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As IBM transitions from software and services to a company fully focussed on hybrid cloud management, it announced  its intention to buy Instana, an applications performance management startup with a cloud native approach that fits firmly within that strategy.

The companies did not reveal the purchase price.

With Instana, IBM can build on its internal management tools, giving it a way to monitor containerized environments running Kubernetes. It hopes by adding the startup to the fold it can give customers a way to manage complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

“Our clients today are faced with managing a complex technology landscape filled with mission-critical applications and data that are running across a variety of hybrid cloud environments – from public clouds, private clouds and on-premises,” Rob Thomas, senior vice president for cloud and data platform said in a statement. He believes Instana will help ease that load, while using machine learning to provide deeper insights.

At the time of the company’s $30 million Series C in 2018, TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois described the company this way. “What really makes Instana stand out is its ability to automatically discover and monitor the ever-changing infrastructure that makes up a modern application, especially when it comes to running containerized microservices.” That would seem to be precisely the type of solution that IBM would be looking for.

As for Instana, the founders see a good fit for the two companies, especially in light of the Red Hat acquisition in 2018 that is core to IBM’s hybrid approach. “The combination of Instana’s next generation APM and Observability platform with IBM’s Hybrid Cloud and AI technologies excited me from the day IBM approached us with the idea of joining forces and combining our technologies,” CEO Mirko Novakovic wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Indeed, in a recent interview IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC’s Jon Fortt, that they are betting the farm on hybrid cloud management with Red Hat at the center. When you combine that with the decision to spin out the company’s managed infrastructure services business, this purchase shows that they intend to pursue every angle

“The Red Hat acquisition gave us the technology base on which to build a hybrid cloud technology platform based on open-source, and based on giving choice to our clients as they embark on this journey. With the success of that acquisition now giving us the fuel, we can then take the next step, and the larger step, of taking the managed infrastructure services out. So the rest of the company can be absolutely focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence,” Krishna told CNBC.

Instana, which is based in Chicago with offices in Munich, was founded in 2015 in the early days of Kubernetes and the startup’s APM solution has evolved to focus more on the needs of monitoring in a cloud native environment. The company raised $57 million along the way with the most recent round being that Series C in 2018.

The deal per usual is subject to regulatory approvals, but the company believes it should close in the next few months.

Twitter has at various times acknowledged that Donald Trump isn’t bound by the same rules that govern the rest of us. This executive privilege has allowed him to continue posting comments that could have long ago gotten any normal person banned from the platform.

More recently, the service has sought to balance misinformation/disinformation with warning labels that alternately sit below or obscure the text. Twitter was adding these at a frenetic pace in the lead-up to the November 3 election. Labeling has slowed somewhat since then, but moderators have continued flagging a number of Trump’s tweets as his feed has pivoted into a barrage of false or misleading claims around election results.

At yesterdays congressional hearing, Twitter head Jack Dorsey reiterated that — once he has vacated the office — Trump will no longer be subject to the same manner of protections. “If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away,” the executive said.

What, precisely, that means remains to be seen of course — and, according to Republican Party leaders, at least, the timing of Trump’s transition to civilian life isn’t entirely certain. But it seems possible, at the very least, that Trump could be suspect to a suspension or ban once Twitter no longer considers his account a matter of public record in the same way.

Twitter offered TechCrunch the following statement regarding Trump’s post-presidency account a few weeks back: “A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable. With this in mind, there are certain cases where it may be in the public’s interest to have access to certain Tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules.”

The exceptions that get a sitting world leader banned or tweets deleted are decidedly more extreme than most, including:

• Promotion of terrorism;

• Clear and direct threats of violence against an individual (context matters: as noted above, direct interactions with fellow public figures and/or commentary on political and foreign policy issues would likely not result in enforcement);

• Posting private information, such as a home address or non-public personal phone number;

• Posting or sharing intimate photos or videos of someone that were produced or distributed without their consent;

• Engaging in behaviors relating to child sexual exploitation; and

• Encouraging or promoting self-harm.

