Author: azeeadmin

Amazon this morning announced a handful of updates across its Echo Show line of smart screens. The top-level most interesting bit here is the addition of a pan and zoom camera to the mid-tier Echo Show. The feature is similar to ones found on Facebook’s various Portal devices and Google’s high-end Nest Hub Max.

Essentially, it’s designed to keep the subject in frame – Apple also recently introduced the similar Center Stage features for the latest iPad Pro. It comes after Amazon introduced a far less subtle version in the Echo Show 10, which actually follows the subject around by swiveling the display around the base. I know I’m not alone in being a little creeped out, seeing it in action.

The new feature arrives on the Show 8’s 13-megapixel camera, which is coupled with a built-in physical shutter – a mainstay as Amazon is look to stay ahead of the privacy conversations. The eight-inch HD display is powered by an upgrade octa-core processors and coupled with stereo speakers. The new Show 8 runs $130.

The other biggest news here is the arrival of the Echo Show 5 Kids – the one really new product in the bunch. At $95, the kid-focused version of the screen features a customizable home screen, colorful design, a two-year warranty in case of creaks and a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+.

There’s a new version of the regular Show 5, too, featuring an upgraded HD camera, new colors and additional software features. That runs $85. The new devices go up for preorder today and start shipping later this month.

 

Low code and no code tools abound these days, as the industry attempts to give non-technical end users the ability to create applications without code (or very little anyway). Salesforce has been a big proponent of this approach to help reduce the complexity of working on its platform, and today the CRM giant announced a new wrinkle: drag and drop interactive components.

These new components allow users to create more sophisticated kinds of interactions, says Ryan Ellis, SVP for product management and platform at Salesforce. “We’re introducing this new feature called Dynamic Interactions and prior to their existence you had to have developers if you wanted to be able to build essentially truly interactive applications,” Ellis said.

What he means by this is if you have an application made up of multiple components such as a list of companies, a map and information about the company. You can click a company name and its location instantly appears on the map, and information about the company appears alongside it.

Salesforce will be providing about 150 such interactions like maps, lists, Einstein next best action and so forth. Developers can also create these for users as reusable building blocks that make sense to your organization or make them available in the AppExchange for others to use. Finally, you might have a systems integrator or consultant help build them for you.

“With dynamic interactions, we’re really dramatically simplifying the process of building apps with components that communicate with each other, pass data back and forth and react to user actions. It’s an entirely no code tool so that developers write the code once for their component, and then that component can be reused by people who don’t have technical skills by dragging and dropping them onto the page, then configuring what should happen when a user takes an action,” Ellis explained.

He says that this is part of a larger trend of digital transformation happening across the industry, one that was accelerated by the pandemic, something we hear frequently from tech companies like Salesforce.

“There’s really this big push to go digital faster than ever before, and this was happening for years as we were seeing businesses having to pivot much more rapidly as new business models were coming about. […] But then in this last year COVID really changed the game, and people just had to put on full gas in terms of actually being able to deliver those digital transformations in some instances overnight,” he said.

When you combine that with a shortage of developers, it makes sense that Salesforce and many other companies in the industry are developing these low-code tools that allow non-technical business users to build some applications themselves, while freeing developers to concentrate on more sophisticated organizational requirements.

Dynamic Interactions will be available starting today from Salesforce in beta. The product is expected be generally available around Dreamforce in the fall.

Having a great idea for an app or game is one thing, but scaling it to become a successful business is quite another. A new fintech startup called Sanlo aims to help. The company, which is today announcing an oversubscribed $3.5 million seed round, offers small to medium-sized game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth.

To be clear, Sanlo is not an investor that’s taking an equity stake in the apps and games it finances. Instead, it’s offering businesses access to technology, tools, and insights that will allow them to achieve smart and scalable growth while remaining financially healthy — even if they’re a smaller company without time to sit down and structure their finances. Then, when Sanlo’s proprietary algorithms determine the business could benefit from the smart deployment of capital, it will assist by offering financing.

The idea for Sanlo hails from co-founders Olya Caliujnaia and William Liu, who both have backgrounds in fintech and gaming.

