Author: azeeadmin

There are far fewer annoying things than managing one’s passwords.

There are a bunch of companies out there to help you attempt to do that. And there’s also a number of companies that want to go a step further and eliminate the password completely.

One such company, Stytch, just raised $30 million in a Series A round of funding as it launches out of beta with its API-first passwordless authentication platform.

The round caught our attention for a couple of reasons.

For one, this is the same startup that just months earlier announced it had raised a $6.25 million seed round led by Benchmark with participation from Index Ventures and a number of angels including Plaid co-founder William Hockey. That round was speculated to have valued the new company at a staggering $200 million (although that was never confirmed), and was actually raised last summer around the time of Stytch’s founding, but only announced this year. Other angels that have backed the company include Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field, Very Good Security co-founder Mahmoud Abdelkader, startup advisor Elad Gil and early Stripe employee and Cocoon co-founder Amber Feng.

Also notable about this round is that Stytch was founded by two former Plaid employees, Reed McGinley-Stempel (CEO) and Julianna Lamb (CTO), who built user authentication features that “millions” use to connect their bank accounts to apps like Venmo, Coinbase and Robinhood. The company was founded on the premise that passwords are no longer secure, and make companies easy targets for hackers and expose them to account takeover risk.

Lamb says that as she and McGinley-Stempel worked together at Plaid on user authentication, they realized how frustrating it is to build sign-up and login flows.

“In addition to it being complicated, it’s resource intensive and error-prone to build in house,” she told TechCrunch. “The other thing that really frustrated us was that the core building blocks that all companies use for authentication had really significant security and conversion issues. It struck us that the web has improved in so many ways over the past few decades, but authentication is still stuck in the 1990s.”

Thrive Capital led the Series A, which also included participation from Coatue Management and existing backers Benchmark and Index. The company declined to reveal its new valuation, although sources say only that it is “north of $200 million.”

Stytch claims that it simplifies the authentication process by giving developers and users the “tools and infrastructure to incorporate passwordless authentication methods into modern applications.”

Specifically, the team is creating “simple” APIs and SDKs (software development kits) that the founders say allow “any company to boost user onboarding and retention by removing passwords from their application, while improving security and saving significant engineering time in the process.”

In its first year of operation, Stytch released its product in beta to more than 350 developers who have added passwordless features such as email magic links, SMS and WhatsApp passcodes and one-click user invitations into their user onboarding and authentication login flows. As mentioned above, Stytch launched out of beta this week to make all of the features publicly available in conjunction with the funding announcement. 

“What we found is that it makes more sense to be more flexible with developers,” Lamb told TechCrunch. “The thing that even surprised us about the API-first approach is that we now also have a handful of Fortune 500 companies using the product and the primary reasoning from their standpoint was one of the simplicity of getting set up on the platform. It took them an hour rather than the multiple months they sometimes spend with other providers. There is also the direct API piece where it’s just a much more flexible way to think about workflows in onboarding or login.”

Nearly 65% of users reuse passwords across accounts, which can pose major security threats and breach liabilities, according to a study conducted by Google. Also, many people struggle with remembering passwords and the password reset process can be so frustrating that many users just give up on the account.

This can negatively impact businesses that rely on e-commerce sites, who lose customers over that frustration.

Thrive’s Gaurav Ahuja, who is taking a seat on Stytch’s board with the funding round, believes that the startup’s product is specifically designed for improving sign-up conversion and user retention, and its customizable front end tools help companies get started “quickly.”

He said his firm talked to many developers who used it and saw “how impressed they were with the company’s best-in-class API docs and speed to go live.”

“Over the past several years we’ve seen that most authentication systems are both outdated and pose a security risk to users,” Ahuja told TechCrunch via email. “Stytch is addressing both of these issues head on.”

The new capital will be used to roll out more authentication options, including biometrics, WebAuthn, OAuth logins, QR codes and push notification login. The company also plans to launch additional user infrastructure features and to build out session management and advanced fraud detection solutions. Stytch also aims to hire 20 people by year’s end.

Stytch is not the only company out to kill the password. Boston-based Transmit Security in June raised a massive $543 million in Series A funding in what was believed to be the largest Series A investment in cybersecurity history and one of the highest valuations for a bootstrapped company. Microsoft has announced plans to make Windows 10 password-free, and Apple recently previewed Passkeys in iCloud Keychain, a method of passwordless authentication powered by WebAuth.

 

Unybrands is the latest e-commerce aggregator to pick up a significant investment, this time closing $300 million in growth capital from Crayhill Capital Management.

The Miami-based company, which created a platform for e-commerce businesses looking to scale their operations on and off Amazon, was founded in 2020. It previously raised a $25 million seed round in February.

Unybrands looks for brands across eight categories, including baby, garden and outdoor, sports and fitness and personal care, and provides capital and resources to grow those brands.

