Category: UNCATEGORIZED

When T4 co-founder and CEO Maks Khurgin was working at Bain and Company, he ran into a common problem for analysts looking for market data. He spent way too much time searching for it and felt there had to be a better way. He decided to build a centralized market data platform himself, and T4 was born. This week the company competes in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield.

What he created with the help of his long-time friend and CTO, Yev Spektor, was built on a couple of key components. The first is an industry classification system, a taxonomy, that organizes markets by industries and sub-industries. Using search and aggregation tools powered by artificial intelligence, it scours the web looking for information sources that match their taxonomy labels.

As they researched the tool, the founders realized that the AI could only get them so far. There were always pieces that it missed. So they built a second part to provide a way for human indexers to fill in those missing parts to offer as comprehensive a list of sources as possible.

“AI alone cannot solve this problem. If we bring people into this and avoid the last mile delivery problem, then you can actually start organizing this information in a much better way than anyone else had ever done,” Khurgin explained.

It seems simple enough, but it’s a problem that well-heeled companies like Bain have been trying to solve for years, and there was a lot of skepticism when Khurgin told his superiors he was leaving to build a product to solve this problem. “I had a partner at Bain and Company actually tell me, “You know, every consulting firm has tried to do something like this — and they failed. Why do you think you can do this?””

He knew that figuring out the nature of the problem and why the other attempts had failed was the key to solving the puzzle. He decided to take the challenge, and on his 30th birthday, he quit his job at Bain and started T4 the next day — without a product yet, mind you.

This was not the first time he had left a high-paying job to try something unconventional. “Last time I left a high paying job, actually after undergrad, I was a commodities derivatives trader for a financial [services company]. I left that to pursue a lifelong dream of being in the Marine Corps,” Khurgin said.

T4 was probably a less risky proposition, but it still took a leap of faith that only a startup founder can understand, who believes in his idea. “I felt the problem first-hand, and the the big kind of realization that I had was that there is actually a finite amount of information out there. Market research is created by humans, and you don’t necessarily have to take a pure AI approach,” he said.

The product searches for all of the related information on a topic, finds all of the data related to a category and places it in an index. Users can search by topic and find all of the free and paid reports related to that search. The product shows which reports are free and which will cost you money, and like Google, you get a title and a brief summary.

The company is just getting started with five main market categories so far, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking, data centers and eSports. The founders plan to add additional categories over time, and have a bold goal for the future.

“Our long-term vision is that we become your one-stop shop to find market research in the same way that if you need to buy something, you go to Amazon, or you need financial data, you go on Bloomberg or Thomson. If you need market research, our vision is that T4 is the place that you go,” Khurgin said.

Nonprofits employ 10% of the U.S. workforce and generate some $2 trillion in revenue each year and yet, many charitable organizations are still using pen and paper to track their volunteers.

Civic Champs, a startup that presented onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, has developed a platform that aims to give non-profits the tech tools they need to better manage volunteers.

“The nonprofit market is underserved by technology companies,” co-founder and CTO Mike Jeffery told TechCrunch.

Civic Champs is initially focusing on volunteer management. However, the mobile app, which was built with React Native for Android and iOS, can be broadened over time.

For instance, the company recently launched a micro-donations feature that automatically converts volunteers to donors. The feature will integrate a number of payment options, including Stripe, Apple Pay, and Plaid/Dwolla for ACH donations.

The Civic Champs platform uses geolocation and geofences to automate volunteer-hour tracking. The seemingly simple task of checking volunteers into events and tracking their time can take a small nonprofit 10 hours per month to manage, according to the company. Civic Champs co-founder and CEO Geng Wang says their platform can slash that task down to an hour per month.

Civic Champs designed a mobile-first platform. However, the company’s co-founders say they understood that not all volunteers will have smartphones or want to use the app. So they developed three ways to use the platform.

Volunteers can use the Civic Champs mobile app to check in at events and track their hours. The platform has also been adapted to web-based kiosks, which nonprofits can use to make it easier for tech-averse volunteers to check in. A volunteer’s hours can also be tracked through a nonprofit’s administrative features on both the app and the web. All three tracking methods — mobile, web kiosk, or by administrator — synchronize volunteer tracking across platforms and between users and potentially multiple organizations.

With the launch of Civic Champs, Wang, who co-founded the startup with Jeffery and Ryan Underdahl, is now solidly in serial entrepreneur territory. Wang’s first startup, RentJungle, was an apartment search engine, which was acquired in 2014 by The Rainmaker Group. Wang’s second startup, a social media marketing firm called Community Elf that has since been rebranded as Cosmitto, was acquired in 2017 by private equity firm Topanga Partners.

For his third go around, Wang told TechCrunch he wanted to do something more mission-driven. The original idea was to create a mobile game for volunteering. This “Pokemon Go” of volunteering would let users contribute in small ways — like helping cities collect data on physical assets, such as traffic lights and fire hydrants using GPS and photo uploads.

But that idea quickly morphed into something larger when Geng started talking to volunteer organizations and learned the challenges were far more basic and widespread.

“Essentially, nine out of the 10 organizations we talked to still track their volunteers on pen and paper forms,” Geng said. “As a former consultant, I thought well that’s sort of crazy. That’s a lot of time that you’re spending on paperwork that you could direct back to the community and in certain, more impactful ways.”

The co-founders pivoted away from gamification and started developing a mobile platform that nonprofits can use to track volunteers. The company officially launched in January 2019.

Civic Champs has raised $312,000 in a pre-seed round and also received $29,000 in non-dilutive grants through the Indiana University CLAPP competition and the Indiana Technical Assistance Program.