Caliujnaia began her career in venture capital in one of the first mobile-focused funds, before moving to operator roles in gaming, stock photography, and fintech, at EA, Getty Images, and SigFig, respectively. She later joined early-stage fintech and enterprise fund XYZ.vc as an Entrepreneur in Residence.

Liu, meanwhile, had also worked in gaming at EA, but later switched to fintech, working at startups like Earnest and Branch.

After reconnecting in San Francisco, the co-founders realized they could put their combined experience to work in order to help smaller businesses just starting out recognize when it’s time to scale, what areas of the business to invest in, and how much capital they need to grow.

Caliujnaia has seen how the app and gaming market has evolved over the years, and she realized the difficulties new developers now face.

“You have this explosion of the app economy that’s growing insanely,” she says. “That’s the exciting part of it. That creativity. That passion and that desire to build — that’s so admirable.”

Today, companies benefit from having access to better development tools, broader access to talent, consumer demand, and other forces, she notes, compared with those in the past. But on the flip side, it’s become incredibly difficult to scale a consumer app or game.

“I think a lot of that comes down to, one, that there are dynamics around the free-to-play model — how you monetize and therefore, what kind of players and users you bring on board,” Caliujnaia says. “And then the second aspect is that it’s just harder to get noticed. So, ultimately, it comes down to marketing.”

Many of the decisions that a company has to make on this front are predictable, however. That means Sanlo doesn’t have to sit down with businesses and consult with them one-on-one, the way a financial advisor working in wealth management would do with their clients.

Instead, Sanlo asks companies for certain types of data to get started. This includes product data about how well the app or game monetizes and customer acquisition and retention, for example, as well as marketing data and a subset of financial data. Its predictive algorithms then continually monitor the company’s growth trajectory to surface insights to identify where and how the business can grow.

This concept alone could have worked as a services business for mobile studios, but Sanlo takes the next step beyond advice to actually provide companies with access to capital. The amount of financing provided will vary based on the life stage of the company and risk profile, but it’s non-dilutive capital. That is, Sanlo takes no ownership stake in the companies it finances.

Caliujnaia said it made more sense to go this route rather than return to the VC world, because of potential to reach a wider group.

“There’s this long tail of developers and it’s more about enabling them, rather than producing more hits,” she says. “It’s very different mindsets, different markets that we’re going for.”

Sanlo doesn’t have a lot of direct competitors beyond perhaps, Silicon Valley Bank and other financial lenders, as well as mobile gaming publishers. But the publisher model often implies some sort of ownership, which is a significant differentiating factor. In some cases, you may see a larger gaming company extending debt financing to a smaller one. That was the case with Finnish mobile games company Metacore which recently raised another debt round from gaming giant Supercell, for example.

Caliujnaia points out that most smaller companies don’t have that kind of access to financing. Now they could, through Sanlo.

“The idea is to have a healthier layer of companies that are able to survive for the long-term,” she says.

That means more companies that won’t have to stress about their futures, leading to them to aggressively monetize their users, and later, scrambling for an exit when their financial runway comes to an end.

Sanlo is currently pilot testing its system with a small group of mobile game studios who will serve as its initial customer base, but plans to later support consumer apps, which have similar struggles with customer acquisition costs and growth.

The San Francisco-headquartered startup itself was founded in 2020 and began raising money. It has now raised a total of $3.5 million in seed funding co-led by Index Ventures and Initial Capital, with participation from LVP, Portag3 Ventures, and  XYZ Venture Capital. Angel investors include Kristian Segestrale (Super Evil Megacorp CEO), Gokul Rajaram and Charley Ma. 

Initial Capital co-founder and partner Ken Lamb became a board director with the fundraise, while Index partner Mark Goldberg and XYZ managing partner Ross Fubini joined as board observers.

“Sanlo cracked the code to help mobile gaming and app companies reach maturity with a new level of speed, scale, and fiscal wellbeing,” said Goldberg, in a statement. “The company is building a very sophisticated fintech offering that will give those companies superpowers.”

Sanlo plans to use the funds to grow its team and product suite ahead of its public launch later this year.

