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American micromobility startups Lime along with European competitors Dott and Tier Mobility have won permits to operate shared electric scooters in Paris, following a seven-month tender process that had as many as 16 companies vying for a spot.

Paris is one of a handful of cities in the world that have become key battlegrounds over market share in the shared micromobility market. The permits are a critical win for Dott, Lime and Tier. It conversely represents a major loss for U.S.-based Bird, which just a year ago made a big bet on the French market and announced plans to open up its biggest European office in Paris. Bird said at the time that it wanted to hire 1,000 people by mid-2021.

Other companies that applied for the permit included Bolt, Comodule, Spin, Voi and Wind.

The three operators will each be allowed to deploy 5,000 scooters in Paris for two years. The city is creating 2,500 dedicated parking spots for the devices in an effort to avoid clutter on sidewalks, a primary complaint in cities that have allowed shared scooters companies to set up shop.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo made the announcement via Twitter. A complete translation of the three tweets are below.

Congratulations to Lime, Dott and Tier, winners of the tender for scooters in Paris. Those 3 operators will be the only ones that can each deploy a maximum of 5,000 scooters in Paris.

Operators have been selected according to three criteria: environmental responsibility, user safety, scooter maintenance and charging management (edited)

I remind scooter users that they should respect pedestrians and the rules of the road during their trips and that they should park in the allocated areas: 2,500 dedicated parking spots are currently being created in Paris.

All three scooter companies have made a variety of environmental and social pledges for its operations in Paris and beyond in an effort to win over cities and shore up their business models. For instance, Lime said in a blog post Thursday that it powers its warehouses with local renewable energy, employs an extensive repair and reuse program with local labor, recycles 97% of materials at end of life, and operates a certified CarbonNeutral fleet in accordance with the CarbonNeutral Protocol.

Dott and Tier have made similar commitments. Dott said each of its scooters will be equipped with a removable battery, recharged with renewable energy and serviced entirely by its own local full-time employees. Dott said it plans to offer fixed-price tickets in Paris for access to its scooters with round-trip passes costing €3.99 and 7-day unlimited unlocking pass at €2.9. Unlocking fee usually €1/trip.

Earlier this month, Dott, Tier and Voi announced a sustainability coalition that makes 10 environmental and social pledges, including commitments to not use gig economy workers in any market, use at least 20% recycled material in all new e-scooters from 2021 and as of this year, for all new scooters to have swappable batteries.

 

TikTok today announced a $200 million fund, aimed at helping top creators in the U.S. supplement their earnings, and potentially coax the next Charli D’Amelio out of the woodwork.

Called the TikTok Creator Fund, the money is aimed at helping “eligible” creators on the platform earn a livelihood, it said. Eligible for now is defined as 18 years or older, meeting a certain (unspecified) baseline for followers, and consistently posting original content that is in line with TikTok’s community guidelines. The platform will begin accepting applications from U.S.-based creators starting next month and distribute the capital over the coming year.

The promise of payouts is coming at a key moment for the app and its Chinese parent ByteDance . TikTok has been facing mounting criticism in the US, its biggest market by revenues, over how it handles user data and its ties to China, with calls from the Trump administration to ban the popular app outright.

And in response to that, TikTok has been making moves to present a more friendly face to the US. It has pledged to add 10,000 more staff in the US, and this week rumors began to circulate that investors in the US are considering buying a majority stake in the TikTok business back from ByteDance to establish control of the company out of China’s hands.

(It’s not clear if the latter is testing the waters of sentiment, or just an outright rumour, but as an aside to that, these days, ByteDance and TikTok try to go to great lengths to show they are not connected, if you go by how they handle their PR: Chinese spokespeople will not answer TikTok questions and refer journalists to the US team.)

Vanessa Pappas, GM of TikTok’s U.S. business, said in a blog post that ByteDance is starting the Creator Fund at $200 million and plans to increase it over time. She did not disclose how TikTok would decide what sum would be paid to an individual creator, and whether there would be any additional conditions to getting a payout. (We have asked about this and how many followers creators might need to have to be eligible, and will update as we learn more.)

