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TikTok announced this morning it will expand the set of resources provided in its in-app election guide in the U.S. to include direct access to sites that help users get information about polling locations and hours, those that help people having voting difficulties, and those offering other details how the voting process works, and more. TikTok also said it’s working with the Associated Press (AP) to provide access to an interactive map showing live results for both federal and state elections, as well as ballot initiatives, in the updated guide.

This map will be updated with live results starting on Election Day, so TikTok users can check it at any time from within the app to get the most current information.

In addition to the AP, the expanded election guide will include FAQs from the National Association of Secretaries of State about the voting process itself. This section helps to explain details that may be new to TikTok’s younger user base — many who voted for the first time in this election. This information, which is summarized in the app, includes how election results are compiled and what to expect during the counting process.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok will also link out to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) website for information about polling locations and hours.

And it will link to the Election Protection Hotline number which provides assistance with voting difficulties in English, Spanish, Asian languages, and Arabic, as well as a video call option for American Sign Language.

Image Credits: TikTok

The election guide was first introduced in the TikTok app last month to help connect TikTok’s 100 million U.S. users to partner organizations that offered information about the candidates, how to vote, media literacy and more. At launch, the guide included information from the National Association of Secretaries of State, BallotReady, SignVote and several others.

The information is organized in an easy-to-read format, but TikTok itself is not creating the content — it’s pulled from partners and cited accordingly. In other cases, TikTok offers a short snippet of information with a link to the partner site to “learn more.”

TikTok users are today pointed to the guide by way of a banner that appears across all election-related videos. They can also choose to visit it directly from TikTok’s Discover Page, where it has a permanent home during election season.

With the update, if users encounter videos about the elections — for example, if a video discusses the current results — the user could tap the link to see the AP’s live election map. This could be useful because TikTok’s in-feed videos aren’t always the most recent.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok this summer announced expanded partnerships with PolitiFact and Lead Stories to fact check misinformation related to the 2020 U.S. election in its app, in addition to their work helping with misinformation related to COVID-19, climate change and other topics. It also claimed to be working with experts, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to protect against foreign influence on its platform.

And like other social media platforms, TikTok said it isn’t accepting political ads. However, unlike Facebook and Google, which only committed to temporary pauses on these ads before and after election day, TikTok announced its decision last year, explaining that the nature of political ads didn’t fit with the experience its users expect on its platform.

Ahead of today’s news about the expanded election guide, TikTok launched an Election Safety Center to increase transparency about how its policies apply to a range of election-related content.

While it’s not unusual for a large tech platform to offer election-related resources to their user base — Facebook, Google, Snapchat and Twitter all do the same — TikTok’s position is unique. The app is currently trying to fight off the Trump administration’s ban of its app in the U.S., and its long-term fate in the country is unknown.

Despite these issues, TikTok has not slowed on developing new features, adding resources, or expanding its platform in other ways. Just yesterday, for example, TikTok announced a partnership with Shopify over social commerce initiatives.

The pandemic has resulted in a growth spurt for gaming, an industry that was already growing on the backs of esports and Twitch streaming. So it makes sense that startups big and small are flocking to the industry to find their own place in the ecosystem.

One such company is Shotcall, founded by Thomas Gentle, Gordon Li, and Riley Auten, which aims to increase engagement for streamers by giving their fans what they really want: a chance to play alongside their favorite content creator.

The company today announced the close of a $2.2 million seed round led by Initial Capital, New Stack and Lerer Hippeau.

As it stands now, viewers who tune in to a Twitch stream only have so many ways of interacting with their favorite streamer, whether it’s gifting subscriptions to the channel or cheering with bits, Twitch’s virtual currency. Streamers with a smaller audience are often pretty engaged with their chat, but as they grow their audiences, it’s harder for viewers to stand out in the crowd.

And even if you do manage to stand out and get a shout out, that’s all it is. The streamer says thanks and reads your message and that’s that. Some streamers host games with their subscribers but organizing them can be tedious at best, and monetizing them is nearly impossible.