As Dorsey noted during the hearing, Trump will (theoretically) lose those protections when he leaves office.

A group of more than 200 Facebook content moderators are demanding the tech company “stop needlessly risking moderators’ lives,” they wrote in an open letter to Facebook and the company’s contractors that manage content moderators, Accenture and Covalen. This comes after The Intercept reported how Facebook content moderators were required to come back into the office during the pandemic. Shortly after they returned to the office, a Facebook content moderator reportedly tested positive for COVID-19.

“After months of allowing content moderators to work from home, faced with intense pressure to keep Facebook free of hate and disinformation, you have forced us back to the office,” the group wrote. “Moderators who secure a doctors’ note about a personal COVID risk have been excused from attending in person.[1] Moderators with vulnerable relatives, who might die were they to contract COVID from us, have not.”

Moderators are now demanding Facebook allow those who are high-risk or live with someone who is high-risk for having a severe case of COVID-19 to be able to work from home indefinitely. Additionally, moderators generally want Facebook to maximize the amount of work people can do from home, offer hazard pay, offer healthcare and psychiatric care and employ moderators rather than outsource them.

“We appreciate the valuable work content reviewers do and we prioritize their health and safety,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. “While we believe in having an open internal dialogue, these discussions need to be honest. The majority of these 15,000 global content reviewers have been working from home and will continue to do so for the duration of the pandemic. All of them have access to health care and confidential wellbeing resources from their first day of employment, and Facebook has exceeded health guidance on keeping facilities safe for any in-office work.”

In the letter, moderators argue that Facebook’s algorithms are nowhere near where they need to be in order to successfully moderate content. They argue they’re “the heart” of Facebook.

“Without our work, Facebook is unusable,” the moderators wrote. “Its empire collapses. Your algorithms cannot spot satire. They cannot sift journalism from disinformation. They cannot respond quickly enough to self-harm or child abuse. We can.”

The group represents content moderators in throughout the U.S. and Europe and has support from legal advocacy firm Foxglove. Foxglove said in a tweet that it’s the “biggest joint international effort of Facebook content moderators yet.”

“Almost every business on earth is affected by weather,” says Alexander Levy, an investor serial entrepreneur whose latest company is the new weather prediction startup Atmo.

The company, which graduated from Y Combinator earlier this year, has recently raised $2 million from Signia Ventures and Sound Ventures for its predictive software, because sometimes businesses do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Atmo was founded by Johan Mathe, a former Google X employee who worked on Project Loon, the business unit focused on providing internet connectivity via floating balloons that would create a network of wireless coverage in emerging markets.

“I spent a lot of time working on weather,” said Mathe. It was his job to find ways for the balloons to navigate different areas and much of that navigation was complicated by weather patterns, he said.

“As I needed to build that there was so much complexity from the sheer amount of data with the weather,” Mathe said. “I thought I have to build something to make the intersection of weather and AI much more available for everyone.”

That was the beginning of a four year journey, which culminated in Atmo (formerly known as Froglabs.ai), the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup that’s providing predictive weather analysis for businesses ranging from renewable energy to ice cream shops.

Levy, who had co-founded the drug discovery company Atomwise, knew Mathe socially and initially invested in his company when it was just an idea. But  as he saw the value in weather data and made the jump from investor and advisor to co-founder.

Now Mathe, Levy, and chief technology officer Jeremy Lequeux all work from Levy’s Berkeley house as they develop their software and take their company to the next level.

And recent events make the need for the company’s services abundantly transparent. Since 2019, climate-related events have cost the US roughly $89 billion, according to data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Every business is on this weather spectrum,” said Levy. “Let’s say you just are an ice cream location. Degree to which it’s hot or cold will affect your sales 10%. We’ve worked towards creating a general purpose predictive system and takes weather data on one hand and all the historical weather collected around the world. It compares the two and analyzes how are all of your key business metrics affected by the weather.”

The company already has a half dozen customers including two billion-dollar businesses in the renewable energy and eCommerce and logistics industries, Levy said.

