Author: azeeadmin

The Sill, a startup that sells potted plants online and in physical stores, announced this weekend that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Raine Ventures.

The company was founded in 2012 and has now raised a total of $7.5 million. It was bootstrapped until last year, when it raised seed funding from Brand Foundry Ventures, Halogen Ventures, BBG Ventures, Tuesday Capital, BlueSeed and The Chernin Group. (BBG Ventures is backed by TechCrunch’s parent company Oath.)

That seems like a long time for a startup to go without outside funding, and indeed, CEO Eliza Blank acknowledged that she “probably waited too long to go out and raise.” Still, she said those first few years also gave her time to find the right business model (like focusing “exclusively on the direct-to-consumer business,” rather than selling to offices as well.)

And while it’s easy to group The Sill among all the startups using the Internet to build a consumer business around a traditional category of retail, Blank said her vision is bigger than “just putting plants online and being another direct-to-consumer brand.”

After all, there are plenty of people (myself included) who are interested in owning plants but don’t really know how to care for them properly. And our casual interest level probably isn’t going to get us to the local horticultural society to learn more.

Blank said she founded the company in response to her own experience wanting to buy plants, and realizing how limited the resources were for learning “how to approach the category as a newbie.”

So The Sill doesn’t just sell you a plant (along with basic care instructions). It also allows you to ask questions of the company’s plant experts — and with the opening of its first brick-and-mortar stores in New York City, it also offers weekly workshops.

“We have a much longer relationship than a typical transaction business,” Blank said. “Making the purchase is almost like the start — or maybe the middle — of a conversation.”

The company says it sold more than 75,000 products in the last six months, with sales up 500 percent year-over-year, and anticipated revenue for the year of more than $10 million.

Root Insurance, an Ohio-based car insurance startup with a tech twist, said Wednesday it has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round led of Tiger Global Management, pushing the company’s valuation to $1 billion. 

Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Scale Venture Partners all participated as follow-on investors in this latest round.

The car insurance company, founded in 2015, plans to use the funds to expand into existing markets and make inroads into new states as well as hire more employees such as  engineers, actuaries, claims, and customer service to support increased scale. 

Root provides car insurance to drivers. Not exactly a new concept. But it establishes the premium customers based on their driving along with other factors. Drivers download the app and take a test drive that typically lasts two or three weeks. Then Root provides a quote that rewards good driving behavior and allows customers to switch their insurance policy. Customers can purchase and manage their policy through the mobile phone Root app.

Root says its approach allows good drivers to save more than 50% on their policies compared to traditional insurance carriers.

The company uses AI algorithms to adjust risk and sometimes provide discounts. For example, a vehicle with an advanced driver assistance system that it deems improves safety might receive further discounts.

“Root Insurance is leading digital innovation in U.S. auto insurance,” Lee Fixel, a partner at Tiger Global Management said in a statement. “This industry is ripe for change, and we are excited to invest in a team that has the expertise, vision, and momentum to deliver real results. We look forward to growing our partnership with Root and helping them expand their footprint across the United States.”

The company has grown from its home market of Ohio into 20 other states in the past two years. The company plans to expand to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., by the end of 2019.

Drive Capital and Silicon Valley Bank are also investors in the company.

After finally settling on a new apartment, packing your last box and rushing out to pick up your moving van for the measly three hours you could book it for — have you ever taken a moment to think, “Wow, this is so easy?”

Nope, and neither has anybody else. But Shyft, a logistics platform company based in San Francisco, is hoping to change that.

Originally named Crater, the company has announced today a re-brand of its name and mission to focus on helping improve the corporate relocation process for millions of movers per year. The company is bringing with it three years of experience developing software and technology to help moving companies provide better estimates and service to customers.

“We spend hours thinking about these global citizens who are moving everyday and literally shifting their lives,” Shyft CMO Rajiv Parikh told TechCrunch. “They’re moving to new communities, they’re finding new schools, they’re finding new opportunities. It’s a monumental and pivotal moment in someone’s life.”