With Shotcall, streamers can engage with their fans in a way that not only gives that fan a chance to really connect with them, but that also creates more high-quality, shareable content.

The platform allows streamers to set up a tournament, coaching session, Q&A, charity event or whatever type of event they’d like, and fans can pay to get in on the action. Shotcall organizes these community events, giving the streamer control over the length of each gaming session, how much they’d like to charge to participate, and the rules of engagement (whether fans can use mics, curse on stream, etc.).

“Fans are at the center of the entire global value chain in the gaming world,” said Gentle. “They dictate what games are bought and which content creators rise and fall out of favor. They pay the bills for everything. And yet their interactions are weak. And if you take a look at the data, they have a high desire and a high willingness to pay more if you were to give them what they truly want. And that is engagement.”

The revenue split between hosts and Shotcall depends on the type of event, whether that streamer is a partner, etc. but the most Shotcall will ever take is 25 percent.

The company is in the process of integrating directly with Twitch and Discord (with bots) to make the process even more seamless.

Thus far, Shotcall has amassed around 350 active hosts and more than 4,500 fans have been active on the platform in the past two months.

MarketerHire, a Los Angeles-based startup backed by a slew of executives from some of the city’s hottest startups, launched its new service matching freelance marketing experts with open jobs listed on its platform. 

“Today’s startup economy depends on the expertise of industry specialists as much or more than full-time generalists,” said Nick Green, co-founder and CEO Thrive Market, MarketerHire customer and investor, in a statement. “For a lot of high-growth companies, it no longer makes sense to build a big in-house team; better to leverage the best specialists to get the job done, and MarketerHire enables that talent to be easily found and matched — and all remote.”

To date, the company has raised $4 million in financing from executives like Green and other undisclosed c-suite executives from startups like Zillow, FabFitFun, Seamless and Notion .

The company provides a pre-vetted pool of marketing experts and matches those professionals with open positions posted by brands and agencies based on the qualifications, education, skills and project details they submit. Brands can typically fill their open positions in as little as 48 hours, the company said.

The new upgrade to the company’s service provides brands with a faster matching service based on machine learning algorithms designed to parse available jobs over different attributes across specific functions.

“The term ‘marketing’ has morphed to broadly encompass a growing list of niche specialties and platform-specific skills — from SEO and SMS to Amazon and TikTok,” said investor Andy Appelbaum, Managing Partner of RiverPark Ventures and co-founder of Seamless, in a statement. “As the algorithms, best practices, and expertise required for effective digital marketing rapidly evolve, organizations need instant access to expert talent to fill gaps in their internal teams.”

The company already counts a customer base that includes Allbirds, Netflix, PUMA, and Quip and it pulls its marketing professionals from a roster of former marketing executives from companies like Netflix, Sephora, Rothy’s, Facebook, Uber, and Glossie. And the industry it’s tackling accounts for some $248.9 billion in business spending.

VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a mainstay of corporate network security (and also consumers trying to stream Netflix while pretending to be from other countries). VPNs create an encrypted channel between your device (a laptop or a smartphone) and a company’s servers. All of your internet traffic gets routed through the company’s IT infrastructure, and it’s almost as if you are physically located inside your company’s offices.

Despite its ubiquity though, there are significant flaws with VPN’s architecture. Corporate networks and VPN were designed assuming that most workers would be physically located in an office most of the time, and the exceptional device would use VPN. As the pandemic has made abundantly clear, fewer and fewer people work in a physical office with a desktop computer attached to ethernet. That means the vast majority of devices are now outside the corporate perimeter.

Worse, VPN can have massive performance problems. By routing all traffic through one destination, VPNs not only add latency to your internet experience, they also transmit all of your non-work traffic through your corporate servers as well. From a security perspective, VPNs also assume that once a device joins, it’s reasonably safe and secure. VPNs don’t actively check network requests to make sure that every device is only accessing the resources that it should.

