Author: azeeadmin

It’s been just over five months since Carl Pei first told the world about Nothing. Perhaps it’s just the way time moves these days or maybe it’s the fact that the company has trickled out information in the intervening months. Whatever the case, it feels like we’ve been waiting on today’s full Ear (1) reveal forever.

It’s been a pretty savvy strategy for a brand-new consumer hardware startup, building on the built-in buzz/anticipation from Pei’s connection to OnePlus. We’ve covered a number (but certainly not all) of the announcements between February and now and gotten most of the jokes about its name out of our system.

Frankly, the sheer volume of news Nothing has released hasn’t left a lot to the imagination. Our interview with Pei revealed the pricing of the buds ($99 USD), along with their noise canceling. We recently caught an image of the transparent charging case and battery life (24 hours, all told, with the case and ANC turned on, 36 hours without) via a StockX auction. In fact, the only thing left to reveal was the buds themselves (a pretty big piece, admittedly).

In conversations I’ve had with Pei, the founder has emphasized aesthetics as a key differentiator. The message has, admittedly, been somewhat muddled by the imagery Nothing has chosen to release. The first image associated with the company and product was actually the silhouette of the device’s PCB (printed circuit board). The second was an early concept Pei said was inspired by his grandmother’s tobacco pipe.

It’s clear that Nothing was keen to highlight how much it iterated on this project before launch. In fact, Pei told me that such iterations were part of the reason the product’s original launch was pushed back by a few months. For one thing, the company wanted the Ear (1) to look distinct from anything else on the market. For another, there’s an added level of complications when making your gadget at least partially transparent. That means the insides — the components and the glue that gold them together — need to look as good as the outside.

One thing you can say almost immediately about the Ear (1): Nothing looks quite like them. From a form factor standpoint, they most closely resemble AirPods, with a long stem that drops down from the buds. The stems themselves feature the majority of the product’s transparency (putting aside the case for a moment). The bud segment is an opaque white, likely owing to the fact that the those insides are frankly more unsightly.

Each stem features a touch panel single color dot — red and white — to distinguish right from left. That’s a subtle nod to RCA cables, with red for right and white for left. Another nice aesthetic touch is the Nothing logo printed down the lengths of the stem. The dotted text is an homage to printing on circuit boards — it’s an aesthetic the company is using across its press material. Around the other side are two magnetic dots that connect to the charging pins in the case.

The case is made of transparent plastic, with a pair of dots that keep the buds in place. A third, large concave circle further secures the case and doubles as a spot for your thumb while holding it. A white swath runs through the center of the case, again presumably covering up some unsightly electronics.

The buds themselves feature 11.6mm drivers and audio tuned by Teenage Engineering, which also served as the design team. There’s Bluetooth 5.2 onboard and a trio of listening modes: Active Nose Canceling, Light Mode and Active Transparency. Some other features worth, including a built-in chirp for locating lost buds via the app.

They go on sale July 31 for $99. Stay tuned for a review.

Fireblocks, an infrastructure provider for digital assets, has raised $310 million in a Series D round of funding that tripled the company’s valuation to $2.2 billion in just over five months.

Sequoia Capital, Stripes and Spark Capital co-led Fireblocks’ latest round, which also included participation from Coatue, DRW VC  and SCB 10X – the venture arm of Thailand’s oldest bank – and Siam Commercial Bank. The latter is the third global bank to invest in Fireblocks in addition to the Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon and SVB Capital. 

In February, the New York-based startup raised $133 million in a Series C round at a $700 million valuation. The latest financing brings Fireblocks’ total raised since its 2018 inception to $489 million. And as for Fireblocks’ valuation boost, the growth correlates with its increase in customers and ARR this year, according to CEO and co-founder Michael Shaulov. 

Since January, Fireblocks has seen its customer base increase to about 500 compared to 150 in January. Its ARR (annual recurring revenue) is also up – by 350% so far in 2021 compared to 2020. Last year, ARR rose by 450% compared to 2019.

“We expect to end the year up 500%,” Shaulov said. “We’ve already adjusted our revenue predictions for 2021 three times.”

