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Lime has announced that it has raised a $170 million funding round. Uber is the leading investor with existing investors Alphabet, Bain Capital Ventures, GV and others also participating. The Information first reported on the new funding round, before the official announcement.

As part of the deal, Lime is also acquiring Uber’s micromobility subsidiary Jump. There will be more integrations between Uber and Jump in the future, but both apps will remain active for now. It’s still unclear whether you’re going to be able to unlock Lime electric scooters in the Uber app, and Jump scooters and electric bikes in the Lime app.

“We’re glad that our customers will continue to have access to bikes and scooters in both our apps because we believe micromobility is a critical part of the urban landscape, now more than ever,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release.

Yesterday, Uber announced a massive round of layoffs. Around 14% of the company have been laid off — it represents 3,700 employees. Cuts come mostly from community operations, recruiting and Greenlight hubs, the company’s in-person help centers for drivers. Uber Eats is also pulling out of seven markets around the world.

Uber is trying to cut costs as usage has been plummeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns around the world. With today’s deal, the company is also going to save on operating costs as Jump employees transition from Uber to Lime.

On April 30, Lime also laid off 13% of its workforce, representing about 80 employees. “Almost overnight, our company went from being on the eve of accomplishing an unprecedented milestone — the first next-generation micromobility company to reach profitability — to one where we had to pause operations in 99% of our markets worldwide to support cities’ efforts at social distancing. Needless to say, while we thought we had planned for all possibilities this year, we did not anticipate a global pandemic,” the company’s CEO wrote at the time.

According to The Information’s report, Lime’s valuation is down 79% to $510 million with this round. In April 2019, Lime raised at a $2.4 billion valuation.

In other news, Lime has a new chief executive officer — Wayne Ting is getting a promotion as he joined Lime in October 2018 as Global Head of Operations and Strategy.

Last year, Lime co-founder Toby Sun stepped down from the CEO role. Brad Bao, another co-founder of the company, assumed chief responsibilities. Following today’s news, Bao will remain chairman of the board with Sun taking on the CEO position.

Uber’s stock is currently trading up 6.61% compared to yesterday’s closing price during pre-market trading.

Savings and investing apps are having a moment. While many startups are struggling in the wake of COVID-19 and its economic impacts, services that help regular folks save a bit more or invest their funds are seeing a demand boom.

Coming into 2020 on the back of a huge fundraising year for the fintech cohort, it’s a welcome result for investors and founders alike

Public, a startup whose app allows consumers to invest for free, is enjoying the updraft. So much so that it accelerated a feature release to help capitalize on changing consumer behavior. This morning let’s explore how quickly Public has grown in recent weeks, and why it’s doubling-down on the social side of its service, something that many of its peers lack.

Growth

Public launched out of beta last September and saw rapid consumer adoption right away, according to Jannick Malling, the startup’s co-founder and co-CEO. “We’ve been growing very, very quickly since September,” Malling told TechCrunch.

But Public’s service is a different from other investing apps that you might be familiar with. Users can buy fractional shares, invest in ETFs, and invest in themes for free, as you’d expect in 2020. But it also has a social element that makes its application more than just a place to take stock of your portfolio’s performance.

Users can display their investments and stocks that they are interested in on a public page (here’s one). They can also explain their investment choices in a public feed (the company’s name is rather on-the-nose).

Those social tools became more than a neat feature when the markets began to gyrate earlier this year. According to Malling, users were coming to app to handle the market’s ups-and-downs alongside their investing peers. Public’s users “are going through [the turbulence] together,” Malling told TechCrunch, adding that he and his company believes that investing through a downturn with fellow investors is a “a much better way” than hacking it alone.

But Public wanted to provide more social tools to its users, and quickly, once the markets stopped merely going up and began to bounce up and down instead. So the startup accelerated the rollout of private and group messaging, which it launched this morning.

Public had messaging capabilities on the roadmap before COVID-19, but the changing world “made the need so much more apparent,” Malling said. “Times of great uncertainty [are] really when you do need community,” the co-CEO explained in an interview. “You need people that you can have dialogue with.”

Community in trying times is welcome, and public-market investors are a famously chatty bunch, so messaging might prove to be a smart call for Public. From day trading chat rooms in the 1990s to today’s WallStreetBet denizens, folks putting money to work like to talk about where they are deploying capital and why. Public is not designed for day traders, mind, but that doesn’t mean its longer-term investing users won’t want to talk amongst themselves.