Amplitude, the well-funded product intelligence startup that helps businesses use their data to predict which features will drive the best business outcomes for them, today announced that it has acquired Iteratively, a startup that helps businesses build trustworthy data pipelines.

Since data is at the core of Amplitude’s services, this acquisition will help the company bolster its data management capabilities that power many of its features, including its recently launched personalized recommendation engine.

This marks Amplitude’s second acquisition, after buying ClearBrain last March. With a total of $186.9 million in funding and a unicorn valuation, we may just see it do more of these in the no-so-far future. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

“I think the big story for us is to be able to expand beyond product analytics to really help companies one, measure user behavior, two, predict which features and actions lead to business outcomes, and then use that to intelligently adapt each experience based on those insights,” Amplitude EVP of Product Justin Bauer told me. “For us, that’s really the broader problem that we’re focused on and why we think digital optimization is really critical.”

As Bauer noted, the Amplitude Behavioral Graph that powers these optimization services is only as effective as the data that is fed into it — and that’s why buying Iteratively made a lot of sense at this point.

Bauer and Iteratively CEO Patrick Thompson tell me that the two companies started talking in earnest around the end of last year after hearing more about Iteratively from Amplitude’s customers. “As we spoke to our customers, we consistently heard from them the importance of proactively and continuously increasing the quality of data,” he said. “And many of them told us how excited they were about Iteratively to help them solve that. As we dug in more, we found out that 70% of their customers are Amplitude customers. That gave us a lot of conviction to explore the acquisition.”

The two companies also had compatible cultures and Bauer tells me that the executive team at Amplitude was impressed by Iteratively’s founding team, which, like virtually everybody else at Iteratively, will move to Amplitude.

“The biggest thing for us is we saw the excitement from many of our existing customers who were using Amplitude and how that helped change the way that they built product and delivered customer value,” Iteratively’s Thompson said. “From the early days, we were really big fans of what Amplitude was building and saw the impact that it was having on the industry. For us, when we thought about folks who fit our cultural values, where we could see ourselves as well as the rest of the team working, I don’t think there was another company at the top of the list beyond Amplitude who fit all those criteria. And generally, as we’ve been having conversations with these folks internally, it just made sense.”

Iteratively will continue to exist as a stand-alone product and will continue to support a wide range of customers, including those who don’t use other Amplitude services. Bauer and Thompson stressed that this was important to both teams, in part because the data governance and quality problem expands well beyond the Amplitude audience. As such, a stand-alone product like Iteratively will also likely help Amplitude bring in new customers. But at the same time, the teams have already integrated some of Iteratively’s technology into Amplitude’s stack and specifically the existing Amplitude Govern service that helps businesses oversee their data pipelines.

This new integration is now available to Amplitude customers through an early access program, with wider availability planned for later this year.

Divibank, a financing platform offering LatAm businesses access to growth capital, has closed on a $3.6 million round of seed funding led by San Francisco-based Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV).

São Paulo-based Divibank was founded in March 2020, right as the COVID-pandemic was starting. The company has built a data-driven financing platform aimed at giving businesses access to non-dilutive capital to finance their growth via revenue-share financing.

“We are changing the way entrepreneurs scale their online businesses by providing quick and affordable capital to startups and SMEs in Latin America,” said co-founder and CEO Jaime Taboada. In particular, Divibank is targeting e-commerce and SaaS companies although it also counts edtechs, fintechs and marketplaces among its clients.

The company is now also offering marketing analytics software for its clients so they can “get more value out of the capital they receive.”

A slew of other investors participated in the round, including existing backer MAYA Capital and new investors such as Village Global, Clocktower Ventures, Magma Partners, Gilgamesh Ventures, Rally Cap Ventures and Alumni Ventures Group. A group of high-profile angel investors also put money in the round, including Rappi founder and president Sebastian Mejia, Tayo Oviosu (founder/CEO of Paga, who participated via Kairos Angels), Ramp founder and CTO Karim Atiyeh and Bread founders Josh Abramowitz and Daniel Simon.

In just over a year’s time, Divibank has seen some impressive growth (albeit from a small base). In the past six months alone, the company said it has signed on over 50 new clients; seen its total loan issuance volume increase by 7x; revenues climb by 5x; customer base increase by 11x and employee base by 4x. Customers include Dr. Jones, CapaCard and Foodz, among others.