Put simply, Fireblocks aims to offer financial institutions an all-in-one platform to run a digital asset business, providing them with infrastructure to store, transfer and issue digital assets. In particular, Fireblocks provides custody to institutional investors and has secured the transfer of over $1 trillion in digital assets over time. 

Fireblocks launched out of stealth mode in June of 2019 and has since opened offices in the United Kingdom, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, France and the DACH region. Today, it has over 500 financial institutions as customers – a mix of businesses that already support crypto and digital assets and those that are considering entering the space. Customers include global banks, crypto-native exchanges, lending desks, hedge funds, OTC desks as well as companies such as Revolut, BlockFi, Celsius, PrimeTrust, Galaxy Digital, Genesis Trading, crypto.com and eToro among others. 

Of those 500 institutions, Fireblocks is working with 70 banks that are looking to join the cryptocurrency space, and start platforming their infrastructure, according to Shaulov. Siam Commercial bank, for example, is using the company’s infrastructure to transform into a blockchain-based bank.

“Our platform creates highly secure wallets for cryptocurrencies and digital assets, where institutions can store their funds or their customer funds, and also get security insurance,” he said.

Fireblocks’ issuance and tokenization platform allows for the creation of asset-backed tokens.

“We handle all the security or compliance, all the policies and workflows,” Shaulov said. “Basically all the complicated stuff you need to do as a business when you want to start working with this new technology. So it’s a bit like ‘Shopify for crypto.’ ”

Sequoia Partner Ravi Gupta is naturally bullish on the company, describing Fireblocks as “the leading back-end infrastructure for crypto products.”

“The team has the potential to build a large, enduring business serving crypto-native companies, consumer fintech companies, and traditional financial institutions alike,” he told TechCrunch. “Their growth has been tremendous, and the quality of their product and customer sentiment are remarkable.”

Fireblocks has also started to see businesses outside of what would be identified as fintech or finance show interest in its platform such as e-commerce websites that are looking to create NFTs on the back of their merchandise. 

The Fireblocks platform, Shaulov said, helps spread the expansion of digital asset use cases beyond bitcoin into payments, gaming, NFTs, digital securities and “ultimately allows any business to become a digital asset business.”

What that means is that Fireblocks’ technology can be white labeled for crypto custody offerings, “so that new and established financial institutions can implement direct custody on their own without having to rely on third parties,” the company says.

Shaulov emphasizes Fireblocks’ commitment to staying an independent company after a wave of consolidation in the space. Earlier this year, PayPal announced its plans to acquire Curv, a cryptocurrency startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Then in early May, bitcoin-focused Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. said it agreed to buy BitGo Inc. for $1.2 billion in cash and stock in the first $1 billion deal in the cryptocurrency industry.

“Consolidation can be painful for clients,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s Important for us that we stay independent and that’s part of the purpose of this round.

The company will also use the funds to increase its engineering and customer success operations, and expand geographically, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.  

“Fireblocks provides the most secure and flexible platform for a wide range of customer needs,” said Sequoia’s Gupta. “It uses world-class multi-party computation technology to secure digital assets in storage and in transit, and has the most flexible platform with controls for product teams to be able to build on and manage Fireblocks effectively.”

Toronto-based 1Password is one of those rare companies that is a) profitable and b) transparent enough to share financials.

And today, the company announced that it raised $100 million in a Series B round of funding that doubles the company’s valuation to $2 billion.

You may recall that the previously bootstrapped 1Password only raised its first round of external capital in 2019 – a $200 million Series A led by Accel that represented the venture firm’s largest single investment in its 35-year history. At the time, 1Password was hardly a startup, having been founded in 2005. 

Accel also led its latest round, which notably included participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital and a slew of tech executives including Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify; Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify; Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack; Anthony Caselena, founder and CEO of Squarespace; Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, co-CEOs of Atlassian; and Kevin Hartz, co-founder and chairman of Eventbrite, among others.

Profitable since day one, 1Password recently crossed the $120 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark, according to CEO Jeff Shiner. Over 90,000 businesses use its SaaS platform, including a number of big names such as Under Armour, Shopify, the PGA, IBM, GitLab, Slack and PagerDuty. That’s up from 50,000 customers at the time of its November 2019 raise.