TikTok already helps its creators sign brand partnerships and sponsorship deals, and it provides monetization for live-streams. The platform also has a $50 million Creative Learning Fund to introduce teachers to the platform, which has been used by some 1,000 teachers in the U.S. already. And a Creator Marketplace connects brands to creators to collaborate on paid campaigns.

“Through the TikTok Creator Fund, our creators will be able to realize additional earnings that reflect the time, care, and dedication they put into creatively connecting with an audience that’s inspired by their ideas,” she said.

TikTok currently employs about 1,400 people in the U.S. and recently crossed the milestone of 2 billion installs globally. Last year, it said it had 26 million users in the U.S.

Several lawmakers including Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton have expressed concerns in recent months that TikTok’s user data could end up with the Chinese government. China-headquartered ByteDance insists that it does not share any user’s data with the Chinese government, and that it stores its U.S.-based user data in the U.S. and Singapore. Earlier this week House lawmakers voted 336-71 to bar federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices.

TikTok, which appointed Disney streaming executive Kevin Mayer as its chief executive officer in May this year, also insists that it is a Cayman Islands incorporated firm.

For now, it seems that the programs that TikTok is launching are squarely aimed at fighting that fire in the US. It did not respond to a request for comment asking what it was doing to help creators in other markets supplement their earnings.

India, where TikTok has more than 200 million users and over 1 million creators, banned TikTok and 58 other apps developed by Chinese firms late last month over cybersecurity concerns. Its neighboring nation Pakistan issued a “final warning” to TikTok earlier this week over what it deemed “immoral, obscene, and vulgar content.”

As we move deeper into the pandemic, companies are looking for ways to digitize processes that previously required in-person meetings with manual approaches. Investors appear to be rewarding companies who can achieve this. iObeya, a French company that helps digitize management planning processes like lean and agile, announced a $17 million Series A today.

Red River West led the round with help from Atlantic Bridge Capital and Fortino Capital Partners. It has now raised a total of $20 million, according to the company.

Tim McCracken, who heads up the company’s US operations, says the name comes from the Japanese word for the large room where companies did all their planning. Many companies gather a group of people in a conference room and line the walls with sticky notes and white boards with their plans for the coming weeks and months.

Even before the pandemic struck, it wasn’t the most effective way to record this valuable business content, and iObeya has developed a service to put it in the digital realm. “And so one of the things that they did with those obeya rooms was they had lots of different visual management boards with post it notes and with different types of indicators that they would use to manage their business. And so what iObeya does is digitize that type of visual management, so that you can access it from multiple locations and share it amongst teams and basically eliminate the need for doing it on paper and on walls,” McCracken explained.

This involves digitizing four main areas that include lean management, factory floor management, agile programming and finally what they call the digital workplace, which includes design thinking, virtual whiteboarding and brainstorming. All of these approaches have lots of planning associated with them and could benefit from being moved online.

They are approaching 100 employees with the majority in France right now with a small office in the U.S. in Seattle, but they will be using this money to expand with plans to add 50 more. He says that the company has always looked at diversity when it comes to its hiring practices.

“We want to try to attract, not only experienced salespeople, as well as the support organization around them, but also really do as much outreach in the local community to see how we can ensure that our workforce reflects the community,” he said.

As the company had to shut down offices due to COVID-19, McCracken says their own software helped them make that transition more smoothly. “We actually use our own software to manage business so we had very little disruption to our actual work. At the same time, the volume of work increased probably four to five fold, simply because of increased demand for the software. So we had to manage not only moving from working in an office to work at home, but also the increased workload,” he said.

The company was founded near Paris in 2011. They plan to use the money to expand operations in the U.S. and build awareness of the company through greater sales and marketing spend.

Working with a team of ten trained mental health clinicians, the Y Combinator -backed startup Daybreak Health is working with Bay Area high schools to provide mental health support for teens. 

