Category: UNCATEGORIZED

With the employment market remaining sluggish as the world continues to struggle with Covid-19, a company that has built its popular businesses largely around recruitment is launching a redesign that pushes engagement in other ways as it waits for the job economy to pick up.

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned site now with 706 million registered users, where professionals network and look for work, is today taking the wraps off a new redesign of its desktop and mobile apps, its first in four years. And within that, LinkedIn is introducing several new things. First and foremost, starting in the US and Canada and then expanding globally, LinkedIn is rolling out its own version of Stories — the popular, ephemeral video and photo narratives that have become a major engagement engine on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. It’s also updating its direct messaging service with several new features like video chat. And it’s rebuilt its search feature to net in a wider set of parameters.

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The message to LinkedIn’s user base is this: we can be useful in other ways.

LinkedIn has been, to be sure, working on ways to make itself and its job tools particularly relevant to people in the last eight months, which have been truly outside of everyone’s previous norms, with its own takes on helping connect people together. But it’s also come under fire for not necessarily acting fast enough when its hat as recruitment network hasn’t been used very well.

Today’s news, in a way, doesn’t draw a line under all that — indeed, LinkedIn will very much hope to continue being a recruitment go-to as it picks up, even if job posting has really slowed down of late — but it is the company’s demonstration of its other purposes.

“The effort didn’t start with Covid, but over the last few years we’ve tried to diversify, by bringing the social network and conversations aspects of our platform to the forefront,”  and Kiran Prasad, LinkedIn’s VP of product, in an interview.

Stories have been one of the most notable developments across all social media in recent years, so it’s not too much of a surprise to see LinkedIn also jumping on the bandwagon. It started testing them about a while ago in a handful of countries — Brazil, Netherlands, UAE, Australia, and France — and the company said that “millions” of Stories have been shared in that time across hundreds of thousands of conversations. As you would expect, the subjects focus more on things like work life, influencer types speaking to their LinkedIn audiences — the video equivalents, in other words, of the kind of content LinkedIn is already known for, but now in a more engaging format. For now, Prasad said that there are no ads in these, but the plan will be to bring these in eventually.

Messaging, meanwhile, has been one of the more popular services on LinkedIn, allowing for more private conversations between connections and would-be contacts. The site doesn’t disclose usage numbers but says that messages sent are up by 25% in the last year.

That will be something LinkedIn also hopes to boost, again with a turn to video. In this instance, it’s announcing integrating with Zoom, BlueJeans (disclaimer: owned by Verizon, which also owns us), and Microsoft’s Teams for video chats. I have to admit, I’m really surprised it’s taken LinkedIn so long to bring video chat into its messaging service, but better late than never.

Alongside that, it’s also bringing in the ability to recall, delete and edit messages (hear that, Twitter?); respond with emoji’s (already widely used in business communication thanks to them being a part of Slack and other collaboration tools, as well as smartphone keyboards); and tools that flag incendiary and other harassing content.

The search updates, finally, are one more way that LinkedIn is trying to improve how people engage across the whole of its platform. Results now will include not just people and companies, but jobs, courses, events and other content, “making it easier for members to find what they need, and also explore other aspects of LinkedIn they may not have known existed,” in the words of new CEO Ryan Roslansky. Keywords will still be king, but if you search on a word like “Java,” he said, results will include not just people with that skill, but jobs, courses, groups and, yes, Stories, focused on it. 

The bigger design focus of the redesign, meanwhile, is best described as a shift to more “warmth.” That might seem like an odd term to associate with LinkedIn, and I’m frankly not sure how well a social networking site for professionals will wear it, but the company is shifting to less of the cold “LinkedIn Blue”, bigger lettering for more accessibility, and more images with less text.

We may still be in the knowledge economy, but LinkedIn’s new approach seems less intent on trying to remind you of that. Indeed as work and home life become one for many of us, so too is LinkedIn trying to cross that chasm itself.

Cryptocurrency meets carbon trading.

That’s the pitch from Nori, a new Seattle-based startup, that just raised $4 million in funding from cryptocurrency focused investors including Placeholder, North Island Ventures, Tenacious Ventures, and a big, privately held agriculture multinational that the company declined to disclose.