Founding couples Dave and Sara Teare and Roustem and Natalia Karimov came up with the idea for 1Password while they were growing another company that built websites and realized the struggle of keeping up with passwords.

It started out focused on consumers only. Over time, it evolved and began offering its password management services to businesses. This move took an already successful company to another level. 

It also caught the attention of Accel, which has a history of investing in bootstrapped and profitable businesses. In both its Series A and B rounds, the venture firm approached the company about investing.

Accel partner Arun Mathew, who drove his firm’s investment in 1Password in both rounds, noted that “1Password has a very unique company profile. To see a company riding all these market tailwinds with fundamentals and metrics like this is really, really unusual. Our hope is this [latest round] allows the entire company to be even more aggressive about winning this market.”

Since its last raise, 1Password has continued to evolve — a testament to its self-proclaimed intent to never sit on its laurels, said Shiner. For one thing, it has increased its headcount from 174 employees to about 475 today, including the formation of a go-to-market team, which the company never really had before.

And in the past few months, 1Password has expanded its business offerings, launching Secrets Automation in April and more recently, 1Password Events,  an enterprise offering aimed at protecting “critical”  business information. It has also launched a Linux Desktop Application and integrations with Slack and Rippling. 

Secrets Automation, Shiner said, allows 1Password to protect a business’ infrastructure secrets “machine to machine.”

“Password management is usually human to machine, so it’s a huge win for us and expands what we do into the broader infrastructure,” he added. It was able to launch Secrets Automation with the help of the acquisition of a Dutch company, SecretHub. 

The company is planning to use some of its new capital for further acquisitions as the number of startups in the cybersecurity space continues to grow.

“Having a stronger balance sheet only helps the company take calculated risks and be opportunistic about potential M&A or investing even more aggressively where we see opportunity,” Accel’s Mathew said. “For almost 16 years, this company has been one of the best-kept secrets, no pun intended, for businesses and consumers alike.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting work-from-home shift only led to more demand for 1Password’s offering. In fact, with each business account, 1Password is giving each employee a free family account to use at home. 

“As work and home have mixed, it’s been a huge benefit for users,” Shiner said.

That line-blurring is one of the reasons that Accel sees even more potential in 1Password. The firm has 24 active security investments across its portfolio, according to Accel partner Ethan Choi.

“This doubling down [on 1Password] signifies our belief that this is one of the most important areas of security today,” Choi said. “CIOs and CISOs want their employees to be productive and get into the applications they need to, but they also need them to be secure.”

For its part, 1Password believes that despite being around for 16 years, it’s only “just scratching the surface,” according to Shiner.

“I think that’s what gets us excited, is just this incredible opportunity that we see in front of us,” he said. “We need to keep moving forward, with urgency.”

Gaining the insight of so many experienced tech execs was also a factor in raising more capital, Shiner said.

“We already had a great relationship with Accel, but being able to bring in those additional folks and the experience they bring along with them is tremendously valuable,” he added.

Site reliability engineering platform Blameless announced Tuesday it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, led by Third Point Ventures with participation from Accel, Decibel and Lightspeed Venture Partners, to bring total funding to over $50 million.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments.

Blameless, based in San Mateo, California, emerged from stealth in 2019 after raising both a seed and Series A round, totaling $20 million. Since then, it has turned its business into a blossoming consultancy.

Blameless’ platform provides the context, guardrails and automated workflows so engineering teams are unified in the way they communicate and interact, especially to resolve issues quicker as they build their software systems.

It originally worked with tech-forward teams at large companies, like Home Depot, that were “dipping [their toes] into the space and now [want] to double down,” co-founder and CEO Lyon Wong told TechCrunch.

The company still works with those tech-forward teams, but in the past two years, more companies sought out resident SRE architect Kurt Anderson to advise them, causing Blameless to change up its business approach, Wong said.

Other companies are also seeing a trend of customers asking for support — for example, in March, Google Cloud unveiled its Mission Critical Services support option for SRE to serve in a similar role as a consultant as companies move toward readiness with their systems. And in February, Nobl9 raised a $21 million Series B to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build service-level-objective-centric operations, which is part of a company’s SRE efforts.