The process works two-fold. First, Shyft is continuing its partnerships with moving companies and selling its software to them in order to help update their portals and make the process as seamless as possible for their existing customers. As part of these partnerships, Shyft is able to create a reliable network of moving companies and services that it can utilize in the second part of its service — connecting with corporate Fortune 500 companies to help their transferees easily and intuitively complete their moving process.

Through the platform, employees planning a move can fill out information like how many boxes they’re moving, what their housing needs will be, and even what kind of food they like and dietary restrictions they have. With this data, Shyft will help direct them to the services they need and work to help them best integrate into their new communities.

Shyft works with corporate companies’ lump sum funds to help employees find the best price possible for their move. And transferees can use the services for free (or be reimbursed the difference).

“A traditional moving company is focused on moving — dollars and cents — [and] they want the largest and the biggest moves out there,” Shyft CEO Alex Alpert told TechCrunch. “From our perspective, we’re agnostic to that. If it’s in someone’s best interest to sell their sofa and buy a new one, we want to help facilitate that.”

In a recent collaboration with eBay, the company says it has seen large increases in the number of employees using its portal instead of trying to figure out logistics on their own.

“We have monitored the use of Shyft in our lump sum program and have seen a marked increase in the willingness of employees to engage with Shyft to identify the best solution to their moving needs,” eBay Director of HR Global Mobility Eric Halverson said in a statement. “Shyft is helping our employees optimize their lump sum allowance with a variety of moving solutions geared to their personal needs and circumstances.”

Alpert says that Shyft is now focusing on growing and refining its service, and this summer was accepted to join Moderne Venture’s summer Passport Program. The 7-month industry immersion program is designed to help companies refine their go-to-market strategies and network with others working in the real estate, finance, insurance and home-services space.

Latch announced this morning that it has raised $70 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by Brookfield Ventures, the investment arm of Brookfield Asset Management. As part of the deal, Brookfield Properties will also be installing Latch systems in its multi-family properties that are currently under development.

“We are thrilled to support Latch, the clear market leader in a nearly $25 billion space that is expected to grow at twice the rate of traditional access over the next several years,” said Brookfield’s Josh Raffaelli in the funding announcement.

Lux Capital, RRE Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Third Prime, Camber Creek, Corigin Ventures, Tishman Speyer and Balyasny Asset Management also participated int he new funding.

Latch’s smart lock system is designed for apartment buildings rather than single family homes, allowing you to open doors with a smartphone, keycard or door code. It also allows residents to create temporary access codes for guests and service providers.

Speaking of service providers, Latch announced a pilot partnership with UPS earlier this summer that will allow UPS drivers to receive unique credentials for entering buildings to make deliveries.

Latch was founded five years ago, but stayed in stealth mode until 2016. It previously raised $26 million funding.

An apparent hacking attempt on the Democratic National Committee’s voter database was a false alarm, the organization has said.

CNN and the Associated Press reported on Wednesday, citing an unnamed party official, that the political organization was warned of an attempt on its systems. DNC officials contacted the FBI after Lookout, a security firm, detected and reported a phishing page that replicated a login page for NGP VAN, a technology provider for Democratic campaigns.

But the party’s security chief quickly reversed its position Thursday, confirming that the phishing page was “simulated.”

“The test, which mimicked several attributes of actual attacks on the Democratic party’s voter file, was not authorized by the DNC… or any of our vendors,” said Bob Lord, DNC’s chief security officer, in a statement.

Just a day earlier, he briefed Democratic officials on the apparent incident in Chicago on Wednesday.

It’s believed that the Michigan Democratic Party asked a third party to conduct the test without clearance or authorization from the DNC, according to one reporter.

In the case of phishing attacks, hackers attempt to obtain the username and password for sensitive internal systems by tricking staff into entering their credentials on spoofed sites. Hackers can then reuse those credentials to log in themselves.

Mike Murray, Lookout’s vice president of security intelligence who originally informed the DNC of the phishing page, said in a tweet that, “you don’t know that they’re false until you’ve showed up to investigate.”

It’s not uncommon for political parties to store vast amounts of information on voters. Political parties and national committees often use the data to target voters with political messaging.

In recent years, several voter databases have leaked or were exposed on unprotected servers for anyone to find.