Since the February seed round, Unybrands said it closed on multiple acquisitions in both the United States and Europe, and along with more in the works, will put the company on track to beat its 2021 projections of completing 20 deals.

Ulrich Kratz, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch via email that the funding “gives us more firepower to execute and overachieve on our business goals.” It will also enable the company to accelerate acquisitions of Fulfillment By Amazon brands, invest in technology development and further build out its team. Unybrands has more than 25 full-time employees across the U.S., Europe and Asia and plans to more than double its headcount by the end of the year.

The company said it already began building out its technology platform to provide functionalities like finding new targets, automating supply chain management and optimizing e-commerce growth investments.

“Unybrands had an incredibly strong first half of the year,” Kratz said. “We’ve been able to accelerate our business plan across all fronts, including acquisitions, technology and team building. Crayhill has significant e-commerce experience in general and a dedicated strategy to finance players in the Amazon ecosystem, and they have been a great partner.”

Unybrands’ major cash infusion follows a strong e-commerce trend of buying and consolidating multiple smaller third-party merchants that sell their goods via Amazon’s marketplace. Leading the pack is Thrasio, which raised nearly $2 billion in both debt and equity over the past three years.

This capital raise is in good company: This week, Elevate Brands brought in $250 million in funding, while a new company, Foundry, debuted after raising $100 million. Others amassing large rounds recently include Heyday’s $70 million from General Catalyst and Berlin’s The Razor Group raise of $400 million.

Kratz feels the real growth and penetration of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer is just starting to accelerate, which is creating an environment for several players to provide better ways to do business.

“And, the space has attracted a lot of capital, which is a big validation of the enormous upside,” he added.

 

Earlier this year, Amazon launched Build It, a fun little program that lets customers preorder concept devices. Think about it like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, where the company will only actually make the product if enough people buy-in via preorder. Obviously Amazon has a significantly larger ability to absorb a misstep than your average first-time hardware startup, but I digress.

This latest round isn’t particularly experimental as far as these things go. The company partnered with fashion mogul Diane von Furstenberg to create new coverings for its popular entry-level smart speaker. The Echo Dot x Diane von Furstenberg is being offered up in three varieties: Midnight Kiss, Ikat or Twigs. It’s not exactly thew new product entries we saw the first time out, which included a sticky note printer, smart scale and Alexa cuckoo clock.

Each runs $59 — the price of the Echo Dot with clock and $10 more than the standard Dot. The product looks to otherwise be the same as the latest gen Echo Dot. The company says it will be donating to Vital Voices, a charity chosen by the designer — though it wouldn’t specify how much when we asked.

Preorders open now and close August 13. If the designs don’t hit their goal, customers won’t be charged. Once they’re live, “a select number of successful prints may be available at full price after the campaign closes, while supplies last,” according to Amazon.

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Another US femtech startup has joined the race to build up data-sets to support research into and understanding of a range of health issues that can affect women.

Evvy has today launched an at-home test kit for the vaginal microbiome. The user returns their swab to the startup for analysis — and gets detailed information and analysis of the microbes (fungi and bacteria) that are present in their vagina and may be associated with a variety of health concerns.

Users of the test also get personalized suggestions for things they could try (such as diet and lifestyle changes) to improve the balance of microbes — potentially helping with related heath issues they may be suffering from, like yeast infections or BV.

Variances in the microbes present in an individual’s vaginal microbiome are thought to have broad implications for women’s health — playing a role in relatively minor infections (like thrush) but Evvy also flags research linking imbalances in the vaginal microbiome to more serious issues like infertility or pre-term birth, or even linkages to the progression of cervical cancer.

Decoding the vaginal microbiome is thus seen as an opportunity to support a broad range of women’s health goals.

“We give users back a full understanding of everything that’s present. So here are all of the bacteria and fungi and importantly what is the relative amount of each of those bacteria,” explains CEO and co-founder Priyanka Jain, noting that users also get their test data in a downloadable format so they can take the information to their healthcare provider if they wish.

“There are certain bacteria that play really important roles in the vagina, either positive or negative, and understanding if that’s 90% of your vagina vs 5% makes a big difference… For every single microbe that we show to a woman we also fully explain what that microbe is, what the scientific understanding of it is today, how it might contribute to symptoms, how it might be behaving with other microbes that exist in your vagina — as well as if research has shown that it’s related to any health outcomes that you might care about.”

“We also give every woman a full personalized plan — that includes ways to help reduce any type of disruptive bacteria, ways to promote their protective bacteria and ways to overall maintain their vaginal health based on their personal life experiences,” she adds.

