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Google has hired Microsoft’s former Cortana and Outlook VP, Javier Soltero, to head up its productivity and collaboration bundle, G Suite — which includes consumer and business tools such as Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Google Docs and Sheets.

He tweeted the news yesterday, writing: “The opportunity to work with this team on products that have such a profound impact on the lives of people around the world is a real and rare privilege.”

Soltero joined Microsoft five years ago, after the company shelling out $200M to acquire his mobile email application, Acompli — staying until late last year.

His LinkedIn profile now lists him as vice president of G Suite, starting October 2019.

Soltero will report to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian — who replaced Dianne Green when she stepped down from the role last year — per a company email reported by CNBC.

Previously, Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan — now SVP for its Advertising and Commerce products — was in charge of the productivity bundle, as VP of Google Apps and Google Cloud. But Mountain View has created a dedicated VP role for G Suite. Presumably to woo Soltero into his next major industry move — and into competing directly with his former employer.

The move looks intended to dial up focus on the Office giant, in response to Microsoft’s ongoing push to shift users from single purchase versions of flagship productivity products to subscription-based cloud versions, like Office 365.

This summer Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that its cloud business unit had an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, up from $4BN reported in early 2018, though still lagging Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

He added that Google planned to triple the size of its cloud sales force over the next few years.

The early-stage startup community knows that the Disrupt Main Stage is the place to hear and learn from iconic founders, technologists and investment leaders. And the speakers you’ll hear at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December will follow that grand tradition.

Hold up a sec. Don’t have a ticket yet? Buy your early bird pass today and save up to €500.

Okay, back to the point at hand. “Always leave them wanting more” — a phrase often attributed to P.T. Barnum — also applies to the Disrupt Main Stage. “More” is what Disrupt attendees frequently tell us they want after hearing our featured guests speak. More time to engage, to ask questions, to take a deeper dive into critical issues and emerging trends.

And that’s where the Q&A sessions come into play. They’re a series of smaller, moderated panel discussions — and a place where audience members can interact and ask their top-of-mind questions. Panels consist of a TechCrunch editor to moderate and subject experts, many of whom are the very people who held forth on Main Stage.

Each Q&A Session takes place on the Extra Crunch Stage and, while the topics vary, they focus primarily on these tracks — Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Gaming, Investor Topics, Media, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS, Space and Social Impact & Education.

If you’re not familiar with our new Extra Crunch Stage, that’s the place to find fireside chats, panel discussions and to learn all kinds of actionable, how-to tips from successful founders and investors. You know, things you can actually use in your business once the show ends.

Here’s an important aspect you need to understand about our Q&A sessions. The only way to experience a session is to be there in the flesh. We do not record or livestream the content for these sessions. Keep in mind that seating is limited in this smaller, more intimate setting, and it’s strictly first come, first served. Bottom line: get there early if you want a seat.

Whether you want the 40,000-foot view of the Main Stage or the up-close-and-personal take of the Q&A sessions, you find it — and everything in between — at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Get your early bird passes now and save up to €500. We can’t wait to see you in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Uber said on Tuesday that it has won a bid to work with subway system in India’s capital in one of its rare announcements in India, a key overseas market where it is facing an upheaval battle with local giant Ola.

The ride-hailing giant said it has partnered with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation to deploy parking spots and introduce new products at 210 subway stations in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida. Neither of the parties offered a clarification on how many years it would take for these deployments to materialize.

The company has also started to roll out a software update to its app to include real-time public transportation options from within the Uber app. It’s the same feature — which is limited to offering details such as navigation data — that Uber introduced in several markets in recent months as it attempts to make Uber app “an operating system” for a user’s every transportation need.

But the company, which has retreated some of its businesses in India, had nothing more concrete to say. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said onstage that Uber was “here to stay in India” — a familiar promise that he made in Southeast Asia early last year before selling the local business to Grab a month later — but avoided a question about future of UberEats, the ride-hailing firm’s food delivery option.

In recent months, many restaurants have ceased their tie-up with UberEats, and the company has lowered the discounts it was bandying out to compete with local rivals Swiggy and Zomato .

UberEats has lost more than a third of its business in India in recent months, industry sources told TechCrunch. Last year, Uber held talks with both Swiggy and Zomato to sell its UberEats business in the country but failed to attract any meaningful offer, people familiar with the talks said.

Bhavik Rathod, UberEats’ India and Southeast Asia head, Deepak Reddy, head of central operations for UberEats in India, and several more executives have resigned in recent weeks, people familiar with the matter said. Uber’s spokespeople have not returned TechCrunch’s emails since last month.

