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Valence, the Los Angeles-based online community dedicated to increasing economic opportunity for the Black community, has raised $5.25 million in financing as it looks to continue to expand its network for Black professionals in all fields.

The timing for the investment is critical as the country reckons with the implications and effects of systemic racism. In no field is the under-representation of Black professionals more deeply felt than the tech industry, where lack of diversity can have profound implications on products and services that are becoming increasingly central to large swaths of the economy.

Problems with under-representation and underlying issues of systemic racism manifest in facial recognition technologies, social networking applications and decision-making software for lending and credit that are aspects of how American society functions.

It’s with an eye toward technology and entrepreneurship that Valence raised its most recent round, according to a letter sent to the company’s users by new chief executive officer Guy Primus.

“Now that we have the capital that we were seeking, we will be doing three things. First we will improve the current product. We are very proud of what we have built thus far, but we know there are a few issues. We will continue to address those issues and will accelerate work to enhance technical performance on the platform,” Primus wrote. “Second, we will be expanding the team. We expect the team to more than triple in the coming months so that we can better serve you. Finally, we’ll be adding features and expanding our services. We will be delivering additional tools that facilitate even more meaningful connections and will expand Valence’s scope to include the professional growth and development of our members.”

A lot of that product development will go toward building tools that can help with professional development and career growth.

“We’re being very targeted in how we can drive economic opportunity and wealth creation in the black community,” said Valence co-founder and Upfront Ventures general partner Kobie Fuller.  

Already, Valence has brought on some of the top names in Silicon Valley as participants in a program to promote entrepreneurship and career development.

Valence currently has 10,000 people signed up for the platform and is growing at about 20% per month, according to Primus. The goal is to serve educational advice and tools to Valence users while at the same time making that group of career-minded Black professionals available to companies that would want to hire them.

Primus said that Valence will be selling its database and access to companies that would want to find prospective hires on the platform in a per-seat licensing model that would be accessible to headhunters and human resources departments.

The new investment round was led by GGV Capital, the international investment firm whose investments include Slack, Peloton, Wish and StockX. Hans Tung, the managing director who invested in those marquee deals, will be joining the company’s board of directors.

Other investors in the round include Upfront Ventures, along with Maveron, the SoftBank Opportunity Fund and Silicon Valley Bank.

We’ve aggregated many of the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Our community consists of startup founders and heads of growth. You can participate by joining Demand Curve’s marketing training program or its Slack group.

Without further ado, on to our community’s advice.

Accessing social groups through referrals

Excerpt from Demand Curve’s Growth Training.

A surprising benefit of referrals is how they often lead to social partnership opportunities.

Consider this process:

1. Find your happiest users.
2. Figure out what social groups they belong to. This could be anything from a female founders group, to university alumni networks, to a restaurant management trade association.
3. How do you find out? Just ask them what groups they belong to. Don’t be afraid of conversation.
4. Ask the happy user to connect you with the heads of those groups. Solve a problem they collectively have — even if it’s only tangentially related to your business. What matters is that more of these ideal customers know and trust you. You can also refer speakers, offer deals, write content for them or offer free office hours.
5. Down the road, these people inevitably send you referrals.
6. Reach out cold to people in other, similar groups. Reference the endorsement of the original group and provide a case study (with their permission).

Going through groups can be a high-leverage way to land and expand into ideal audiences.

Pixel-sharing tactics

Pattern, a Lehi, Utah-based reseller that offers large and small brands a way to optimize their sales on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Google Shopping, has raised $52 million in growth funding, the company said.

The money, from Ainge Advisory and KSV Global, will be used to expand the company’s business worldwide.

Founded in 2013, the e-commerce reseller uses analytics to lock down market specific keywords in advertising and has managed to reach a run-rate that should see it hit $500 million in annual revenue by the end of 2020, according to Pattern co-founder and chief investment officer, Melanie Alder.

Brands like Nestle, Pandora, Panasonic, Zebra and Skechers sell their goods to Pattern in an effort to juice sales on digital marketplaces.

