVP of network and technology in April of 2017. In June of 2018, the company announced that Vestberg would succeed Lowell McAdams as CEO of Verizon Communications. The promotion was made official that August.

Vestberg is unlike some of our previous guests on Extra Crunch Live — VCs like Kirsten Green, Roelof Botha and Charles Hudson and entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban. Vestberg is an operator at the helm of one of the world’s biggest corporations, and, as such, provides a unique perspective on adaptation strategies during the coronavirus pandemic.

Not only can attendees plan to hear about how Verizon is thinking both short and long-term about the effects of this pandemic on business, but also about how things are changing internally at the company, from re-opening offices to keeping morale high.

Vestberg leads a company with thousands of employees and can help founders understand how to manage a company at scale, particularly during a time when decisions are being made quickly and the stakes are high.

We’re also interested in talking to Vestberg about the company’s 5G rollout. 5G technology has huge implications for startups, especially as video conferencing and high-bandwidth communication formats become more popular in the midst of physical distancing.

Oh, another important thing! We’re not going to be the only ones asking questions. Extra Crunch members can also ask their questions directly in the Zoom call. So make sure you come prepared! If you’re not already a member, you can join Extra Crunch here.

Again, this episode of Extra Crunch Live with Hans Vestberg goes down on May 26 at 2pm ET/11am PT. You can find the full details below the jump.

BetterCloud gives IT visibility into its SaaS tools providing the means to discover, manage and secure those tools. In the middle of a crisis that has forced most companies to move workers home, being able to manage SaaS usage in this way is growing increasingly significant.

Today the company announced a $75 million Series F. Warburg Pincus led the way with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, Greycroft Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, New Amsterdam Growth Capital and e.ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to $182 million, according to the company.

While CEO David Politis acknowledges the gravity of the current situation, he also recognizes that giving companies a way to manage their SaaS usage is more pertinent than ever. “What has happened in the last two months has been terrible for the world, but in some crazy way it has just made what we do a lot more relevant,” Politis told TechCrunch.

He says the pandemic has really accelerated the market opportunity because of the reliance on cloud services and the services his company provides.

Those services began as an operational layer on top of G Suite. Later it added support for Office 365 and in 2016 it moved to more general SaaS management. It now offers direct integrations into multiple SaaS apps including Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, Zendesk and more. The set of tools in Bettercloud gives IT control over security, configuration, spend optimization and auditability across SaaS applications.

In normal times after a large Series F round, we might be talking about this being the last round before an IPO, but Politis isn’t ready to commit to that just yet, especially in this economy. He does say, however, that he’s in it for the long haul and sees an opportunity to build a long-term, sustainable company.

“The last couple of months I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and when you take a $75 million round at the stage you’re not doing that because you want to sell the business. You’re doing that because you want to build something and build something really special,” he said.

When I spoke to Robert Ross, CEO and co-founder at FireHydrant last week, we had a technology adventure. First the audio wasn’t working correctly on Zoom, then Google Meet. Finally we used cell phones to complete the interview. It was like a case study in what FireHydrant is designed to do — help companies manage incidents and recover more quickly when things go wrong with their services.

Today the company announced an $8 million Series A from Menlo Ventures and Work-Bench. That brings the total raised to $9.5 million including the $1.5 million seed round we reported on last April.

In the middle of a pandemic with certain services under unheard of pressure, understanding what to do when your systems crash has become increasingly important. FireHydrant has literally developed a playbook to help companies recover faster.

These run books are digital documents that are unique to each company and include what to do to help manage the recovery process. Some of that is administrative. For example, certain people have to be notified by email, a Jira ticket has to be generated and a Slack channel opened to provide a communications conduit for the team.

While Ross says you can’t define the exact recovery process itself because each incident tends to be unique, you can set up an organized response to an incident and that can help you get to work on the recovery much more quickly. That ability to manage an incident can be a difference maker when it comes to getting your system back to a steady state.

Ross is a former site reliability engineer (SRE) himself. He has experienced the kinds of problems his company is trying to solve, and that background was something that attracted investor Matt Murphy from Menlo Ventures.