Founded by Paul Gambill, a former Deloitte Technology employee who left the firm in 2015 to begin working on a company that would tackle climate change, Nori uses blockchain to solve the “double counting” that exists in the carbon offset market.

“Every single carbon credit that has been sold across international borders has been counted twice,” said Gambill. “When a project happens, the carbon credit themselves are the assets that someone then sells to someone else. They sell that to a broker who sells it on to someone else. If you see carbon trading in markets… it’s the same ton that is trading hands over and over and over again.”

Using the example of a rainforest preservation project in Brazil as an example, Gambill said that both the Brazilian originators of a project and the international purchaser of the credits will count the project in their own carbon emissions mitigation accounting.

“It’s a silly problem that can easily be solved by double entry bookkeeping but no one is doing it,” Gambill said. And while many companies are now buying and immediately retiring carbon offsets so they can’t trade again on open markets, those transactions only represent a fraction of the total volume of offset sales, according to Gambill. 

Gambill believes that carbon markets are the right solution for the climate change problem, which he sees as a matter of engineering.

“In 2015 I left and I wanted to work on something that was bigger and more important and climate change seemed like an obvious thing to me,” Gambill said. “I’ve been thinking about this as more of an engineering project. The CO2 is in the wrong location and we have to move it. This is the next great engineering project that humanity must undertake… by 2017 i had put together a team and a business model and we were off to the races.”

The problem that Gambill set out to solve in 2017 was the way carbon markets have failed to operate. By separating out the certificate for the offsets from the payment mechanisms. Buyers pay using Nori’s token and a token is always good for one ton of sequestered emissions, but the price of the token will fuluctuate based on supply and demand.

“We want a commodities market where people are speculating on and buying and selling, but we don’t want to do that on the actual carbon itself,” Gambill said. 

The company operates an ecommerce front end where people can buy Nori tokens to offset their purchases (the company already has a customer in Shopify) and then there are trading mechanisms where Nori will list its token to trade on exchanges that also address carbon emissions mitigation and financing for projects. “We will have auction in our application in the future,” Gambill said. It’s another step on the company’s roadmap toward becoming an api for carbon removal that integrates into any platform or application.

If that vision sounds familiar, that’s because Nori’s not alone in attempting to develop the api for carbon offsets.

Companies like Wren and Cloverly are also pursuing emissions reductions, but Gambill says that they’re approaching the issue from the wrong side of the equation. While Cloverly and Wren are coming up with ways to sell existing carbon credits based on customer demand, Nori’s Gambill argues that his company is tackling the supply side of the equation by promoting the development of new carbon sequestration projects starting with farmland.

The company has a convincing collaborator in Comet Farm, a greenhouse gas accounting and reporting system developed by the US Department of Agriculture, that’s working with Nori on its emissions reductions accounting framework.

Cryptocurrency meets carbon trading.

That’s the pitch from Nori, a new Seattle-based startup, that just raised $4 million in funding from cryptocurrency focused investors including Placeholder, North Island Ventures, Tenacious Ventures, and a big, privately held agriculture multinational that the company declined to disclose.

Founded by Paul Gambill, a former Deloitte Technology employee who left the firm in 2015 to begin working on a company that would tackle climate change, Nori uses blockchain to solve the “double counting” that exists in the carbon offset market.

“Every single carbon credit that has been sold across international borders has been counted twice,” said Gambill. “When a project happens, the carbon credit themselves are the assets that someone then sells to someone else. They sell that to a broker who sells it on to someone else. If you see carbon trading in markets… it’s the same ton that is trading hands over and over and over again.”

Using the example of a rainforest preservation project in Brazil as an example, Gambill said that both the Brazilian originators of a project and the international purchaser of the credits will count the project in their own carbon emissions mitigation accounting.

“It’s a silly problem that can easily be solved by double entry bookkeeping but no one is doing it,” Gambill said. And while many companies are now buying and immediately retiring carbon offsets so they can’t trade again on open markets, those transactions only represent a fraction of the total volume of offset sales, according to Gambill. 

Gambill believes that carbon markets are the right solution for the climate change problem, which he sees as a matter of engineering.