“Pattern represents our brands in the US, across Europe, and in select markets in Asia, selling for us on global marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and JD as well as building and managing three of our direct-to-consumer sites,” said Kyle Bliffert, CEO and president of Atrium Innovations, a Nestle Health Science company, in a statement. “The global e-commerce growth we have experienced by leveraging Pattern’s expertise is extraordinary.”

Pattern places bets on where a product is likely to receive the most attention using specific keywords, according to the company’s chief executive, Dave Wright. The company buys products from its brand partners and then sells them widely across marketplaces in the US, Europe and Asia. These markets represent $2.7 trillion in total sales and Wright expects it to reach $7 trillion by 2024.

As Wright noted, a majority of searchers for sales begin on Amazon . The company just opened its eighteenth location in Germany. Pattern has grown sales for brands from $3 million to $26 million and the company makes money off of the margin on the sales of products. With the new funding, the company intends to expand into other geographies like Japan and India.

Wright says his company addresses one of the fundamental problems with advertising technology — the proliferation of tools hasn’t meant better optimization for most brands, because they’re teams aren’t equipped to specialize.

While there may be hundreds of different advertising and marketing folks working at a company, each company may have hundreds of brands that it sells and the dedicated teams to specific brands may only have one or two  people on staff.

“Data makes all the difference,” said co-founder and CEO Dave Wright. “I’ve spent the bulk of my career in data science and data management, and our ability to detect and act on ‘patterns’ on ecommerce platforms has allowed the brands we represent to be incredibly successful.”

This year’s TC Sessions: Mobility on October 6 & 7 will be a fantastic opportunity to find out all the latest on advancements in autonomy, micro-mobility, transportation AI and much more. Argo AI co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky is among the best-positioned people in the world to speak to all those topics, and how they intersect with both the startup world, and legacy automaker giants like Ford and Volkswagen.

Salesky has a long history of focusing on the intersection of robotics and transportation dating all the way back to his work at the Carnegie Mellon University National Robotics Engineering Center, and CMU’s DARPA Urban Challenge winning competition entry in 2007. He was also an early team member for Google’s self-driving car project, which would eventually become Waymo, overseeing the search comnpany’s self-driving sensor, computer and vehicle hardware platform.

Since founding Argo AI in 2016, Salesky has also been at the center of some of the biggest and most influential developments in the autonomous vehicle industry. The startup first made waves with a $1 billion investment from automaker Ford in 2017, which gave Ford a majority stake in the venture. Then in 2019, Volkswagen announced a $2.6 billion investment in Argo, putting it at the center of the self-driving stack of now just one, but two of the world’s largest car companies.

As of July, Argo’s valuation sits at around $7.5 billion, making it a unicorn many times over. We’ll hear from Salesky how the company is helping both these industry heavyweights prepare for an autonomous future. We’ll also talk about the path to commercialization of these services, and how soon we can think about seeing them in active use as consumers.

Get your tickets for TC Sessions: Mobility to hear from Bryan Salesky along with several other fantastic speakers from Porsche, Waymo, Lyft, and more. Tickets are just $145 for a limited time with discounts for groups, students and exhibiting startups. We hope to see you there!

Till, a platform that serves as an intermediary between landlords and renters, has raised an $8 million seed round led by Route 66 Ventures with participation from MetaProp Ventures and NextGen Venture Partners.

Till was founded on the premise that people are not always able to pay their rent on the 1st of the month, but might be better suited to paying their rent in smaller payments throughout the month. Through its flexible rent platform, Till creates a customized payment schedule for renters that aligns with their monthly cash flow. Till estimates it can help cut evictions by as much as 50%.

“We work to understand that timing and we can look at their expense loads to help them balance if they should be paying more now or more later in the month,” Till CEO David Sullivan told TechCrunch.

With the funding, Till plans to work on getting more landlords on board across additional states and further develop the flexible rent product. In order for renters to use the platform, their landlords must already be working with Till. To date, Till is live at 170 properties that consist of 30,000 units in total across 14 states.