“I love his authentic perspective, as a former SRE, on the problem and how to create something that would make the SRE function and processes better for all. That value prop really resonated with us in a time when the shift to online is accelerating and remote coordination between people tasked with identifying and fixing problems is at all time high in terms of its importance. Ultimately we’re headed toward more and more automation in problem resolution and FH helps pave the way,” Murphy told TechCrunch.

It’s not easy being an early stage company in the current climate, but Ross believes his company has created something that will resonate, perhaps even more right now. As he says, every company has incidents, and how you react can define you as a company. Having tooling to help you manage that process helps give you structure at a time you need it most.

MasterClass, a startup that sells celebrity-taught classes to people, has raised $100 million in a Series E round. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from new investors including Owl Ventures, 01 Advisors and existing investors NEA, IVP, Atomico and NextEquity Partners.

The new financing brings MasterClass’ valuation to $800 million, according to Bloomberg, which broke the news of the edtech company’s then-impending funding round earlier this month. MasterClass declined to disclose its new valuation.

MasterClass charges a $180 annual subscription fee for users to access its library of content. The subscription model is responsible for 80 percent of the company’s revenue.

MasterClass views itself as neatly on the intersection of entertainment and education. The startup has produced 85 classes taught by celebrities, or “masters,” on their specialities. The platform has garnered blockbuster names like Anna Wintour to talk about how to grow a business, Gordon Ramsey on how to cook, and David Sedaris on how to be funny. The previews of classes are called “trailers.”

It also touches on the public’s innate curiosity about how famous people think and work. MasterClass tugs on that idea a bit by also offering classes that fundamentally do not make sense to be “digitized.” Think high-contact sports, like a tennis lesson from Serena Williams or a basketball lesson from Steph Curry. Or just general pontifications from RuPaul on self expression and Neil deGrasse Tyson on scientific thinking and communication.

Despite its flashy line up of stars, MasterClass doesn’t sell access but instead sells a window into someone’s work diary. Celebrities are not interacting with students on a day-to-day basis, and sometimes, not at all.

It is relatively a light lift for celebrities once they get their content on the platform, which of course only happens if they are personally invited to from the company. Any MasterClass on the site includes a number of lessons, broken down in separate videos that range from 20 to 30 minutes, and a downloadable workbook. Students for each class can flock to community hubs to chat with their fellow virtual classmates. There are opportunities for celebrities to interact with students, but nothing is put in the contract to make the instructors give back.

MasterClass proudly touts the few exceptions where celebrities have chosen favorites in class: Electronic music producer DeadMau5 reportedly invited one of their MasterClass students to record a track alongside him. Serena Williams reportedly invited one of her students to play a game with her.

MasterClass declined to share how it pays the celebrities.

Last year, MasterClass more than doubled in terms of sales. The company also says its content is so engaging that people might sign on for a Steph Curry workshop, but then eavesdrop in on a Ramsey cooking session.

MasterClass raised the round as millions are at home with nothing to do. CEO and co-founder David Rogier said that the most watched chapter of a class is Chris Voss, former FBI negotiator, and his thoughts on the art of tactical empathy.

Beyond this anecdote, Rogier repeatedly denied to share any data on how MasterClass’ usage has changed since coronavirus began. The silence is notable only because its competitors and neighbors in the edtech space have been noisy as of late. The massive shift to remote education has already helped edtech companies raise millions across the board, from new unicorns to seed stage deals.

The silence might be because MasterClass has positioned its content as more entertainment-focused than simply education-focused. Since the company produces high quality, documentary-style content, it means that it might struggle to produce, similarly to the delays we’re seeing in the entertainment industry right now due to COVID-19 shutdowns.

Similar to other edtech companies, however, MasterClass claims that the new financing was closed less out of necessity and more out of opportunity.

Rogier said that the capital will be used to create new classes for students and up production to one class a week. The company is also experimenting with an audio-only mode, short form and augmented reality.

“Imagine if we had Steph Curry, but you had augmented reality on your phone so you could actually see where to put your feet,” he said.

MasterClass’s marketing strategy has recently been a topic of conversation because of how aggressive and ever-present it is. It seems like every YouTube video you watch, there is a MasterClass ad waiting to be your commercial break. It seemingly has only increased as everyone started to work from home.