“One of the areas that we work on is risk and extreme weather, like how do you predict these fluke events that you have very little intervention around,” said Levy. “We make that kind of prediction separate and apart from how you can best optimize when things are in a relatively normal state.”

Demand is only going to increase as these extreme events become more common, because governments and businesses will be looking at ways to improve their ability to withstand or adapt to these catastrophic conditions. “There’s a need because everybody is talking about resilience these days,” said Levy. “I see Atmo as the company that’s going to provide these insights for the big companies that are concerned about this problem now.”

Google is launching a major redesign of its Google Pay app on both Android and iOS today. Like similar phone-based contactless payment services, Google Pay — or Android Pay as it was known then — started out as a basic replacement for your credit card. Over time, the company added a few more features on top of that but the overall focus never really changed. After about five years in the market, Google Pay now has about 150 million users in 30 countries. With today’s update and redesign, Google is keeping all the core features intact but also taking the service in a new direction with a strong emphasis on helping you manage your personal finances (and maybe get a deal here and there as well).

Google is also partnering with 11 banks to launch a new kind of bank account in 2021. Called Plex, these mobile-first bank accounts will have no monthly fees, overdraft charges or minimum balances. The banks will own the accounts but the Google Pay app will be the main conduit for managing these accounts. The launch partners for this are Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union.

Image Credits: Google

“What we’re doing in this new Google Pay app, think of it is combining three things into one,” Google director of product management Josh Woodward said as he walked me through a demo of the new app. “The three things are three tabs in the app. One is the ability to pay friends and businesses really fast. The second is to explore offers and rewards, so you can save money at shops. And the third is getting insights about your spending so you can stay on top of your money.”

Paying friends and businesses was obviously always at the core of Google Pay — but the emphasis here has shifted a bit. “You’ll notice that everything in the product is built around your relationships,” Caesar Sengupta, Google’s lead for Payments and Next Billion Users, told me. “It’s not about long lists of transactions or weird numbers. All your engagements pivot around people, groups, and businesses.”

It’s maybe no surprise then that the feature that’s now front and center in the app is P2P payments. You can also still pay and request money through the app as usual, but as part of this overhaul, Google is now making it easier to split restaurant bills with friends, for example, or your rent and utilities with your roommates — and to see who already paid and who is still delinquent. Woodward tells me that Google built this feature after its user research showed that splitting bills remains a major pain point for its users.

In this same view, you can also find a list of companies you have recently transacted with — either by using the Google Pay tap-and-pay feature or because you’ve linked your credit card or bank account with the service. From there, you can see all of your recent transactions with those companies.

Image Credits: Google

Maybe the most important new feature Google is enabling with this update is indeed the ability to connect your bank accounts and credit cards to Google Pay so that it can pull in information about your spending. It’s basically Mint-light inside the Google Pay app. This is what enables the company to offer a lot of the other new features in the app. Google says it is working with “a few different aggregators” to enable this feature, though it didn’t go into details about who its partners are. It’s worth stressing that this, like all of the new features here, is off by default and opt-in.

Image Credits: Google

The basic idea here is similar to that of other personal finance aggregators. At its most basic, it lets you see how much money you spent and how much you still have. But Google is also using its smarts to show you some interesting insights into your spending habits. On Monday, it’ll show you how much you spent on the weekend, for example.

“Think of these almost as like stories in a way,” Woodward said. “You can swipe through them so you can see your large transactions. You can see how much you spent this week compared to a typical week. You can look at how much money you’ve sent to friends and which friends and where you’ve spent money in the month of November, for example.”

This also then enables you to easily search for a given transaction using Google’s search capabilities. Since this is Google, that search should work pretty well and in a demo, the team showed me how a search for ‘Turkish’ brought up a transaction at a kebab restaurant, for example, even though it didn’t have ‘Turkish’ in its name. If you regularly take photos of your receipts, you can also now search through these from Google Pay and drill down to specific things you bought — as well as receipts and bills you receive in your Gmail inbox.