Twingate is fighting directly to defeat VPN in the workplace with an entirely new architecture that assumes zero trust, works as a mesh, and can segregate work and non-work internet traffic to protect both companies and employees. In short, it may dramatically improve the way hundreds of millions of people work globally.

It’s a bold vision from an ambitious trio of founders. CEO Tony Huie spent five years at Dropbox, heading up international and new market expansion in his final role at the file-sharing juggernaut. He’s most recently been a partner at venture capital firm SignalFire . Chief Product Office Alex Marshall was a product manager at Dropbox before leading product at lab management program Quartzy. Finally, CTO Lior Rozner was most recently at Rakuten and before that Microsoft.

Twingate founders Alex Marshall, Tony Huie, and Lior Rozner. Photo via Twingate.

The startup was founded in 2019, and is announcing today the public launch of its product as well as its Series A funding of $17 million from WndrCo, 8VC, SignalFire and Green Bay Ventures. Dropbox’s two founders, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, also invested.

The idea for Twingate came from Huie’s experience at Dropbox, where he watched its adoption in the enterprise and saw first-hand how collaboration was changing with the rise of the cloud. “While I was there, I was still just fascinated by this notion of the changing nature of work and how organizations are going to get effectively re-architected for this new reality,” Huie said. He iterated on a variety of projects at SignalFire, eventually settling on improving corporate networks.

So what does Twingate ultimately do? For corporate IT professionals, it allows them to connect an employee’s device into the corporate network much more flexibly than VPN. For instance, individual services or applications on a device could be setup to securely connect with different servers or data centers. So your Slack application can connect directly to Slack, your JIRA site can connect directly to JIRA’s servers, all without the typical round-trip to a central hub that VPN requires.

That flexibility offers two main benefits. First, internet performance should be faster, since traffic is going directly where it needs to rather than bouncing through several relays between an end-user device and the server. Twingate also says that it offers “congestion” technology that can adapt its routing to changing internet conditions to actively increase performance.

More importantly, Twingate allows corporate IT staff to carefully calibrate security policies at the network layer to ensure that individual network requests make sense in context. For instance, if you are salesperson in the field and suddenly start trying to access your company’s code server, Twingate can identify that request as highly unusual and outright block it.

“It takes this notion of edge computing and distributed computing [and] we’ve basically taken those concepts and we’ve built that into the software we run on our users’ devices,” Huie explained.

All of that customization and flexibility should be a huge win for IT staff, who get more granular controls to increase performance and safety, while also making the experience better for employees, particularly in a remote world where people in, say, Montana might be very far from an East Coast VPN server.

Twingate is designed to be easy to onboard new customers according to Huie, although that is almost certainly dependent on the diversity of end users within the corporate network and the number of services that each user has access to. Twingate integrates with popular single sign-on providers.

“Our fundamental thesis is that you have to balance usability, both for end users and admins, with bulletproof technology and security,” Huie said. With $17 million in the bank and a newly debuted product, the future is bright (and not for VPNs).

Many smart home gadgets focus on convenience or automation of typically manual tasks, but Flume’s smart water sensor provides a potentially much more vital service: The ability to track how much water you’re consuming, and alert you to potential leaks in you home’s plumbing. The company just released its second-generation Flume Smart Home Water Monitor ($199), and the device is easier to set up and use, and smarter than ever.

The basics

Flume’s Smart Home Water Monitor consists of a device you affix to your water meter, and a gateway that connects it to your home wifi network. Installation is super simple and requires no plumbing or any kind of home DIY expertise. The Flume app guides you through installation, and in most cases you should be up and running in under 10 minutes – plus Flume has live assistance available via chat through the app in case you get stuck.

The Flume monitor provides up-to-date information about your whole home’s water usage, including any consumption from interior or exterior faucets, plumbing and fixtures. It can alert you when it detects suspected leaks based on water behavior, and help you budget your water use if you’re looking to save on your utility bill, or just conserve more water through more efficient usage.