And there are more Public users than ever. Like its competitors (Robinhood, Wealthfront, M1 Finance, Betterment, it’s a list) Public has seen its userbase boom in recent weeks. According to the company, it saw “new customer growth” of +80% in April when compared to March’s results, along with a doubling (+100%) of trading activity and a tripling (+200%) of time spent in its app by users.

That recent growth has been organic, according to Malling. Noting that he views Public as a social network, Malling said that his company “predominantly” grows via organic channels, including user referrals, because it is an “app that gets better with friends on it.”

Looking ahead, TechCrunch asked the company if messaging would be followed up by other, socially focused features in the future. It will, according to Malling, who told TechCrunch the new messaging feature will be prominently featured in the app itself, which he felt was “indicative that [the new feature] is the start of something, and there will be many more exciting updates that we will roll out in the coming months.”

The social aspirations of Public are serious. Malling explained TechCrunch that folks today have Slack for work, for example, and Twitch and Discord for for gaming, but that “there isn’t really that social network for investing and that is ultimately what we think we can build with Public.”

Harbr CEO Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to solve that problem, and today it came out of stealth.

Cosgrove explained that in his experience, data platforms of the past had several problems. “They were too slow. They were too expensive and too risky, and when you got the data you then ended up working in a silo with really no repeatability of anything that you did for anybody else in your organization,” he explained.

Cosgrove started Harbr because he saw a dearth of tools to help with these issues. “We wanted to create an environment where organizations could share their data, collaborate on that data and create new versions of that data that were really optimized for very specific use cases,” he said.

For now, the company is concentrating on large data vendors, helping them package and monetize the data they produce as a business more efficiently, but Cosgrove sees a time where he could be helping other firms that produce data as a byproduct of conducting business to monetize that data more easily.

He says these big data businesses generally lack the agility to package data in ways that make sense for each customer, and his company’s product should help solve that. “They’re able to start working directly with their customers to move away from kind of sending data to actually selling services, models or insights, which is what customers really want,” he said.

One other unique aspect of the tool is that it is a true platform, meaning that you are not just restricted to the data in your system. You can pull together other data sources as well, and that could make for even more interesting ways to package the data for customers.

The company launched in London in 2017 and spent some time building the product. It recently opened offices in the United States and currently has 30 employees divided between the two locations. It has raised $6.5 million in seed capital led by Boldstart Ventures .

A couple of weeks ago, we noted some new NPD numbers pointing to a very good March for the Switch. Nintendo’s financials this week bear out the predicted surge in popularity for the  three-year-old console.

The company has sold 21 million Switch units in the past year, handily beating a 19.5 million forecast. 6.2 million of those systems were the newer, cheaper Switch Lite, which hit the market in September. All of this comes as the company has run up against shortage through a combination of increased popularity and a a global supply chain knocked off balance from COVID-19.

In spite of the increased difficult procuring a device at retail, the pandemic looks to have had a positive impact on Switch sales as stay at home orders have increased interest. The arrival of Animal Crossing: New Horizons couldn’t have been better timed, either. The title fulfills both the increased demand for stationary entertainment as well as virtual socialization.

No surprise, then, that the game has become the console’s fastest selling. As of the end of March, 11.77 million copies have been sold. The figures make New Horizons the seventh best-selling Switch title of all time — between Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Eevee! And Splatoon 2 — in spite of having only been on sale for just over a month.

The year ahead may look at bit rockier for the company, however, with the arrival of next gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony arriving this holiday. 

Hub Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that developed a software and hardware platform for cryptographic operations, today announced that it has raised a $5 million Series A round led by AXA Ventures. Crowdfunding platform OurCrowd also participated in this round. Like most companies at the Series A stage, the company plans to use the investment to expand its team and technology offerings.

On the hardware side, Hub Security is building both a relatively standard Hardware Security Module (HSM), using FPGAs to accelerate various processes and to create a physical separation between the part of the machine that holds the secrets and the outside world.

But it’s also building a mini-HSM, which is basically a small hardware wallet with a built-in firewall, EMI shield and tamper-resistant case. On the software side, the company offers tools for managing the signing and authorization workflows, as well as a machine learning-based tool that has been designed to anticipate cyberattacks on the system.

Like most Israeli cybersecurity companies, most of Hub Security’s founding team got its start in the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200. The team founded the company in 2017, but co-founder Andrey Iaremenko had started working on the problem a few years earlier. “He was trying to figure out a way to deal with secrets in motion for anything that’s not military, anything that doesn’t require a lot of resources and can be relatively cheap and can be commoditized easily,” Eyal Moshe, Hub Security’s CEO, told me.