Blameless now has interest from more mainstream companies in the areas of enterprise, logistics and healthcare. These companies aren’t necessarily focused on technology, but see a need for SRE.

“Companies recognize the shortfall in reliability, and then the question they come to us with is how do they get from where they are to where they want to be,” Anderson said. “Often companies that don’t have a process respond with ‘all hands on deck’ all the time, but instead need to shift to the right people responding.”

Lyon plans to use the new funding to fill key leadership roles, the company’s go-to-market strategy and product development to enable the company to go after larger enterprises.

Blameless doubled its revenue in the last year and will expand to service all customer segments, adding small and emerging businesses to its roster of midmarket and large companies. The company also expects to double headcount in the next three quarters.

As part of the funding announcement, Third Point Ventures partner Dan Moskowitz will join Blameless’ board of directors with Wong, Accel partner Vas Natarajan and Lightspeed partner Ravi Mhatre.

“Freeing up engineering to focus on shipping code is exactly what Blameless achieves,” said Moskowitz in a written statement. “The Blameless market opportunity is big as we see teams struggle and resort to creating homegrown playbooks and point solutions that are incomplete and costly.”

 

Early in the pandemic, Nick Gerard, Steven Layne, and Samantha Safer Valentine had a hit on their hands. In the era before Zoom fatigue set in, the trio launched Mainstream Live, a website and newsletter that curated live virtual events across platforms and gave people text-based reminders to check them out. 

“We started with the discovery problem of people looking for cool things to do online,” Gerard told TechCrunch. “…Right away we knew that we were tapping into something.” Overnight, tens of thousands of people were on the site, browsing for online events to keep them connected in a period of unprecedented social isolation.

After going viral, the Mainstream Live team found itself inundated with questions about the tools it used to surface events and keep its community in the loop. As the team built more services for its own needs, it eventually opened its custom toolkit, sharing the code to other community leads and content creators who implemented the same set of tools with a rebrand.

“People loved it — more and more people asked for it,” Gerard said. “We got to the point where we were juggling a dozen of [these] for different partners.” By the fall, the team wound down the original community, leaned into the inbound interest in its toolset and built Norby.

The new company rolled together everything that people were asking for: a link-in-bio service, referral tracking, SMS, ticketing and other marketing tools necessary to keep a small brand or creator community humming. 

Gerard says the team at Norby has been “following that signal” ever since. Now, Norby has raised a $3.8M seed round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s venture AI-focused fund, to grow its team and scale its full-stack marketing platform to new heights. Bungalow Capital, BBG Ventures, Charge VC, and Notation also participated in the funding round. 

Norby’s big idea is to combine services like LinkTree, Eventbrite and MailChimp into a single, affordable, subscription-based service, offering anyone who handles an online community a single solution rather than an expensive patchwork of services that have to be individually set up and managed. Norby is ideal for small brands and solo entrepreneurs and most of its customers run less than 10-person operations. The creator tool suite is purely subscription based and won’t collect any fees like Eventbrite and other popular services.

For brands, it starts at $20 per month and the company has plans in the works for a $5 per month tier for individual use. There’s no free tier, and Gerard prefers to think that Norby’s customers will be excited to save time and money on the company’s bundled offering. “What we found is that people spend an enormous amount of money on these tools,” Gerard said. “We can knock a bunch of tools out of your stack and save you money. But we can also save you time.” 

Norby’s team spends a lot of time talking to creators and small companies. Its customers range from sexual wellness companies to advice columnists and activists — anybody who needs to manage an online community. It counts Sad Girls Club, EVRYMAN and Allbodies among its early customers

The company is growing slowly and organically, bringing new users in through a waitlist and invite system and showing them around the product in group demos. “What’s been really cool for us, we’ll get a new customer for one or two features… then they came into the product and were like ‘oh we’ve always wanted to try SMS’ and then it’s just there and they can start using it,” Gerard said. 