Design and features

The Flume meter is a very impressive example of technology designed for use by just about anyone, anywhere. It doesn’t have its own display or interface, and instead works entirely through the app, but that simplicity is part of its genius. The water monitor itself is encased in a simple gray plastic box, which you attach to your water meter externally using the included rubber straps. All it needs is to be placed on the side of where your meter’s readout is located, and then it’s activated by you simply running water through your system by turning on a faucet. It’s reading the magnetic field generated by your water meter, which the company says can detect any water usage all the way down to one one-hundredth of a gallon – i.e., a slowly dripping faucet.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

The meter is powered by 4 AA batteries that come pre-installed, and you can see the battery status in the app, but those should last a very long time. The meter talks to a Flume bridge, which does need to be connected to power but can be set up pretty much anywhere within wifi range in your home. The final component is the app, which is available for iOS and Android, and which provides a dashboard visualizing your usage, as well as push notifications you can set up for when the Flume system detects a leak.

In practice, set up is a breeze, and it’s truly amazing how much detail and information Flume can provide given how easy it is to install and use. The data itself is also incredibly fascinating, and truly resulted in my being more aware about my general water consumption, how it affects my monthly utility bills, and how I might be able to conserve water going forward. My home actually didn’t have a dishwasher when I originally installed the Flume 2, for instance, and I realized how much more water I was using hand-washing dishes vs. putting in a small, water efficient 18-inch dishwasher instead – which was proven out by the Flume data.

Bottom line

You might not realize you need a smart home water sensor, but Flume 2 makes a strong case for everyone investing in one. The simple, practical design and user-friendly app instantly make you a much more informed consumer of water, and can save you a bundle in the long run by detecting leaks early and preventing any more serious and damaging flooding incidents. It also just feels good to be aware of what you’re using, and being able to translate that into direct action to save a little water here and there, for the good of the environment and your monthly spending.

Ad-based platforms can face a lot of heat from advertisers when they can’t control how and where their ads run: just look back to the ad boycott against Facebook earlier this year (or earlier boycotts against YouTube and others) as examples of when it all goes wrong. One of the ways this is getting addressed is with tech; and today, DoubleVerify, one of the companies that has been building tools to improve how those two interplay together, is announcing that it has closed a monster round of $350 million to continue with that work.

DoubleVerify provides tools to advertisers and brands, marketplaces and publishers — longtime customers include the likes of Facebook, which provides it as a tool for advertising clients to use in their analytics dashboard. Its tech can detect fraud (essentially verifying that you are paying for actual people, not bots, to see your ads), “viewability” (making sure ads are in formats that don’t go wonky depending on devices and so on), and brand safety (eg, making sure your soda pop ad is not running as a preroll to a Covid conspiracy video).

The round is being led by Tiger Global, with Fidelity, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and funds advised by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC also participating, among others. DoubleVerify says that Providence Equity Partners, which took a controlling stake in the company in 2017, remains the majority investor. It is not disclosing its valuation but in 2017, the Providence investment valued it at $300 million, according to PitchBook data.

The company said that this new investment — which it expects to close in Q4 2020 — will primarily be used for secondary purposes, purchasing shares from existing shareholders, with part also going to investing in the business itself in newer areas of business such as connected TV analytics.

“The support of these high caliber investors speaks to DoubleVerify’s momentum, including new customer growth, product innovation and global expansion,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify, in a statement. Zagorski joined the company in July of this year, having previously been at the Rubicon Project.

DoubleVerify’s rise comes at a key moment in the world of online media.

Sites built on the complementary streams of advertising and user-generated/shared content have been navigating tricky waters, especially in recent times with the proliferation of misinformation related to Covid-19, the US elections, and increasing unrest over social issues like racism.

Those sites want traffic and engagement to continue growing, but that also means — especially these days — coming up against controversial material that raises the hackles of brands and other ad customers who don’t want to be associated with it.