While Rogier would not disclose MasterClass’ marketing budget (or how in the world it managed to crowd already crowded challenges) the strategy is a bit telling. MasterClass doesn’t compete with YouTube, it advertises on the platform. It is betting that the world wants a highly produced, celebrity-led class, and is willing to pay for it.

“If you’ve seen more ads, it is because they are working,” he said.

Octant, a company backed by Andreessen Horowitz just now unveiling itself publicly to the world, is using the tools of synthetic biology to buck the latest trends in drug discovery.

As the pharmaceuticals industry turns its attention to precision medicine — the search for ever more tailored treatments for specific diseases using genetic engineering — Octant is using the same technologies to engage in drug discovery and diagnostics on a mass scale.

The company’s technology genetically engineers DNA to act as an identifier for the most common drug receptors inside the human genome. Basically, it’s creating QR codes that can flag and identify how different protein receptors in cells respond to chemicals. These are the biological sensors which help control everything from immune responses to the senses of sight and smell, the firing of neurons; even the release of hormones and communications between cells in the body are regulated.

“Our discovery platform was designed to map and measure the interconnected relationships between chemicals, multiple drug receptor pathways and diseases, enabling us to engineer multi-targeted drugs in a more rational way, across a wide spectrum of targets,” said Sri Kosuri, Octant’s co-founder and chief executive officer, in a statement.

Octant’s work is based on a technology first developed at the University of California Los Angeles by Kosuri and a team of researchers, which slashed the cost of making genetic sequences to $2 per gene from $50 to $100 per gene.

“Our method gives any lab that wants the power to build its own DNA sequences,” Kosuri said in a 2018 statement. “This is the first time that, without a million dollars, an average lab can make 10,000 genes from scratch.”

Joining Kosuri in launching Octant is Ramsey Homsany, a longtime friend of Kosuri’s, and a former executive at Google and Dropbox . Homsany happened to have a background in molecular biology from school, and when Kosuri would talk about the implications of the technology he developed, the two men knew they needed to for a company.

“We use these new tools to know which bar code is going with which construct or genetic variant or pathway that we’re working with [and] all of that fits into a single well,” said Kosuri. “What you can do on top of that is small molecule screening… we can do that with thousands of different wells at a time. So we can build these maps between chemicals and targets and pathways that are essential to drug development.”

Before coming to UCLA, Kosuri had a long history with companies developing products based on synthetic biology on both the coasts. Through some initial work that he’d done in the early days of the biofuel boom in 2007, Kosuri was connected with Flagship Ventures, and the imminent Harvard-based synthetic biologist George Church . He also served as a scientific advisor to Gen9, a company acquired by the multi-billion dollar synthetic biology powerhouse, Ginkgo Bioworks.

“Some of the most valuable drugs in history work on complex sets of drug targets, which is why Octant’s focus on polypharmacology is so compelling,” said Jason Kelly, the co-founder and CEO of Gingko Bioworks, and a member of the Octant board, in a statement. “Octant is engineering a lot of luck and cost out of the drug discovery equation with its novel platform and unique big data biology insights, which will drive the company’s internal development programs as well as potential partnerships.”

The new technology arrives at a unique moment in the industry where pharmaceutical companies are moving to target treatments for diseases that are tied to specific mutations, rather than look at treatments for more common disease problems, said Homsany.

“People are dropping common disease problems,” he said. “The biggest players are dropping these cases and it seems like that just didn’t make sense to us. So we thought about how would a company take these new technologies and apply them in a way that could solve some of this.”

One reason for the industry’s turn away from the big diseases that affect large swaths of the population is that new therapies are emerging to treat these conditions which don’t rely on drugs. While they wouldn’t get into specifics, Octant co-founders are pursuing treatments for what Kosuri said were conditions “in the metabolic space” and in the “neuropsychiatric space”.

Helping them pursue those targets, since Octant is very much a drug development company, is $20 million in financing from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz .

“Drug discovery remains a process of trial and error. Using its deep expertise in synthetic biology, the Octant team has engineered human cells that provide real-time, precise and complete readouts of the complex interactions and effects that drug molecules have within living cells,” said Jorge Conde, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and member of the Octant board of directors. “By querying biology at this unprecedented scale, Octant has the potential to systematically create exhaustive maps of drug targets and corresponding, novel treatments for our most intractable diseases.”