“In 2015 I left and I wanted to work on something that was bigger and more important and climate change seemed like an obvious thing to me,” Gambill said. “I’ve been thinking about this as more of an engineering project. The CO2 is in the wrong location and we have to move it. This is the next great engineering project that humanity must undertake… by 2017 i had put together a team and a business model and we were off to the races.”

The problem that Gambill set out to solve in 2017 was the way carbon markets have failed to operate. By separating out the certificate for the offsets from the payment mechanisms. Buyers pay using Nori’s token and a token is always good for one ton of sequestered emissions, but the price of the token will fuluctuate based on supply and demand.

“We want a commodities market where people are speculating on and buying and selling, but we don’t want to do that on the actual carbon itself,” Gambill said. 

The company operates an ecommerce front end where people can buy Nori tokens to offset their purchases (the company already has a customer in Shopify) and then there are trading mechanisms where Nori will list its token to trade on exchanges that also address carbon emissions mitigation and financing for projects. “We will have auction in our application in the future,” Gambill said. It’s another step on the company’s roadmap toward becoming an api for carbon removal that integrates into any platform or application.

If that vision sounds familiar, that’s because Nori’s not alone in attempting to develop the api for carbon offsets.

Companies like Wren and Cloverly are also pursuing emissions reductions, but Gambill says that they’re approaching the issue from the wrong side of the equation. While Cloverly and Wren are coming up with ways to sell existing carbon credits based on customer demand, Nori’s Gambill argues that his company is tackling the supply side of the equation by promoting the development of new carbon sequestration projects starting with farmland.

The company has a convincing collaborator in Comet Farm, a greenhouse gas accounting and reporting system developed by the US Department of Agriculture, that’s working with Nori on its emissions reductions accounting framework.

Bangalore-based Rephrase.ai has an ambitious vision for reshaping how movies and videos are made.

CEO Ashray Malhotra laid it out for me yesterday, saying that his co-founder Nisheeth Lahoti “came up with this concept — he wants to build an engine that can take any script as input and create a professional movie,” no filming required.

But Rephrase.ai is starting with what Malhotra said is a more “short-term, monetizable” goal: Offering technology that makes it easy to create personalized sales videos.

The startup was part of the Techstars Bangalore program in 2019 and is announcing today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and AV8 Ventures.

Malhotra demonstrated the technology for me, showing me how a salesperson can select a model, a background and a voice, and enter text that the model will recite. They can then export that video for use in a variety of sales tools.

This is valuable for, he said, because sending personalized video messages in sales emails can lead to “an insane increase” in clickthrough rates. But creating all those videos can be a huge chore, if not downright impossible.

And while there are plenty of other startups working on synthetic media, Malhotra said Rephrase.ai is set apart by the 18 months the team spent developing technology that can take 10 minutes of footage and “predict how the lip movements of the person would have been if you’d shot them [saying any phrase] in an actual studio.”

You can see the results for yourself in the video above. Personally, I was impressed by the lip movements but disconcerted by the fact that Rephrase.ai customers can pair any model with any voice, leading to some strange combinations that feel more like badly dubbed movie than an effective sales pitch.

When I brought this up, Malhotra replied that some clients will want to take the time “perfecting it out, finding the right voices, the right costumes, the right personality of the actors,” while other clients might be fine spending less time to create something a little less convincing.

It’s also worth noting that Rephrase.ai has several policies designed to prevent the creation of deceptive deepfakes: Presenters can control who has the authority to create videos using their faces, the platform is only open to authorized businesses and videos are created from scratch, rather than transferring someone’s face onto an existing person.

Malhotra said Rephrase.ai is currently talking to a number of potential customers, but those discussions are in early stages. He also suggested that the technology could expand fairly quickly into areas like chatbots and education.

“I think it’s going to open a whole new world of creativity,” he said. “When you and I want to express something, we’re most likely to write a text document, but as a viewer, we want to see a video. They’ve been disconnected because video creation is really difficult.”

Climate change is on everyone’s minds these days, what with the outer Bay Area on fire, orange skies above San Francisco, and a hurricane season that is bearing down on the East Coast with alacrity (and that’s just the United States in the past two weeks).