While sites continue to try to hone their terms and conditions and content policies, and policing tactics, the whole situation continually feels like a leaky bucket, with iffy material always coming through regardless (and that’s before you consider the pesky presence of bots on on these platforms, which not only turn the wheels of virality and activity but, yes, count as “viewers” of ads).

Groups like DoubleVerify serve — pardon the pun — a double purpose. They are both there to provide more visibility and control for brands and the platforms themselves; but they also can be held up by the parties as an example of best-effort investments, using third-party sources to improve the quality of what the companies themselves are doing firsthand.

“We look forward to partnering with Mark and the entire DoubleVerify management team as the Company continues the growth of its business globally,” said John Curtius, Partner, Tiger Global, in a statement.

Brand safety and the related areas here are starting to get increasing focus with the proliferation of problematic content, and advertisers’ backlash against it. Others that have invested in tools to address it have included Oracle, AppLovin, and Cheq, among others.

“The DoubleVerify team has consistently executed across all levels of the business,” added Davis Noell, senior MD at Providence and chairman of DoubleVerify’s board, in a statement. “We welcome the investment by Tiger and these other premier investment firms, and we are excited to continue to support the Company.”

This investment comes weeks after the company inked a new $150 million revolving credit facility led by Capital One.

With many restaurants forced to rely entirely on the delivery and takeout business during the pandemic, there’s been a lot of discussion about the industry can survive while paying hefty fees to delivery platforms like Uber Eats and Grubhub.

Lunchbox, on the other hand, is a startup that allows restaurants to build  ordering experiences on their own websites and apps. Today, it’s announcing that it’s raised $20 million in Series A funding.

CEO Nabeel Alamgir knows the industry well, having served as Bareburger’s CMO — a position he rose to after starting out as a busboy at New York City chain’s first location. He told me that he isn’t expecting restaurants to abandon third-party delivery platforms — but if they can handle more and more online orders themselves, they’ll more money while also delivering personalized promotions to their most loyal customers.

“You don’t want to lose a customer to these marketplaces,” Alamgir said. “You should be on these channels, but you should also invite your customers to order from you directly.”

That’s why Alamgir founded Lunchbox with Andrew Boryk and Hadi Rashid last year. He said that it took them more than 100 days to build ordering systems for for their first customers — which put them ahead of other restaurant ordering platforms, but they’ve been working hard to reduce that on-boarding process, which is now down to 44 days.

And next year, he’s hoping to move to a self-serve model, which would make Lunchbox accessible to small, independent restaurants, not just the chains and restaurant groups (like Bareburger, Clean Juice and Fuku) that it currently works with.

The startup says that when a customers starts working with Lunchbox, it usually sees a 30% increase in sales. And the startup’s own customer base has grown 925% over the last year.

Alamgir also noted that Lunchbox allows restaurants to embrace new business models, like delivery via cloud kitchens. In fact, one of Lunchbox’s partners is Ordermark, which just raised $120 million as it moves to a cloud kitchen model. The startup also been experimenting with autonomous delivery through partnerships with Sodexo and Kiwibot, and it recently partnered with sbe to create a “virtual food hall” where diners can combine food from different restaurants into a single order.

Alamgir predicted that as investors look at new restaurant businesses post-pandemic, one of their key questions will be, “Can we open this on the third floor [where the rent is more affordable]? Can this be a delivery-only experience?” At the same time, he’s not suggesting that those will ever fully replace the in-person dining experience.

“The outfit and the mindset you have when go out to eat is different from when you eat at home and watch Netflix in your pajamas,” he said. “Those different kinds of dinners, and with off-premise dining, there’s an opportunity to innovate significantly.”

The round was led by Coatue, with participation from 645 and Primary Ventures, as well as chef Tom Colicchio, Behance founder Scott Belsky, former Venmo COO Michael Vaughan, HelloFresh founder Bryan Ciambella, Planet Hollywood founder Robert Earl and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani. Coatue’s Rahul Kishore and Bennett Siegel are joining Lunchbox’s board of directors.

“Local businesses have been hard hit this year, but we think Lunchbox can help enable these businesses to move online, engage with their customers digitally, and build back stronger than ever,” Kishore said in a statement.