As with many such femtech startups, Evvy is targeting the women’s health data gap. This refers to how women can have a relatively poor experience of traditional healthcare, perhaps especially when seeking help or support with conditions related to female biology, because of historic under-representation of women in medical research — which means female health conditions tend to be less well researched and understood vs conditions affecting biological men.

Even relatively common conditions which can affect the vagina — such as a simple yeast infection — can be frustratingly difficult to connect to individual triggers. And while over-the-counter treatments do work, some women report recurrent infections — and may benefit from a better understanding of why the infections may be occurring in the first place.

The problem of less research into women’s health issues does also mean that femtech startups can have a lot of ground to cover to live up to enticing pitches of ‘demystifying’ the female body, as Evvy couches it. In its case, a key challenge is clearly analyzing the vaginal microbiome data it gets from users and turning it into useful recommendations for each person — without overpromising, given there may be relatively little research to back up possible links to wider health conditions.

Evvy says it tackles this challenge by signposting the level of research associated with each of the personalized suggestions it offers.

“I always say treat women like they’re smart,” says Jain. “What we actually do on each of our recommendations is we rate them. So they’re either rated as ‘novel’, ’emerging’ or ‘established’. And we show the women this is the research that exists on this type of treatment [and how relevant it might be to them personally — based on] if it was done on people that resemble you enough that you are actually interested in what the results are.

“Our goal is to highlight everything that’s out there. Because women are… looking for answers everywhere — and you see this kind of amazing crowdsourcing of knowledge, of people trying to figure out what might work for them — and our goal is to say, from a scientific perspective, this is everything that has been studied and we are actually just transparent about how well researched each of those things are.”

Jain says wider research-related goals include trying to identify biomarkers with suspected links to a swathe of serious female health issues — such as infertility, preterm birth, STI acquisition and cervical cancer progression.

Although it’s important to note that Evvy’s commercial offering comes with a disclaimer that it’s not providing medical advice — and is only selling a “wellness” test for now. This is because the service is not a regulated medical device. Hence Evvy specifies it’s only providing customers with “information” about their vaginal microbiome (although the co-founders told us they may consider applying for FDA clearance in the future).

The gap in knowledge around female health issues has led to a proliferation of ‘wellness’ claims and products targeted at women — some of which are, unfortunately, peddling what amounts to ‘snake oil’; i.e. selling products that lack rigorous scientific research to underpin a fuzzy range of ‘holistic benefits’ suggested by the associated marketing (crystal-healing yoni eggs, anyone?).

Being in the unregulated ‘wellness’ category therefore has risks for any femtech startup. But Evvy also sees an opportunity to cut through some of the noise and dubious claims by arming women with robust data on what’s going on in their bodies and connecting them with genuine scientific expertise that can help them interpret it.

Education is a key goal for the startup, per CMO Laine Bruzek.

“How can we bring the scientific community, care providers and women together in the same place to get their questions answered quickly and with the best scientific information… Education is just such an important goal for us because there’s not a lot of great information that exists on the Internet,” she says.

“Not just about your vaginal microbiome — which is sort of a new and emerging space — but just vaginal health in general. There’s so much misinformation, there’s so much snake oil that people are selling. So we want to make sure that we have, not just a chance to bring the women together, but that we give them access to people who are pushing the bounds of vaginal health research so that they can get the best information when they need it.”

Evvy’s approach — which includes bringing in OBGYNs and experts in gynecology & reproductive health as advisors (although the founders themselves have data science and product design backgrounds) — has attracted some top-tier investors: Today it’s announcing a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst which will see the fund’s Margo Georgiadis (formerly the CEO of Ancestry.com) join the board.

Commenting in a statement, Georgiadis said: “Evvy is breaking boundaries to advance women’s health with more affordable and comprehensive testing starting with its vaginal microbiome metagenomics test. The team has bold plans to enable greater early detection, improved treatment, and enhanced therapeutics using new female-specific biomarkers.”

“There is a huge opportunity to build new datasets that will transform our understanding of these conditions in the female body, and I truly believe that Evvy’s unique platform combined with the development of new therapeutics will catalyze a new era in women’s health,” added Dr. Craig Cohen, professor of obstetrics, gynecology & reproductive sciences at UCSF and advisor to Evvy in another supporting statement.

Evvy is not the first startup to sell a home testing kit for the vaginal microbiome, targeting women who may be suffering from conditions related to microbial imbalances, or — well — just women who want to learn more about their own bodies.

Juno Bio, for example, launched an at-home test kit last year.

But Evvy is using a technique — called metagenomic sequencing — which the founders say is able to capture more data than other commercial tests, or the typical tests a woman is able to obtain via a doctor’s office (where scans may only look for a few specific pathogens). So the pitch is the approach provides a higher fidelity view of what’s going on inside a woman’s vagina.