At the event today, Uber executives miserably escaped questions surrounding UberEats’ future in India. Uber’s local rival Ola, which leads the market, is increasingly expanding its footprint in the nation. In an interview in 2017, Khosrowshahi said India was one of the key regions where the company planned to invest heavily.

Supermercato24, the Italian same-day grocery delivery service, has acquired Szopi.pl, an on-demand grocery delivery service in Poland.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it is a mixture of cash and stock. Szopi had raised €1.7M from various investors, including Impera Alfa.

The acquisition sees the two companies join forces to speed up the growth of Supermercato24’s expansion in Poland. Full integration of the respective platforms will be completed at the beginning of 2020. Szopi’s founders are joining Supermercato24 where they’ll be focusing on Business Development and Operations.

Similar to Instacart in the U.S. and claiming to be the leader in Italy, Supermercato24 lets customers order from local supermarkets for delivery. The startup uses gig economy-styled personal shoppers who go into the store and ‘pick’ the products ordered and then deliver them same-day, or for an added cost within an hour. It’s live in 31 Italian cities.

The company raised €13 million in Series B funding in June 2018. Leading that round was FII Tech Growth, with participation from new investor Endeavor Catalyst, and current investors 360 Capital Partners, and Innogest.

Meanwhile, I’m told that one of the key assets being acquired is the network of partnerships that Szopi has been able to develop with retailers such as Auchan and Carrefour. In Italy, Supermercato24 has partnered with +20 retailers such as LIDL and Carrefour.

“The acquisition marks the first step for the international expansion of the company, aiming to lead the way and expand into Europe,” a spokesperson for Supermercato24 tells TechCrunch.

Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight.

The company is also announcing the completion of its first manufacturing facility and plans for a much larger second factory in preparation for a 2025 commercial launch.

In the flight footage (embedded below), the five-seater all-electric Lilium Jet can be seen taking off and then transitioning to vertical flight, where it functions along broadly similar lines to conventional airplane.

Describing this type of transition as one of “aerospace’s greatest challenges,” Lilium claims this is what gives the Lilium Jet a range advantage over some other all-electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) competitors, with its two sets of wings contributing to much higher levels of efficiency than in aircraft lifted solely by rotors.

“Powered by 36 all-electric jet engines, the aircraft has zero operating emissions and requires less than 10% of its maximum 2000 horsepower during horizontal cruise flight thanks to the lift generated by having two sets of wings,” explains Lilium.

The company — which we reported is currently raising a large round of funding, thought to be between $400 million and $500 million — is also disclosing that its jet has now been flown at speeds exceeding 100 km/h and undergone “increasingly complex” manoeuvres. It says it is still on track to be able to complete journeys of up to 300 km in one hour and on a single charge.

In a call with Remo Gerber, Lilium’s chief commercial officer (CCO), he reiterated the company’s plans for a “meaningful” 2025 launch and talked up the 300 kilometre target range. Specifically, he explained that this means Lilium will be able to operate an air taxi service that connects cities and country regions, rather than simply speeding up travel time across a single city.

“We’re actually quite clear in our mind what our goal is,” Gerber told me when asked to elaborate on Lilium’s 2025 ambitions. “We want to be live and a real meaningful part of transportation ecosystems in several cities around the world. So what does that mean? We’re having talks around the world with a number of different cities and governments and then entire regions to look at how we best connect them”.

Describing England in the U.K. as one example of an ecosystem, where the main hubs are reachable within a 300 kilometre range, he says we could imagine services between London-Manchester, Manchester-Birmingham, Birmingham-London, “or maybe down to Brighton and several other places”.

“So that is really a meaningful new addition to transportation opportunities for customers and for people to use every day,” says Gerber. “And that wouldn’t be just something that will be useful for Londoners, but it would be just as useful for people living in the other larger towns but also – and that’s where the timeline is [hard to predict] – how quickly other smaller cities jump on the opportunity”.

The upside for building the landing pads, which will need to be close to other transport links, is that it will require a “manageable investment” compared to much larger and more capital intensive infrastructure projects. The smallest and most affordable sizes of a pad will cost as little as half a million pounds to build, says Gerber.

“I can all of a sudden make one investment into a pad the size of a football field and be connected to all of these other 10 different pads in the country. And that’s where we’re coming in,” he explains, revealing that Lilium is already having conversations with various different parties who are interested in creating a landing site.

“We are developing the blueprints for people and we will be advising people what they need to build. Of course, we cannot go and build all around the world all of these landing sites, but where we will come in is to work with these cities to say ‘how do we connect you in a meaningful way into the network, into the Lilium service’. That’s how you have to imagine it”.