A major — and growing — source of those emissions is data centers, the cloud infrastructure that powers most of our devices and experiences. That’s led to some novel ideas, such as Microsoft’s underwater data center Project Natick, which just came back to the surface for testing a bit more than a week ago.

Yet, for all the fun experiments, there is a bit more of an obvious solution: just make the chips more energy efficient.

That’s the thesis of NUVIA, which was founded by three ex-Apple chip designers who led the design of the “A” series chip line for the company’s iPhones and iPads for years. Those chips are wicked fast within a very tight energy envelope, and NUVIA’s premise is essentially what happens when you take those sorts of energy constraints (and the experience of its chip design team) and apply them to the data center.

We did a deep profile of the company last year when it announced its $53 million Series A, so definitely read that to understand the founding story and the company’s mission. Now about one year later, it’s coming back to us with news of a whole bunch of more funding.

NUVIA announced today that it has closed on a $240 million Series B round led by Mithril Capital, with a bunch of others involved listed below.

Since we last chatted with the company, we now have a bit more detail of what it’s working on. It has two products under development, a system-on-chip (SoC) unit dubbed “Orion” and a CPU core dubbed “Phoenix.” The company previewed a bit of Phoenix’s performance last month, although as with most chip companies, it is almost certainly too early to make any long-term predictions about how the technology will settle in with existing and future chips coming to the market.

NUVIA’s view is that chips are limited to about 250-300 watts of power given the cooling and power constraints of most data centers. As more cores become common pre chip, each core is going to have to make do with less power availability while maintaining performance. NUVIA’s tech is trying to solve that problem, lowering total cost of ownership for data center operators while also improving overall energy efficiency.

There’s a lot more work to be done of course, so expect to see more product announcements and previews from the company as it gets its technology further finalized. With $240 million more dollars in the bank though, it certainly has the resources to make some progress.

Shortly after we chatted with the company last year, Apple sued company founder and CEO Gerald Williams III for breach of contract, with the company arguing that its former chip designer was trying to poach employees for his nascent startup. Williams counter-sued earlier this year, and the two parties are now in the discovery phase of their lawsuit, which remains ongoing.

In addition to lead Mithril, the round was done “in partnership with” the founders of semiconductor giant Marvell (Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai), funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, and Temasek, plus Atlantic Bridge and Redline Capital along with Series A investors Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC, and WRVI Capital.

Whitebox, a startup that manages e-commerce logistics and fulfillment for a variety for brands, has raised $18 million in Series B funding.

While discussing the new funding, CEO Marcus Startzel repeated a point he made after Whitebox raised its $5 million Series A last year — that the startup is differentiated by combining tools for managing e-commerce listings across a variety of marketplaces with the ability to store and ship products from its own warehouse spaces across the United States.

“We really saw an opportunity for a platform that could both sell stuff and move stuff,” Startzel said.

However, he suggested that more recently, “The thing that really shined for us through this period has been third layer of that platform, which is our decisioning layer.” That’s the layer that allows brands to use data to answer questions like, “Should I fulfill this big wholesale order or hold inventory for the marketplaces? Should I inbound a bunch of stuff into Amazon, or do I keep it here in my Whitebox warehouses to potentially fulfill wholesale orders?”

And of course, this is happening as e-commerce has become increasingly important during the pandemic. Startzel suggested that initially, Whitebox’s ideal customer was a “challenger brand” whose business was mostly coming from Shopify, and who needed help as it expanded to Amazon and other marketplaces. But increasingly, the startup is also working with more traditional customers.

“Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to buy a bottle of ketchup, you had to go to a store and discover a bottle of ketchup as you walked down the condiment aisle,” Startzel said. “Today, the store brands can no longer count on foot traffic, and they’re beginning to recognize how important it is on to be on e-commerce.”

As a result, Whitebox said it saw 40% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in the first three months of 2020, followed by 78% growth in Q2. And its direct-to-consumer shipments grew 300% over the first half of the year.

Startzel also said that the company took “a very aggressive and conservative approach” to managing its fulfillment facilities during this period — aggressive in the sense that it wanted to ensure that there was no disruption in shipments, conservative in its efforts to make sure the facilities were safe.