Big picture, Norby views itself as an advocate for creators — and an insulator against the power that big platforms wield. In the long term, Gerard hopes to help creators own their own communities as a kind of “counterbalance” to big platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Norby hopes to help more people make a reliable living creating content and communities online. “There’s a handful of extreme winners and it’s just barren after that,” Gerard said, citing Li Jin’s ideas on building a creator middle class. 

Helping creators “own the relationship” with their communities is something that big platforms will never have an incentive to do. But those same platforms are realizing that creators wield some very real power — and the ability to pick up their content empires and take them to go if they choose to. 

“Whats exciting about this moment is that right now looking ahead to the next five or ten years, nothing is inevitable,” Gerard said. “These windows don’t come along all the time.”

As it gears up to expand access to younger users, Instagram this morning announced a series of updates designed to make its app a safer place for online teens. The company says it will now default users to private accounts at sign-up if they’re under the age of 16  — or under 18 in certain locales, including in the E.U. It will also push existing users under 16 to switch their account to private, if they have not already done so. In addition, Instagram will roll out new technology aimed at reducing unwanted contact from adults — like those who have already been blocked or reported by other teens — and it will change how advertisers can reach its teenage audience.

The most visible change for younger users will be the shift to private accounts.

Historically, when users signed up for a new Instagram account, they were asked to choose between a public or private account. But Instagram says that its research found that 8 out 10 young people selected the “private” option during setup, so it will now make this the default for those under the age of 16.

It won’t, however, force teens to remain private. They can switch to public accounts at any time, including during signup. Those with existing public accounts will be alerted to the benefits of going private and be instructed on how to make the change through an in-app notification, but Instagram will not force them to go private, it says.

This change follows a similar move by rival platform TikTok, which this January announced it would update the private settings and defaults for users under the age of 18. In TikTok’s case, it changed the accounts for users ages 13 to 15 to private by default but also tightened other controls related to how young teens use the app — with comments, video downloads, and other TikTok features, like Duets and Stitches.

Instagram isn’t going so far as to restrict other settings beyond suggesting teens’ default account type, but it is taking action to address some of the problems that result from having adults participate on the same app that minors use.

The company says it will use new technology to identify accounts that have shown “potentially suspicious behavior” — like those who have been recently blocked or reported by other young teens. This is only one of many signals Instagram uses to identify suspicious behavior, but the company says it won’t publicize the others, as it doesn’t want people to be able to game its system.

Once identified as “potentially suspicious,” Instagram will then restrict these adults’ accounts from being able to interact with young people’s accounts.

For starters, Instagram will no longer show young people’s accounts in Explore, Reels or in the “Accounts Suggested For You” feature to these potentially suspicious adults. If the adult instead locates a young person’s account by way of a search, they won’t be able to follow them. And they won’t be able to see comments from young people on other people’s posts or be able to leave comments of their own on young people’s posts.

(Any teens planning to report and block their parents probably won’t trigger the algorithm, Instagram tells us, as it uses a combination of signals to trigger its restrictions.)

These new restrictions build on the technology Instagram introduced earlier this year, which restricted the ability for adults to contact teens who didn’t already follow them. This made it possible for teens to still interact with their family and family friends, while limiting unwanted contact from adults they didn’t know.

Cutting off problematic adults from young teens’ content like this actually goes further that what’s available on other social networks, like TikTok or YouTube, where there are often disturbing comments left on videos of young people — in many cases, girls who are being sexualized and harassed by adult men. YouTube’s comments section was even once home to a pedophile ring, which pushed YouTube to entirely disable comments on videos featuring minor children.

Instagram isn’t blocking the comments section in full — it’s more selectively seeking out the bad actors, then making content created by minors much harder for them to find in the first place.

The other major change rolling out in the next few weeks impacts advertisers looking to target ads to teens under 18 (or older in certain countries).

Previously available targeting options — like those based on teens’ interests or activity on other apps or websites — will no longer be available to advertisers. Instead, advertisers will only be able to target based on age, gender and location. This will go into effect across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

The company says the decision was influenced by recommendations from youth advocates who said younger people may not be as well-equipped to make decisions related to opting out of interest-based advertising, which led to the new restrictions.

In reality, however, Facebook’s billion-dollar interest-based ad network has been under attack by regulators and competitors alike, and the company has been working to diversify its revenue beyond ads to include things like e-commerce with the expectation that potential changes to its business are around the corner.