It won’t all be tax payer-funded or public money, but private companies will also be courted. These could be shopping malls that want additional footfall or large businesses that want their business parks to be connected in different ways or want a 10 minute transfer to a specific airport.

However, Gerber says Lilium will remain “ultra-cautious” with regards to where Lilium landing pads are created so that there is “no negative impact” on communities.

“We see the landing infrastructure to a very large extent is the public good,” he tells me. “We see it a bit like on the scale of a train station, because it should have a use to the community that it serves and that’s where really our whole philosophy comes in”.

Meanwhile, Lilium’s first manufacturing facility is a 3,000 square meter space located at the company’s headquarters in Southern Germany. It will soon be complemented by a second, much larger, facility which is already under construction at the same site. The plan is to be capable of producing hundreds of Lilium aircraft per year by the time commercial services begin in 2025.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity when you have the manufacturing sitting next to the engineers because they can work together…,” says Gerber. “Now we know the performance is right, how do we tweak it so that it’s actually also easy to make, so that we can get that scale? We’re building the first manufacturing line to really produce this aircraft at scale”.

Media monitoring — where news sources and other public information outlets are scanned regularly for mentions of specific organizations — is a well established service used by companies for market intelligence and to measure sentiment around their businesses. Today, London-based Signal AI, which has built a substantial operation in the area, has raised $25 million funding to expand to newer frontiers: applying AI to that public data to also spot themes, risks and opportunities to make better decisions; and continuing to take that business to new markets.

The Series C is being led by Redline Capital, with previous VCs MMC Ventures, GMG Ventures (an investment firm linked to the Guardian Media Group) and Hearst Ventures also participating. The startup, which has now raised around $53 million, is not disclosing its valuation but CEO and found David Benigson said that it is “significantly higher” than before (it last raised $16 million a year ago), after growing revenues at well over 100% each year for the last two.

The presence of not one but two media-linked investors in the round points to the startup’s roots: Signal AI had previously been called Signal Media and worked mainly around the task of media monitoring in the more traditional sense: tracking how companies were being mentioned in the press.

Benigson said that the reason for the rebrand was to “signal” to the world how the startup was widening its remit, both in terms of its sources of data and also in terms of its customers and how they now utilize Signal’s technology.

The challenge and opportunity that Signal AI is tackling is the fact that the world is awash in information, much of it unstructured and usually bombarding us from many angles, but tantalising all the same for hinting at the insights that it might hold if it could be looked at in a more comprehensive way.

“When we started six years ago, it was by aggregating news data and tapping the repository of global, traditional media,” Benigson said. “We have since broadened into social media, broadcast and radio, and regulatory information and started to apply more machine learning to structure that data.” The company also, in addition to selling services directly, now partners with third parties to build analytics around more targeted subjects such as a changing regulatory climate in a specific area, which in turn sold on by the third parties to other clients.

The company, for example, works with Deloitte’s tax division to monitor how tax codes are evolving and likely to move over time: the firm used to keep its own clients up to date verbally on these details, and now it sends alerts automatically with insights — a switch that Benigson said has saved the company $100 million a year in human and overhead costs.

Signal AI sits in a relatively new, not clearly defined area of business. It can be comparable with the likes of Meltwater, Cision (Gorkana) and even Dataminr when it comes to reading media in real time. But it also works a little like business intelligence or market analytics in its predictive analysis. The company refers to its specific area as “augmented intelligence”:

“There is a trend / emerging category that is far less crowded and defined than business intelligence or analytics,” Benigson said. “For me, it’s around taking those same values of BI and applying them to the world of data that sits outside the organization. There are very few companies that use augmented intelligence, although we are seeing management consultancy firms and others we potentially compete with convening around this space.”

It’s that open water that has attracted investors to the company.

“In this new digital era of news and content, having an adaptive platform to help the world’s leading organizations see around the corner is invaluable,” said Nicolas Giuli, Partner at Redline Capital, in a statement. “Signal AI’s team of data scientists and engineers have been at the forefront of the AI revolution and we are excited to take this journey with them as they continue to scale across the world.”

In this day and age, data is indeed very much a hot commodity, but I’d argue that it’s also a hot potato. By that, I’m referring to the rise of security breaches, people’s growing awareness of how their personal information is being used (and too often misused), and regulation that now draws lines on how data can be used, after organizations failed to draw those lines themselves. All of these have made concepts like data analytics and data mining, even around supposedly anonymised information, feel more nefarious and unclear in their target purposes and ends. That potentially spells out trouble ahead for companies that dabble in this space.