In the early days, the company focused a lot of its marketing on the blockchain market, but as Moshe told me, it has evolved its messaging quite a bit since then. “The vision didn’t change. What changed was the focus and how we pitch it, but the vision didn’t change much. What I think is changing recently is some understanding of how we can market it alongside how we can add value to cloud customers without interfering too much with their setup,” said Moshe.

Unsurprisingly, Hub Security’s focus today is on working with fintech and cloud companies. It already has a strategic partnership with Seagate Technology’s Tel Aviv-based Lyve Labs, which focuses on partnering with local companies that work on building new solutions for managing exabytes of data.

“I was actively looking for a ‘software-defined HSM’ platform company in Israel for the past twelve months and I was very pleased when I met Hub Security and learned about their unique offering. We agreed very quickly to partner and invest,” said Moshe Raines, partner at OurCrowd and Labs/02 managing partner. That investment came together just around the time Israel went into its strict COVID-19 lockdown

A UK parliamentary committee that focuses on human rights issues has called for primary legislation to be put in place to ensure that legal protections wrap around the national coronavirus contact tracing app.

The app, called NHS COVID-19, is being fast tracked for public use — with a test ongoing this week in the Isle of Wight. It’s set to use Bluetooth Low Energy signals to log social interactions between users to try to automate some contacts tracing based on an algorithmic assessment of users’ infection risk.

The NHSX has said the app could be ready for launch within a matter of weeks but the committee says key choices related to the system architecture create huge risks for people’s rights that demand the safeguard of primary legislation.

“Assurances from Ministers about privacy are not enough. The Government has given assurances about protection of privacy so they should have no objection to those assurances being enshrined in law,” said committee chair, Harriet Harman MP, in a statement.

“The contact tracing app involves unprecedented data gathering. There must be robust legal protection for individuals about what that data will be used for, who will have access to it and how it will be safeguarded from hacking.

“Parliament was able quickly to agree to give the Government sweeping powers. It is perfectly possible for parliament to do the same for legislation to protect privacy.”

The NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, is in the process of testing the app — which it’s said could be launched nationally within a few weeks.

The government has opted for a system design that will centralize large amounts of social graph data when users experiencing COVID-19 symptoms (or who have had a formal diagnosis) choose to upload their proximity logs.

Earlier this week we reported on one of the committee hearings — when it took testimony from NHSX CEO Matthew Gould and the UK’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, among other witnesses.

Warning now over a lack of parliamentary scrutiny — around what it describes as an unprecedented expansion of state surveillance — the committee report calls for primary legislation to ensure “necessary legal clarity and certainty as to how data gathered could be used, stored and disposed of”.

The committee also wants to see an independent body set up to carry out oversight monitoring and guard against ‘mission creep’ — a concern that’s also been raised by a number of UK privacy and security experts in an open letter late last month.

“A Digital Contact Tracing Human Rights Commissioner should be responsible for oversight and they should be able to deal with complaints from the Public and report to Parliament,” the committee suggests.

Prior to publishing its report, the committee wrote to health minister Matt Hancock, raising a full spectrum of concerns — receiving a letter in response.

In this letter, dated May 4, Hancock told it: “We do not consider that legislation is necessary in order to build and deliver the contact tracing app. It is consistent with the powers of, and duties imposed on, the Secretary of State at a time of national crisis in the interests of protecting public health.”

The committee’s view is Hancock’s ‘letter of assurance’ is not enough given the huge risks attached to the state tracking citizens’ social graph data.

“The current data protection framework is contained in a number of different documents and it is nearly impossible for the public to understand what it means for their data which may be collected by the digital contact tracing system. Government’s assurances around data protection and privacy standards will not carry any weight unless the Government is prepared to enshrine these assurances in legislation,” it writes in the report, calling for a bill that it says myst include include a number of “provisions and protections”.

Among the protections the committee is calling for are limits on who has access to data and for what purpose.

“Data held centrally may not be accessed or processed without specific statutory authorisation, for the purpose of combatting Covid-19 and provided adequate security protections are in place for any systems on which this data may be processed,” it urges.

It also wants legal protections against data reconstruction — by different pieces of data being combined “to reconstruct information about an individual”.

The report takes a very strong line — warning that no app should be released without “strong protections and guarantees” on “efficacy and proportionality”.

“Without clear efficacy and benefits of the app, the level of data being collected will be not be justifiable and it will therefore fall foul of data protection law and human rights protections,” says the committee.

The report also calls for regular reviews of the app — looking at efficacy; data safety; and “how privacy is being protected in the use of any such data”.