The Series B was led by Alan Taetle of Noro-Moseley Partners, with participation from TDF Ventures, TCP Venture Capital’s Propel Baltimore Fund, Merkle global chairman David Williams and Millennial Media co-founder Chris Brandenburg.

“Whitebox remains a leader in this extremely busy and competitive space, and is uniquely positioned to see continued growth,” Taetle said in a statement. “The team has built a technology platform that not only expands the tools and insights that brands need to manage their sales and fulfillment processes from top to bottom, but also powers the larger e-commerce economy by eliminating marketplace complexities. Our investment signifies our confidence in Whitebox and the capabilities that we know the company can bring to the table for new and current customers.”

Startzel said the company will use the new funding to expand its sales and marketing teams, continue developing its technology platform and build out its fulfillment centers — it currently has centers in Baltimore (where Whitebox is headquartered), Las Vegas and Memphis, with plans to expand in the Midwest next year.

Airship is announcing that it has acquired mobile commerce startup ReplyBuy.

The startup (which was a finalist at TechCrunch’s 1st and Future startup competition in 2016) works with customers like entertainment venues and professional and college sports teams to send messages and sell tickets to fans via SMS. It raised $4 million in funding from Sand Hill Angels, Kosinski Ventures, SEAG Ventures, Enspire Capital, MRTNZ Ventures and others, according to Crunchbase.

Airship, meanwhile, has been expanding its platform beyond push notifications to cover customer communication across SMS, email, mobile wallets and more. But CEO Brett Caine said this is the first time the company is moving into commerce.

While sports and concerts tickets might not be a booming market right now, Caine suggested that the company is actually seeing increased purchasing activity “in and around the Airship platform” as businesses try to drive more in-app purchases. He also suggested that both the COVID-19 pandemic and increased restrictions on mobile data collection and ad targeting are going to “accelerate direct-to-consumer motion by large brands.”

Airship isn’t disclosing the deal price, but Caine said the seven-person ReplyBuy team will be joining the company, with CEO Brandon O’Halloran becoming Airship’s general manager of commerce and CTO Anthony Saia leading the commerce engineering team.

“Nobody directly connects more brands to mobile consumers than Airship,” O’Halloran said in a statement. “Joining Airship offers ReplyBuy the opportunity to serve the global market with a more comprehensive solution across more industries, and provide more valuable mobile customer experiences.”

Caine added, “These are really key roles, demonstrating the importance, in our view, of extending commerce to the customer engagement experience.”

He also said that Airship will continue to support ReplyBuy as a standalone product, while also integrating and extending its capabilities to other areas of the Airship platform.

“This one-to-one commerce at scale is a key part of the ReplyBuy solution,” he said. “We’re going to bring it into all the digital channels that Airship powers [to create] a seamless, fast, easy experience around commerce.”

With the US presidential election now 40 days away, all eyes are focused on how online conversations, in conjunction with other hallmarks of online life like viral videos, news clips, and misleading ads, will be used, and often abused, to influence people’s decisions.

But political discourse, of course, is just one of the ways that user-generated content on the internet is misused for toxic ends. Today, a startup that’s using AI to try to tackle them all is announcing some funding.

Spectrum Labs — which has built algorithms and a set of APIs that can be used to moderate, track, flag and ultimately stop harassment, hate speech, radicalization, and some 40 other profiles of toxic behavior, in English as well as multiple other languages — has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding, capital that the company plans to use to continue expanding its platform.

The funding is being led by Greycroft, with Wing Venture Capital, Ridge Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and Super{set} also participating. The company has raised about $14 million to date.

Spectrum Labs’ connection to combatting toxic political discourse is not incidental.

CEO Justin Davis said that the startup was founded in the wake of the previous US election in 2016, when he and his co-founder Josh Newman (the CTO) — who hailed from the world of marketing tech (they and about 9 other employees at Spectrum all worked together at Krux and then Salesforce after Krux got acquired by it) — found themselves driven to build something that could help combat all the toxicity online, which they felt had a huge role to play not just in how the election unfolded but in the major rifts that get established, and play themselves out everyday, on the internet and beyond.