Earlier this week, Microsoft said it thwarted an attempt by a Russian-backed advanced persistent threat group known as Fancy Bear (or APT28) to steal data from political organizations.

Updated on August 23: with new information from the DNC. This story and its headline have been updated.

2018 has been the year that AR promises came face-to-face with reality. While Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore sparked a ravenous response from developers that had grown worried about VR’s near-term market and the fate of AR headsets from Microsoft and Magic Leap, little seemed to resonate deeply with consumers.

That realization is part of the reason that AR startups working on backend services and more base level development pipelines have seen so much success. Onstage at Disrupt SF 2018, we’ll be chatting with Anjney Midha, the CEO of an AR startup called Ubiquity6.

The startup was founded just a year ago but has already raised over $37 million to solve some of the hardest augmented reality problems that companies like Google and Apple are working hard to solve as well. Its backers include Google’s Gradient Ventures, First Round, Benchmark and KPCB where Midha previously ran a small fund.

The company is tackling problems like multiplayer interactions and world mapping as well as issues key to more immersive gameplay like making sure that virtual objects stay tied to physical markers in-between gaming sessions. Ultimately, the company’s work is aiming to promote the Ubiquity6 app to be a hub for AR experiences that will have a development backbone that enables much deeper AR interactions for users.

Ubiquity6 is ambitious about the scale of their AR capabilities. While so many companies are focusing their efforts on how to capture AR interactions taking place in the living room, Ubiquity6 is actively working to map entire cities so that it can deliver massive AR experiences that can turn heads (or at least phones).

We’re looking forward to chatting with Midha and hearing about how his startup is planning to compete with some of the world’s biggest tech companies in building out a digital reality that’s projected onto our own.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

59 startups took the stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2  and among the highlights were a company that helps developers manage in-app subscriptions; a service that lets you create animojis from real photos; and a surplus medical equipment reselling platform. Oh… and there was also a company that’s developed an entirely new kind of life form using e coli bacteria. So yeah, that’s happening.

Based on some investor buzz and what caught TechCrunch’s eye, these are our picks from the second day of Y Combinator’s presentations.

You can find the full list of companies that presented on Day 1 here, and our top picks from Day 1 here. 

64-x

With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver, and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute) 64-x is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries. Basically they’ve engineered a new life form that they want to use for novel kinds of bio-manufacturing.

Why we liked it: These geniuses invented a new life form.

CB Therapeutics

Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of ten and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company, SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market.

Why we liked it: Using manufacturing processes to make industrial quantities of what looks like nature’s best painkiller at scale is not a bad idea.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform.

The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place. It might be on to something, though it isn’t clear how big that something is quite yet. The nine-month-old company says it’s currently seeing $350,000 in transaction volume every month; it’s making some undisclosed percentage of money off that amount.

Read more about RevenueCat here.

Why we liked it: Write code. Release app. Use RevenueCat. Get paid. That sounds like a good formula for a pretty compelling business.

 

Ajaib

Indonesia is a country in a transition, with a growing class of individuals with assets to invest yet who, financially, don’t meet the bar set by many wealth managers. Enter Ajaib, a newly minted startup with the very bold ambition of becoming the “Ant Financial of wealth management for Indonesia.” Why the comparison? Because China was in the same boat not long ago — a  country whose middle class had little access to wealth management advice. With the founding of Ant Financial nearly four years ago, that changed. In fact, Ant now boasts more than 400 million users.

China is home to nearly 1.4 billion, compared with Indonesia, whose population of 261 million is tiny in comparison. Still, if its plans work out to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar managed, with an estimated $370 billion in savings in the country to chase after, it could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard if it gains some momentum.

Why we liked it: If Ajaib’s wealth management plans (to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar it manages) work out — and with a total market of $370 billion in savings in Indonesia — the company could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard.

 

Grin

The scooter craze is hitting Latin America and Grin is greasing the wheels. The Mexico City-based company was launched by co-founder Sergio Romo after he and his partner realized they weren’t going to be able to get a cut of the big “birds” on the scooter block in the U.S. (as Axios reported). Romo and his co-founder have already lined up a slew of investors for what may be the hottest new deal in Latin America. Backers include Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees and Base10 Partners.

