Author: azeeadmin

Rent the Runway just closed a $125 million led by Franklin Templeton Investments and Bain Capital Ventures. This round values the company at $1 billion. In total, Rent the Runway has raised $337 million in venture funding.

“Shared, dynamic ownership is a movement that Rent the Runway has pioneered over the last decade and we’re excited to continue to lead the market and innovate our subscription service,” Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman said in a statement.

Late last year, Rent the Runway opened a physical location in San Francisco, marking the company’s fifth standalone brick and mortar space. Rent the Runway, which launched about ten years ago, has expanded from the sole offering of one-time rentals to now three offerings, including two subscription offerings.

With the funding, Rent the Runway plans to scale its subscription business, broaden its clothing and home decor offerings, and open additional fulfillment facilities.

Since its founding, a number of other fashion services have cropped up. The most notable one is StitchFix, which went public in 2017.  But what differentiates Rent the Runway from the likes of Stitch Fix is that, “they’re trying to get you to buy stuff,” Rent the Runway COO Maureen Sullivan told me back in September. “You’re still buying things that accumulate in your closet.”

We’re just weeks away from our TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley on April 18.

Some of the best and brightest minds are joining us for the day-long event, including Marc Raibert, Colin Angle, Melonee Wise and Anthony Levandowski . Last week, we added to the list of marquee guests and announced a panel with roboticist Ken Goldberg, who is chief scientist at Ambidextrous Robotics and William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley, and Michael I. Jordan, the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley.

Today we’ve got another exciting panel to unveil.

This is the first time artificial intelligence has joined robotics at this TC Sessions event. And what better way to discuss the intersection of AI and robotics than a panel on autonomous vehicle technology.

Today we’re revealing two people who are among the top thinkers focused on autonomous vehicle development: Sterling Anderson, co-founder and chief product officer of Aurora, and Uber ATG Chief scientist Raquel Urtasun. 

The pair will dig into the self-driving stack and how AI is used to help vehicles understand and predict what’s happening in the world around them and make the right decisions.

Sterling Anderson

In the brain trust of self-driving car developers, Anderson is highly regarded. Prior to founding Aurora with Chris Urmson and Drew Bagnell, Anderson was director of Tesla’s Autopilot program. He also led the design, development and launch of the Tesla Model X, an all-electric SUV that launched in 2015.

Anderson has a PhD in Robotics from MIT. After finishing his doctorate at MIT, Anderson founded a startup called Gimlet Systems with another self-driving car pioneer Karl Iagnemma. He also worked at McKinsey & Co.

Raquel Urtasun

Urtasun, chief scientist and head of Uber ATG Toronto, is also an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Urtasun is a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Urtasun is a leading expert in machine perception for self-driving cars. She earned her degree from the computer science department at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne and postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley. Her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing.

General Admission ($349) tickets are on sale now. Prices go up at the door so book today!

Students, grab your discounted $45 tickets here.

Startups, make sure to check out our demo table packages, which include three tickets, for just $1,500.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Review: Apple’s new iPad mini continues to be mini

Matthew Panzarino tried out Apple’s new tablet with Apple Pencil support, and he says the experience is “aces.”

His only caveat: After using the brilliant new Pencil, the old one feels greasy and slippery by comparison, and lacks the flat edge against your finger for shading or sketching out curves.

2. Windows Virtual Desktop is now in public preview

Starting today, any enterprise user who wants to test out a virtual Windows 10 desktop hosted in the Azure cloud will be able to give it a try.

3. MoviePass co-founder’s new startup PreShow gives you free movie tickets for watching ads

As founding CEO of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes has already changed the way we think about paying for movie tickets. Now he’s pursuing a new approach — providing a free ticket to people who watch 15 to 20 minutes of ads.

4. What latency feels like on Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform

We got our hands on one of their new controllers and pressed play to try out Doom 2016 gameplay on Google’s new platform.

5. Guesty, a tech platform for property managers on Airbnb and other rental sites, raises $35M

The idea for Guesty came about like many of the best startup ideas do: out of a personal need. In 2013, twin brothers Amiad and Koby were renting out their own apartments on Airbnb, and found themselves spending a lot of time doing the work needed to list and manage those properties.

6. Microsoft warns Windows 7 users of looming end to security updates

The patch rolled out Wednesday warning users of the impending deadline, January 14, 2020, when the software giant will no longer roll out fixes for security flaws and vulnerabilities.

7. Amify raises its first venture round on a promise: to boost revenue for third-party sellers on Amazon

Amify now works with a long line of customers, from brands you might not recognize to household names like Fender guitars and Brooks, all of which pay Amify a percentage of their revenue in exchange for its services.