As organizations look for safe and efficient ways of running their services in the new global paradigm of increased social distancing, a startup that has built a platform to help people verify their work details in a secure way is announcing a round of growth funding.

Truework, which provides a way for banks, apartment-rental agencies, and others to check the employment details of an applicant in a quick and secure manner online, has raised $30 million, money that CEO and co-founder Ryan Sandler said in an interview that it would use both grow its existing business, as well to explore adding more details — both via its own service and via third-party partnerships — to the identity information that it shares.

The Series B is being led by Activant Capital — a VC that focuses on B2B2C startups — with participation also from Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures, as well as a number of high profile execs and entrepreneurs — Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn); Tom Gonser (Docusign); William Hockey (Plaid); and Daniel Yanisse (Checkr) among them.

The LinkedIn connection is an interesting one. Both Sandler and co-founder Victor Kabdebon were engineers at LinkedIn working on profile and improving the kind of data that LinkedIn sources on its users (the third co-founder, Ethan Winchell, previously worked elsewhere), and while Sandler tells me that the idea for Truework came to them after both left the company, he sees LinkedIn “as a potential partner here,” so watch this space.

The problem that Truework is aiming to solve is the very clunky, and often insecure, nature of how organizations typically verify an individual’s employment information. Details about salary and where you work, and the job you do, are typically essential for larger financial transactions, whether it’s securing a mortgage or another financing loan, or renting an apartment, or for others who might need to verify that information for other purposes, such as staffing agencies.

Typically that kind of information gathering is time-consuming both to reach out to get and to confirm (Sandler cites statistics that say on average an HR person spends over 1,000 hours annually answering questions like these). And some of the systems that have been put in place to do that work — specifically consumer reporting agencies — have been proven not be as watertight in their security as you would hope.

“Your data is flowing around lots of third party platforms,” Sandler said. “You’re releasing a lot of information about yourself and you don’t know where the data is going and if it’s even accurate.”

Truework’s solution is based around a platform, and now an API, that a company buys into. In turn, it gives its employees the ability to consent to using it. If the employee agrees, Truework sources a worker’s place of employment and salary details, and then when a third party wants to verify that information for the person in question, it uses Truework to do so, rather than contacting the company directly.

Sandler says that currently the idea is that if you leave your job, your next employer would need to also be a Truework customer in order to update the information it has on you: the startup makes money by charging both larger enterprises to make the platform accessible to employees as well as those organizations that are querying for the information/verifications (small business employers using the platform can use it for free). Over time, the plan will be to configure a way to update your profiles regardless of where you work.

So far, the concept has seen a lot of traction: there are 20,000 small businesses using the platform, as well as 100 enterprises, with the number of verifiers (its term for those requesting information) now at 40,000. Customers include The College Board, The Real Real, Oscar Health, The Motley Fool, and Tuft & Needle.

While all of this was built at a time before COVID-19, the global health pandemic has highlighted the importance of having more efficient and secure systems for doing work, especially at a time when many people are not in the office.

“Our biggest competitor is the fax machine and the phone call,” Sandler said, “but as companies move to more remote working, no one is manning the phones or fax machines. But these operations still need to happen.” Indeed, he points out that at the end of 2019, Truework had 25,000 verifiers. Nearly doubling its end-user customers speaks to the huge boost in business it has seen in the last five months.

That is part of the reason the company has attracted the investment it has.

“Truework’s platform sits at the center of consumers’ most important transactions and life events – from purchasing a home, to securing a new job,” said Steve Sarracino, founder and partner at Activant Capital, in a statement. “Up until now, the identity verification process has been painful, expensive, and opaque for all parties involved, something we’ve seen first-hand in the mortgage space. Starting with income and employment, Truework is setting the standard for consent-based verifications and unlocking the next wave of the digital economy. We’re thrilled to be partnering with this exceptional team as they continue to scale the platform.” Sarracino is joining the board with this round.

While a big focus in the world of tech right now may be on building more and better ways of connecting goods and services to people in as contact-free a way as possible, the bigger play around identity management has been around for years, and will continue to be a huge part of how the internet develops in the future.

The fax and phone may be the primary tools these days for verifying employment information, but on a more general level, there are companies like Facebook, Google and Apple already playing a big role in how we “log in” and use all kinds of services online. They, along with others focused squarely on the identity and verification space (and Truework works with some of them) will all continue to try to make the case for why they might be the most trusted provider of that layer of information, at a time when we may want to share less and less with long lists of parties.