“Traditional banks and financial institutions do not know how to evaluate internet businesses, so they generally do not offer loans to these companies. If they do, it is generally a long and tedious process at a very high cost,” Taboada said. “With our revenue-share offering, the entrepreneur does not have to pledge his home, drown in credit card debts or even give up his equity to invest in marketing and growth.”

For now, Divibank is focused on Brazil, considering the country is huge and has more than 11 million SMEs “with many growth opportunities to explore,” according to Taboada. It’s looking to expand to the rest of LatAm and other emerging markets in the future, but no timeline has yet been set.

As in many other sectors, the COVID-19 pandemic served as a tailwind to Divibank’s business, considering it accelerated the digitalization of everything globally.

“We founded Divibank the same week as the lockdown started in Brazil, and we saw many industries that didn’t traditionally advertise online migrate to Google and Facebook Ads rapidly,” Taboada told TechCrunch. “This obviously helped our thesis a lot, as many of our clients had actually recently went from only selling offline to selling mostly online. And there’s no better way to attract new clients online than with digital ads.”

Divibank will use its new capital to accelerate its product roadmap, scale its go-to-market strategy and ramp up hiring. Specifically, it will invest more aggressively in engineering/tech, sales, marketing, credit risk and operations. Today the team consists of eight employees in Brazil, and that number will likely grow to more than 25 or 30 in the coming 12 months, according to Taboada.

The startup is also developing what it describes as “value additive” software, aimed at helping clients better manage their digital ads campaigns and “optimize their investment returns.”

Looking ahead, Divibank is working on a few additional financial products for its clients, targeting the more than $205 billion e-commerce and SaaS markets in Latin America with offerings such as inventory financing and recurring revenue securitizations. Specifically, it plans to continue developing its banking tech platform by “automating the whole credit process,” developing its analytics platform and building its data science/ML capabilities to improve its credit model.

Jake Gibson, general partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, noted that his firm is also an investor in Clearbanc, which also provided non-dilutive financing for founders. The company’s “20-minute term sheet” product, perhaps its most well-known in tech, allowed e-commerce companies to raise non-dilutive marketing growth capital between $10,000 to $10 million based on its revenue and ad spend.

“We are very bullish on the idea that not every company should be funded with venture dollars, and that lack of funding options can keep too many would-be entrepreneurs out of the market,” he said. “Combine that with the growth of e-commerce in Brazil and LatAm, and expected acceleration fueled by COVID, and the opportunity to build something meaningful seemed obvious.”

Also, since there aren’t a lot of similar offerings in the region, Better Tomorrow views the space that Divibank is addressing as a “massive untapped market.”

Besides Clearbanc, Divibank is also similar to another U.S.-based fintech, Pipe, in that both companies aim to help clients with SaaS, subscription and other recurring revenue models with new types of financings that can help them grow without dilution.

“Like the e-commerce market, we see the SaaS, and the recurring revenues markets in general, growing rapidly,” Taboada said.

This morning Treasury Prime, a banking-as-a-service startup that delivers its product via APIs, announced that it has closed a $20 million Series B. The capital comes around a year since the startup announced its Series A, and around 1.5 years since it raised its preceding round.

For Treasury Prime, the new capital was an internal affair, with prior investors stepping up to lead its new round of funding. Deciens Capital and QED Investors co-led the round, with Susa Ventures and SaaStr Fund also putting cash into the transaction.

As is increasingly common among insider-led fundraises in recent years, the startup in question was not in dire need of new funding before the new investment came together. In fact, Treasury Prime CEO Chris Dean told TechCrunch that his firm is “super capital efficient” in an interview, adding that it had not tucked into its Series A capital until January of this year.

So, why raise more funds now? To invest aggressively in its business. That plan is cliche for a startup raising new funding, but in the case of Treasury Prime the move isn’t in anticipation of future demand. Dean told TechCrunch that his startups had run into a bottleneck in which it could only take on so much new customer volume. That’s no good for a startup in a competitive sector, so picking up its spend in early 2021 and raising new capital in mid-2021 makes sense as it could help it hire, and absorb more demand, more quickly.