Also new inside of Google Pay is the ability to see and virtually clip coupons that are then linked to your credit card, so you don’t need to do anything else beyond using that linked credit card to get extra cashback on a given transaction, for example. If you opt in, these offers can also be personalized.

Image Credits: Google

The team also worked with the Google Lens team to now let you scan products and QR codes to look for potential discounts.

As for the core payments function, Google is also enabling a new capability that will let you use contactless payments at 30,000 gas stations now (often with a discount). The partners for this are Shell, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, 76 and Conoco.

In addition, you’ll also soon be able to pay for parking in over 400 cities inside the app. Not every city is Portland, after all, and has a Parking Kitty. The first cities to get this feature are Austin, Boston, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., with others to follow soon.

It’s one thing to let Google handle your credit card transaction but it’s another to give it all of this — often highly personal — data. As the team emphasized throughout my conversation with them, Google Pay will not sell your data to third parties or even the rest of Google for ad targeting, for example. All of the personalized features are also off by default and the team is doing something new here by letting you turn them on for a three-month trial period. After those three months, you can then decide to keep them on or off.

In the end, whether you want to use the optional features and have Google store all of this data is probably a personal choice and not everybody will be comfortable with it. The rest of the core Google Pay features aren’t changing, after all, so you can still make your NFC payments at the supermarket with your phone just like before.

Farmstead, a startup that operates an online grocery business while also selling software to other grocers, is announcing that it has raised $7.9 million in Series A funding.

While there’s been plenty of demand for grocery delivery this year, the major players like Instacart are making purchases and deliveries from existing supermarkets. Farmstead co-founder and CEO Pradeep Elankumaran said that this model puts a big constraint on the number of possible deliveries, which is why you may be struggling to get a delivery slot.

There have been fewer success stories around the Farmstead approach, where a company sells groceries from its own warehouse (and in Farmstead’s case, employs its own warehouse staff and drivers).

In fact, Elankumaran said that when the company started in 2016, “The warehouse model was incredibly unattractive to everyone else,” because of the operational headaches and expenses.

To address these issues, Elankumaran said Farmstead has built software to “re-orchestrate” warehouse operations and make them more efficient. The startup says it’s been able to reduce food waste by 3-4x, while also serving thousands of orders per day across a 50-mile radius, with no delivery fees, from each warehouse “hub.” In fact, in the startup’s first market of San Francisco, Farmstead is supposedly “marching towards profitability, and we’re very close at this point.”

Image Credits: Farmstead

Next up: Geographic expansion, starting in North Carolina, with Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham (where Farmstead just opened its wait list). Elankumaran said he’s hoping to launch between 15 and 30 new markets in the next 12 months.

“A better way of putting it is: Two years ago we were not ready [to expand], and right now we are ready,” he said.

In addition, Farmstead has started selling its Grocery OS software to other grocery businesses that want to move online. Elankumaran said that in some cases, the grocer may simply buy the software, while in others, Farmstead could also work with them to operate the warehouse. Either way, he said the key is the need to “fork the demand,” so that offline shoppers are going to one store, while online orders are being fulfilled from a separate location.

“You cannot get this industry online unless the capacity increases,” he said.

Elankumaran also said that while it can cost $10 million of dollars to open a new supermarket location, Farmstead can launch a hub in four to six weeks, at a cost of $100,000.

As for whether grocery stores have any hesitation about buying software from a potential competitor, Elankumaran said that the opposite is true — they trust Farmstead more because of “the fact that we’re not a B2B software company that has not operated a grocery store.”

Farmstead has now raised a total of $14.7 million. The Series A was led by Aidenlair Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Gelt VC, Duro, Maple VC, Heron Rock, 19 York, Red Dog Capital and others.

AI startup RealityEngines.AI changed its name to Abacus.AI in July. At the same time, it announced a $13 million Series A round. Today, only a few months later, it is not changing its name again, but it is announcing a $22 million Series B round, led by Coatue, with Decibel Ventures and Index Partners participating as well. With this, the company, which was co-founded by former AWS and Google exec Bindu Reddy, has now raised a total of $40.3 million.