“We were all looking for some way to get involved,” he said. “We wanted to use our big data experience” — Krux’s speciality was online content categorization for marketers to better measure and their campaigns — “to do some good in the world.”

Spectrum Labs today works with a wide range of companies — from gaming giants (Riot Games is one customer), to social networks (Pinterest is another), online dating sites (the Meet Group is one more), marketplaces (Mercari is a fourth), DTC brands and organizations that want to track their own internal conversations.

The company’s primary platform is called “guardian” (not to be confused with the eponymous newspaper, whose logo it resembles) and it comes in the form of a dashboard if you need it, or just a set of services that you can integrate, it seems, into your own.

Customers can use the tech to check and vet their existing policies, get guidance on how to improve them, and use a framework to create new samples and labels to train models to track content better in the future.

Tools for content moderation have been around for years, but they have largely been very simplistic complements to human teams, flagging keywords and the like (which as we know can throw up many false positives).

But more recently, advances in artificial intelligence have supercharged that work — an arrival that has come not too soon, considering how online conversations have grown exponentially with the surge of popularity of social media and online chatting in general.

Spectrum Labs’ AI-based platform is currently set up to scan for more than 40 kinds of toxic behavior profiles such as harassment, hate speech, scams, grooming, illegal solicitation, and doxxing, a set of profiles that it built initially in consultation with researchers and academics around the world and continues to hone as it ingests more data from across the web.

The startup is not the only one that is tapping AI to target and fix toxic behavior. Just this year, for example, we’ve also seen the AI startups Sentropy — also focusing on social media conversations — raise money and come out of stealth and L1ght also announce funding for its own take on tackling online toxicity.

Indeed, what has been notable is not just the emergence of other startups building businesses around fighting the good fight, but seeing investors interested in backing them, in what might not be the most lucrative ventures, but definitely efforts that will help society for the better in the longer term.

“Justin and Josh have grit and resilience and it takes a unique set of leaders and team,” said Alison Engel, a venture partner at Greycroft. “But as investors we know to solve the most systemic problems requires capital, too. You have to invest behind them. To pull it off, you will need coalitions, platforms coming together. A lot of this is a problem rooted in data and making it more robust, second is people behind it and third is the capital.”

She said that it feels like there is a changing tide right now among VCs and where they choose to put their money.

“When you look at the investment community supporting and thriving on community growth you have to think, what is our value system here? We need to invest in the platforms that are part of this greater good, and you are starting to see investors responding to that.”

Sometimes raising venture capital can be as simple as talking to your existing investor and having them wire over another check.

When we last caught up with Petal in January 2019, the startup was hot off its $30 million Series B round and was accelerating its mission to take on the world of credit cards. Petal’s core differentiation is that it looks at the cash flow of potential borrowers rather than traditional credit scores to assess creditworthiness, helping to identify underbanked users who have the ability to be trusted with a credit card, but lack the formal statistics to prove it.

Well, a lot has happened since then. COVID-19 hit, and along the way, the traditional credit score has been rent asunder as millions lost their jobs, had their hours cut back, and changed life circumstances. At the same time, federal stimulus relief in the form of direct payments to taxpayers actually led some credit scores to increase during the pandemic. All of this is to say that underwriting based on prospective cash flow has been a bit more attuned to reality rather than credit scores based on retrospective history.

Now, the New York City-headquartered startup is expanding, and netted a $55 million dollar Series C round led by Valar again, who not only led the company’s Series B, but also its $13 million Series A round back in 2018. This Series C round closed in April just after the COVID-19 pandemic got fully underway and is officially being announced today.

Valar, one of the many vehicles in the Peter Thiel capital universe, has staked its claim in the fintech world, backing companies like Even, Stash, N26, BlockFi, Point Card, and Taxfix. I asked Petal CEO Jason Gross his thoughts on why he took capital from his existing investors two more times, and his line was “if you’ve heard the expression, ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’” He continued, “Our view has been that if we already have a really great working relationship, and a lot of support and a dynamic that’s been successful in the boardroom, there’s no reason to necessarily change that.”