Benigson, for his part, was unequivocal on where Signal AI stands on any kind of anonymised or other potentially personal data:

“We purposefully avoid those data sets because we feel that the challenges are not being met,” he said. The exception, he noted, was in cases where a company uses its own internal data for its own purposes, but this does not feed into Signal’s AI engine, which focuses only on publicly-available third-party content. “We have no plans to incorporate that kind of data ourselves. We have an opportunity to do this in an ethical manner.”

When Adobe acquired Magento, the e-commerce platform aimed at SMBs, last May for $1.68 billion, you knew it would only be a matter of time before the company would begin integrating its new purchase into the Adobe technology stack. Today, at the MagentoLive customer conference in Amsterdam, Magento announced some new integrations with Adobe.

Perhaps the most important piece is that Magento tools are beginning to take advantage of the Adobe intelligence layer they call Sensei. They are using Sensei in conjunction with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to collect data and offer more personalized recommendations. “We have had rules-based recommendations for years and years, but we’ve rewritten this capability to be driven by Adobe Sensei,” Peter Sheldon, senior director of strategy at Adobe explained. This new capability will be available starting in January when they will be opening up an early access program.

Brent Leary, founder at CRM Essentials, says that the Sensei integration is the beginning of a more complete integration with the Adobe stack that should help Magento’s small-to-medium sized business customers offer much more personalized experiences than would typically be in their reach.

“This will provide a fuller end-to-end analysis of what kinds of content and experiences will take people from clicks to conversions to subscriptions. And having a clearer understanding of the digital customer journey provides more opportunities to automate personalized “next best actions” that improve the journey experience,” Leary told TechCrunch.

The company is also integrating with Adobe Stock to allow customers to have access to the massive Adobe content library, which includes images, templates, media assets, stock videos, premium image collections and so forth. “We see a lot of opportunities to leverage the creative tools on the Creative Cloud side of the business. For our merchants, creating highly engaging visual content is an integral part of their day,” Sheldon said.

In addition, the company announced a couple of external integrations including one with Amazon in the UK to make it easier for Magento users there to become Amazon merchants directly from Magento. This capability had been available in the US earlier this year, according to Sheldon.

Finally, the company announced, that in addition to running Magento on AWS, customers can choose to run it on Azure if they wish. This will help attract customers, who are running their operations on Azure.

There are 831 financial technology startups headquartered in or operating in Canada, according to data collected by Fintech Growth Syndicate, yet only a handful of venture capital funds specializing in the region and sector.

Luge Capital, a fintech and AI-focused venture capital fund headquartered in Montreal and Toronto, is looking to close that gap. The firm has raised $85 million for its debut fund and plans to make seed investments as small as $150,000 and as large as $2 million.

The relatively new outfit, founded in 2018, is led by David Nault, a former vice president at iNovia Capital, and Karim Gillani, who previously led corporate development for Xoom, the PayPal -acquired remittances startup.

Luge Capital is backed by iA Financial Group, BDC Capital, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Desjardins Group, La Capitale, Sun Life Financial and Fonds de solidarité FTQ. In a somewhat unusual series of events, some of the limited partners approached Nault and Gillani and said if they raised a fund, they would bankroll them. And so the pair left their jobs to raise a debut vehicle to support fintech companies in Canada’s growing tech scene.

Luge Capital will deploy capital to startups across North America, but will focus on Canadian tech.

“We’ve seen growth in terms of absolute numbers of fintech companies,” Gillani tells TechCrunch. “We think it’s because there’s new access to capital. Companies can now find themselves getting funded and there’s a bigger appetite for larger companies to partner with these startups.”

Luge Capital has to date made five investments, three of which they were able to disclose. Gillani says they’ve provided checks to Flinks, which helps businesses connect apps and users’ bank accounts; Owl, a provider of a service that supports financial institutions with customer onboarding, fraud detection and more; and insurance technology company Finaeo.

According to PitchBook, nearly $3 billion has been invested in Canadian startups, a record year for the country.

“We are going to see more growth in venture in Canada,” says Gillani. “I think we are going to see founders in Canada having more of a global mindset such that they look at Canada as an initial market for them, with a focus to expand geographically soon after they’ve been able to prove the model in Canada. And I think because of that dynamic, we are going to see more and more outside capital to finance these founders.”

As more and more news businesses turn to paywalls and subscriptions, The Financial Times looks like an early model and success story — a few months ago the organization announced that it’s passed 1 million paying readers, with digital subscribers accounting for more than three-fourths of its circulation.

Now The FT is looking to share some of what it’s learned (and further diversify its business) by launching a new consulting unit called FT Strategies.