Why we liked it: Scooters are so 2018. But there’s a lot of money to be made in mobility, and as the challenge from Bird and Lime to Uber and Lyft in hyperlocal transit has revealed, there’s no dominant player that’s taken over the market… yet.

Emojer

Creating animated emojis made from real photos, Emojer just might be the most fun you can have with a camera. The company’s software uses deep learning algorithms to detect body parts and guides users in creating their own avatars with just a simple photo take from a mobile phone. It’s replacing deep Photoshop expertise and animation skills with a super simple interface. The avatars look very similar to Elf Yourself, a popular site that let you paste your friends’ faces on dancing Christmas elves that went viral every year at Christmastime. Founders have PhDs in machine learning and computer vision.

Why we liked it: As the company’s chief executive said, Snap was for sexting, and Facebook was hot or not, so who says the next big consumer platform couldn’t be the trojan horse of easily generated selfiemojis (akin to Elf Yourself)?

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals is a public benefit corporation connecting doctors and patients with sources of low-cost, compounded pharmaceuticals. The company is looking to decrease barriers to entry for drugs for rare diseases. Three weeks ago the company introduced a drug to treat Wilson’s Disease. There was no access to the drug that treats the disease before in Brazil India or Canada. It slashes the cost of drugs from $30,000 a month to $120 per month. The company estimates it has a total addressable market of $17 billion. “Generic drug pricing is a crisis, people are dying because they can’t get access to the medicine they need,” says chief executive Alex Oshmyansky. Osh’s might have a solution.

Why we liked it: Selling lower-cost medications for rare diseases in countries that previously hadn’t had access to them is a good business that’s good for the world.

Medinas Health

Tackling a $75 billion problem of healthcare waste Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used and a and supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural health care centers.

Why we liked it: Finding uses for hospital equipment that’s been lying fallow in corners is a big business. A $75 billion dollar business if Medinas’ estimates are correct. Add helping cut costs for rural medical facilities and Medinas is a business we can get behind.

And Comfort

Plus-size women have limited clothing options even at the largest retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s. While a majority of American women fall into the plus-size clothing category, 100 million women are constrained to shopping for a very small percentage of options. And Comfort wants to solve the supply problem. To do this, the founders, two former Harvard classmates, are building a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with stylish, minimalist offerings for plus-size women, including tunic shirts and an apron dress. It’s very early days for the brand, but since launching in recent weeks, they’ve seen $25,000 in sales.

Why we liked it: This direct-to-consumer fashion brand is bringing higher quality, better-designed clothing options to a market that’s underserved and growing quickly. What’s not to like?

 

ShopWith

Influencers of the world are uniting on mobile app, ShopWith, which allows shoppers to browse virtual storefronts and aisles alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators and YouTubers. Users can see exactly what products those influencers have featured and can buy them without ever leaving the app. It’s a free download and hours of commercially consumptive fun.

It’s like the QVC model, but for GenZ shoppers whose buying habits are influenced by social video content on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. The company revealed that one beauty influencer made $10,000 within five hours, using the ShopWith platform. The founders are former product managers with experience building social commerce products at Facebook and Amazon.

Why we liked it: The QVC for GenZ not only has a nice ring to it, it’s a recipe for making cash registers hum. A mobile-first, influencer-based shopping company is something that we’d definitely not call an impulse purchase.

One of the best features of the new Gmail is its quick-access side panel with easy access to Google Calendar, Tasks, Keep and your Gmail extensions. Now, Google is bringing this same functionality to Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings, too.

In Google Calendar, you’ll be able to quickly access Keep and Tasks, while in the rest of the G Suite apps, you’ll get easy access to Calendar, Keep and Tasks.

In Gmail, the side panel also brings up access to various G Suite extensions that you may have installed from the marketplace. It doesn’t look like that’s possible in Docs and Calendar right now, though it’s probably only a matter of time before there will be compatible extensions for those products, too. By then, we’ll likely see a “works with Google Calendar” section and support for other G Suite apps in the marketplace, too.