“Since we first learned about Till, we have been extremely impressed by its ability to bridge the gap between the increasingly volatile income and expense patterns of renters and the more rigid financial realities of landlords,” Metaprop General Partner Zak Shwarzman said in a statement. “As the uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic fallout continues with no clear end in sight, it’s more important than ever that landlords find new, mutually beneficial, ways to work with renters to reduce late fees, minimize evictions and foster renters’ long-term financial health.”

Late fees vary by state and by landlord. Sometimes they come in the form of a flat fee or a percentage of your rent. Either way, they’re punitive.

“It’s a very punitive fee against a renter having a cash flow issue,” Sullivan said. “Even if a renter has the ability to stay in the unit, renters then get overburdened with fees, which makes their ability to pay even more challenging.”

While this product may have more relevance these days, during a time when people are facing severe economic insecurity as a result of COVID-19, Sullivan said this problem is not specific to the pandemic. Though, COVID-19 has exacerbated the issue.

“Pre-Covid, you have about $50 billion of delinquent rent a year and renters being charged about $5 billion in late fees,” Sullivan said. “That creates a burden on renters. It leads to three million families being evicted in normal year. And evictions disproportionately impact minority communities.”

The business model, however, relies on financial insecurity, as Till’s target customer is someone who already struggles to make their monthly rental payments. For its flexible rent product, Till charges renters $3 per month if they make all of their payments on time, and $9 per month if they don’t. Till also offers a rental loan product for renters with varying rates.

“We want to create win-win outcomes,” Sullivan said. “We fundamentally believe that when you get renters to succeed, landlords succeed to.”

The summer is coming to an end, and fall is almost here. Which means it’s time for students to “return” to school. To help those looking to get ahead, we are offering an annual Extra Crunch membership to students for $50 off. That’s a full year of Extra Crunch for only $50 (plus tax). You’ll also be grandfathered in at the discounted price for future years until you cancel. Make the most of your curriculum with Extra Crunch startup intelligence at your disposal. 

How to claim the discount:

• Use a .edu or university email address and send a message to our customer support team at extracrunch@techcrunch.com. Please let them know that you are seeking the back to school student discount. 
• The team will respond within 24 hours with a unique link to claim your discount.

With Extra Crunch membership, students receive more than 100 exclusive articles delivered per month, including weekly investor surveys, market analysis and how-tos and interviews on fundraising, growth, monetization and other work topics. You also can browse and use TechCrunch.com more efficiently without the distraction of banner ads, and stay up-to-date through our Extra Crunch members-only newsletter.

Another benefit of Extra Crunch is discounts on events and services. If you have interest in attending TechCrunch events, you’ll be able to save 20% on tickets. Once you join, all you have to do is reach out to our customer service team to receive a discount code for any TechCrunch event.

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Extra Crunch is currently available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and select European countries. We’re also hoping to have support in Australia by the end of August. If you are outside of the supported regions, you will not be able to take advantage of this deal.

Mozilla today announced a major restructuring of its commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation that will see about 250 employees lose their jobs and the shuttering of the organization’s operations in Taipei, Taiwan. This move comes after the organization already laid off about 70 employees earlier this year.  The most recent numbers from 2018 put Mozilla at about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Citing falling revenues because of the global pandemic, Mozilla’s executive chairwoman and CEO Mitchell Baker said in an internal message that the company’s pre-COVID plans were no longer feasible.

“Pre-COVID, our plan for 2020 was a year of change: building a better internet by accelerating product value in Firefox, increasing innovation, and adjusting our finances to ensure financial stability over the long term,” Baker writes. “We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real.”

Layed off employees will receive severance that is at least equivalent to their full base pay through December 31 and will still receive their individual performance bonuses for the first half of the year, as well as part of their company bonus and the standard COBRA health insurance benefits.