In a recent iOS update, for example, Apple restricted the ability for Facebook to collect data from third-party apps by asking users if they wanted to opt out of being tracked. Most people said “no” to tracking. Meanwhile, attacks on the personalized ad industry have included those from advocacy groups who have argued that tech companies should turn off personalized ads for those under 18 — not just the under-13 crowd, who are already protected under current children’s privacy laws.

At the same time, Instagram has been toying with the idea of opening its app up to kids under the age of 13, and today’s series of changes could help to demonstrate to regulators that it’s moving forward with the safety of young people in mind, or so the company hopes.

On this front, Instagram says it has expanded its “Youth Advisors” group to include new experts like Jutta Croll at Stiftung Digitale Chancen, Pattie Gonsalves at Sangath and It’s Okay To Talk, Vicki Shotbolt at ParentZone UK, Alfiee M. Breland-Noble at AAKOMA Project, Rachel Rodgers at Northeastern University, Janis Whitlock at Cornell University, and Amelia Vance at the Future of Privacy Forum.

The group also includes the Family Online Safety Institute, Digital Wellness Lab, MediaSmarts, Project Rockit and the Cyberbullying Research Center.

It’s also working with lawmakers on age verification and parental consent standards that it expects to talk more about in the months to come. In a related announcement, Instagram said it’s using A.I. technology that estimates people’s ages. It can look for signals like people wishing someone a “happy birthday” or “happy quinceañera,” which can help narrow down someone’s age, for instance. This technology is already being used to stop some adults from interacting with young people’s accounts, including the new restrictions announced today.

Oova officially launched its Oova Kit Tuesday after receiving $1.5 million in seed funding led by BBG Ventures with participation by Company Ventures. The kit includes an at-home test that quantitatively measures two hormones, informing a woman — and her doctor — of her fertile days and confirming ovulation.

The New York-based company was founded in 2017 by Amy Divaraniya, CEO, who holds a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences with a focus on genetics. She personally struggled to conceive due to irregular menstrual cycles and was told by doctors to come back after she turned 35 to be evaluated then. Except that Divaraniya didn’t want to wait — she wanted something done right then.

She continued to pursue natural avenues for getting pregnant like peeing on sticks and taking her temperature, and after 18 months she conceived her son. However, Divaraniya realized that all of the tools available were hardwired for women who “have a perfect cycle,” and that was not the case for her. Not funding anything available for women with irregular cycles, she created Oova to provide a tool that would be personalized, non-invasive and done at home to address the personal hormone profile.

Divaraniya founded the company in 2017 after completing her Ph.D. and has spent the past four years focused on getting the technology to work as accurately as possible, she said. Oova’s at-home kit comes with a handle holder, 15 disposable cartridges and a mobile app. Users will take a urine test, scan the results with their phone’s camera and receive actionable steps, including confirmation that the person ovulated and the best days for conception. The person’s physician can also see the data and talk to the patient.

She boasts that Oova is the only test on the market that measures luteinizing hormone and progesterone and that tracks hormones over time. The only alternative is for women to go into their doctor’s office every day for a blood draw, and they are only doing that if the woman is going through IVF, Divaraniya said.

Susan Lyne, co-founder and managing partner of BBG Ventures, has been focused on women’s health for a while and heard from other founders that she needed to meet Divaraniya.

“Seeing your cycle visualized is a transformative moment for a lot of women,” Lyne said in an interview. “Oova’s science is strong and enables consumers to understand their test results without having to go to an expert. The fact that you can get a personal hormone profile in the past only meant if you hit a certain level to tell if you are fertile. This one is quantitative, so it tells you yesterday, today, so you can track it and when you are about to ovulate.”

The company’s original goal was to launch direct to consumer, but after fertility clinics were shut down during the pandemic, Divaraniya received calls from physicians last year asking her to launch the kits early so that they could support their patients who now couldn’t come into their offices. Today, over 75 fertility clinics use the platform.