“A lot of the work that we’ve done is specifically incorporating what’s called metagenomic sequencing into the analysis of the vaginal microbiome,” explains Jain. “When you go to the doctor’s office the type of test that they can run is what’s called a PCR test — essentially they take a sample and they look for a specific pathogen within that sample. So oftentimes when you go to the doctor you’ll get a PCR test that looks for one to three different individuals pathogens.

“Since then there have been a few iterations of improvements on that done by other companies. Some are not using what’s called 16-S sequencing — which is a form of amplicon sequencing — which is definitely a large step up from PCR but the downside is it’s only able to look at certain variable regions of the genome. And you actually have to pre-define what you’re looking for. So it’s much harder to do discovery and you’re not able to find all bacteria and fungi that are present. Because 16-S actually can’t detect fungi at all so you have to separately test for it — which means you can’t understand their relative relationships.

“So our test is really the first time anyone is using metagenomics at scale to better understand the vaginal microbiome; both for individual woman and the healthcare system as a whole… In the same way that 16-S was an improvement on PCR, metagenomics is just an improvement on 16-S; it allows us to understand everything that’s possibly present across all bacteria and fungi.”

Per Jain, the service is the only commercially available vaginal microbiome test that’s able to use metagenomics.

A key part of Evvy’s work as a startup is then the analysis of this higher dimension data it’s capturing — to map different microbes to potential health outcomes (based on its analysis of existing research) — and understand how to interpret individual findings and offer relevant and actionable information to each user.

“A lot of our work has been on the data analysis part,” confirms Jain. “So when you do metagenomics sequencing you get much, much higher fidelity data back — and we had to build out everything from, we co-developed an amazing bioinformatics pipeline that is able to analyze that type of data and understand which bacteria and fungi they are. And then actually mapped out for each of those bacteria and fungi how are they related to the vaginal microbiome? What type of symptoms might they cause, and also what type of health implications might they be related to.

“Lastly we’ve done a tonne of work with our science advisory board around putting together personalized recommendations that take into account — not only the microbial data that we get from the test — but also someone’s health history and their symptoms, and if what stage of menopause they’re in, or all of this other information so that we can actually make this information actionable for the women.”

Once data from paying users starts to flow the idea is also to support a range of Evvy’s own research initiatives and partnerships (on the latter, specific details are being kept under wraps for now) — all aimed at furthering knowledge of women’s health and supporting what they hope will be more products in future.

“There’s been so much research done showing that the vaginal microbiome is for example related to pre-term birth,” says Jain. “When you look at women who deliver early or pre-term, they tend to have very different vaginal microbiomes than women who don’t. But a lot of the sequencing that’s been done in that space has been using things like 16-S — and our goal is to bring a much higher level of fidelity. And so, more specifically, we can look at the strain level of bacteria — whereas 16-S and other forms of sequencing can only get you to the species level. And when we’re looking at something as complex as pre-term birth, cervical cancer progression and STI acquisition it’s not just what’s there — but it’s getting to the very, very high fidelity information of specifically what strains are there. So that we can actually start to discover what are the biomarkers that might be leading to differences between people who deliver pre-term and people who don’t.”

“The other value of metagenomic sequencing is it gives us functional profiling,” she adds. “Which helps us not only understand who’s there but also what they might be doing — and all of that information together is more likely able to help us better understand these complex conditions that research has shown is related but no-one’s been able to figure out exactly how.”

While the overarching goal is that data from users’ vaginal swab samples will support research into a range of women’s health issues, Evvy’s users are also paying for a commercial service to get their individual analysis — so what can they expect?

The at-home swab test kit is being priced at $129 for one test kit — which delivers them with a personalized analysis after two weeks.

Evvy is also offering a membership rate for users who want to be able to carry out multiple tests — to be able to track changes to their vaginal microbiome — and for those users tests will cost $99 each (with the user able to take a test every three months).

As they launch the service across the US’ 20 states, Evvy’s co-founders say they’re hoping “thousands” of women will sign up to quantify their vaginal microbiome and support the wider goal of backing research into female health.

“Why is it that looking at the bacteria in the vaginal microbiome is 94% accurate in predicting whether or not a cycle of IVF works?” asks Jain. “Why is it that women who give birth pre-term have a differing vaginal microbiome than people who don’t? Or the whole cervical cancer progression, STI acquisition, pelvic inflammatory disease.

“There’s so many conditions that seem to be — either the vaginal microbiome is an interesting diagnostic opportunity [or] there’s even some very early research showing that women who have PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or endometriosis have varying markers in their vaginal microbiome from women who don’t have those conditions — so everything from helping to detect disease to helping diagnose things, to helping predict risk for so many of these conditions that often we don’t catch for too long.

“Also thinking about treatment as well — something like IVF success or pre-term birth — if we’re able to identify risk earlier can we actually come up with interventions that are personalized to that individual person so that we’re able to avoid that negative outcome in the long term?”