Mozilla promises that its smaller organization will be able to act more “quickly and nimbly” and that it will work more closely with partners that share its goal of an open web ecosystem. At the same time, Baker wants Mozilla to remain a “technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement,” yet she also acknowledges that the organization as a whole must also focus on economics and work on creating sustainable business models that still stay true to its mission.

‘We are also restructuring to put a crisper focus on new product development and go to market activities,” writes Baker. “In the long run, I am confident that the new organizational structure will serve our product and market impact goals well, but we will talk in detail about this in a bit.”

On the product side, Mozilla will continue to focus on Firefox, as well as Pocket, its Hubs virtual reality project, its new VPN service, Web Assembly and other privacy and security products. But it is also launching a new Design and UX team, as well as a new applied machine learning team to help bring machine learning to its products.

Fintech is quite possibly the hottest investment area in the venture world these days, and that is why we are so excited to have one of the world’s leading operators and investors talk more about the future of fintech, wealth management, neobanks, infrastructure and more later today on Extra Crunch Live at 1pm EDT / 10am PDT / / 5pm GMT.

For more than a decade, Andy Rachleff has been the founder and CEO of Wealthfront, an algorithmic wealth management app that has also been adding new banking functionality as well. Before Wealthfront, he was a general partner at early-stage venture firm Benchmark.

We’re going to be taking a bunch of questions from the audience, so do come prepared. That said, there is just so much to talk about in fintech these days that we are going to cover a lot of ground.

We’ll talk a bit about what the landscape looks like in the robo-advisor world, and how and why Wealthfront has been building out neobank features. We’ll ask Rachleff what he sees as the future of the industry, particularly given that bank heavyweights like Chase and Goldman Sachs are increasingly becoming digital native.

And then we will migrate the conversation into the VC investing world covering the full range of fintech stages. For the earliest startups, what does the world look like today to get started in the fintech space? Getting started seems easier than ever due to the rise of platforms like Plaid, but the ease of starting has been met with a massive increase in competition. How should startups navigate that? And are there still moats available in the fintech space?

On the other side of the coin, what does the exit market look like for fintechs these days? We had a number of massive exits last year including Plaid and Galileo, and so what does the future portend here?

These questions, plus more questions from you, our audience. So join us if you’re an Extra Crunch member and get caught up on all the fintech goodness going on. And if you aren’t an Extra Crunch member, be sure to check out subscription options before we get started.

Meeting details are below the paywall.

Meeting Details

Many workers today are still stuck doing a bushel of manual tasks, copying and pasting data into spreadsheets, sending out the same emails every morning and generally lacking any kind of automation because they lack coding skills. Parabola wants to change that with a simple drag and drop workflow set up, and today the startup announced an $8 million Series A investment.

Matrix Partners led the round with participation from Thrive Capital and various individual investors. Ilya Sukhar from Matrix will be joining the Parabola board under the terms of the agreement. The company has now raised $10.2 million including a $2.2 million seed round in 2018.

At the same time, the company also announced a new Shopify connector. As COVID has forced a dramatic increase in online shopping, Parabola has seen a corresponding increase in demand for its workflow automation services from eCommerce vendors and they have added functionality to support that.

Company founder and CEO Alex Yaseen sees the tool as a way to bring programming-like automation to anyone who deals with data tasks on a regular basis, particularly in a spreadsheet. “We’re a drag and drop productivity tool, and we like to say we bring the power of programming to everybody,” Yaseen told TechCrunch.

They do this by providing a library of pre-built steps that you can drag and drop onto a workflow canvas. Each of those steps helps you automate what was previously a manual repetitive data task in Excel or Google Sheets.

Image Credits: Parabola

Lead investor Sukhar says that while low code is becoming more popular right now, he and Yaseen have always seen it as a way to bring programming-level productivity enhancing skills to a much broader set of users, and to bring that focus to eCommerce in particular.

“The real trick is finding the right set of users, the right abstraction, the right niche to start with and that’s where I think this goes back to the eCommerce focus. I think that’s what’s super exciting about the approach Parabola has taken, and what got me excited,” he said.