According to Alamgir, the new funding will allow Lunchbox to bring on more restaurants, improve its product (one of his big goals is to become agnostic next year with regards to point-of-sale systems) and to expand the team.

Many of today’s most successful software companies, from Atlassian and Datadog to Zoom, subscribe to the bottom-up SaaS go-to-market model. In this model, the user purchases software directly from a website, without ever speaking to a sales person. The product essentially sells itself.

The bottom-up model has a few key benefits: Companies spend dramatically less on sales than their peers, allowing them to invest more in product; they can sustain hypergrowth for longer because they are not as reliant on raw sales headcount to win business; and they tend to be more profitable in the long run, leading to premium valuations.

For all these reasons, more and more SaaS startups are choosing to adopt the bottom-up go-to-market model. But for every Atlassian or Zoom, there are many more companies that fail — often because they don’t understand the hidden challenges and costs that come with the bottom-up model.

Before proceeding further, it’s important to note that bottom-up is not the right starting strategy for every company. A few quick ways to see if bottom-up is the right place to start for you:

1. Product: People can easily try your product.
2. Decision-maker: Your decision-maker is a line-level employee (not C-Suite).
3. Users: Teams and individuals can get value from your product (doesn’t have to be full enterprise roll-out).
4. Data: The data involved isn’t something that compliance would need to review.

For companies that meet these criteria, there are three important questions that you must be able to answer:

1. Who needs to work together to make a bottom-up SaaS model work?
2. What is the value you deliver to your customer and how do you determine pricing that matches that value?
3. When do you hire a sales team? (Spoiler alert — it’s sooner than you think!)

In this piece, we will tackle each of those questions in turn and share some of the best answers we’ve seen from companies that are making it work.

Who needs to work together to make a bottom-up SaaS model work?

Unlike most traditional companies who rely on a head of sales to keep tabs on customers and how much each one is paying, most successful bottom-up companies rely on a combination of product, sales, customer support, marketing and community teams to manage revenue.

There’s a new company that’s sitting on top of some of the fastest growing consumer-facing businesses in the world — liquor and marijuana delivery — and its name is Pacific Consolidated Holdings Group.

The investment firms and executive teams behind the Los Angeles-based delivery liquor delivery company, Saucey, along with Inception Companies, the backer of marijuana distribution company, Emjay, have formed Pacific Consolidated to merge their two companies and build what’s likely the largest “vice” company in the world.

(Although in a global pandemic and period of political tumult unseen since the 1960s, what even is vice anymore anyway?)

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The merger is the first step of what’s a planned rollup strategy for PCH (also the nickname for the highway that runs along the California Coast), which aims to be the leading vertically integrated vice platform focusing on e-commerce, delivery logistics, and cross industry behavioral insights.

As the co-founder of Saucey and now chief executive of PCH, Chris Vaughn, said: “Everyone in the liquor industry is thinking about the marijuana business and everyone in marijuana is looking at liquor.”

Both Vaughn and his Saucey co-founder Daniel Leeb will take management positions at PCH, and Blumberg Capital and Bullpen will have a large equity stake in the newly formed holding company, Vaughn said.

“We’ve spent the past decade in bev-alc at the forefront of providing solutions to changing consumer shopping behaviors. What we’ve seen is a more exploratory customer than the industry recognizes, ready to try new form factors, products and categories. The one consistent theme is they want to be able to discover and shop these products conveniently, and to be able to trust their platform of choice,” said Vaughn in a statement. “The strength of PCH is that we’re able to provide unparalleled and personalized cross-industry shopping experiences to consumers, while also having the data to understand customer behaviors between cannabis, alcohol, tobacco and CPG. When you combine this with the diversified infrastructure of PCH and the incredible team we have working on these opportunities, it gives us the flexibility and the foundation for best serving the future of these industries.”

Saucey launched in 2014 and now operates across 22 markets including LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, New York City, Chicago, Washington, Dallas, Orlando, Tampa and Miami.