Proper, an automated accounting and bookkeeping service for property managers, announced Wednesday it raised $9 million in Series A funding in a round led by QED.

Existing investors MetaProp, Expa and Bling Capital also participated in the round, which gives the San Francisco-based proptech company a total amount raised of $13.8 million. The company brought in $4.8 million of seed funding last August.

CEO Mark Rojas, whose background is in product development, founded Proper in 2017 after spending a year-and-a-half learning the ropes in a property manager’s office. He was looking at the maintenance side of the business when he realized how much the accounting part of the business “was almost a dumpster fire.”

“I knew the space was rife with problems to solve and how much accounting was a bigger part of the operations that needed to be executed each month and tied everything else together,” Rojas told TechCrunch. “Property managers don’t often come from an accounting background — usually they have a real estate license, so that lack of expertise can put them in a position where they can’t scale their portfolio, or if they try to, things break.”

Proper’s tech-enabled service is designed to execute those specific real estate accounting-related processes and apply automation to those that are repetitive. The company said property managers with 1,000 doors can see 63% higher profit margins and spend 45% less time per year on accounting.

Rojas says accounting automation in real estate has been neglected with few startups stepping up to solve it like Proper is. He considers proptech still in its infancy with much of the innovation coming from home buying, selling and maintenance rather than accounting. It also doesn’t have a “champion company” yet leading the way.

Rather than sit and wait for a company like that to emerge, Proper pivoted to address accounting in early 2020 and saw “growth explode” over the past year. Rojas said he saw the opportunity to not only scale aggressively on the revenue side, but also build a lasting business that was sustainable.

“Real estate is the most valuable asset class, and what I am looking at is how big this industry could be,” he added. “That idea of there being no competitors enables us to be aggressive, be the go-to brand and scale with that high demand.”

Now armed with the Series A funding, the company intends to focus on operations, product development, build a new customer-facing platform and add to its headcount across business functions. Rojas said it went from zero to $2.3 million in annual recurring revenue in 2020 over 12 months. Proper also grew from 15 to 120 employees in 2021 and expects to end the year with about 200.

Proper paused its sales and marketing in order to scale, and Rojas is ready to hit the “play” button again. He is also happy to work with QED, which is in alignment with the company’s vision.

As part of the investment, QED Partner Matt Risley is joining Proper’s board of directors. Risley’s background is in fintech, and he was previously chief financial officer of e-commerce payment platform Klarna.

Risley told TechCrunch he initially met Rojas during Proper’s seed round and was tracking the company’s growth as its initial ideas came to fruition. He considers Proper among the success stories coming out of the real estate industry that also include RealPage, Yardi and AvidXchange.

He spent time with small business owners using Proper and said its product has a good market fit.

“What we see consistently is they are passionate about the core business of delivering value to clients and have a true expertise,” Risley said. “We also see the relief that Proper gives property owners and managers from doing bookkeeping. Anything that enables small businesses to spend more time on what they like about their businesses, they will seize upon it.”

Many consumers use their credit cards to rack up rewards to be used toward travel. 

But what if you’re a sports fan, and using your credit card could lead to a virtual conversation with a player on your favorite team? Thanks to San Francisco-based Cardless, that opportunity may be less of a stretch than you think.

The startup, which is out to give brands and tech companies a way to launch custom co-branded credit cards, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Activant Capital. Other investors include the owners and management of the Phoenix Suns and Boston Celtics and existing backers such as Accomplice and Pear VC. The financing brings the two-year-old company’s total raised since its 2019 inception to $50 million. Accomplice and Greycroft co-led its $7 million Series A last June.

Put simply, Cardless aims to help consumer brands launch credit cards “very quickly and easily” by handling the program creation, card underwriting, lending, issuance and customer service for brands. This quarter, the startup launched three digital programs — with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, British soccer team Manchester United and the Miami Marlins, a Major League Baseball team based in Florida.

The company is out to modernize the whole concept of co-branded credit card programs. Of the 200 that exist in the U.S. today, only one is from a company that is less than two decades old, according to Cardless’ co-founder and president Michael Spelfogel.

“There are close to 200 brands with traditional cards but they are often old legacy businesses such as Costco and Sam’s,” he told TechCrunch. “We want to connect folks with brands they love most, and elevate fans’ relationships with those brands.”

Cardless’ customized rewards programs are catered to very specific demographics “that actually truly appreciate the value that that brand is providing,” Spelfogel added. 

“Our first programs helped fans get things like players’ autographs and experiences that money can’t buy,” he said.  The company plans to announce “several” more programs this year and says that it’s able to do so “in a matter of weeks” compared to traditional issuers, which can take months or more than a year to issue similar programs.