As eCommerce in general surges during the pandemic, Yaseen says he has seen a corresponding increase in usage on the platform over the last couple of months as retail companies move online or increase their online presence, and need to find ways to automate more of their internal processes to keep up.

While the company is still in its early stages of development with around 20 employees, it is actively hiring and looking to build a diverse workforce as it does. Yaseen sees this tied to the company’s overall mission of bringing programming level skills to a larger group of people who don’t know how to code, and they need a diverse set of workers that reflects society at large to build that effectively..

“We talk about this as a core authentic value, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far. I think we have a lot of room for improvement, as does the tech industry as a whole, but we are pushing very hard,” he said.

The company wants to use the money from this round to keep refining the design of the platform to make it even easier for non-technical users. “This round is very much for product and design work to make it increasingly comfortable for these users who are today really familiar with doing their tasks in spreadsheets […] and increasingly working towards a less and less technical user, as we make products  easier and more approachable,” he said.

More worries for TikTok: A European data watchdog that’s landed the biggest blow on a tech giant to date — slapping Google with a $57M fine last year (upheld in June) — now has an open investigation into the social video app du jour, TechCrunch has confirmed.

A spokeswoman for France’s CNIL told us it opened an investigation into how the app handles user data in May 2020, following a complaint related to a request to delete a video. Its probe of the video sharing platform was reported earlier by Politico.

Under the European Union’s data protection framework, citizens who have given consent for their data to be processed continue to hold a range of rights attached to their personal data, including the ability to request a copy or deletion of the information, or ask for their data in a portable form.

Additional requirements under the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) include transparency obligations to ensure accountability with the framework. Which means data controllers must provide data subjects with clear information on the purposes of processing — including in order to obtain legally valid consent to process the data.

The CNIL’s spokeswoman told us its complaint-triggered investigation into TikTok has since widened to include issues related to transparency requirements about how it processes user data; users’ data access rights; transfers of user data outside the EU; and steps the platform takes to ensure the data of minors is adequately protected — a key issue, given the app’s popularity with teens.

French data protection law lets children consent to the processing of their data for information social services such as TikTok at aged 15 (or younger with parental consent).

As regards the original complaint, the CNIL’s spokeswoman said the person in question has since been “invited to exercise his rights with TikTok under the GDPR, which he had not taken beforehand” (via Google Translate).

We’ve reached out to TikTok for comment on the CNIL investigation.

One question mark is it’s not clear whether the French watchdog will be able to see its investigation of TikTok to full conclusion.

In further emailed remarks its spokeswoman noted the company is seeking to designate Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) as its lead authority in Europe — and is setting up an establishment in Ireland for that purpose. (Related: Last week TikTok announced a plan to open its first data center in Europe, which will eventually hold all EU users’ data, also in Ireland.)

If TikTok is able to satisfy the legal conditions it may be able to move any GDPR investigation to the DPC — which has gained a reputation for being painstakingly slow to enforce complex cross-border GDPR cases. Though in late May it finally submitted a first draft decision (on a Twitter case) to the other EU data watchdogs for review. A final decision in that case is still pending.

“The [TikTok] investigations could therefore ultimately be the sole responsibility of the Irish protection authority, which will have to deal with the case in cooperation with the other European data protection authorities,” the CNIL’s spokeswoman noted, before emphasizing there is a standard of proof it will have to meet.

“To come under the sole jurisdiction of the Irish authority and not of each of the authorities, Tiktok will nevertheless have to prove that its establishment in Ireland fulfils the conditions of a ‘principal establishment’ within the meaning of the GDPR.”

Under Europe’s GDPR framework, national data watchdogs have powers to issue penalties of up to 4% of a company’s global annual turnover and can also order infringing data processing to cease. But to do any of that they have to first investigate and go through the process of issuing a decision. In cross-border cases where multiple watchdogs have an interest, there’s also a requirement to liaise with other regulators to ensure there’s broad consensus on any decision.