The global fertility technology market, which includes services like in vitro fertilization, genetic testing, egg freezing and reproductive donation, was valued at $33.1 billion in 2020 and is expected to be $47.9 billion by 2027, according to consultancy Precedence Research. That compares to the at-home diagnostics and digital health markets forecasted to be $7 billion and $551 billion, respectively, by 2027.

Other startups are focused on making similar fertility care more accessible — for example, this year, Future Family raised $9 million to make fertility costs and processes transparent, while digital health company Ro acquired Modern Fertility in May in order to add fertility testing and reproductive health to its suite of services. And Mate Fertility launched with $2.8 million in financing to create a network of family planning services.

To meet future demand, Divaraniya intends to use the new funding to add more features and get the hormone tests ready for market. She would also like to work on a rebrand and “make Oova into a company, not just a science experiment.” The starter kit is priced at $159.99, while refillable kits are $99.99 per month with a subscription.

“We started with fertility, but we want to expand into other areas of health, like chronic disease, letting data users and clinicians drive what the demand is,” Divaraniya added. “We are also working on adding estrogen to the panel, which with luteinizing hormone and progesterone will be the perfect trifecta for fertility.”

 

Homeownership is one of the key components to building intergenerational wealth, and Landis is working to make that a reality for renters.

U.S. homeownership rates in 2020 were about 65.8% according to Statista. The rate reached its peak of 69.2% in 2004 before falling sharply due to the economic recession of 2007-2009. The rate reached 63.7% in 2016 before steadily going back up.

To continue with its mission, Landis raised $165 million in a combination of debt and Series A equity funding. Sequoia Capital led the round and was joined by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation venture investment arm Arrive, Will Smith’s Dreamers VC and existing investor Signia Venture Partners. A group of founders also invested in the company, including those from Plaid, Cash App, Ethos, Instacart, Front, Flatiron Health and Tango. This latest funding brings Landis’ total debt and equity raised to date to $182 million.

“Landis helps families take their very first steps toward homeownership,” Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia, said in a written statement. “By focusing on financial literacy and individualized coaching, we are giving everyone the opportunity to own their home, increasing financial inclusion and equality in America. Our technology is particularly relevant to those with low-to-moderate income who have been neglected by traditional financial solutions.”

Cyril Berdugo and Tom Petit founded Landis in 2018 and told TechCrunch that the idea for the company came after witnessing renters losing money, by, for example, paying $1,700 per month to live in a home where, based on its value, a mortgage would be $1,000 per month.

The New York-based fintech company receives referrals from real estate agents and mortgage lenders to work with prospective homeowners, who are typically unable to qualify for a mortgage due to poor credit, lack of down payment savings or debt.

It uses its underwriting technology to determine if the client will be able to afford a mortgage in the next 12 to 24 months. If so, Landis gives the client a budget to pick a property, and will purchase the home and rent it to the client, who will then work toward saving money and building a stronger financial footing to get to mortgage-readiness.

Berdugo and Petit don’t see their relationship with renters as a typical landlord-renter one, but instead as a partnership. Clients have also taught the pair that school districts matter in where they purchase a home and setting their children up for equal success is important.

“Our clients are more motivated than typical renters and really want to hang on, improve their savings, and it is working,” Petit said. “They are so much more successful. We also feel it when they call and ask for advice and even try to beat their deadlines.”

Berdugo did not disclose the round’s debt versus equity breakdown, or go into specifics about growth metrics, but did say the driver for the funding round was to expand into new states, add to Landis’ headcount and improve user experience.

The company is already operating in 29 cities in 11 states and plans to increase that to 20 states by next year. Berdugo and Petit target states where the impact will be greatest, like where rents are higher than they should be.

In addition to the funding announcement, Landis said it opened up access to its Landis Homeownership Coach mobile app for free to everyone with an iPhone. The app provides a dashboard view of credit, down payment savings and debt, with insights and actions for clients toward reaching their goal of qualifying for a mortgage.

“Inequality to financial literacy and financial services are related,” Berdugo said. “People with low-to-moderate income don’t have access to services that wealthier people have, and we are trying to bridge that gap by providing financial literacy and services to get them mortgage ready.”