That is the bigger opportunity that investors are betting on here.

“The increasing momentum Truework has seen since its founding in 2017 demonstrates the critical need for transformation in this space,” said Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia, in a statement. “Privacy, especially around identity data, is becoming increasingly top of mind for consumers and how they make transactions online.”

Chinese robots will soon be seen roaming a number of warehouse floors across North America. Geek+, a well-funded Chinese robotics company that specializes in logistics automation for factories, warehouses and supply chains, furthers its expansion in North America after striking a strategic partnership with Conveyco, an order fulfillment and distribution center system integrator with operations across the continent.

Geek+ is seizing a massive opportunity in replacing repetitive warehouse work with unmanned robots, a demand that has surged during the coronavirus outbreak as logistics services around the world face labor shortage, respond to an uptick in e-commerce sales, and undertake disease prevention methods.

The partnership will bring Geek+’s autonomous mobile robots, or ARMs, to Conveyco’s clients in retail, ecommerce, omnichannel and logistics across North America. The deal will give a substantial boost to Geek’s overseas distribution while helping Conveyco to “improve efficiency, provide flexibility, and reduce costs associated with warehouse and logistics operations in various industries,” the partners said in a statement.

Beijing-based Geek+ so far operates 10,000 robots worldwide and employs some 800 employees, with offices in China, Germany, the U.K, the U.S., Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of its clients include Nike, Decathlon, Walmart and Dell.

Since founding in 2015, the company has raised about $390 million through five funding rounds, according to public data collected by Crunchbase, including a colossal $150 million round back in 2018 which it claimed was the largest-ever funding round for a logistics robotics startup. It counts Warburg Pincus, Vertex Ventures and GGV Capital among its list of investors.

Ola said on Wednesday it is cutting 1,400 jobs in India, or 35% of its workforce in the home market, as the ride-hailing firm works to reduce its expense to steer through the coronavirus pandemic that has severely impacted mobility companies in the country.

Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and chief executive of Ola, shared the job elimination update with the team in an email today, in which he also revealed that the company’s revenue had dropped by 95% in the last two months as India enforced a stay-at-home order for its 1.3 billion citizens in late March.

An Ola spokesperson told TechCrunch that only employees working in mobility and food operations were impacted and that the job cuts were limited to teams in India. Ola Electric, a separate entity of the ride-hailing firm, remains unaffected of the layoffs.

“We had all hoped in the beginning that this would be a short-lived crisis and that its impact would be temporary. Over the past couple of months, all members of our extended leadership team have taken significant salary cuts to be able to help the organization delay tougher people decisions as we waited for the situation to evolve. But unfortunately, it’s not been a short crisis,” he wrote in the email, which the company has since published on its blog.

“And the prognosis ahead for our business is very unclear and uncertain. It is going to take a long time for people to go out and about like before. With more companies preferring to have a large number of employees work from home, air travel limited to essential trips and vacations being put off for better times, the impact of this crisis is definitely going to be long-drawn for us. The world is not going to revert to the pre-COVID era anytime soon,” he added.

The employees who are being let go will be provided with three months of salary as well as insurance coverage for them and their parents, healthcare and emotional support until the end of the year, said Aggarwal.

India announced a lockdown in late March that shut all public transportation services across the country. In recent weeks, New Delhi has eased some restrictions and both Ola and Uber have resumed their services in most parts of the country except those where concentration of coronavirus cases is very high. As of today, Ola is operational in more than 160 cities across the country.

Ola is the latest company in India to enforce reduction in its workforce. Uber let go about 500 employees in India as part of its first wave of job cuts earlier this month, as first reported by Indian news outlet Entrackr. It’s unclear how its most recent layoffs announcement impacts its teams in India.

Food delivery startups Swiggy and Zomato, both of which are also facing severe disruptions due to the spread of the infectious disease, have together eliminated about 2,600 jobs (with 2,100 in Swiggy alone) in their companies in recent weeks.

Travel and hospital firms such as Ixigo, MakeMyTrip, and Oyo have also cut several jobs in recent months as their revenues drop significantly.

More to follow…