Those reward programs include digital apps and numberless, virtual cards.

Cardless is attempting to shake up a massive market. Consumer credit cards yielded an estimated $150 billion in revenue for traditional banks in 2019, but startups only captured a small fraction of the value. Cardless aims to help brands and tech companies snag a larger piece of the huge market by working with a bank issuer to provide simple card issuance and bespoke digital credit programs for customers of those brands. 

“This funding round is the result, not the start, of the long-awaited transition to digital-focused card issuing,” said Scott Kazmierowicz, Cardless CEO, in a written statement.

Cardless is not restricted to working with sports brands.

“We’re committed to supporting the super users of today’s influential brands across a variety of verticals,” said Spelfogel.  “Cardless puts the customer first by eliminating fees and providing responsible products with transparent rates.”

Andrew Steele of Activant was impressed with Cardless’ ability to power and execute “unique” credit card programs “for prestigious and innovative brands” just two years after launch.

“Most brands have been restricted from launching innovative credit card programs due to the limitations of incumbent providers,” he added. “It became clear that Cardless can transform and expand one of the largest markets in digital payments, and that we’re only in the early innings of what’s possible.”

Castor is on a mission to make every clinical trial faster and patient-focused. The clinical trial software company announced Wednesday it raised $45 million in Series B funding to continue modernizing the process as the industry shifts to decentralized clinical trials.

Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital co-led the round and were joined by existing investors Two Sigma Ventures and Inkef Capital. The Series B brings Castor’s total funding to $65 million since it was founded in 2012.

Clinical trials are “stuck in a rut,” Derk Arts, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Castor told TechCrunch. Currently, they take a long time to set up and don’t involve continuous data monitoring.

They also require patient participants to travel to a research site that could be hours away from their home. As a result, slow enrollment accounts for nearly 40% of terminated trials, and an inconvenient process inhibits researchers from attracting a diverse group of patients, he said.

Castor, which is remote first, but has offices in New York and Amsterdam, is one of several companies bringing technology to a process that is largely still done on paper. Its software provides a self-service version enabling researchers to design studies and integrate in-person and remote patient data from any source in real time. Patients interested in joining trials can enroll and share their data via a mobile app.

The global pandemic pushed innovation forward at an accelerated pace, and Castor responded in turn, making its software free for COVID-19 research.

It then saw an influx of users and new customers like the World Health Organization. WHO used Castor for its “Solidarity Trial,” which was identifying how existing medications might improve outcomes compared to standard of care alone. The study included over 10,000 patients across 553 sites in 30 countries, Arts said.

Michael Treskow, partner at Eight Roads Ventures, called Arts “a straight shooter” who knows the industry’s pain points and is bringing the clinical trials industry into the modern age.

“Technology is making a real impact,” Treskow added. “Castor is so driven to dramatically improve clinical trials, and with its work with WHO has a significant use case of how this is important. As we have seen with the rapid development of COVID vaccines, this is what the industry is able to do.”

The clinical trial market is valued at around $16 billion and is growing rapidly at 16% per year, Arts says. A market that big is also attracting companies that want to innovate it. He cites Science 37 and Medable, which recently pulled in a $78 million extension to its $91 million Series C.

The Series B enables Castor to have teams in place to respond to the fast-growing industry. Last year, the company nearly tripled in revenue growth and is on course to do the same in 2021. Castor has 150 employees currently and expects to hit 200 by the end of the year.

Arts, who has a background in software programming and in medicine, said the new funds will go toward continued product development, interoperability and collecting real-world evidence from decentralized trials. The company is focusing on the United States for now, but sees potential in moving into the Asia region later this year.

“Patients deserve to have an amazing service, and it is up to us to deliver on that,” he said.

Life insurance — financial protection you buy against your death — may not read like the liveliest of industries on paper. But a life insurance startup that believes it can turn that stigma around, by infusing the concept with gamification and a push towards wellness and health — and change the life insurance industry in the process — is today announcing significant funding, a sign of the traction it’s getting for its big ideas.

YuLife, a London startup that has built a new kind of life insurance concept — it incentivizes and rewards users to focus on their physical and mental health through a gamified interface — has raised $70 million in what is, to date, one of the largest Series B’s raised by an insurtech startup in Europe.

Led by Target Global, the round also included Eurazeo, Latitude and previous backers Creandum, Notion Capital, Anthemis, MMC Ventures, and OurCrowd. Sammy Rubin, YuLife’s CEO and founder, confirmed that the round values YuLife at $346 million (£250 million).

The company will be using the funding to continue expanding its business, build more products on its platform, and importantly continue to invest in the technology that it uses to run its service and determine how its policies should run.