Alex Alvarado, Siddarth Cidambi, and Luke Mercado, the three co-founders of Daybreak Health, either worked with startups in the health care industry or consulted on the healthcare industry for a few years before deciding to launch their new startup.

For Alvarado, whose brother has been struggling with depression since he was twelve years old, the issue is personal, the founder said in an interview. It was only two years ago that Alvarado received a call telling him that his brother had attempted to take his own life after his decades-long struggle.

It was then that Alvarado began to confront just how broken current treatment methodologies were. His family had tried to find consistent care for Alvarado’s younger brother, but therapists were expensive, remote, had waiting lists that were weeks-long, and had difficulty related to teens (especially teens who weren’t white).

Alvarado’s brother isn’t alone. One in five teens in the US have or will have a mental health issue, Alvarado said, and the nation’s ineffectual response to the COVID-19 epidemic is only exacerbating the problem. Judging by the statistics, there are 7 million teens in the US right now with a mental health condition and rates of depression and anxiety are going up.

The team of ten clinicians that Daybreak Health works with have a deep experience with evidence-based care and Alvarado expects that most of the patients that they consult will be undergoing some form of behavioral therapy guided by those clinicians.

For teens who are experiencing less acute mental health issues, there’s a team of what the company calls “trained listeners” to provide support.

Alvarado and Cidambi both worked at the consulting firm Oliver Wyman and Mercado and Alvarado knew each other from Jiff, a healthcare startup focused on providing wellness benefits to employees at companies, which was eventually bought by Castlight Health.

To ensure their mental health bona fides, the company brought in Dr. Neha Chaudary from Stanford’s Brainstorm Lab, which focuses on innovation in mental health. “They’re actually the ones designing our clinical program from the ground up,” says Alvarado.

The company is currently working with 20 Bay Area schools and pediatric groups in the Bay area and is focused on treating teens aged thirteen to nineteen, says Alvarado.

Currently, both schools and pediatric groups are referring patients to the company, and the cost of care is covered either through insurance or through an $89 per-week fee.

“This is a full-stack therapy program,” says Alvarado. “It’s an improvement, in our view [on traditional therapy], because not only are you getting that invidividual one-on-one therapy, but you’re also getting curriculums around certain points in time.”

For the teens, it’s not only about specific interventions to prevent certain behaviors, Cidambi says. It’s also to build up coping mechanisms so teens can better respond to mental health pressures as adults.

Alvarado stresses that the program isn’t for any teen that’s feeling a bit stressed or for parents who’re just worried about their child’s performance. There’s an hour-long intake consultation conducted with both the teen and the parent before a teen can be admitted to the program.

And the company has already turned away some potential customers because they just didn’t need the treatment. “Our goal is not to just bring anybody into treatment.”

Alvarado would not say how many students are currently being treated from its Bay Area partner schools, and says that the schools are a mix of both public and private institutions in the Bay Area.

“Our main touchpoint at the school will be the school counselor or the wellness coordinator,” says Cidambi. Daybreak Health doesn’t pay for referrals but does reach out to school counselors to market its services.

The company is far from the only service out there trying to provide online counseling for teens, TeenCounseling is one service that boasts 5,000 therapists and offers its services from $80 to $100 per week.

“The beauty of what we’re doing is the marriage of the clinical program with the technology,” says Alvarado. “We always want to have the therapist involved. And we are developing a mobile app… that is to communicate… and enable patients to do some exercises on their own, but we never believe that it will be a standalone app.”

The Toronto Blue Jays may not have a have a home yet this season, but one things for sure: plenty of teams are going to be playing in the uncanny valley this year. The spectacle of a major league baseball team playing in front of an empty has some precedent from places like Korea, Taiwan and Japan, which got a head start on the season while MLB players and owners were hashing out the details of their own shortened 60-game season.

And while a number of teams are enlisting the help of cardboard fan cutouts and artificial crowd noise to dull the pain of an empty stadium, Fox Sports is convinced it’s found a technological solution that’s totally good and fine and not at all nightmare inducing horror show of artificial humanity.