I’m already seeing this in my personal Google Calendar, but not in Google Docs, so this looks to be a slow rollout. The official word is that paying G Suite subscribers on the rapid release schedule should get access now, with those on the slower release schedule getting access in two weeks.

An ESA mission 20 years in the making is set to take off today, launching the first satellite to monitor the planet’s winds directly — and using a giant laser, at that. Aeolus takes off from French Guiana at nearly midnight there, about 2:20 PM Pacific time, and you can watch the launch live here.

Aeolus, named after the Greek god who was the keeper of the winds, is a satellite designed and approved way back in 1999 but only recently completed and deemed ready for launch. It’s essentially a vehicle for a single payload, the Atmospheric Laser Doppler Instrument, or “Aladin,” essentially an orbital lidar system.

Once in orbit, Aladin will blast the surface with a 10-megawatt ultraviolet laser 50 times per second, tracking the minute changes evident in the reflected beam caused by air molecules and other matter in the atmosphere. 20 separate measurements done on the laser light allow the satellite to determine the exact velocity of the wind where it’s pointing.

Believe it or not, measuring the wind from space hasn’t really been done. Sure, you can observe cloud patterns and infer that air in some places is behaving in a certain way. But there has been no space-based, global-scale mission to directly measure the direction of the wind.

This information should prove extremely valuable, since it will allow for much improved weather prediction, especially in areas like the tropics where there are fewer stations and weather balloons (yes, they use them) from which to collect data. As such the Aeolus mission may help understand and predict the genesis and paths of tropical storms, giving people more timely and accurate warnings.

Weather in areas rich in balloons should also be improved by a few percent of accuracy — which doesn’t sound like a lot, but really is, especially for aerospace businesses, farmers, and others whose livelihood revolves around the weather.

Ironically (though not particularly worryingly), Aeolus’s first intended launch date was scrubbed because of high winds. If only there were a satellite that could have helped predict that.

Aeolus’s orbit is a slightly unusual one called a sun-synchronous dusk/dawn orbit. It will hover at 320 kilometers above the terminator, the line demarcating night from day, while circling around the poles every 90 minutes. So it’s zipping in the north-south axis at great speed, and takes a week to sample the whole globe.

Data is fired off to a station in Svalbard, Norway once every orbit, and the plan right now is to distribute that data within three hours to the meteorological authorities who will be using it for their own purposes.

The satellite has been in French Guiana since July and has been loaded up atop a Vega rocket since earlier this month. Live coverage should begin at 23:00 local time, 14:00 (2:00 PM) Pacific time, and liftoff is planned for 20 minutes after that. It should take almost an hour for the full deployment process to take place, so we’ll know shortly afterwards if all went well.

According to Chinese numerology, 48 represents a determination to prosper — as in business. How fitting, because 48 also represents the number of hours you have left to reserve your place in Startup Alley, the huge exhibition floor at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place on September 5-7.

Disrupt events are all about creating prosperity, so if you want to exhibit your early-stage startup in front of more than 10,000 attendees — including influential investors, technologists, entrepreneurs and media — buy a Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before August 24 at 5 p.m. PT.

Startup Alley will be home to more than 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors from just about every vertical. Secure your spot and you can join them as they showcase their latest tech products, platforms and services to potential customers, future investors and more than 400 media outlets.

What do you get in your value-packed Startup Alley Exhibitor Package? We’re glad you asked.

• Two Founder passes for all three days of Disrupt SF 2018
• One day to exhibit on the Startup Alley show floor
• Use of CrunchMatch — our curated investor-to-startup matching platform
• Access to The Main Stage, The Next Stage, The Q&A Stage, The Showcase Stage
• All workshops
• Access to the attendee list; ability to message attendees with the Disrupt App
• Attend the TC After Party

Plus, every Startup Alley exhibitor has a chance to win one of two Wild Card slots to compete in Startup Battlefield — this year’s grand prize is a whopping $100K. Not only did that happen to Recordgram at Disrupt NY 2017, they went on to win the entire Battlefield!

Only 48 hours left to capitalize on the prosperity potential awaiting you in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2018 on Sept. 5-7. Go buy a Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before time — and opportunity — runs out.