“Our insurance is about helping people live healthier and longer lives,” Rubin said in an interview. “If we can help to reduce claims while incentivizing people to do that, it’s a win-win.” But it’s about more than that, he added. “We are building a new type of risk model where we are able to create new actuarial tables, which have not been updated in 200 years. Actually, I think smoker rates and how they’ve changed was the last update. So, most will just look at your age and whether you are a smoker and that’s it.”

YuLife is currently active only in the UK and is only sold directly to organizations, who in turn provide it to their employees. That business currently — which also includes income protection and critical illness cover — provides $15 billion of coverage and has seen 10x growth in the last year — a bumper one for life insurance policies, possibly for the worst reasons (hello, pandemic; goodbye, predicting what the future might look like). Customers include Capital One, Co-op, Curve, Havas Media, Severn Trent, and Sodexo.

That $15 billion is just a drop in the bucket in an industry that is currently estimated to be worth some $2.2 trillion.

The company got its start on the back of a persistent problem that Rubin experienced at his previous insurance startup PruProtect (which is now called Vitality Life): “Usually insurance benefits just sit on shelf and never get used,” he said. YuLife set out to change that by making the policy “all about engagement.”

The app — built by veterans of the gaming industry — is designed around the concept of different environments, currently covering forest, ocean, desert and mountains, which YuLife collectively terms its “Yuniverse.” (This incidentally also became a template for the company’s HQ design in London.)

Within each of these environments, users are encouraged to walk, cycle, meditate and do other activities to get around their environments in a healthy way, while at the same time being able to compare their progress against other co-workers. There is a degree of personalization in everyone’s experience, in that one person leaning into one activity over another seems to produce different subsequent scenarios.

Along with this, users are offered discounts on third-party products to further engage with the game within YuLife, which could include a subscription to meditation app Calm, FitBit and Garmin devices, and more.

As users make their ways through their worlds, they get rewards, in the form of something called YuCoins. The YuCoins can in turn be used to redeem vouchers from the likes of Amazon and Asos to buy things… consumerism being another way to improve happiness for some of us.

All of this sums up as more than just a policy aimed at giving people peace of mind for their families should they depart this world.

“Long term, it’s not just about health, it’s about lifestyle,” Rubin said. It’s also about YuLife’s business: the various products that it offers are built around an affiliate model, so there is a business interest for the company around offering and seeing items purchased and redeemed. However, this is not essential to using the app as a policy holder. The win-win theme runs strong, but so too does the fact that YuLife is taking a different approach altogether, in an industry where a lot of the “disruption” has up to now been more about how to buy life insurance, rather than reassessing what life insurance actually is. (For others in the space, see DeadHappy, BIMA, and the Jay-Z backed Ethos.)

“YuLife is redefining life insurance, using the most innovative technologies to transform a largely traditional industry,” said Ben Kaminski, partner, Target Global, in a statement. “With health and wellbeing increasingly thrust into the limelight in the wake of Covid-19, YuLife is fundamentally changing insurance by incentivizing people to lead healthier lifestyles. YuLife is ideally positioned to build on its tenfold growth during the pandemic and lead the way in helping its clients respond to the challenges posed by an ever-changing working environment. We are very proud to partner with YuLife on its journey of becoming a global leader in life insurance.”

Singapore-based Next Gen Foods will bring its plant-based chicken alternative to the United States after raising a $20 million seed extension. Investors included GGV Capital, agriculture and food tech-focused Bits x Bites, food and beverage company Yeo Hiap Seng, entrepreneur and “Blitzscaling” author Chris Yeh and English footballer Dele Alli.

Returning investors include Temasek, which led Next Gen Foods’ original $10 million seed round, announced in February, and K3 Ventures. The first $10 million was already the largest seed funding ever raised by a plant-based food tech company, based on data from Pitchbook, and now the round totals $30 million. Part of the funding will be used to fill 50 roles in the U.S. for its research and development, sales, supply chain and finance and marketing teams. 

Next Gen also announced changes to its leadership team. Co-founder Timo Recker is moving from his chief executive officer position to chairman, while Andre Menezes, another founder, will take over the CEO spot. Former Temasek director Rohit Bhattacharya will join the startup as its chief financial officer. 

Next Gen’s chicken alternative, called TiNDLE, launched in Asia through partnerships with restaurants and is now served in more than 70 locations in Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau. Over the next 12 months, Next Gen will take a similar approach as it enters the U.S., working with food services in cities to develop TiNDLE dishes for their menus. Eventually it will expand to other distribution channels, like retail, Menezes told TechCrunch.

To replicate chicken meat’s texture, Next Gen uses a proprietary blend of plant-based fats, including sunflower oils, and natural flavors. This allows TiNDLE products to replicate the aroma and browning of chicken when it cooks. 

In the U.S., Next Gen faces rivalry from plant-based food companies like Beyond Meat, which launched its Chicken Tenders product at about 400 restaurants earlier this week. Panda Express, a popular food chain, is also piloting Beyond Meat orange chicken. 

When asked about the competitive landscape, Menezes said, “We are really glad this sector is gaining traction and we do not see other plant-based companies as our competitors. The only competition we worry about are the companies bringing unsatisfactory products to consumers. Consumers may end up having the wrong impression that plant-based foods compromise in taste and experience even today.” 

He added that TiNDLE is GMO and cholesterol-free, and Next Gen has an asset-light business model that will make it easier to scale into new markets. 

Before launching Next Gen, Recker founded German-based LikeMeat, while Menezes worked at one of the world’s largest poultry exporters before serving as general manager of Singapore food distributor Country Foods. 

In a statement, GGV managing partner Jenny Lee said, “The Next Gen team has one of the strongest founder-market fits in foodtech, having previously developed and successfully launched a plant-based meat product for the European market. The team’s focus on product quality, brand recall and distribution provides a strong foundation for the future growth of the company.”

Financial services-as-a-service — where entities like neobanks, retailers and others can create and sell their own financial products by way of a few lines of code and APIs — has been one of the bigger trends in the world of fintech in recent years, with embedded finance on its way to being a $7.2 trillion market by 2030, according to forecast from Bain Capital. Now, one of the companies building and providing those APIs is announcing some growth funding to expand.

Railsbank, which builds APIs for banking, payment cards and credit products for use by fintechs but also a wide range of other kinds of businesses, has raised $70 million in new funding, money that the London startup plans to use to continue growing internationally and to add more features to its product set.

“Our mission is to reinvent, unbundle and democratise access to the complex, opaque and byzantine 70-year-old credit card market, which is worth $4 trillion in the U.S. alone,” Nigel Verdon, CEO and co-founder of Railsbank, told TechCrunch in an interview last year. Verdon is a repeat entrepreneur, with one of his previous companies being Currency Cloud.

Rails not disclosing its valuation, but according to data from Pitchbook, the company was valued at just under $200 million in its last round at the end of last year (we reported on it here). That would imply it’s now at a $270 million valuation. We’re checking with the company and will update if we learn more.

This latest round is being led by Anthos Capital, a previous backer of the company, with Central Capital, Cohen and Company, and Chris Adelsbach’s fund Outrun Ventures, as well as other unnamed previous backers also participating. Central Capital is a strategic investor: it’s the VC arm of the largest privately held bank in Indonesia, while Cohen and Company is the founder of Bancorp. Those backers speak to where Railsbank is targeting its services and who is interested in potentially working with it.

Banking-as-a-service, and other financial products-as-a-service, has become one of the most significant building blocks not just in the world of fintech, but in financial services overall. As with Twilio or Sinch in communications, or Stripe in payments, the idea here is that financial specialists have built out the complicated infrastructure and partnerships that underpin a product like a credit card, or a banking account.

This is then packaged up in a service that can be integrated into another one by way of an API, and the small amount of code needed to add it to another platform. In turn, that API can be used not just by another financial services company that is consumer- or business-facing, but by any kind of company that sees offering a financial product as part of a bigger customer service and loyalty play. That could mean a retailer offering its own-brand credit card, but also a “neobank” that is building a slick front end with great customer service and personalization, without needing to build the now-commoditized banking infrastructure underneath it to run it.

Railsbank is far from being the only company that has identified and built around this concept. Other big players include Rapyd, which raised a big round at a $2.5 billion valuation earlier this year; Unit, which also has been picking up funding and growing; FintechOS, which really does what its name says; and the startup 10x was even built for incumbent players to also have access to lighter fintech-as-a-service.

Railsbank believes its distinct from many of its would-be competitors in part because it has built a lot of its own infrastructure from the ground up (hence the “rails” in its name), “bypassing” legacy players, in contrast to others that are built as software that still ultimately runs on top of stacks (and inefficiencies) of those older providers. This also means that it is regulated as a financial institution.

Railsbank is also in the business of making some acquisitions in order to grow its business, for example acquiring the UK business of German fintech Wirecard when it was crashing due to financial malpractices. And it doesn’t build everything from scratch: earlier this year it also partnered with Plaid to embed some of its services within Railsbank’s.

Railsbank does not disclose a full list of customer names but has case studies on a number of smaller clients that speak to just how widely proliferated financial services are today. They include GoSolo, Kyshi, and SimpledCard.

“The market has evolved so rapidly since we founded the world’s first BaaS business, the Bancorp,” noted Betsy Cohen, chairman of Fintech Masala and founder of Bancorp, in a statement. “As we move into the $7 trillion embedded finance market, it has been great watching Railsbank’s growth story. With this investment, it’s a privilege to continue to be part of the journey with a global leader like Railsbank.”