It also makes a blanket call for transparency, with the committee writing that the government and health authorities “must at all times be transparent about how the app, and data collected through it, is being used”.

A lack of transparency around the project was another of the concerns raised by the 177 academics who signed the open letter last month.

The government has committed to publishing data protection impact assessments for the app. But the ICO’s Denham still hadn’t had sight of this document as of this Monday.

Another call by the committee is for a time-limit to be attached to any data gathered by or generated via the app. “Any digital contact tracing (and data associated with it) must be permanently deleted when no longer required and in any event may not be kept beyond the duration of the public health emergency,” it writes.

We’ve reached out to the Department of Health and NHSX for comment on the human rights committee’s report.

There’s another element to this fast moving story: Yesterday the Financial Times reported that the NHSX has inked a new contract with an IT supplier which suggests it might be looking to change the app architecture — moving away from a centralized database to a decentralized system for contacts tracing. Although NHSX has not confirmed any such switch at this point.

Some other countries have reversed course in their choice of app architecture after running into technical challenges related to Bluetooth. The need to ensure public trust in the system was also cited by Germany for switching to a decentralized model.

The human rights committee report highlights a specific app efficacy issue of relevance to the UK, which it points out is also linked to these system architecture choices, noting that: “The Republic of Ireland has elected to use a decentralised app and if a centralised app is in use in Northern Ireland, there are risks that the two systems will not be interoperable which would be most unfortunate.”

Today at 10am PDT, two-thirds of the Equity crew are sitting down with Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist with Homebrew and well-known seed-stage investor.

Continuing TechCrunch’s running series of Extra Crunch Live discussions with prominent people in the tech industry, bringing Walk in for a discussion is fitting. Our recent chat with Sequoia Roelof Botha’s gave us a slightly later-stage look at the world of startups, for example. And our conversation last week with Mark Cuban gave us an anti-VC perspective on startup growth and profitability.

Danny and Alex will dig through the health of the seed-stage market with Walk, working to understand which cohort of super early-stage startups are the best capitalized, and the best prepared, to survive the COVID-19 era’s worsening economy and changing consumer and business spending patterns.

Fintech is also on the docket, given that Homebrew has put money into Chime (a popular neobank that has raised an ocean of capital), Finix (a payments infra startup that recently annoyed Stripe), and Plaid (which Visa bought for billions earlier this year).

And we will also talk about whether now is a good time to begin a startup — does the economy bode well for new startups?

Plus, we will take your questions, so come prepared with them.

Details for Extra Crunch members are below. You can grab a trial for a few bucks here if you need one. See you all later today!

Schedules, links

Extra Crunch crew, your details are below:

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

As the economy has worsened, the market for many goods and services has slowed. Some SaaS products have found themselves immune, or even boosted by recently changes in consumer and business consumption patterns and travel habits. Software that aids in remote work, for example, have seen demand for their products rise sharply.

But on balance, private-market investors had told TechCrunch that they expect SaaS customer loss (churn) to rise and growth to slow. SaaS revenue, often sold on year-long contracts, is generally expected to hold up reasonably well in the current downturn; you can see this in the rapid rebound in the value of public SaaS stocks, for example. But what can data tell us?

Today we’re turning once again to statistics from ProfitWell, a Boston-based software startup that helps other companies track their subscription businesses and reduce churn. The company has provided TechCrunch with updated performance charts detailing how SaaS in the B2B world is performing.

Let’s examine what the data says, and we’ll close with a hint of how consumer SaaS is itself holding up.

A recovery, a plateau

We live in a time when old playbooks about how to build a company are suddenly out the window. Some VCs are questioning whether it’s even worth having a true sales team for early stage startups when there is nobody to sell to right now.

But eventually you will need to have people in place to help sell what you’re building, and you’re going to have to think about what selling in this new reality is going to look like. Will you still be able to pitch face-to-face in the near or medium term, and if you can’t how will you change your sales motion to reflect this?

It’s a confusing time, and we are bringing together some top experts to help you understand how to navigate this ever-changing landscape and build a sales team that can help you continue to grow as we wait for the market to return to some semblance of normalcy.

At Disrupt SF (Sept 14-16), Brian Ascher, Jill Rowley and Peter Kanzanjy will discuss all this and more.

Brian Ascher is a partner at Venrock’s Palo Alto office. He joined the company back in 1998 and has been helping enterprise startups build successful organizations for more than 20 years.