“We had a vision for making our Major League Baseball broadcasts look as natural as they were before COVID,” Fox Sports EVP Brad Zager said in an interview with Variety. “A lot of that is having a crowd in the stadium.”

Which, fair enough. The return of baseball — and sports generally — is an earnest (and not at all a crass,  profit-fueled enterprise) attempt to regain some of that normalcy we’ve all been clamoring for months to return to. And I totally get it. I love baseball and am very excited to watch my team play this week. But honestly, this only contributes to the weirdness in an uneasy sort of way.

Fox News showcased the technology in a tweet preview of gameplay, including some close ups on fans that look like Sims characters in Orioles paraphernalia (write your own Orioles digs, if so inclined). The faux fans (fauns?) cheer, boo and even do the wave. It’s a strange but fitting attempt at the new normal from the network that gave us Cleatus, the football robot.

The virtual fans will be on full display this Saturday.

Zoom has run away with the prize in the last few months for becoming the video calling platform of choice for people confined to their homes, whether they are making work calls or friend calls. No one really talks about “Teamsing up” (“Skyping,” perhaps?), or “Hangoutsing” or “Meeting“, or indeed “Roomsing.” But today Facebook added in a new feature to its own contribution to the video chat landscape that should lead, if not immediately to more usage, more engagement when Messenger Rooms does get used.

Today, the social network announced that people using Messenger Rooms — the video chat software that lets people create calls with up to 50 people via a link (no Facebook or Messenger account required to join the call) — can now choose to link up that Rooms chat to Live, the feature in Facebook that lets people broadcast directly through Groups, Pages and in timelines via your Profile.

Facebook Rooms via Live will still come with controls for the call host as before: the limit is 50 people, users need a link to join, and the moderator/call host can still remove people if needed.

The difference now is that those calls will essentially be carried out on a stage, seen by as many as would have seen a Live broadcast posted by that host. When the room goes “Live”, participants will have to opt-in to be a part of it, and they can also leave before it starts to broadcast.

Messenger Rooms was first announced as “Rooms” in a limited rollout at the end of April. Seen by some initially as a Houseparty competitor, it was launched was a time when the world was well into numerous shelter-in-place orders to try to stem the spread of the global health pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. Amid many alternatives, Zoom had quickly emerged as the most popular way for people to connect with each other through all that, albeit, not without lots of controversy, partly due to the fact that this enterprise company had never in its wildest dreams thought it would take off as a consumer product and get used by a billion people. Meanwhile, Rooms was then rolled out globally as Messenger Rooms in June.

Because of the controversies Zoom faced, and because Facebook is, well, Facebook, it didn’t really matter at first how well Messenger Rooms was picking up traction: the message was that Zoom should be worried.

It’s actually not clear how many people are now using Messenger Rooms. (We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask.) Nor is it even clear if Facebook ultimately finds Zoom a threat. The feature is about adding more incremental engagement across Facebook overall, and adding in features that already exist for the de facto leader in the market. You can already stream a Zoom call on Facebook Live, so why not be able to stream a Messenger Rooms call live there too?

Facebook said that the feature is getting rolled out in limited release today and will soon expand globally to everywhere that Messenger Rooms works. Facebook also says this is a work in progress, with other news features coming soon, too.

Organizations are spending more money on cybersecurity and feeling less secure. Last year, 93% of cybersecurity professionals said they were moderately or extremely concerned about cloud security.

And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic made the threat landscape even more precarious, with a sudden and dramatic increase in remote work that expanded the attack surface.

If we don’t reinvent cybersecurity, things will get worse before they get better.

According to IDC, more than 50% of global GDP is expected to come from digitally transformed enterprises in the next three years. Multicloud environments continue to proliferate and the Internet of Things (IoT) could reach 41.6 billion IoT devices by 2025.

These trends will accelerate as COVID-19 necessitates a workforce that is more mobile and distributed than ever. This means the need for a new cybersecurity approach must also accelerate.

No business can afford to operate as it did 10 or even five years ago. Organizations must be able to leverage technological innovation — particularly machine learning (ML) — to ease the burden on IT and be faster and more proactive.

Machine learning is one factor in a broader transformation. Organizations of all sizes must adopt a new model for scaling and delivering cybersecurity, one that looks at security holistically, from the data center to the edge to multiple clouds.

As someone who has spent an entire career on the front lines of cybersecurity, it is my firm belief that a platform approach is the only possible path we can take. It is the only way to effectively eliminate the inefficient silos, disparate products and reactive models that no longer work in a far more complex threat environment.

What’s a platform approach?

First, let me be clear about what I mean by a platform approach. I’m talking about reimagining cybersecurity from the ground up. With ML, cloud computing and the evolution to a modernized IT stack, there’s an opportunity and mandate to go against the nature of traditional cybersecurity models.

We need to be consolidating and moving to fewer, more encompassing solutions. We need open platforms that enable the continual and seamless integration of security functions without asking organizations to constantly deploy new technology.

We should also use machine learning in cybersecurity, for everything from proactive prevention to integrated IoT security to ML-based policy recommendations for all endpoints.

Accomplishing this will require drilling down to the architectural level. Think of a future in which there is one agent for every workload and one agent for each tool or device used. Everything else is consumed as a service, with new services created on top of the platform.

SpaceX and NASA are aiming to launch the first official operational mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon human-rated spacecraft sometime in September, the agency revealed via a media update this week. The launch had been tracking towards an August date, but the updated timeframe indicates “late September,” allowing time for the completion of the current Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission which will see astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley return to Earth using the SpaceX spacecraft potentially as early as August 1.

The Demo-2 mission, while it carried actual astronauts to the International Space Station, is actually the final step in the test and development phase of human-rating Crew Dragon and Falcon 9, meaning that they’ll then be qualified for regular service transporting astronauts in the eyes of NASA. Crew-1 is the first operational mission, meaning the first considered a standard part of SpaceX’s contract to provide regular astronaut transportation.

Crew-1 is set to carry three NASA astronauts, including Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, to the ISS, along with JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi. The launch will take place from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and will deliver the astronauts to the Space Station for a full-length stay, during which time they’ll work with their international peers on various experiments and research for both NASA and partners.

There are of course some dependencies here that are required for Crew-1 to take place by the end of September, including the successful return of Hurley and Behnken from the ISS. That part of the Demo-2 mission needs to go smoothly in order to complete SpaceX’s certification process, and will require retrospective study by NASA to confirm smoother operation, which takes some time.

Behnken and Hurley have just completed another key test for the Crew Dragon while docked at the ISS, called a “habitability assessment,” involving opening and closing the docking hatch, making sure they can operate the waste system as intended, and moving cargo back into Crew Dragon from the Station. All of this is checking off requirements on the long list of items NASA requires for its certification.

Startups that fit under the broad umbrella of insurance technology are having quite a year.

In early 2020, insurtech marketplaces raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and as the year continued, more insurtech startups saw their fortunes rise. But these busy and lucrative recent quarters are perhaps best demonstrated by Lemonade’s IPO.

The rental and home-insurance startup went public in early July, pricing at $29 per share ahead of its raised IPO range, which valued it at around $1.6 billion.

Despite a strong IPO pricing run, Lemonade was still worth less than the $2 billion valuation it had previously earned from private investors. The debut looked like an example of public markets taking a bite out of private investor enthusiasm, a cooling off for a hot startup.

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But when Lemonade began to trade, its shares soared 139% on their first day, closing at $69.41 per share and valuing the company far above its final private price. No matter what price bankers and institutional investors had managed to agree on, the investing public had quickly repriced the company for a multiple of its IPO price.

Today, Lemonade is worth $78.50, or around $4.31 billion, according to Google Finance.

This week, fellow insurance-selling insurtech player Hippo announced that it had raised a Series E worth $150 million at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation.

But while the moment appeared laudable, Hippo also announced that it had gross written premium — the value of insurance products sold, before certain deductions — of $270 million in the preceding 12 months, a figure that had grown 140% over the prior year.

Lemonade, in contrast, had gross written premium of $116 million in 2019, up around 147% from its 2018 result, and $38 million in Q1 2020, putting it on an annualized pace of $152 million at the end of March. It was worth $1.6 billion at IPO, and north of $4 billion today. The mismatch in the size and value of the companies was interesting to say the least.

To explore both Hippo’s round and the apparent pricing discrepancy between this private firm and the public Lemonade, The Exchange got on the phone with Hippo’s CEO Assaf Wand to dig in.

Are the public markets too frothy? Are private investors too conservative? Both? Let’s find out.

Hippo

Hippo offers homeowners’ insurance, which Lemonade also offers, though the latter has a historical focus on renters’ insurance. Regardless, the firms are sufficiently related to warrant comparison.

TechCrunch spoke with Wand about his round, learning that it was raised during COVID-19, which meant that some VCs were effectively offline, or tending to their own portfolio companies. Still, after fundraising over Zoom, Hippo and Wand aligned terms, investors and valuation in a way that it felt made the sense and put the capital together.

Camping has been on the rise, especially among younger people, for the past couple years. Even during a pandemic, camping represents a relatively safe way to get back on the road again.

Arrive Outdoors, a startup based out of Santa Monica, is looking to capitalize on the growing popularity of camping and interest in outdoor activities with its gear rental platform.

The company was cofounded by married couple Rachelle Snyder and Ross Richmond who had experienced the problem of wanting to do outdoor activities, particularly while traveling, but not having access to quality gear. The only options for an adventurer are to schlepp their own gear around, or rely on a local gear rental store, many of whom do not offer reservations.

Simply put, Arrive Outdoors brings the internet into the equation.

The company, which just raised $4.75 million in seed funding led by Freestyle Capital, allows users to choose gear on an a la carte basis, or choose a pre-packaged kit of items, and reserve their gear for free. The equipment is shipped in a box with a pre-paid return label, and can be sent back to the company once the trip is over.

For a weekend, the usual rental period for users, the cost of the equipment is approximately 10 percent of the retail price of the gear.

This gear includes hiking and backpacking apparel, camping gear, and snow and ski equipment/apparel. The most popular product on the site, according to Snyder, is the Camping Set for Two, which includes a tent, two sleeping bags and pads, headlamps, a lantern, a cooler, a stove and pot, and a couple chairs.

Arrive Outdoors partners with around 40 premium brands, and offers different types of partnerships depending on the size and goals of the brand itself. With smaller brands, the company buys the gear wholesale, while bigger brands that are looking to ‘advertise’ their products may partner with Arrive Outdoors to get those products in the hands of customers.

The company also partners with state parks, including Washington State Parks, Michigan State Parks, and Utah State Parks who refer campers to Arrive Outdoors for their camping gear.

All gear is held in the company’s California warehouse and is cleaned between uses per the CDC’s Recreate Responsibly guidelines and the National Park Service’s recommendations.

Alongside Freestyle Capital, Science Inc., Corigin Ventures, Narrative Fund, AVG Basecamp Fund, James Reinhart and John Voris have also invested in the company. As part of the deal, John Felser (Freestyle Capital cofounder) and Mike Jones (cofounder and CEO of Science Inc.) have joined the board.

Our biggest challenge is that we are growing at a rate that is fairly unexpected this summer,” said Snyder. “COVID hit and it was a low point in March and April and then it shot up. So, for us, it’s all about catching up and trying to run as fast as we can to make sure that we can supply everybody who wants gear.”

Snyder added that it’s a challenge the company feels very fortunate to be faced with.

The company plans on using the funding to grow the team (currently at 12). Women make up 46 percent of the team, and people of color represent 46 percent of the team.