Abacus co-founder Bindu Reddy, Arvind Sundararajan and Siddartha Naidu. Image Credits: Abacus.AI

In addition to the new funding, Abacus.AI is also launching a new product today, which it calls Abacus.AI Deconstructed. Originally, the idea behind RealityEngines/Abacus.AI was to provide its users with a platform that would simplify building AI models by using AI to automatically train and optimize them. That hasn’t changed, but as it turns out, a lot of (potential) customers had already invested into their own workflows for building and training deep learning models but were looking for help in putting them into production and managing them throughout their lifecycle.

“One of the big pain points [businesses] had was, ‘look, I have data scientists and I have my models that I’ve built in-house. My data scientists have built them on laptops, but I don’t know how to push them to production. I don’t know how to maintain and keep models in production.’ I think pretty much every startup now is thinking of that problem,” Reddy said.

Image Credits: Abacus.AI

Since Abacus.AI had already built those tools anyway, the company decided to now also break its service down into three parts that users can adapt without relying on the full platform. That means you can now bring your model to the service and have the company host and monitor the model for you, for example. The service will manage the model in production and, for example, monitor for model drift.

Another area Abacus.AI has long focused on is model explainability and de-biasing, so it’s making that available as a module as well, as well as its real-time machine learning feature store that helps organizations create, store and share their machine learning features and deploy them into production.

As for the funding, Reddy tells me the company didn’t really have to raise a new round at this point. After the company announced its first round earlier this year, there was quite a lot of interest from others to also invest. “So we decided that we may as well raise the next round because we were seeing adoption, we felt we were ready product-wise. But we didn’t have a large enough sales team. And raising a little early made sense to build up the sales team,” she said.

Reddy also stressed that unlike some of the company’s competitors, Abacus.AI is trying to build a full-stack self-service solution that can essentially compete with the offerings of the big cloud vendors. That — and the engineering talent to build it — doesn’t come cheap.

Image Credits: Abacus.AI

It’s no surprise then that Abacus.AI plans to use the new funding to increase its R&D team, but it will also increase its go-to-market team from two to ten in the coming months. While the company is betting on a self-service model — and is seeing good traction with small- and medium-sized companies — you still need a sales team to work with large enterprises.

Come January, the company also plans to launch support for more languages and more machine vision use cases.

“We are proud to be leading the Series B investment in Abacus.AI, because we think that Abacus.AI’s unique cloud service now makes state-of-the-art AI easily accessible for organizations of all sizes, including start-ups. Abacus.AI’s end-to-end autonomous AI service powered by their Neural Architecture Search invention helps organizations with no ML expertise easily deploy deep learning systems in production.”

After rising sharply in the second quarter of 2020, Robinhood’s income from routing its users’ orders to different parties for execution appears largely flat in the third quarter.

To be clear, Robinhood’s year-over-year growth is likely very impressive given the gains we’ve seen in the key revenue category for the heavily-funded unicorn this year. But, after torrid sequential growth from Q1 2020 to Q2 2020, Robinhood’s payment for order flow rose only modestly during Q3, according to a TechCrunch analysis of the company’s disclosures.

The data matters in the wake of news that Robinhood could go public as soon as the first quarter of 2021.

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Payment for order flow is a way that many brokerages make money, and by rule the data from the transactions is public. This provides a window into various fintech companies, both startup and incumbent that shows how quickly they are growing in this particular area. Robinhood has made the concept of payment for order flow better known thanks to its zero-fee model — order flow incomes are therefore key to its revenues — but it did not invent the practice.

Notably in the context of Robinhood’s slim Q3 order flow revenue growth, total equity trading volume was up in Q3, according to DriveWealth data. DriveWealth sells technology that powers equity trading for other companies.

So, the trading boom continues, which we read as bullish for Robinhood and similar players like Public (here’s the data from its securities provider, Apex. And, for fun, here’s E*Trade’s Q3 data.)

Still, a slowdown in growth of its payment for order flow revenue could decelerate Robinhood’s 2020 growth rate from simply bonkers to merely very good. And that could lower its potential IPO valuation from titanic to merely rich.