Wiliot — the IoT startup that has developed a new kind of processor that is ultra thin and light and runs on ambient power but possesses all the power of a “computer” — has picked up a huge round of growth funding on the back of strong interest in its technology, and a strategy aimed squarely at scale.

The company has raised $200 million, a Series C that it will use towards its next steps as a business: in the coming months, it will make a move into an SaaS model — which Wiliot likes to say refers not to “software as a service”, but “sensing as a service,” using its AI to read and translate different signals on the object attached to the chip — to run and sell its software. This will be combined with a shift to a licensing model for its chip hardware, so that they can be produced by multiple third parties. Wiliot says that it already has several agreements in place for the chip licensing part. The plan is for this, in turn, to lead to a new range of sizes and form factors for the chips down the line.

Softbank’s Vision Fund 2 led the financing, with previous backers — it’s a pretty illustrious list that speaks of the opportunities ahead — including 83North, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Avery Dennison, Grove Ventures, M Ventures, the corporate VC of Merck KGaA, Maersk Growth, Norwest Venture Partners, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., Vintage Investment Partners, and Verizon Ventures.

Wiliot’s valuation is not being disclosed but Steve Statler, the startup’s SVP, described as “in line” with its pivot to SaaS. For some further context, when we last covered Wiliot funding, a $30 million Series B in 2019, sources told us it was valued at $120 million, although between then and now it also extended that Series B to $70 million, implying a pre-money valuation of closer to $200 million. With basic math, that implies a valuation of more like $400 million now, although the SaaS focus, and strong interest already in licensing the tech, means it could easily be more. (I’ll update as and when I learn more.)

Up to now, the company has been focusing on business development based on “version 1” of its chips, produced by Wiliot itself. (Version 2, which is likely to be announced officially in September, will be the chips that third parties will make.) Wiliot’s chips are, in the words of Statler, printable computers the size and thinness of postage stamps that contain RAM, ROM, sensors, Bluetooth, an ARM CPU, memory and secure communications capabilities, all running on ambient power (radiowaves) already in the air. Thin like RFID tags, these are significantly more powerful and useful.

Statler said Wiliot has 30 paying customers so far using “hundreds of thousands” of these chips. But the scale (and opportunity) of IoT is such that even in the hundreds of thousands bracket, none of these are full deployments but limited tests.

Statler told me that one such customer is a major pharmaceutical company (name not disclosed) that’s making vaccines: it’s attaching the chips to a proportion of its vaccine vials to monitor temperature, dosage amounts (since you get several doses out of one vial) and dilution, with the plan being to use the system across all of its vaccines in the future, something that has particular relevance right now, given how strongly vaccines are figuring in the fight against the Covid-19 health pandemic globally.

Other industries that have been talking with Wiliot include consumer packaged goods companies, furniture companies and the apparel industry (which has been a big adopter of RFID).

With version 2, the ambient power aspect will also expand. In version 1, the chips can harness energy from radio waves that are already in the air, as well as via inexpensive devices that provide a boost of power to spread the waves around more evenly. Right now the range of those boosters in 1-3 meters, Statler said, but version 2 will be a “major breakthrough” that will see that extended, making the booster a more interesting option. Wiliot also, notably, has been working with Sigfox, which is also developing some very innovative ways of harnessing and using ambient power, so maybe we should watch this space.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” CEO and co-founder Tal Tamir told me back in 2019 (he wasn’t available for an interview this time around, unfortunately). “We think many edge devices will come that will harvest radio frequency energy. But the problem is not what you harvest but how much you need. If you get nanowatts of energy and a phone consumes 3-5 watts when active, you can see where this has to go.”

For a company like SoftBank that is making multiple bets around services and hardware across its investment and ownership portfolios, there is a lot of opportunity here not just as a financial backer but strategic partner, too.

“By inventing the first hyper-scalable, self-powered computer that uses AI to sense the world, Wiliot is positioned to bring together the digital and physical” said Yanni Pipilis managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “We have always believed that with IoT and AI, people will live better and healthier lives – where any food or medicine has the ability to understand if it’s safe to use and communicate seamlessly with people. We are pleased to play a part in helping Wiliot dramatically scale the ever-expanding application of IoT globally.”