Its sales growth has expanded 200% year-over-year even as the company maintains its profitability, according to a statement. The liquor side of the PCH business is indeed incredibly strong.

And of the 1 million users that the company surveyed (most in its largest market — California, which is perhaps one of the most mature consumer markets for cannabis consumption in the US) an overwhelming majority of 70% said they’d like to see integrated marijuana and liquor delivery services.

While Emjay was only formed a year ago, the company had built a groundwork of distribution, cultivation, and production licenses as it was getting off the ground. Formed by the Inception Companies, Emjay brought in Vaughn as an advisor to the company early on and as the company grew, so did the recognition among the investors and operators of the potential for a powerful merger, Vaughn said.

With Emjay, not only does PCH get a distribution company, but since it also acts a vertical operator the company can deliver marijuana products to consumers at a far lower cost than its competition.

Vaughn and Leeb have actually been operating the Emjay business since January and have grown the company’s revenues from less than $100,000 in transaction volume to the seven-figure sales that the company currently enjoys. And Emjay itself became a profitable business earlier this year, according to a statement. Now, the focus is on growing its footprint within Saucey’s massive California user base.

While there was a surge of interest and investment into the cannabis business in the industry’s early years following its legalization in certain states back in 2014, many of the market’s early leaders fell on hard times in 2019 as legal hurdles, grey market suppliers, a crisis in the vaping industry, and a lack of professionalization took their toll on the industry.

It’s a storm that Omar Mangalji, the former Goldman Sachs banker turned Los Angeles gadfly who co-founded the Inception Companies (and sometimes goes by the name Ronnie Bacardi).

“The broader cannabis market has largely struggled due to weak underlying fundamentals and poor management. But much like the dashed expectations that came with the rise and fall in the DotCom era, this industry is now evolving into Cannabis 2.0.”, Mangalji said in a statement.

With the merger of the two companies, Saucey users can create an Emjay account with their existing login and toggle between the two services simply by tapping on an icon.

Kandji, a mobile device management (MDM) startup, launched last October. That means it was trying to build the early stage company just as the pandemic hit earlier this year. But a company that helps manage devices remotely has been in demand in this environment, and today it announced a $21 million Series A.

Greycroft led the round with participation from new investors Okta Ventures and B
Capital Group, and existing investor First Round Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $28.4 million, according to the company.

What Kandji is building is  a sophisticated zero-touch device management solution to help larger companies manage their fleet of Apple devices, including keeping them in compliance with a particular set of rules. As CEO and co-founder Adam Smith told TechCrunch at the time of his seed investment last year:

“We’re the only product that has almost 200 of these one-click policy frameworks we call parameters. So an organization can go in and browse by compliance framework, or we have pre-built templates for companies that don’t necessarily have a specific compliance mandate in mind,” he said.

Monty Gray, SVP of corporate development at Okta, says Okta Ventures is investing because he sees this approach as a valuable extension of his company’s mission.

“Kandji’s device management streamlines the most common and complex tasks for Apple IT administrators and enables distributed workforces to get up and running quickly and securely,” he said in a statement.

It seems to be working. Since the company’s launch last year it reports it has gained hundreds of new paying customers and grown from 10 employees at launch to 40 today. He has plans to triple that number in the next 12 months. As he builds the company, he says finding and hiring a diverse pool of candidates is an important goal.

“There are ways to extend out into different candidate pools so that you’re not just looking at the same old candidates that you normally would. There are certain ways to reduce bias in the hiring process. So again, I think we look at this as absolutely critical, and we’re excited to build a really diverse company over the next several years,” he said.

Image Credits: Kandji

He said the investment will not only enable him to build the employee base, but also expand the product too. He says in the past year, it has already taken it from basic MDM into compliance and there are new features coming as they continue to grow the product.

“If someone saw our product a year ago, it’s a very different product today, and it’s allowed us to move up market into the enterprise, which has been very exciting for us,” he said.