Jill Rowley is an author and advisor to companies with a speciality in social selling. She has more than 20 years experience and counts among her experience being one of the first 100 employees at Salesforce.

Pete Kazanjy has founded two successful startups. His first, Talentbin was acquired by Monster in 2014. His current venture, Atrium, is a sales performance tool to help companies build a successful sales motion.

The goal of this panel is to help you understand what it’s going to take to build a successful sales department in the middle of a pandemic with tons of economic uncertainty and beyond. Everyone could use some solid advice right now, and these three experienced pros can provide it.

Disrupt SF 2020 runs September 14 to September 16 at the Moscone Center right in the heart of San Francisco. For folks who can’t make it in person, we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually, which you can check out here.

We’ll be announcing more speakers over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

(Editor’s Note: We’re watching the developing situation around the novel coronavirus very closely and will adapt as we go. You can find out the latest on our event schedule plans here.)

With unemployment growing at a worrying rate, we’re seeing a lot more people finding themselves in hot water when it comes to their finances. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help identify and help those users when they find themselves unable to make payments is announcing a very large growth round of funding to meet new demands for its services.

Symend, a Calgary, Canada-based company that builds behavioural analytics into customer engagement products to identify customers having trouble with their bills, and then suggests alternatives to keep them from defaulting altogether, has picked up $52 million in funding, a growth round that it will be using to help it handle a massive boom in its business.

The company has been around since 2016 and has to date “treated” (its term for customers that it has touched and interacted with) some 10 million customers, on behalf of its enterprise clients. But its current funnel is such that CEO Hanif Joshaghani, who co-founded the company with Tiffany Kaminsky (the chief strategy officer), estimates that they will have treated 100 million customers by the end of this year.

Unsurprisingly given that growth, this latest round is a significant boost on the amount its raised previously, which was just $8 million, in a mix of Canadian and USD. It’s being led by Canadian VC Inovia Capital, with participation from Ignition Partners, Impression Ventures, BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund, Mistral Venture Partners, and angel investor Markus Frind (the Canadian founder and former CEO of dating site PlentyOfFish).

A lot of the focus in the world of online payments — perhaps understandably — has been on the payments themselves. How can they be secure, how can they be made more user-friendly for developers to implement, and what is the best practice to make it frictionless for customers to avoid abandoning transactions altogether?

But current times have highlighted another very important issue, which is that payments in many cases (especially with a recurring service) become your primary point of contact with customers, so having a bad experience at that point can ruin that whole relationship. These days, ‘bad experience’ can come in the form of a threatening message delivered when you are at your most vulnerable because of financial problems, or fines that just make the problem worse, and so on.

Symend’s solution is to apply behavioural analytics and AI to the situation, to help try to identify when and where problems might occur, and come up with alternatives, be they defrayed payments, payment holidays or something else. (The company’s staff is 25% PhDs, with a large part of those behavioural scientists, said Joshaghani.)

The idea here is to provide ways of a business recovering some money, in cases where you may never see anything as an alternative, while keeping the customer on board for a time when his or her finances may be in a better state.

“The economic impact of COVID-19 is leaving a lot of people in a bad financial situation,” he said. While some utilities may have their own initiatives or are supported by government efforts to offset people unable to pay bills, this doesn’t cover all businesses or scenarios.

The company does not disclose a lot about how it works, but Kaminsky said that the data that it uses to help assess customers comes from a variety of places, starting with the business itself and sometimes including third-party resources, not unlike the data trove that many AI-based fintechs might use to, say, weigh up the eligibility of a person for a particular loan at a particular interest rate.

“Tell us what you have and we’ll see what we can bring to bear,” she said of the approach. “We have a degree of flexibility depending on what a customer can provide.”

While the company does not tie the pricing of its service to how well a customer performs down the line, it’s always analysing this and sharing data with its users, and Kaminsky said that the ROI on average is 10X what customers invest in using Symend in the first place.

But that’s only some of the motivation here. Built partly on Joshaghani’s own life as a refugee immigrant who lived as a child and young adult with regular financial worries and little inherent financial literacy — something many immigrants can relate to, which I say from first-hand experience — Joshaghani said that providing alternatives and understanding to consumers in a digital world with little nuance otherwise was a huge mission for him. And that social angle was what convinced Kaminsky to join him in building the company.

“We’re impressed with Symend’s commitment to providing at-risk consumers with greater flexibility when it comes to meeting their financial obligations and protecting their credit. We invested in this great founding team because we value their openness, tenacity, and ability to deliver solutions for this critical problem,” said Inovia Capital Partner Dennis Kavelman in a statement.