And for Treasury Prime’s preceding backers, the chance to put more capital into a startup that was dealing with more demand than capacity likely wasn’t too hard a choice.  Dean added that to make sure the round’s price was market-reasonable, he pitched around 10 venture capital firms, got three term sheets, and then went with his preceding investor group; if any VC reading this is irked by the move, this is the founder equivalent of private-market investors asking founders to come back to them after they find a lead.

But with the banking-as-a-service market growing, thanks to entrants like Stripe showing up in recent quarters, how does Treasury Prime expect to stay towards the front of its fintech niche? Per Dean, by bringing together banks that want fintech deal volume, and fintechs who need both technology and eventual banking partners. By courting both sides of its market, Treasury Prime hopes to be well-situated for long-term growth.

And its CEO is bullish on the scale of his market.

If you imagine the banking-as-a-service market as merely neobanks, he explained, it’s not that big. But his startup expects the number of companies that want to offer their customers the sort banking capabilities that Treasury Prime and some competitors can offer will be broad. How broad? The best way I can summarize the company’s argument is that, a bit like how vertical SaaS has proven that building software for particular industries can be big business, Treasury Prime expects that banking tools will also be built for similar business categories. Vertical banking, perhaps, integrated into other services.

And it wants to be there, offering the back-end tech, and access to banks that the companies building those services will need.

Fintech is a big and expensive market, and Treasury Prime isn’t busy raising nine-figure rounds — yet, at least. According to PitchBook data, Treasury Prime was valued at just over $40 million at the time of its Series A; the company’s new valuation was presumably higher, though how much is not yet clear.

Let’s see how far it can get with $20 million more as it sheds some of its frugal DNA and looks to burn a little faster.

As private companies like Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX prepare to ferry private customers to the stars, a whole new market is opening up to train affluent would-be travelers for their future missions. Case in point: space training company Orbite, whose goal is to combine aeronautics and five-star hospitality in its inaugural astronaut training program.

“We’re going to have hundreds, if not thousands of people this decade of the 2020s, who will go to space, but you just don’t get off the couch and strap into a rocket […] you actually have to get mentally prepared, physically prepared, and also spiritually prepared for this out of out of this world journey,” co-founder Jason Andrews told TechCrunch. “And that’s really our role.”

Orbite (the French word for ‘orbit,’ pronounced or-beet) was founded by space and hospitality industry veterans Andrews and Nicolas Gaume. Andrews is an aerospace entrepreneur that founded Spaceflight and BlackSky, while Gaume, a software and game development entrepreneur, sits on the board of his family’s resort and hotel business Groupe Gaume. Last year, Gaume’s business Space Cargo Unlimited shipped a dozen bottles of wine to the International Space Station. They were later retrieved. (When asked how the wine tasted, Gaume told TechCrunch, “It’s a unique product.”)

The program will be led by Brienna Rommes, who previously worked as the director of space training and research at the National Aerospace Training and Research Center. Rommes has trained over 600 people to prepare for spaceflight, including Sir Richard Branson, Orbite said.

Led by Rommes, the program aim to prepare travelers that are determined to reach space, but Andrews also said Orbite can help customers “try before they buy” – give people a taste of spaceflight for those who are unsure whether they’d actually want to board a launch vehicle. This seems to be their main value proposition, by providing a general overview to space travel across different companies, because they’ll also be competing to a degree with the native (and mandatory) training programs of individual private launch companies that are purpose-built to prepare customers for their flight.

Costs remain prohibitively high for the average spacefarer: it’s been reported that a ticket on Axiom’s inaugural commercial launch to the International Space Station costs upwards of $55 million. Orbite’s premium training program comes in at $29,500 per person for the three-day, four-night stay.

In acknowledgement on the premium price tag, the four training program sessions scheduled through the remainder of 2021 will be held at luxury resorts: the Four Seasons Resort in Orlando, Florida, and Hôtel La Co(o)rniche in Pyla-sur-Mer, France. The latter hotel is owned by Groupe Gaume.

Would-be space travelers will be able to experience up to 5 Gs by taking a ride on a high-performance aircraft as well as simulated zero-gravity. To prepare customers mentally and even spiritually, the training program itinerary includes meditation training, a workshop on stress and anxiety management, and individual coaching with staff “to explore personal goals for space, thoughts and asses possible flight options,” the company said. The itinerary also includes virtual reality mission experiences and a ‘Michelin star’ space food tasting.

“We really want to make sure we bridge the gap with more of a sensorial, psychological, even spiritual preparation for the trip,” Gaume said.

The company’s long-term vision is building and operating many training facilities around the world. The first facility will open in 2023 or 2024, though Andrews and Gaume are not yet sharing where it will be located. They did say that the dedicated training facility will offer a range of packages, with some as short as single-day experiences. They will also offer accommodation and hospitality, potentially for the long term – weeks or even months, depending on if we reach a stage in human space travel where we’re sending private citizens to the Moon or even Mars.

Job-hunting for those close to leaving or just out of college is a different ballgame these days than it used to be. Gone (at least for now) are the open job fairs and so-called milk rounds where prospective employers go en masse to tap student bodies for potential new entrant hires. In their place, virtual fairs run by startups like Handshake. Today, the company, which has built a platform for professional networking and graduate recruitment aimed at the wider and diverse breadth of college students, is announcing a hefty round of funding — a sign of how it has capitalized on the new landscape and found a healthy place for itself within it.

The startup has closed in on $80 million, a Series E that it has confirmed values Handshake at over $1.5 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital co-led this round, with first-time backers Coatue Management and Valiant Peregrine Fund also investing, alongside Handshake’s previous investors. (That list of previous backers is a pretty illustrious list: EQT, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Omidyar Network, Reach Capital, True, Kleiner Perkins, and GGV are among them.)

“Covid-19 has had a massive effect on our business,” CEO and co-founder Garrett Lord told me in an interview. Key to that has been a new video product that Handshake built, which powers its virtual career fairs and interviews between prospective recruits and organizations. “It’s all centered around video recruiting with more than 90% of our university partners using our video solution. That’s really important for them because they [recruiters and those working in career services at the schools] are all under a lot of pressure to show results. They moved to our virtual products because they could facilitate those connections.”

The valuation is a big hike compared to its previous round (also $80 million, as recently as last October), and comes as the company is recording a lot of momentum in the market.

It has been doubling revenue every year for the last three, and is now on track for $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The platform now has 18 million students and young alumni hailing from 1,200 educational institutions including four-year colleges — with the recent additions of the wider extent of higher learning, in the form of community colleges and boot camps, now also bolstering those ranks. It said that a full 49% of U.S. college graduates from 2018-2020 received job offers via Handshake.

Meanwhile, the third part of Handshake’s marketplace alongside students and their colleges — the organizations doing the recruiting — is also really digging in. It now has 550,000 companies on its rolls using Handshake to connect with individuals. That includes no less than 100% of the Fortune 500. And it notes that with companies getting more serious about diversity and inclusion, the companies’ engagement on Handshake is only growing. The startup said that 98 million virtual student-employer connections were enabled on its platform last year.

When I previously covered Handshake (see stories here and here), what really stood out to me about the company was how it was building and gaining traction addressing a very significant and often-ignored parts of the workforce, groups traditionally underrepresented in hiring in graduate roles.

Hires for these roles traditionally skew towards white males, and for the most competitive jobs, towards a select coterie of institutions. The mission of Handshake — founded by Garrett Lord (CEO), Scott Ringwelski (CTO) and Ben Christensen (a board member), three friends who hailed from a technical university in Michigan — was to break those models and barriers by creating a network that catered to a much wider range of historically Black colleges, and simply a wider range of institutions to improve the ratios.

In doing so, Handshake has carved out a place for itself as a kind of complement, or even competitor, to LinkedIn in this area. (It’s a complement if you think LinkedIn has squared away its ambitions for building professional networking and social-network-based recruitment for the rest of the wider working world; competitor if you think that LinkedIn has a viable chance of working out how to do this specifically for younger users earlier on in their careers, and those from historically underrepresented groups — both of which it’s never done outstandingly well.)

What’s interesting is that while there have been a lot of worries over how the graduate job market and students would fare in a Covid-19 landscape, Handshake has found a way ahead to match our current times. Specifically, it’s doubled down on virtual recruiting fairs and other ways of facilitating connections and conversations between its users and the organizations that want to hire them.

This funding, Lord tells me, will be used to continue developing the company’s technology and tools that it provides to its users. Interestingly, the company does not believe that its development is best-served by trying to mimic a LinkedIn experience, however: no plans for online education or professional development, or sharing content and news related to your professional life, but more work on improving recommendations and perhaps extending out the number of years where a user might find Handshake useful.

“We know where users went to school, and what they were looking for in a job,” Lord said. “What makes us different is that everyone is searching at the same time and that means a ton of information we can work with.”

Investors are happy with the focus and how Handshake plans to develop it.

“Since leading Handshake’s Series B in 2016, we’ve been thrilled to watch the company become the clear number one way for students to find internships and jobs, and there is still so much opportunity ahead,” said Will Reed, general partner at Spark Capital, in a statement. “Doubling down on our investment five years later underscores our belief that Handshake will not only help students build the skills and relationships they need to get their first job, but also expand into the $100 billion+ market of helping professionals advance their careers with second, third, and fourth jobs over time.”

Mental health has been put into the spotlight in a big way in recent times. For many of us, our lives and lifestyles have changed massively in the last year, and alongside that, we’re collectively facing pandemic-fueled mortality on a global scale in a way that hasn’t existed for generations, a perfect storm of sorts that has inevitably had an impact on our state of mind and our moods.

Today a startup that has built a platform to help people think about and respond to this situation is announcing a big round of growth funding, specifically to help address all of this and how it plays out in one of the more stress-inducing aspects of our life — our workplaces.

Unmind — a London startup that has built a mental health app for the workplace — has raised $47 million, a Series B that it will be using to continue investing in its research and development and also to expand its business reach. The funding is being led by EQT Ventures –- a very active investor at the moment in UK growth rounds — with participation also from Sapphire Ventures and previous backers Project A, Felix Capital, and True.

The core of Unmind’s service is an app built around a set of questions to help employees explore their own states of mental health, which could include depression, anxiety, insomnia, and a host of other manifestations. It provides advice and content to begin addressing the results of that — exercises, advice, podcasts, links for further reading, and links to seeing further help from professionals (not more machine interfaces, but humans). It also provides a service to the employers, sharing anonymized data from the app with them so that they, too, can consider how better to respond to their employees’ needs.

The app has seen some notable traction especially in the last year, a time when the conversation about mental health has become much more commonplace and critical, given the environment we’ve been living in.

Unmind does not disclose user numbers, nor how they have grown, but it tells me that uptake and adoption of its app ranges from 15% to over 60% of an organization’s workforce (this varies by size, and the emphasis that the organization itself puts on using the app, among other things). It said that of those employees who are using Unmind, 88% have said they experience an improvement in mental wellbeing, work, or relationships, while 92% report higher confidence, awareness, and understanding of mental health.

The company also said that revenues grew by more than 3x in the last 12 months. Meanwhile, its customers include major retailers like John Lewis and M&S, high street bank TSB, Uber, Samsung, Virgin Media, British Airways and Asos — a list of companies that have strong degrees of customer service around them, have been greatly impacted by the lockdowns, and you can imagine must have a lot of people working in them pretty stressed out as a result of being on the front lines of interfacing with a stressed-out wider population of consumers.

The company was co-founded by Dr Nick Taylor, who previously had been a clinical psychologist and worked for years in mental health care (and before that was a classically-trained singer), who said he came up with the idea after feeling like he was seeing too many people only for the first time at a stage when their issues were already very advanced.

“I kept encountering the same frustration time and again: I wish I’d met this person six months ago,” Taylor said in an interview.

As with all kinds of preventative healthcare, it’s always better to identify and work on issues before they grow big and more urgent, and so he set out to think about how one might approach the concept of a preventative check-up and check-in for mental health.