According to the City of Paris, there are 15,000 free-floating vehicles of all forms and shapes in the city, from electric scooters to fluorescent bikes and motorcycle-like scooters. And the City of Paris announced today that companies that operate free-floating services will have to pay a tax depending on the size of their fleet.

If the plan goes through and if you’re running a bike-sharing service, you’ll have to pay €20 per bike per year. For scooter companies, they’ll pay €50 per scooter per year. Motorcycle scooters will be taxed €60 per scooter per year.

According to Le Parisien, it will be a tier system. Every time you go over the basic tier, you’ll have to pay more. Companies will pay 10 percent more for vehicle #500 to vehicle #999, 20 percent more for vehicle #1,000 to vehicle #2,999, and 30 percent more for any vehicle after #3,000.

Paris is a tiny city — it’s smaller than San Francisco when it comes to geographical footprint. And it’s also impossible to park a car and drive in Paris. That’s why a vast majority of people who live in Paris don’t own a car. It’s simply much faster and cheaper to use the subway or other transportation methods.

That’s why bikes, scooters and motorcycle scooters are thriving. Having less cars on the road is a great thing, but it has created some unexpected challenges.

Bike-sharing services thrived when the city’s bike-sharing system was more or less useless during a network upgrade. GoBee Bike, oBike, Ofo and Mobike all launched their services in the streets of Paris. But they’ve all failed. GoBee Bike shut down, Ofo still has a few bikes but no team, Mobike is scaling back international operations…

That was a bad start for free-floating services as many broken bikes are littering the streets of Paris. The dock-based bike-sharing system Vélib is now working fine with over 1,200 stations and tens of thousands of rides per day — you basically see them everywhere.

On the scooter front, there are now nine different companies operating in Paris. Yes, you read that number correctly. They all have funny sounding names too — Lime, Bird, Bolt, Wind, Tier, Voi, Flash, Hive and Dott.

They’re quite popular because there are a ton of bike lanes in Paris. Most people still don’t wear helmets and there are a lot of injuries — but that’s another issue.

Like many other cities, many people complain about scooters crowding the sidewalk. If you’re in a wheelchair, pushing a stroller or if you’re visually impaired, navigating the sidewalk can be difficult these days.

The City of Paris wants to make those companies accountable. They need to take care of their fleets in order to maximize the number of scooters that actually work and remove the broken scooters. And I’m sure there will be some consolidation and bankruptcies in the space.

When it comes to motorcycle scooters, Cityscoot and Coup have been putting more scooters on the road. There’s no reason they would be excluded from the tax. Sometimes, they are cluttering bike parking space for instance:

Let’s see if that strategy works to avoid a dumping strategy. Free-floating services have a huge impact on the environment. Scooters only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced. The solution isn’t to throw more scooters at the problem.

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day.

This week Brian Heater, fresh off a trip to Pittsburgh to visit a handful of robotics companies, led a discussion about the current state of robotics and how startups are integrating the machines into our lives. When it comes to our home lives, we really only have the Roomba, that circular disc that moves about our floors on its own sweeping up the dust and dirt. In fact, the jobs being performed behind the scenes are the ones robots are digging into.

Obviously we’ve got some fairly unrealistic expectations about robotics that have been served up to us by sci-fi and things like that. And when we take away the state of consumer robotics and household robotics, the best we can do at the moment right now is the Roomba. Which is obviously quite far away from being Rosie the Robot idea that has been promised to us since the 1960s.The rub of all this, however, is that we tend to not actually see them in action. In automation, there’s a concept of three Ds, which are dull, dirty and dangerous. So they’re the jobs that these robotics are basically designed to adopt.

He also touches upon the fear of robots taking our jobs. What he found is that, no, you don’t have anything to fear — unless you’re an elevator operator, he says, and even that’s not across the board. But there is a political response to that by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said at SXSW last week: “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason that we’re not excited is that we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you’ll have to die. And at its core, that’s the problem.”

And it’s not robotics discussion without mentioning Amazon . Heater recently visited an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island to give you a peek at how robots help get your packages to you on time.

For access to the full transcription and the call audio, and for the opportunity to participate in future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

The world of digital payments continues to power ahead — fuelled by the continuing growth of e-commerce and fintech — and now one of the bigger startups making waves in the secotr is raising a huge round of funding.

TechCrunch has learned that Marqeta — a payment processing company that works in the area of powering payment cards on behalf of other brands along with related services — is in the process of raising $250 million on a valuation of $1.875 billion.

The figures come by way of a Delaware filing, provided to TechCrunch by PrimeUnicornIndex. Marqeta declined to comment on the filing, but we understand that the round is in progress and could close as soon a weeks from now. That also means the final figures might change although sources tell us that $250 million on a $1.875B valuation are the target figures for now.

It’s not clear who is in this round, but previous investors in the company that is based out of Oakland, CA have included Iconiq, Goldman Sachs, Visa, which led its most recent previous round, a Series D of $25 million; Max Levchin; CommerzVentures; 83North and more. Previous to this round, Marqeta had raised $116 million.

The Series E represents a big jump on Marqeta’s previous valuation, which was $545 million as of last year (when it raised an extension to that Series D round led by Iconiq — and that speaks both to Marqeta’s growth as well as the bigger opportunity in commerce.

The company — whose customers include other companies working in the fintech space such as Square, Alipay, Kabbage, Klarna and Affirm — said last October that its payment volume had grown 100 percent.

In the same month, it also spearheaded its first moves into the European market, where there has been a mini-boom of digital only banks that have been successful in eating up market share from traditional incumbents. A recent report from Accenture, cited by Reuters, notes that startups like N26, Monese, Starling and Revolut now account for a collective 14 percent of the banking market’s revenues in Europe, or €206 billion ($238 billion) compared to just 3.5 percent of the US market (which is worth $1.04 trillion).

We will update this post as we learn more.

HoneyBook co-founders Oz and Naama Alon

HoneyBook, a customer-relationship management platform aimed at small businesses in creative fields, announced today it has raised a $28 million Series C led by Citi Ventures. All of its existing investors, including Norwest Venture Partners, Aleph, Vintage Investment Partners and Hillsven Capital, also returned for the round. Citi is a strategic partner for HoneyBook and this will enable it to offer new financial products to freelancers, its co-founder and CEO Oz Alon told TechCrunch.

This brings HoneyBook’s total raised so far to $72 million. It is using the funds to grow its teams in San Francisco and Tel Aviv and build new features for its user base, including small companies, people who work by themselves (“solopreneurs”) and freelancers. Like other CRMs, HoneyBook helps them develop relationships with potential new clients, manage projects, send invoices and accept payments, but with tools scaled for their business’ needs.

Alon told TechCrunch in an email that one segment HoneyBook is focused on is millennials (he cites a survey that found 49 percent of people under 40 plan to start their own business). HoneyBook currently claims tens of thousands of customers and has passed $1 billion in business booked using its software, along with 75,000 members in Rising Tide, the company’s online community for creative entrepreneurs.

Other management software platforms competing for the attention of entrepreneurs and freelancers include Tave, Dubsado and 17hats. One of the main ways HoneyBook differentiates is by enabling its users to accept online payments without integrating with a third-party service. Thanks to this, its users “transact more than 80 percent of their business online, significantly more than any other payments platform serving this audience, Alon said. It’s partnership with Citi will also allow the company to develop more unique services for its target customers, he added.

In a prepared statement, Citi Ventures’ Israel director and venture investing lead Omit Shinar said “We are in the midst of a period of extensive changes in societal structures and economic models. The fintech ecosystem is producing more and more breakthrough innovations that serve the needs of modern consumers, and we believe, as a pioneer in its space, HoneyBook can become a market leader in the U.S.”

Flip the “days since last Facebook security incident” back to zero.

Facebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years.

The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. Facebook admitted the security lapse months later, after Krebs said logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers.

“This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” said Canahuati. “We have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them.”

Facebook said it will notify “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users,” a lighter version of Facebook for users where internet speeds are slow and bandwidth is expensive, and “tens of millions of other Facebook users.” The company also said “tens of thousands of Instagram users” will be notified of the exposure.

Facebook didn’t say exactly how the bug came to be. The company said it hashes and salts passwords — two ways of further scrambling passwords — to store passwords securely. 

Twitter and GitHub were hit by similar but independent bugs last year. Both companies said passwords were stored in plaintext and not scrambled.

It’s the latest in a string of embarrassing security issues at the company, prompting congressional inquiries and government investigations. It was reported last week that Facebook’s deals that allowed other tech companies to access account data without consent was under criminal investigation.

It’s not known why Facebook took months to confirm the incident, or if the company informed state or international regulators per U.S. breach notification and European data protection laws. We asked Facebook but a spokesperson did not immediately comment beyond the blog post.

More soon…

Dan Frommer has worked at some of the best-known publications in tech and business journalism — he was editor in chief of Recode, an editor at Business Insider and he’s even done some writing and chart-making for TechCrunch. But he’s also started his own things, including the tech news site SplatF and the mobile travel guide startup City Notes.

Now, five months after leaving Recode, Frommer is launching a new publication, The New Consumer — an umbrella term he’s using to describe the changing landscape in e-commerce, online advertising and direct-to-consumer brands.

The goal, he said, is to become the first thing that industry executives read in the morning, whether they’re CMOs at Fortune 500 companies, or the founders of direct-to-consumer startups or “anyone who’s in the professional world [trying to figure out] what’s next, how are people using technology differently, how is technology influencing how people spend money differently.”

These are all topics covered by the major tech news sites and general interest publications, but Frommer said he will focus less on “covering the day-to-day moves at tech companies” and more on “the messy lines between the announcements,” and on what is and isn’t working.

“That thing that this company announced a few weeks ago, is it actually working?” he said. “Are people actually using it, is it successful or not and why? What are we learning from it?”

Dan Frommer

The core product at The New Consumer will be the Executive Briefing, a newsletter that Frommer plans to put out twice a week, and that you’ll need to pay a $200 annual subscription fee to read. He said that this month will be a “paid beta,” where you’ll need to subscribe to read the newsletters, but you’ll get 13 months of access for your money, rather than 12.

Frommer also plans to publish non-paywalled feature articles (like this piece about cookware startup Great Jones), and to organizing events such as industry dinners as well.

He added that he’s hopeful that the subscription model can allow him to build a sustainable operation that he can spend all or most of his time on.

“I’m committed to this for the long term,” he said. “This is a job I’d love to be doing for 10 years, 20 years. But I also recognize that I have to iterate a little bit meet the market where it is.”

The New Consumer is starting out as a one-man operation, with Frommer citing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery as one of his inspirations to build an “individual news agency” that’s focused on newsletters and supported by subscriptions. At the same time, he’s interested in expanding the team if things go well.

“Consumer spending represents the majority of all money around the world,” he said. “This is something that could eventually stretch to all kinds of verticals, from sports to entertainment to personal finance.”

China’s Tencent reported disappointing profits in the fourth quarter on the back of surging costs but saw emerging businesses pick up steam as it plots to diversify amid slackening gaming revenues.

Net profit for the quarter slid 32 percent to 14.2 billion yuan ($2.1 billion), behind analysts’ forecast of 18.3 billion yuan. The decrease was due to one-off expenses related to its portfolio companies and investments in non-gaming segments like video content and financial technology.

Excluding non-cash items and M&A deals, Tencent’s net profit from the period rose 13 percent to 19.7 billion yuan ($2.88 billion). The company has to date invested in more than 700 companies, 100 of which are valued over $1 billion each and 60 of which have gone public.

Quarterly revenue edged up 28 percent to 84.9 billion yuan ($12.4 billion) beating expectations.

The Hong Kong-listed company is best known for its billion-user WeChat messenger but had for year relied heavily on a high-margin gaming business. That was until a months-long freeze on games approvals last year that delayed monetization for new titles, spurring a major reorg in the firm to put more focus on enterprise services, including cloud computing and financial technology.

Tencent has received approvals for eight games since China resumed the licensing process, although its blockbusters PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds and Fortnite have yet to get the green light. The firm also warned of a ”sizeable backlog“ for license applications in the industry, which means its “scheduled game releases will initially be slower than in some prior years.”

Video games for the quarter contributed 28.5 percent of Tencent’s total revenues, compared to 36.7 percent in the year-earlier period. Despite the domestic fiasco, Tencent remains as the world’s largest games publisher by revenue according to data compiled by NewZoo. The firm has also gotten more aggressive in taking its titles global.

Social network revenues rose 25 percent on account of growth in live streaming and video subscriptions. The segment made up 22.9 percent of total revenues. Tencent has in recent years spent heavily on making original content and licensing programs as it competes with Baidu’s iQiyi video streaming site. Tencent claimed 89 million subscribers in the latest quarter, compared with iQiyi’s 87.4 million.

Tencent has been relatively slow to monetize WeChat in contrast to its western counterpart Facebook, though it’s under more pressure to step up its game. Tencent’s advertising revenue from the quarter grew 38 percent thanks to expanding advertising inventory on WeChat. Ads accounted for 20 percent of the firm’s quarterly revenues.

All told, WeChat and its local version Weixin reached nearly 1.1 billion monthly active users. 750 million of them checked their friends’ WeChat feeds, and Tencent recently introduced a Snap Story-like feature to lock users in as it vies for eyeball time with challenger TikTok.

The “others” category comprising of financial technology and cloud computing grew 71.8 percent to generate 28.5 percent of total revenues. WeChat’s e-wallet, which is going neck-and-neck with Alibaba affiliate Alipay, saw daily transaction volume exceed 1 billion last year. During the fourth quarter, merchants who used WeChat Pay monthly grew over 80 percent year-over-year.

Meanwhile, cloud revenues doubled to 9.1 billion yuan in 2018, thanks to Tencent’s dominance in the gaming sector as its cloud infrastructure now powers over half of the China-based games companies and is following these clients overseas. Tencent meets Alibaba head-on again in the cloud sector. For comparison, Alibaba’s most recent quarterly cloud revenue was 6.6 billion yuan. Just yesterday, the ecommerce leader claimed that its cloud business is larger than the second to eight players in China combined.