Let’s get into the numbers.

Robinhood’s Q3

Starting with some historical context, Robinhood’s payment for order flow revenues in preceding quarters are as follows:

• Q1 2020: $90.9 million
• Q2 2020: $177.9 million (This is around $6 million lower than we initially counted a few months back. In the spirit of fairness, I wanted to share the spreadsheet we used to tabulate both Q2 and Q3 Robinhood order flow revenues, but I am blocked from doing so by Verizon Media Group’s cybersecurity folks. Anyway, email in if you want to see the doc. Notably, The Block counts $180.1 million for Robinhood Q2 payment for order flow revenue. That number underscores our read that Robinhood order flow revenues were effectively flat in Q3 from Q2.)
  
  

The admissions process for international students applying to colleges is outdated. For starters, there is no Common App, the one-stop application that U.S. students are able to use to apply to a variety of schools in one go. Instead, international students must navigate thousands of schools, each having their own requirements and application process, on a one by one basis.

It’s a time-consuming and convoluted process, which is exactly where Nestlings, a Cupertino, California-based startup, comes in. Founded by Sowmya Satish, a former Apple product manager, and her husband, Raj Basavaraju, the startup is hoping to streamline the college admissions journey for international students.

Nearly 15 years ago, Basavaraju left Bangalore to pursue his master’s degree at Glasgow Caledonian University.

“When I was looking to study, I was not able to find a proper course, proper program, and I didn’t find much support,” he said. “It was not easy for me to get all the information I needed, like how safe it was, the lifestyle, and all of those things that are actually very important information.” So, he had the idea to put the information online and make it more accessible for other students who were interested in studying abroad.

At its core, Nestlings is a platform to help international students browse colleges in the United States, U.K., and Canada and apply to multiple colleges with one application. Beyond this service, Nestlings wants to help connect students to mentors in their potential fields to help with advice along the way, as well as place Nestlings students into post-graduate employment opportunities.

“Our goal is to help students build their career, not just be an admissions portal,” said Satish.

Nestlings is essentially itching to be part of a student’s entire professional life, from the moment they decide to pursue higher education to the jobs they apply to during and after graduation.

Nestlings, like any college recruitment platform, is only as successful as how many students use the platform. For that reason, Nestlings has made its service free for students, and instead charges fees to its partners, both universities and employers, whenever it places a student in one of those groups. The business works as a two-sided marketplace; it scales its students through word of mouth, and its institutions by promising recruitment results.

So far, Nestlings has more than 30,000 students on its platform. It has partnered with over 180 universities, and, more recently, signed a non-exclusive partnership with one of the largest testing centers in Southeast Asia. The testing center is part of Nestlings’ strategy to bring in more students without paying an agent fee or having to advertise.

As an early-stage startup, Nestlings has a huge competitor: ApplyBoard, which recently raised $75 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. ApplyBoard similarly helps international students navigate the abroad college application process, but is a massively bigger company in the late stage. The business did not immediately respond to request for comment on its thoughts about Nestlings.

Still, Nestlings is hoping to win by focusing its business more broadly on student success than simply college admissions. The focus is partly why Nestlings acquired AdmitAlly, a Cincinnati-based video chat platform that matches students with mentors and college applicants with current students.

“Especially in the pandemic, we didn’t want to waste time reinventing the wheel and saw an opportunity to fold the technology into Nestlings’ existing offerings quickly,” Satish said of the acquisition. “International recruiting is going to be tough this admissions cycle, as students can’t visit campuses and recruiters cannot travel abroad.”

AdmitAlly, which was founded by Anu Vora, was sold for an undisclosed price. However, as part of the deal, Vora became both a board director at Nestlings and, separately, an investor in the startup. In tandem with running AdmitAlly, Vora runs an investment firm and incubator, Candid Ventures. She put $1.5 million into the company in seed funding.

As higher education faces its own renovation from low enrollment and remote schooling, Nestlings is still betting on a long-term vision where international students will crave a United States education. The strategy will only pay off if that remains true.