Gross said that the company’s model has allowed it to handle the storm of changes that have been underway this year. “It’s allowing us to make credit accessible at a period of time when legacy institutions — traditional banks and so on — are being forced to to pull back,” he said. “We’ve been able to continue to accurately understand what’s going on with the financial circumstances of our customers and applicants” allowing the company to “lean in” this year.

He noted the company has brought on “tens of thousands of customers” since the last time TechCrunch chatted with the company.

Petal has slightly tweaked the cosmetic design of the card. Photo via Petal.

Outside of fundraising and customer growth, the company has been busy. It launched a second office in Richmond, Virginia last year. It “has a really strong, kind of vibrant and emerging technology scene. It is the largest concentration of colleges in Virginia, and it also is a financial-services-heavy location,” Gross explained. Conveniently, it also shares the same time zone as NYC.

Back last September, the company raised $300 million from Jeffries as a debt facility to finance its credit card, and in February, it recruited Kaustav Das as its new chief risk officer. Das came from small business loan platform Kabbage, which was sold to American Express earlier this year following the heavy economic blow from the pandemic to small businesses across the country.

Petal is now about 100 employees, and the company has been operating entirely remotely since March. Gross says his goal for the next two years is to onboard “hundred of thousands of new customers.”

In addition to Valar, a huge miscellany of funds participated in the round, including “Rosecliff Ventures, Afore Capital, RiverPark Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, GR Capital, Nelstone Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Ride Ventures, Gramercy Fund, Adventure Collective, Starta Ventures, and NFL star Kelvin Beachum, Jr.” The company has now raised about $100 million of equity capital all together.

There’s still no clear path back to any sense of ‘business-as-usual’ as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, but United Airlines is embarking on a new pilot project to see if easy access to COVID-19 testing immediately prior to a flight can help ease freedom of mobility. The airline will offer COVID-19 tests (either rapid tests at the airport, or mail-in at home tests prior to travel) to passengers flying from SFO in San Francisco to Hawaiian airpots, beginning on October 15.

United worked directly with the Hawaiian government and health regulators to meet the state’s requirements when it comes to quarantine measures, so that travellers who return a negative result with this pre-trip tests won’t have to observe the mandatory quarantine period in place upon their arrival. That’s obviously a major barrier to travel to a popular tourist destination like Hawaii, since a two-week quarantine eats up all or more of the typical period of stay for anyone coming from the mainland.

The airline has partnered with two companies to provide the tests: Color for the at-home kit, which is ordered by a physician and provides results within 1-2 days of receiving the sample, and GoHealth Urgent Care, which will be provided the on-site tests at the airport using the Abbot ID NOW rapid COVID-19 test that returns results in just 15 minutes.

If passengers choose the Color option, they’re advised to request the test kit at least 10 days before they fly, and then to provide their sample for testing within 72 hours before they fly, in order to ensure first that they receive the sample kit in time, and second that the results are recent enough that it’s extremely unlikely they’ve contracted COVID-19 in the ensuing time prior to their flight. Passengers choosing this method can even return the sample via a drop box at SFO, with the results arriving after their landing, but still curtailing their mandatory quarantine period once received.

The on-site option will require scheduling a visit to the testing facility in SFO’s international terminal in advance, with tests available between 9 AM to 6 PM PT every day at the airport.

This is just a pilot program, and that’s a very good thing, because it will be crucially important to see what happens as a result of this kind of deployment, and its ability to skip the quarantine period. The two-week quarantine after travelling, which is fairly widely adopted globally at this stage in the pandemic, is intentionally meant to apply in most locations regardless of test results, no matter the source or recency.

That’s because at this stage in testing, the results aren’t anywhere near foolproof – testing has potentially less efficacy at detecting COVID-19 in asymptomatic individuals, for instance, and when viral loads aren’t yet high enough to provide reliable measurement. Those situations can result in false negatives, which isn’t an issue when the 14-day quarantine periods are mandatory and universal.

Tourism, especially domestic U.S. tourism, is vital to the economic wellbeing of states like Hawaii – and widespread testing could be a lever to open up more of this kind of economic activity both elsewhere in the U.S. and internationally. But it’ll require close and careful study, scrutinized by health professionals, as well as improvements in the accuracy and consistency of diagnostics before these measure should expand beyond the pilot stage.