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The ongoing pandemic has drastically shaped how we maintain existing relationships but it’s also transformed how we get those relationships started, pushing more first encounters online and adding social distance into the dating process. It’s been uncharted waters for the dating app market to weather, as well.

For Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, the massive shift comes months after big changes in her own role. After Badoo founder Andrey Andreev sold off his stake in the dating apps conglomerate he created, Wolfe Herd stepped into the CEO role of MagicLab (which has been newly rebranded to Bumble), taking charge of its digital dating empire which includes the Badoo, Bumble, Lumen and Chappy dating apps. We’re excited to announce that Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd will be joining us at Disrupt this September to discuss the future of the dating app market. 

Wolfe Herd entered the dating app scene as a co-founder and VP of Marketing at Tinder, where she helped change the face of online dating. Following her filing of a lawsuit over sexual harassment and discrimination, later settled out of court, Wolfe Herd left the company to create Bumble after taking on a substantial investment from Andreev.

In mid 2019, following a bout of exposés highlighting a culture of sexism and misconduct at Badoo, Andreev sold off his stake to Blackstone. Wolfe Herd was appointed to the helm of MagicLab (now Bumble), the parent company of Badoo and Bumble, where she now wields outsized influence in the world of online dating apps.

Bumble itself has grown to more than 100 million users, and done so in a way that is relatively unique in Silicon Valley terms.

Alongside the news of the rebrand, Bumble has also made some new appointments to the leadership team, including Tariq Shaukat as President, Ronen Benchetrit as the parent company’s Chief Technology Officer, and Tran Taylor, Chief People Officer.

Hear how it all got started, and what’s next in the world of online dating, from Wolfe Herd at Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18. Get a front-row seat with your Digital Pro Pass for just $245 or with a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package.

Earlier this month, Instagram href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/07/instagram-swaps-out-its-activity-tab-for-shop-in-new-global-test/"> began testing new navigation in its app that gave its shopping destination a more prominent position. Today, the company is moving forward with its plans to promote Instagram as a place to shop with the launch of its new Instagram Shop, a place to shop from inside Instagram Explore, as well as the launch of Facebook Pay for purchases and donations in the U.S.

Both initiatives were announced previously, this year and in 2019, but had not yet rolled out.

Instagram Shop is described as a place to browse products from favorite brands and creators, as well as curated collections published by the Instagram-run @shop account. In the Shop tab, you’re able to filter by categories like beauty and home, for example, and then checkout directly in the app.

In its original announcement, Instagram Shop was to launch before the company swapped out the Activity tab for the Shop tab in the bottom nav bar, but the company chose to begin testing that latter change first. If you don’t have the Shop tab, you’ll have to visit Instagram Shop directly from Explore.

While there was already a way to shop within Instagram before today — and even check out from select accounts without leaving the app — the new Instagram Shop has been designed to encourage even more browsing and discovery of brands, creators, and products.

Shop itself grew out of how Instagram users were already using the platform to find new things to buy. The photo-centric app had naturally drawn in users who posted creative content, often including well-styled photos of fashion, beauty products, art, home décor, and more. And thanks to the rise of influencers and their numerous brands deals, Instagram was often a place where you’d find products being demoed and discussed, encouraging purchases.

Meanwhile, Instagram ads and their nearly perfected targeting capabilities would appear in your feed eerily suggesting the very thing you’re likely to buy.

The new Instagram Shop is the culmination of all this data and insight, put into its own destination. How well it will covert as a standalone product, however, remains to be seen. After all, Instagram’s ability to connect users to brands was often due to the massive amount of time users spent inside the Instagram app scrolling through photos — eventually, they’d see something they liked.

The new Instagram Shop experience is personalized to the end user. There are rows with your favorite brand and creators, for example, underneath large, attention-grabbing images at the top of the screen. There’s also a personalized “Suggested For You” section at the bottom.

Facebook Pay, meanwhile, was introduced last year as a way to transact securely across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In Instagram, it will allow U.S. users to make purchases as they shop, as well as donations to the businesses they’re supporting because of the coronavirus outbreak and related shutdowns, because of destruction by rioters, or any other reason.

If the business is using Instagram’s own Checkout feature a selling fee is involved. At scale, this could produce a new stream of revenue for the company, particularly now as consumers are shopping more online amid the pandemic.

The new features are rolling out starting today in the U.S.

Fetch is no doubt best known for its warehouse fulfillment robotics, which have found success competing directly with the likes of Amazon. But as with any good autonomous robotics platform, the Bay Area company offers up a modular system that can be adapted to address different concerns as they arise.

Like many countless other companies, Fetch recognized a need for its technology amid the last several months of pandemic. Last month, the company introduced Breezy One, a disinfecting spray robot. Less than a month later, it’s back with SmartGuardUV, which is based on similar principles, but performs its disinfection using UV-C, UV-B and UV-A light, courtesy of a PURO Lighting Xenon UV fixture.

Like other Fetch robots, the SmartGuardUV operates autonomously, allowing it to be used for large spaces like hospitals, stores and the retail businesses and office spaces that are currently looking toward safety measures as they begin to reopen.

Image Credits: Fetch Robotics

“The facilities best prepared to protect workers and customers from COVID-19 are taking extreme precautions when it comes to sanitization, and are placing their trust in automated solutions that can be deployed at any time,” said Fetch CPO Stefan Nusser said in a release. “Companies of every size recognize the need for reliable sanitization procedures, and SmartGuardUV provides reliable protection at every hour of the day, without taking employees away from their already existing job responsibilities.”

In addition to 3D mapping, the system is also built to offer up disinfecting metrics as it goes to work via the Piedmont 4Site cloud analytics platform. In all, Fetch says it’s capable of disinfecting up to 99.9% of viruses and bacteria.

Uber said Thursday it has acquired Routematch, an Atlanta-based company that provides software to transit agencies as the ride-hailing company looks to offer more SaaS-related services to cities.

Uber did not share terms of the deal. However, it doesn’t appear to be a minor “acquihire,” in which a company is purchased to land a few talented employees. Instead, Uber is making a strategic acquisition for a company that has developed software used by more than 500 transit agencies.

The operations of the 170-person company will continue and CEO Pepper Harward will remain.

The acquisition marks Uber’s push to become a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider to public transit agencies. Routematch’s software provides trip planning, vehicle tracking, payment and tools for fixed route transit like buses as well as paratransit services. The 20-year-old company has a wide range of customers, including rural and suburban enclaves.

Last month, Uber locked in a deal to manage an on-demand service for Marin County in the San Francisco Bay area with a SaaS product. It was Uber’s first software partnership with a public transit agency.

Uber’s foray into SaaS has been years in the making, David Reich, head of Uber Transit, said in a recent interview.

“Uber knows that for cities to thrive, public transit has to thrive,” Reich said.

Uber has been developing services related to public transit since 2015, first with a planning feature and then ticketing, Reich noted. The public transit feature called Journey Planning is available in more than 15 cities around the world, including the Marin area since 2019. The company has also worked with Denver and Las Vegas. In 2018, Uber partnered with mobile ticketing platform Masabi to let people book and use transit tickets from within the Uber app.

Openpath, the developer of software-based security systems for office access, has raised $36 million in new financing as businesses try to find ways to make employees feel more comfortable about coming back to work.

The round was led by Greycroft, which had been following the company’s progress for years, and included participation from strategic investors like Okta Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Lincoln Property Companies, Allegion Ventures and Sentre, and included follow-on from existing investors.

For the greater Los Angeles-based Openpath, the new funding offers a chance to boost its sales and marketing efforts and develop new security-focused products for companies and property managers trying to woo tenants back to the shared office space during a global pandemic.

“Openpath is clearly one of the most innovative companies in PropTech. Their solution has been rapidly accepted by the market and it’s clear to me they will be the leading access security platform for the built world, ” said Mark Terbeek,  a partner at Greycroft, in a statement. “We have followed this team closely since their launch and preempted their fundraise plans, along with a host of important strategic investors, to lead this new round of capital. We are thrilled to be an investor as they execute on their ambitious road map and bring critical new solutions to a marketplace suddenly impacted by COVID-19.”

According to Openpath, Greycroft made it clear that they wanted to pre-empt any fundraising process the company would have attempted later in the year, so the firm and the company began to work on a round over the past quarter — even as the COVID-19 epidemic was spreading in the U.S.

Openpath also noted that the strategic partners involved in the round had worked with the company for at least a year, leading to a relatively smooth investment process.

What’s attractive to the investors — and to potential customers — is likely the company’s deep integration with Okta for digital identification and the use of the mobile-based credential and permission-based software that gets rid of the need for key cards or physical identifiers. Both Hines and Lincoln Property Company use the service to give landlords and tenants control over who can access properties.

The new funding offers Openpath a chance to boost its sales and marketing efforts and develop new security-focused products for companies and property managers trying to woo tenants back to the shared office space during a global pandemic.

The argument from Openpath’s chief executive Alex Kazerani is that as more workers push for flexible work schedules that incorporate an office and remote work, companies will need more controls over access.

“Our technology offers instant mobile credentials, virtual guest passes, remote unlock capabilities, and accommodate [sic] schedule management to comply with social distancing,” he wrote in an email. “Being able to manage the security of your building and employees while you are remote is crucial.”

Lex, a new social app for women, trans, genderqueer, and non-binary people offering the ability to post personal ads, has today announced the close of a $1.5 million seed funding round.

Investors in the round include Corigin Ventures, X-Factor Ventures, and Tusk Ventures, with angels Michelle Kennedy (Peanut), Andy Dunn (Bonobos) Amanda Bradford (The League), Rei Wang (The Grand), Bumble Fund, Elisabeth Hartley, Tavi Gevinson, Nisha Dua, A.G. Breitenstein, Albert Lee, Alice Cheng, Justin Stefano, Piera Gelardi, Philippe von Borries, Debbie Millman and Roxane Gay. Female Founders Fund led the round.

Short for Lexicon, Lex was founded by Kell Rakowski, who had originally rose to some prominence after starting an Instagram account called Herstory that curated cool lesbian content from the 1800s to the 90s, including the Personals Ads found in the backs of lesbian erotica magazines from the 80s.

“[The personal ads] were just so hot, and so cool,” said Rakowski. “They were really witty and the women were super direct, and were able to express themselves in a really clear and inspiring way.”

Rakowski had an idea: What if the queer personal ad came back? She asked her Herstory followers if they’d want to post their own personals and the premise quickly took off, with hundreds of personal ads flooding in over the two-day period each month where submissions were open.

The popularity of the format led to yet another idea. Rakowski decided to set up a dating/social app that was focused on these text-based personal ads for women, trans, genderqueer and non-binary people.

Lex, which launched on the App Store in November 2019, is an MVP that does just that.

Users can set up their own profile and post personals, and can browse the feed of other personals and like the ones that pique their interest. While the personals themselves can be rather graphic, the app is not. There are currently no pictures on Lex, with the caveat that users can link out to their Instagram account if they so choose.

Rather, users can browse through the text-based personals and like them, or message the author of the personal to start up a conversation.

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Moreover, unlike your traditional dating apps, there is no mutuality required to start a private conversation. In other words, people don’t have to be ‘matched’ to chat. Just like the personal ads of yesteryear, the author sends out a call for responses and the responses flow in.

It’s still early days for the app, but Rakowski has plans to set up the ability to post pictures to profiles (which would not be included in the feed, but would be clickable should the text intrigue you), as well as adding group chat to the app for folks that are looking to build community.

Lex also has plans to eventually introduce a freemium subscription model to the app, giving users extended functionality for a monthly price. For now, however, the focus is on growth and building out the app.

With the new funding, Lex is looking to hire underrepresented talent in tech for product and engineering positions. The team, comprised of five people, is currently 80 percent cis women and 20 percent cis men, with 80 percent identifying as LGBTQ. Three of the five team members are people of color.

Lex is being aggressive about this hiring sprint, posting its open positions on the app and on Instagram.

“I’ve gotten so many incredible queer tech talent applying for positions at Lex,” said Rakowski. “It’s so inspiring and also emotional. People are writing the most beautiful emails about how much they like Lex. Hiring is 100 percent our main focus.”

Qumulo, a Seattle storage startup helping companies store vast amounts of data, announced a $125 million Series E investment today on a $1.2 billion valuation.

BlackRock led the round with help from Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Kleiner Perkins and new investor Amity Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $351 million.

CEO Bill Richter says the valuation is more than 2x its most recent round, a $93 million Series D in 2018. While the valuation puts his company in the unicorn club, he says that it’s more important than simple bragging rights. “It puts us in the category of raising at a billion plus dollar level during a very complicated environment in the world. Actually, that’s probably the more meaningful news,” he told TechCrunch.

It typically hasn’t been easy raising money during the pandemic, but Richter reports the company started getting inbound interest in March just before things started shutting down nationally. What’s more, as the company’s quarter closed at the end of April, they had grown almost 100% year over year, and beaten their pre-COVID revenue estimate. He says they saw that as a signal to take additional investment.

“When you’re putting up nearly 100% year over year growth in an environment like this, I think it really draws a lot of attention in a positive way,” he said. And that attention came in the form a huge round that closed this week.

What’s driving that growth is that the amount of unstructured data, which plays to the company’s storage strength, is accelerating during the pandemic as companies move more of their activities online. He says that when you combine that with a shift to the public cloud, he believes that Qumulo is well positioned.

Today the company has 400 customers and over 300 employees with plans to add another 100 more before year’s end. As he adds those employees, he says that part of the the company’s core principles includes building a diverse workforce. “We took the time as an organization to write out a detailed set of hiring practices that are designed to root out bias in the process,” he said.

One of the keys to that is looking at a broad set of candidates, not just the ones you’ve known from previous jobs. “The reason for that is that when you force people to go through hiring practices, you open up the position to a broader, more diverse set of candidates and you stop the cycle of continuously creating what I call ‘club memberships’, where if you were a member of the club before you’re a member in the future,” he says.

The company has been around since 2012 and spent the first couple of years conducting market research before building its first product. In 2014 it released a storage appliance, but over time it has shifted more towards hybrid solutions.

Meet Waldo, a new product that wants to make mobile testing both faster and easier. The New York-based startup lets you record tests in your browser by interacting with your app like you’d normally do. Every time you compile a new build, Waldo runs the same tests you previously recorded on multiple software and hardware models to tell you if everything works fine.

If you’re an app developer, you currently have two possibilities. You can keep a bunch of smartphones and run your current build on these devices to see if there’s anything wrong, but it takes a ton of time. Or you can develop testing scripts that validate the core features of your app — but that requires additional development and creates a whole new set of headaches when you need to update your scripts.

“It’s always a bit weird that we can create incredible experiences when it comes to UX, but that the way we test those apps is outdated,” co-founder and CEO Amine Bellakrid told me.

Waldo wants to lower the barrier to entry and lets smaller mobile development teams take advantage of automated functional and UI testing. It is part of a bigger trend of ‘no code’ startups — no technical skills required.

The company raised a $6.5 million round led by First Round Capital (with Josh Kopelman), with existing investor Matrix Partners and business angels also participating.

Creating tests on Waldo is pretty straightforward. The product runs your app directly (.app / .ipa / .apk), which means that you don’t have to create a special version of your app to take advantage of the platform.

After uploading your app, you see your app running in your browser window. Waldo records every screen and every action you take. For instance, you can record the signup flow or a feature that lets you upload content.

Image Credits: Waldo

When you’re done recording your tests, Waldo keeps them for future versions. Every time you have a new build of your mobile app, Waldo runs the same tests on that new version. In addition to that, Waldo can run those tests on other devices with different screen sizes, older versions of mobile operating systems and in different languages.

If a test fails, users get notified and can browse the replay of the test. You can see exactly what went wrong to spot the problematic step more easily.

The idea is that you set up Waldo once and let it run in the background. It integrates with popular continuous integration (CI) tools, such as Fastlane, Bitrise and CircleCI. You can receive alerts in Slack or see the status of your test results in GitHub directly.

“We have customers that run 500 tests at once every week or we have customers that run 10 to 15 tests multiple times a day,” Bellakrid said.

Waldo is launching a free plan today to kick the tires and you can then pay a subscription to run more tests. Some companies have started using Waldo already, such as Alltrails, Jumprope, KeepSafe and Elevate. Right now, Waldo only works with iOS apps but the team is already working on adding Android support in the future.

Image Credits: Waldo

The coronavirus continues to hit people hard mentally, and this has meant a boom for mental death and meditation apps. According to a recent report from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the world’s 10 largest English-language mental wellness apps in April saw a combined 2 million more downloads during the month of April 2020 compared with January, reaching close to 10 million total downloads for the month. The charts were dominated by market leaders such as Calm, Headspace and others such as “Relax: Master Your Destiny”.

However, a slightly lesser know app called Meditopia featured, and that’s because it’s become a big leader non-English speaking markets.

Today it’s announced a Series A investment of $15M co-led by Creandum, and Highland Europe . Carl Fritjofsson of Creandum and Fergal Mullen of Highland Europe will join Meditopia’s Board of Directors. Total funding prior to this round was $3.2m. This new round takes the total to $18.2m.

Based between Istanbul and Berlin, Meditopia has majored on localization for 75 global markets, in 10 languages, with a focus on long-term mental wellbeing programs. Since launching in 2017 Meditopia has grown to 14M users across 75 countries.

Until recently, most meditation and mental health apps were built to suit the needs of English-speaking, Western culture, especially in the way these apps dealt with topics such as gender.

The startup was founded by Fatih Celebi, Berk Yilmaz and Ali Murat Ceylan.

In a statement, Murat said: “Mental wellness is something everyone should be able to achieve, regardless of their country of origin, native language, socio-economic status, ethnicity, or religion. We first focused our efforts on our home country Turkey before expanding worldwide so whether you are Latino, Japanese, Russian, North American, or Arab, you can find support and coaching in our global community.”

Carl Fritjofsson, Partner at Creandum commented: “We’ve followed Meditopia for the past two years and have been incredibly impressed by how they’ve been able to capture this opportunity across the world, all while being one of the most capital-efficient run companies around.”

Fergal Mullen, Founding Partner at Highland Europe said: “For too long, the technology available was created for English-speaking groups alone. Meditopia provides the alternative; a solution that helps its members get to the heart of what they need in a way that suits them. We’re thrilled to be a part of getting this vital service to those people.”

Investors are becoming more bullish on online education platforms in India as startups demonstrate growth at the height of a global pandemic that has severely impacted other industries.

Bangalore-based startup Vedantu said on Thursday it has raised $100 million in its Series D financing round, just five months after it closed its Series C funding.

U.S. based Coatue led the six-year-old Vedantu’s new financing round, with participation from some existing investors. The new funds valued Vedantu at $600 million, up from $275 million in February this year, when the startup closed its extended Series C round.

Vedantu offers live and interactive courses for students in grades 6 though 12 — and in recent months it has expanded its catalog to serve students in grade one to five as well, said Vamsi Krishna, co-founder and CEO of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Students who have enrolled for the interactive sessions are required to answer questions every few minutes by tapping on their smartphone screen or on the desktop. They also can raise their doubts at the end of the session. Some of these sessions are free for students, but a selection of it requires a subscription, said Krishna.

Vedantu today serves 25 million students each month. The startup has added more than 2 million users in recent months as schools closed across the nation after New Delhi enforced a lockdown.

Krishna said Vedantu is adding more than 20,000 paying subscribers each month to the platform.

More to follow…