Chief Data Officer Tom Betts told me that The FT built a lot of the technology behind its subscription efforts. At first, the team assumed that it might be able to build a business selling that technology to other publishers. After all, Vox Media and The Washington Post are both trying to do something similar with their content management systems.

So it was surprising to hear Betts say that FT Strategy is actually “a pure consulting business.”

Asked whether The FT might eventually start selling a tech product as well, he replied, “Never say never about the technology dimension, but I think as we did our market research and started talking to customers and looking more at the technological landscape out there, we realized that over the years, many of the elements of the technology we have built have become commoditized.”

That doesn’t mean there’s a technology stack that publishers can buy off-the-shelf that can meet all their needs (there’s at least one startup called The News Project trying to piece that stack together).

But Betts argued, “Even if you go and buy best-of-breed technology, that doesn’t mean you can assembly it in the right way to make it useful and meaningful to scale and grow direct-to-consumer revenues. And most importantly it doesn’t mean that you know how to operate it with teams and how to actually use it to successfully scale and grow your business.”

That’s precisely what FT Strategies is trying to provide. In fact, Betts said the company has already been quietly testing out the idea in beta and built up a customer list that includes Bonnier, The Business of Fashion, Penguin Random House and the V&A — so not just news companies, but also a book publisher and an art and design museum.

“I believe that the capabilities that we’e built, clearly they are salient to other news publishers, but I believe that they span far beyond that,” Betts explained.

He went on to argue that FT Strategies could potentially work with any company that’s “either facing disruption as the news media industry has” or that’s in a sector that’s part of the broader direct-to-consumer trend — basically, any company that needs help figuring out “how do we market to individuals, how do we build relationships to individuals, how do we leverage those relationships both so that the consumers have the most positive and engaging experience with our products and to maximize revenue.”

As for whether any of these business might be leery about giving another company — and, in some cases, a competitor — access to their customer data, Betts said that philosophically, the FT believes that “a healthy paid content ecosystem is good for the FT and it’s good for all the publishers that participate in it.”

More concretely, he said his team is “very clear internally about having the Chinese walls and professional standards for FT Strategy that ensures the right levels of confidentiality of clients’ data [so] their confidential information doesn’t leak back into the core operation.”

More than two years after Julie Bornstein–Stitch Fix’s former chief operating officer–mysteriously left the subscription-based personal styling service only months before its initial public offering, she’s taking the wraps off her first independent venture.

Shortly after departing Stitch Fix, Bornstein began building The Yes, an AI-powered shopping platform expected to launch in the first half of 2020. She’s teamed up with The Yes co-founder and chief technology officer Amit Aggarwal, who’s held high-level engineering roles at BloomReach and Groupon, and most recently, served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bain Capital Ventures, to “rewrite the architecture of e-commerce.”

“This is an idea I’ve been thinking about since I was 10 and spending my weekends at the mall,” Bornstein, whose resume includes chief marketing officer & chief digital officer at Sephora, vice president of e-commerce at Urban Outfitters, VP of e-commerce at Nordstrom and director of business development at Starbucks, tells TechCrunch. “All the companies I have worked at were very much leading in this direction.”

Coming out of stealth today, the team at The Yes is readying a beta mode to better understand and refine their product. Bornstein and Aggarwal have raised $30 million in venture capital funding to date across two financings. The first, a seed round, was co-led by Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green and NEA’s Tony Florence. The Series A was led by True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan with participation from existing investors. Bornstein declined to disclose the company’s valuation.

“AI and machine learning already dominate in many verticals, but e-commerce is still open for a player to have a meaningful impact,” Callaghan said in a statement. “Amit is leading a team to build deep neural networks that legacy systems cannot achieve.”

Bornstein and Aggarwal withheld many details about the business during our conversation. Rather, the pair said the product will speak for itself when it launches next year. In addition to being an AI-powered shopping platform, Bornstein did say The Yes is working directly with brands and “creating a new consumer shopping experience that helps address the issue of overwhelm in shopping today.”

As for why she decided to leave Stitch Fix just ahead of its $120 million IPO, Bornstein said she had an epiphany.

“I realized that technology had changed so much, meanwhile … the whole framework underlying e-commerce had remained the same since the late 90s’ when I helped build Nordstrom.com,” she said. “If you could rebuild the underlying architecture and use today’s technology, you could actually bring to life an entirely new consumer experience for shopping.”

The Yes, headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, has also brought on Lisa Green, the former head of industry, fashion and luxury at Google, as its senior vice president of partnerships, and Taylor Tomasi Hill, whose had stints at Moda Operandi and FortyFiveTen, as its creative director. Other investors in the business include Comcast Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures