Author: azeeadmin

Few things are easy in our financial system if you don’t have regular employment. It’s hard to prove (regular) income, which makes applying for a credit card or personal loan much more difficult and time-consuming. That’s particularly tough, since freelancer income is variable, and these sort of income smoothing tools can be critical to make ends meet. Despite those challenges, freelancing is the new normal: if current trends hold true, a majority of the workforce in America could be freelancers within ten years.

SF-based startup Oxygen hopes to give those freelancers some breathing room in their financial lives. Through a digital banking app and a membership program, the startup offers freelancers simple access to credit that can be pulled down or paid off instantly at any time.

The company has raised $2.3 million in the first close of its seed round from investors including Digital Horizon Capital and Cynthia Chen. It participated in Y Combinator’s accelerator program last summer.

Hussein Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Oxygen, is used to breaking down old institutions and understands the acute pain of freelancers. A single founder originally from Egypt, Ahmed worked as a consultant in the Bay Area after getting his MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and his PhD in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. “I tried to take a loan out from LendingClub” and they couldn’t verify his income, he explained to me. They then “asked for 10 pages of documentation” since he was a freelancer.

That experience would eventually lead to the core offering of Oxygen, which is efficient and on-going access to a credit line. “When you have this cash flow problem, you can just make one tap,” Ahmed said. “Open the app, take the money out, and repay it whenever you can.”

Oxygen is unique in that it doesn’t charge fees for taking out a loan, but instead assesses a monthly membership fee of $29.99 if a user draws down their credit limit. “If you aren’t using the cash reserve then you aren’t paying the monthly fee,” he said. That model seems attractive to at least some freelancers as Oxygen has seen 80% month-over-month growth since its November launch according to Ahmed.

The company has also taken advantage of some key growth hacks. Oxygen bought advertising on the back of SF Muni buses, which is significantly less visible and popular than advertising on the side of a bus where pedestrians on sidewalks are more likely to see them. Ahmed though saw opportunity. We “decided to go for the back of the bus which is 10x cheaper than the side of the bus, but if you are working for Instagram or DoorDash, then you are actually spending your day behind the bus,” he explained.

The back of the bus is where the working freelancer looks for ads.

In addition to Digital Horizon Capital and Cynthia Chen, Oxygen received funding from ZMT Capital (China), Locus Ventures, Endure Capital, PioneerFund, Magic City, Light Bridge, Strawberry Creek, Base Ventures, The House Fund and Sam Yam.

Credit cards are a relatively new invention that have entered into something of an innovation rut. Reward programs seem stale, mobile apps remain mired in early-2000s UX paradigms, and all too often, critical financial decisions (and their expensive associated fees) are hidden like booby-traps for users. Little wonder then that consumers are fed up with their credit card providers.

Worse, credit cards are not accessible to millions of people, whether due to a lack of credit history, immigration status, or because they are unlikely to be profitable since they often won’t use certain fee-based services.

Credit card issuer Petal wants to change that status quo, and now has another $30 million to do it.

The New York-based startup announced today that it raised a series B equity round from Valar Ventures, which also led the company’s $13 million series A round almost exactly a year ago (bringing the company’s total to $46.6 million including its seed round). Petal had previously announced in October that it raised a $34 million credit facility to power its product. It was founded in 2016 by a quad of founders including CEO Jason Gross, and currently has 60 employees.

Petal uses a more holistic and comprehensive underwriting model to determine the creditworthiness of credit card applicants compared to traditional banks that rely predominantly on an applicant’s FICO score. The goal is to focus more on cash flows rather than a static score, since that measure provides a more accurate assessment of a potential user’s payback capability. The hope for Petal is that its modern data models will allow more customers to qualify for credit, and for customers who qualify to receive a higher credit line.

After testing its model privately, Petal publicly introduced its Petal credit card product this past October, which is on the Visa network. Among its key features are eliminating many of the fees that credit card issuers have tacked on over the years, including the overdraft fee, late fee, international fee, and annual fees. Petal makes money through interest rates and through the transaction fees charged with use.

The company has seen success with customers so far: more than 100,000 potential applicants signed up during the company’s private beta phase according to Petal, and since then thousands of customers have gotten a Petal card following its public release.

Petal shows options for how to pay a credit card balance, and tries to transparently show the cost of interest when borrowers don’t pay off their whole statement.

Petal’s CEO Gross told me that one of the big goals for this new round of capital was to expand the product to more customers while also offering more features. “The card is really simple, but there is a lot more we want to do over time … and this funding allows us to reach that next level of what we can offer to consumers,” he said. Gross also noted that while there are adjacent opportunities to help consumers around their financial lives, Petal is heads down focused on the credit card market.

Valar Ventures has now led two equity rounds in the company. Gross explained that “the insiders have a lot more information … and they took a look at it and they decided they would rather do it themselves.” Valar has built up an unusually strong consumer fintech portfolio that includes money transfer business TransferWise, smartphone banking service N26, digital investment platform Stash, mobile tax filer Taxfix, and paycheck smoothing / budgeting app Even.

Greyhound Capital joins Petal’s cap table as a new investor in this round. Greyhound is focused on fintech, particularly in Europe. Gross said that he thinks bringing European financial innovation to the U.S. will be critical for Petal’s success. “We are hoping to learn a lot about best practices globally,” he said.

Credit cards have been getting more attention from venture investors recently. In addition to Petal’s series of rounds, Brex, a startup based in Silicon Valley that targets the corporate credit card market, has seen a slew of equity rounds, raising $182.1 million according to Crunchbase.

In addition to Valar and Greyhound, previous investors Third Prime Capital, Rosecliff Ventures, Story Ventures, RiverPark Ventures and Afore Capital joined the round.

Verbit, a transcription startup with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Viola Ventures. Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital, Vintage Venture Partners and ClalTech also participated in this round. The company, which currently focuses on the legal and academic sector, uses both its custom machine learning models and freelancers to offer an accuracy guarantee of over 99 percent. In total, the company has now raised $34 million.

Tom Livne, Verbit’s CEO and co-founder, told me that he used to be a lawyer and saw how the quality and turnaround time of traditional transcription services could be improved with the help of machine learning. While this is a huge but very fragmented market, Livne argues that there hasn’t been a lot of innovation here. “There is no innovation and technology in this market,” he said. “So came up with this idea to build a technological transcription company.”

The company started out with the three founders, but today, Verbit has over 70 employees and more than 100 customers. These include a number of law firms, but Livne also found that there is a big market for good transcription in academia, where accessibility laws often require these institutions to provide transcriptions of their classes and lectures. Coursera, Stanford and Harvard now use its service. Livne says Verbit now has millions of dollars in revenue and by the end of the year, he hopes to get to tens of millions of dollars.

Today, Verbit’s automated system — which the company customizes and retrains for all new customers based on their specific needs and contexts — gets to about 90 percent accuracy. Then, its army of freelancers sets to work on those automated transcripts to look for mistakes and fixes them. All of those fixes then flow back into the model, which then (ideally) gets better over time.

Livne stressed that he believes that his company is not setting out to destroy jobs but that Verbit is creating thousands of new jobs for the freelancers that support its service. “We are not here to replace the human,” he said. “We are here to give them tools to make their job better and easier and we are actually reducing the barrier to entry to be a transcriber. Think about Verbit as an Uber for transcription.”

Recently, Verbit also launched a live transcription service for media firms that also uses a human-in-the-loop process to offer transcriptions with a delay of only a few seconds. It’s no surprise then that the company plans to add new verticals to its lineup as well, though it’s still considering its options. Livne noted that the company is looking at insurance and financial firms, as well as media and medical use cases. “But right now, we have very high demand from academia and law, so we need to support it on a larger scale,” he said. The company is also looking at adding support for other languages.

That’s where the new funding comes in. Verbit plans to hire aggressively, especially in its New York office, with a focus on sales, marketing and customer success.

It’s a big day for Timescale, makers of the open source time series database, TimescaleDB. The company announced a $15 million investment and a new enterprise version of the product.

The investment is technically an extension of the $12.4 million Series A it raised last January, which it’s referring to as A1. Today’s round is led by Icon Ventures with existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Two Sigma Ventures also participating. With today’s funding, the startup has raised $31 million.

Timescale makes a time series database. That means it can ingest large amounts of data and measure how it changes over time. This comes in handy for a variety of use cases from financial services to smart homes to self-driving cars — or any data-intensive activity  you want to measure over time.

While there are a number of time scale database offerings on the market, Timescale co-founder and CEO Ajay Kulkarni says that what makes his company’s approach unique is that it uses SQL, one of the most popular languages in the world. Timescale wanted to take advantage of that penetration and build its product on top of Postgres, the popular open source SQL database. This gave it an offering that is based on SQL and highly scalable.

Timescale admittedly came late to the market in 2017, but by offering a unique approach and making it open source, it has been able to gain traction quickly. “Despite entering into what is a very crowded database market, we’ve seen quite a bit of community growth because of this message of SQL and scale for time series,” Kulkarni told TechCrunch.

In just over 22 months, the company has over a million downloads and a range of users from older guard companies like Charter, Comcast and Hexagon Mining to more modern companies like Nutanix and and TransferWise.

With a strong base community in place, the company believes that it’s now time to commercialize its offering, and in addition to an open source license, it’s introducing a commercial license.”Up until today, our main business model has been through support and deployment assistance. With this new release, we will be also will have enterprise features that are available with a commercial license,” Kulkarni explained.

The commercial version will offer a more sophisticated automation layer for larger companies with greater scale requirements. It will also provide better lifecycle management, so companies can get rid of older data or move it to cheaper long-term storage to reduce costs. It’s also offering the ability to reorder data in an automated fashion when that’s required, and finally, it’s making it easier to turn the time series data into a series of data points for analytics purposes. The company also hinted that a managed cloud version is on the road map for later this year.

The new money should help Timescale continue fueling the growth and development of the product, especially as it builds out the commercial offering. Timescale, which was founded in 2015 in NYC, currently has 30 employees. With the new influx of cash, it expects to double that over the next year.

A little over two years after Lyndra Therapeutics Inc. first unveiled its technology for time-delayed drug delivery through a simple pill, the company has raised $55 million to continue developing the technology for public consumption.

By creating a new kind of ultra long-acting drug delivery mechanism in pills, the company claims it can remove the need for patients to follow strict guidelines for taking their medication.

Following doctors’ prescriptions for medication is a problem in emerging markets and among elderly patients and the new technology has implications for treating pretty much everything.

Developed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory of Dr. Robert Langer, Lyndra was co-founded by Langer and Amy Schulman, a former lawyer for the pharmaceutical industry and a partner recruited to run the LS Polaris Innovation fund established by Polaris Partners in 2014 to invest in healthcare companies.

Polaris led the company’s most recent round of financing, which also included new investors like the Chinese private equity giant HOPU Investments, Gilead Sciences, Invus, Orient Life and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which initially provided funding for Dr. Langer’s research out of MIT).

Lyndra has raised the money as it continues along the path toward developing a pill to treat schizophrenia. Phase II trials for the pill, which are required before it can be approved by U.S. regulators are expected to begin next year. The company said it will also be developing other drug candidates that are developed internally and through partnerships to market over the coming years.

“Lyndra’s long-acting therapies have the potential to address a diversity of disease states,” said Robert Langer, co-founder and Board Member of Lyndra Therapeutics. “The ability to move from daily to weekly administration of an oral drug is groundbreaking. I believe Lyndra’s long-acting oral pill will be truly transformative.”

For investors like the Gates Foundation it was the company’s early work around anti-malarial drugs and HIV that likely attracted attention.

When the company first unveiled its technology back in 2016 publications like The Guardian hailed it as a breakthrough in drug delivery.

The technology depends in part on the novel structure of the pill itself. Encapsulated within a digestible pill is a star-shaped structure that has six arms folded in on itself. As stomach acid dissolves the casing for the pill the arms unfold and release their payload over time. As the star unfolds it expands in size so it can remain in the stomach rather than being pushed down the digestive tract. Eventually the arms break off and the remaining pieces of the pil are naturally expelled — like undigested food.

Almost two years after Equifax’s massive hack, the majority of Fortune 500 companies still aren’t learning the lessons of using vulnerable software.

In the last six months of 2018, two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies downloaded a vulnerable version of Apache Struts, the same vulnerable server software that was used by hackers to steal the personal data on close to 150 million consumers, according to data shared by Sonatype, an open-source automation firm.

That’s despite almost two years’ worth of patched Struts versions being released since the attack.

Sonatype wouldn’t name the Fortune 100 firms that had downloaded the vulnerable software, nor was it clear what the software was used for. Sonatype did say that the companies included more than half of the 26 financial and 19 energy companies, and more than half of all healthcare and technology companies.

In all, more than 18,000 businesses downloaded vulnerable versions of Struts, the company said.

Sonatype’s technology monitors millions of open-source commits per day, Sonatype’s chief executive Wayne Jackson told TechCrunch last year. In doing so, it can see what’s new and updated, and can advise and update vulnerable software with newer, patched versions.

The company, which already works with Fannie Mae and Tomitribe, announced Tuesday a new working relationship with Equifax to monitor the use of the credit agency’s open-source libraries across its network to help prevent another breach.

It’s a stark turnaround from its massive 2017 hack, which a House committee investigation late last year found that the Equifax breach was “entirely preventable” had the company patched its vulnerable servers months earlier when the patches — and the advisories to companies — were released.

Bryson Koehler, Equifax’s chief technology officer of just six months, said in remarks that the company is “focused on building security into each software application from the start and enhancing it throughout the development process.”

Sonatype raised $80 million in September following a $30 million round two years earlier.

Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) just released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2018. The company generated $34.3 billion in revenue with an adjusted EPS of $1.12 that excludes special items.

Verizon’s actual EPS for this quarter is 47 cents. The reason why the company had to adjust its EPS is that the company wrote down $4.6 billion in Q4 2018 for the value of its media division, Verizon Media, formerly known as Oath. The company also took a $2.1 billion charge following a voluntary redundancy program.

Wall Street analysts had expected earnings per share of $1.09 and $34.44 billion in revenue. In other words, earnings per share are slightly above expectations, revenue is slightly below. Revenue is up 1 percent year over year.

Verizon shares (NYSE:VZ) are currently trading down 0.13 percent in pre-market trading compared to yesterday’s closing price of $55.07.

Growth has been strong on the mobile front in particular. The company added 1.2 million postpaid wireless subscribers during the quarter.

“Verizon finished 2018 by delivering solid financial and operational performance, as evidenced by our strong wireless service revenue and earnings growth,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg wrote in the release. “2018 was a remarkable year full of 5G firsts, including being first in the world to commercially deploy 5G with our 5G Home product. As we head into 2019 and the 5G era, we’re beginning a period of transformational change. We are laser focused on delivering customers a best-in-class and game-changing experience on our networks.”

In case Verizon’s priorities aren’t clear, Vestberg managed to say “5G” four times in just one sentence. On the media front, Verizon Media generated $2.1 billion during Q4, down 5.8 percent compared to Q4 2017. But revenue is up by $200 million compared to the previous quarter (Q3 2018).

When it comes to outlook, Verizon expects to generate “low single-digit percentage growth” in 2019 on the revenue front. EPS should be more or less stable.

WeChat isn’t the only one doubling down on lite apps. Ever since China’s messaging titan introduced “mini programs” two years ago, a handful of its peers including Alibaba and Baidu have followed with their own manifestations.

Alipay, the payments solution affiliated with China’s ecommerce juggernaut Alibaba, today announced it surpassed 230 million daily active users and 12 million lite apps. For some context, Tencent’s WeChat said it topped 200 million daily users and one million mini apps last November.

These stripped-down apps run within an all-in-one platform, or what some call the “super app,” allowing users to bypass the App Store. But not all native apps are replaceable by mini programs for the former support more functionalities and give developers more control in aspects like monetization and access to user insight.

Like WeChat, Alipay added a swipe-down menu on the app’s homepage for mini programs to enhance their visibility. The redesign boosts user revisits to lite apps by 20 times over the past month, Alipay claims.

The Chinese super apps are each bringing their own strengths to the mini-app play. Alipay is a digital wallet at heart, with 1 billion monthly active users around the world many of whom also consume its slew of third-party financial services. The top categories of Alipay’s mini apps, unsurprisingly, are services that see high-frequency transactions like retail, paying for utility bills and travel booking.

WeChat, on the other hand, is fundamentally a messenger and as such developers rush to leverage the social graphs from its 1 billion monthly users. Group-buying site Pinduoduo, for example, started as a mini program and effectively used WeChat’s social networks to grow its group-buying business. Eventually, millions of Pinduoduo’s core users migrated to its native app, setting the Tencent-backed ecommerce startup up against Taobao . Similarly, video games, especially casual ones, embrace mini programs for their smaller file size and ability to be shared across family members and friends.

Security researchers have traced a recent spike in FormBook infections to a new file-hosting service that’s been billed as a place for hackers to host their malware.

Deep Insight analysts say in new findings out Tuesday that the resurgence in FormBook malware, used as part of password and information stealing campaigns currently targeting the retail and hospitality sectors, can be traced back to the newly discovered malware-friendly site that hosts the second-stage dropper used to infect a computer with malicious code after the user opens a booby-trapped document.

The researchers say the site, DropMyBin, was created just over a week ago, and is protected by Cloudflare, masking its real-world location.

“Within days of going live it became a hornets nest of malware,” said Shimon Noam Oren, head of threat research at Deep Instinct, in an email to TechCrunch.

FormBook goes back to 2016 when it was first used to target aerospace and defense contractors in the U.S. and South Korea. Since then, the malware has continued to infect sporadically but has remained largely under the radar.

The team also found several other families of malware hosted on the site, including other trojans like AZORult, and the Lokibot trojan for Android devices.

“We wouldn’t be surprised to find more info-stealers and spyware there,” said Oren.

DropMyBin, a hosting service that threat actors are using to host malware (Screenshot: TechCrunch)

The researchers say the site offers reliability for threat actors where traditional file-sharing sites often nix or delete malware from their systems when it’s detected as malware. DropMyBin was advertised and promoted on Hack Forums, a popular hacker forum, as a “high quality” site that offers “direct downloads” — ideal for linking to malware. They said that the site’s functionality has a “clear invitation to use the service to host malware,” according to the researchers, even though malware is expressly forbidden on the site. DropMyBin promises to keep “all works” for “at least 30 day [sic],” the FAQ reads, and the site doesn’t “collect or log any data of our users in respect for privacy.”

Anyone who wants to use the service for sharing malware can upload their malware, “no questions asked,” the researcher said.

“We strongly suggest employing a zero-trust policy with respect to the service DropMyBin until other information becomes available,” the researchers said.

British startup venture builder Entrepreneur First is eying additional expansion in Asia, where its operation is now as large as it is in Europe, as it expands its reach in 2019. But, despite serving a varied mixture of markets, the company said its founders are a fairly unified breed.

The Entrepreneur First program is billed as a “talent investor.” It matches prospective founders and, through an accelerator program, it encourages them to start and build companies which it backs with financing. The organization started out in London in 2011, and today it is also present in Paris and Berlin in Europe and, in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong and (soon) Bangalore. To date, it says it has graduated over 1,200 founders who have created more than 200 companies, estimated at a cumulative $1.5 billion on paper.

Those six cities cover a spread of unique cultures — both in general life and startup ecosystems — but, despite that, co-founder Matthew Clifford believes there’s actually many commonalities between among its global founder base.

“It’s really striking to me how little adjustment of the model has been necessary to make it work in each location,” Clifford — who started EF with Alice Bentinck — told TechCrunch in an interview. “The outliers in each country have more in common with each other and their fellow compatriots… we’re uncovering this global community of outliers.”

Despite the common traits, EF’s Asia expansion has added a new dimension to the program after it announced a tie-in with HAX, one of the world’s best-known hardware-focused accelerator programs, that will see the duo co-invest in hardware startups via a new joint program.

“We saw early that hardware was a much more viable part of the market in Asia than it is traditionally seen in Europe [and] needed a partner to accelerate the talent,” Clifford said.

Already, the first four beneficiaries of that partnership have been announced — AIMS, BOPSIN, Neptune Robotics and SEPPURE — each of which graduated the first EF cohort in Hong Kong, its fourth in Asia so far. Going forward, Clifford expects that around three to five startups from each batch will move from EF into the joint initiative with HAX. The program covers Asia first but it is slated to expand to EF’s European sites “soon.”

Entrepreneur First held its first investor day in Hong Kong this month

Another impending expansion is EF’s first foray into India via Bangalore which starts this month, and there could be other new launches in 2019.

“We’ll continue to grow by adding sites but we are not in a rush,” Clifford said. “The most important thing is retraining quality of talent. It may be six months until we add another site in Asia but there’s no shortage of places we think it will work.

“We operate a single global fund,” he added. “We’re a talent investor and we believe there are strong network effects in that. The people who back us are really betting on the model… [that it’s] an asset class with great returns.

While it appears that its global expansion drive is a little more gradual than what was previously envisaged — backer and board member Reid Hoffman told TechCrunch in 2016 that he could imagine it in 50 cities — Clifford said EF isn’t raising more capital presently. That previous investment coupled with management fees is enough fuel in the tank, he said. The organization also operates a follow-on fund but it has one major exit to date, Pony Technology, the AI startup bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million.

Still, with hundreds of companies in the world with EF on the cap table, Clifford said he is bullish that his organization can target an international-minded breed of entrepreneur worldwide. The impact he sees is one that will work regardless of any local constraints placed on them.

“With our global network of capital, we always want capital, not talent, to be the limiting factor. Our goal is to make being ‘an EF company’ more relevant to your identity as a startup regardless of your location,” he told TechCrunch