The workplace is not a bad place to base that effort. Not only is it often a source of stress for people, but it’s a regular place for them to be every day so creating a way of assessing mental health through that implicitly creates a kind of routine to the effort. It also potentially means a closer connection to the employer to work on issues more collectively when and if they emerge, in a way that the employer might not do (or ever discover) through other means.

The connection between work and mental health is a longstanding one but has perhaps been proven out more than ever before in the last year.

“I didn’t know what would happen with mental health during Covid,” Taylor recalled. “I actually wondered if it would be demoted,” given all of the other conflicting priorities. “But the prevalence of mental illness has escalated. It’s out of control. And in the workplace, it’s a leading cause of absenteeism and turnover.” And given how full-on everything has become, including likely more hours spent working since now it all has merged with our home lives, we all know (and may well be among) many people who are feeling incredibly burned out right now.

Taylor said that in fact quite the opposite has happened to his early skepticism: mental health has become front of mind, “and the shackles of stigma are falling away.”

This is part of what has really caught the eye of investors: technology that is not just effective, but very relevant to right now. “It is now universally recognized that our Mental Health is as important if not more important than our physical health – but has long been neglected. That is now changing rapidly,” said Alastair Mitchell, a partner at EQT Ventures. “As a result there has been a massive rise in the popularity of consumer mental health apps which is now being matched by surging demand from employers and employees for the same in the workplace. Unmind is the leading mental health app for the enterprise and we are so excited to work with Dr Nick and the team to support their scaling globally.” EQT is also a strategic investor, not just a financial one: it’s rolling out Unmind across its own workplace and its many portfolio companies.

Unmind, it should be noted, is not the only company that has identified this “opportunity,” if you could call it that. They include other startups like SF-based Ginger — which has also built a platform that partners with employers, but also healthcare providers and other stakeholders, to help people identify and manage their state of mind. Ginger has been well-capitalised over the years. Others in the same space include Welbot in New York, Spill also out of London and a host of others providing different aspects of mental wellness like Calm and Headspace, the meditation apps.

I’m inclined to think that, given the size of the problem and that mental health should not be a bunfight but something that takes a village to address, the key will be in how each company approaches its remit, and how people respond to it, and whether what people do ultimately use results in better bridges for employees to getting the help and peace they need, whether it’s from the app or a professional.

“We have a responsibility to connect with our mental health in the same way that we do when it comes to healthcare,” Taylor said, likening the effort to how it takes a number of skill sets sometimes to work on the complexities of a health issue. “Great healthcare integrates across a number of systems.”

When eventually they become a working reality, Quantum computers won’t be of much value if they simply sit there on their own. Just like the internet, the value is in the network. But right now there’s scant technology to link these powerful devices together.

That’s where QphoX comes in. Thus Dutch startup has raised €2 million to connect Quantum computers with a ‘Quantum modem’.

The funding round was led by Quantonation, Speedinvest, and High-Tech Gründerfonds, with participation from TU Delft.

QphoX aims to develop the Quantum Modem it created at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) into a commercial product. This networks separate processors together, allowing quantum computers to scale beyond 10’s or 100’s of qubits. Look out for the Singularity folks…

Simon Gröblacher, CEO and co-founder of QphoX told me: “It is the exact same thing as a classical modem except for quantum computers, so it kind of converts electrical and microwave signals to optical signals coherently, so you don’t do any of the quantum information in the process. It then converts it back so you can really have two quantum computers talk to one another.

I noted that there’s more than one type of quantum computer. He countered “We are in principle agnostic to what kind of quantum computer it is. All we do at the moment is we focus on the microwave part, so we can work with superconducting qubits, topological qubits etc. We can convert microwaves to optical signals and they can talk to each other. Currently, the only competitors I know are all the in the academic world. So this is we’re the first company to actually starts building a real product.”

Rick Hao, Principal with Speedinvest’s Deep Tech team, added: “ We want to invest in seed-stage deep technology startups that shape the future and QphoX is well-positioned to make a major impact. Over the next couple of years, there will be rapid progress in quantum computers. Quantum Modem, the product developed by QphoX, enables the development of quantum computers that demonstrate quantum advantage by combining separate quantum processors.”