The company is still figuring out its pricing structure. Civic Champs does have 34 customers, 24 of which are paid clients. The remaining 10 are pilots. The business model, which is set up like a Software-as-a-Service product, charges between $25 a month for its smallest customer up to $450 a month for its largest client.

The founders of Vise AI met when they were 13, a couple of teenagers more interested in applied artificial intelligence than English class. Fast-forward several years and the pair has relocated from the Midwest to San Francisco to raise money for a financial technology business they’ve been self-funding since 2016.

As teenagers with an inordinate amount of AI knowledge, Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra proved to be quite useful to large businesses, investment bankers and other financiers. Leveraging their AI know-how, they were paid $700 per hour by a consulting firm to teach financial “experts” about AI. Mehrotra, according to Vasavada, is a mathematical prodigy: “And that translates extremely well to AI, right, because what underlies AI is math,” Vasavada, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vise AI, tells TechCrunch. “We had the ability of articulating what AI is to investment bankers in a way that they would understand. Whereas most expert explanations would be really complex and very technical.”

Meanwhile, school was on autopilot. “I was taking phone calls in English class,” Vasavada said. “It wasn’t very good but we were making a lot of money.” Ultimately, that money funneled into the early makings of a real business, Vise AI, which automates portfolio management using AI and machine learning. Launching onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today, the SEC-registered investment advisor will begin customer on-boarding next week. In short, the platform analyzes clients’ investment needs and builds them a personalized portfolio of stocks, bonds and other assets, then provides investment manager tools to automate management.

“It’s an unsexy industry that makes all of the money in finance,” said Mehrotra, co-founder and chief technology officer of Vise AI.

For now, the team is going after independent advisory shops, those without a flock of analysts available at their beck and call and who need outsourced investment management. Ultimately, they plan to pursue the big wealth managers. The business has also been approved as a subadvisor by TD Ameritrade Institutional, which has thousands of independent RIAs on its platform.

“The icing on the cake is what we refer to as portfolio intelligence,” Vasavada explains. “We can provide unique insights, justifications and logic as to why specific investment decisions were made — talking points to make the advisor look smarter with the clients because it’s a relationship game with these advisors, so tools that will help build their relationships and help empower their relationships, while still delivering a better portfolio to the client is the type of solution that really needs to be built in this space.”

“We are literally giving them bite-sized portfolio intelligence,” adds Mehrotra. “Because most of them aren’t really doing the investment management themselves, right? So they’re either using some ETF allocation tool, like Betterment for Advisors, or something like that, where it’s just a standard set of ETFs and there really isn’t any personalization.”

Vasavada, hailing from Cleveland, and Mehrotra, raised just outside Detroit, met years ago at a Northwestern University summer research program. The two have since established themselves as AI experts, supporting high-profile clients (who they can’t name due to non-disclosure agreements) as consultants and completing the fintech conference circuit a few times over. But when it came to raising venture capital to exit the era of self-funding and launch their AI-enabled portfolio manager, they were clueless.

Their first infusion of outside capital came in the form of a $20,000 uncapped note from Dorm Room Fund. A little something to help them through the daunting fundraising process. But their first real pitch meeting was with none other than Vinod Khosla, the billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures. Khosla’s son, Neal Khosla, had worked on the investment team at Dorm Room Fund and made the introduction.

Khosla passed and the Vise team realized they had no idea what they were doing. They began refining their pitch. After reaching out to roughly 1,000 different investors (Vasavada created a detailed CRM to track all their cold pitches) they raised $2 million from co-leads Keith Rabois, a co-founder at PayPal and a partner at Founders Fund, and Ben Ling of Bling Capital, two investors who were, ironically, former general partners at Khosla Ventures. Great Oaks Ventures, Flatiron Health co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, Future Advisor founder John Xu, NFX’s Pete Flint and Contrary Capital also participated. Vasavada and Mehrotra said that once they had tapped two high-profile leads, offers came flooding in, including from VCs who had rejected them just weeks before.

“This was our first round of fundraising ever,” says Mehrotra. “So in the beginning, a lot of it was just like, figuring out how things worked and learning how to best pitch the company because it is a niche market. I think once we got the momentum … We felt like we were turning away tons of money.”

Once they reach $50 million in assets under management, Vise plans to raise a much larger round of funding to help the team expand and open an office in New York.

Vise is targeting a market worth trillions in one of the most valuable industries in the world. To succeed in the long term, the startup will have to infiltrate a decades-old network relying on legacy technology, as well as battle Silicon Valley’s narrative that robo-advisors will soon make the financial advisory space obsolete. According to their thesis, companies like Betterment and Wealthfront are successful with tech-rich millennials, but once one accumulates “real wealth,” it’s a conversation with a human being they’re looking for, not an easy-to-use app.

“We want to empower advisors to be better at their jobs, so they can focus on actually building better relationships and holding their clients’ hand,” said Mehrotra.

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle startup, is expanding to Las Vegas, CTO Jesse Levinson said at TechCrunch Disrupt ST.

The startup, which has raised $800 million and has been testing on public roads in San Francisco, said Las Vegas is a target market for its autonomous driving fleet and service. Las Vegas will serve as an anchor market for Zoox. The company plans to test, validate and refine its autonomous vehicle technology with future plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service there, Levinson said.

Zoox received permission from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to drive autonomously on state roads in early 2019. The startup is currently mapping and test-driving new routes in the greater Las Vegas region.

For now, Zoox, is doing strategic testing to keep costs in line, CEO Aicha Evans told TechCrunch during Disrupt. That means, Zoox will send its retrofitted Toyota Highlander autonomous vehicles to Las Vegas for blocks of time, maybe six weeks or so. The company has now completed five of these deployments.

Over time, Zoox will expand its time and footprint in the city. Eventually, Zoox will bring its built-from-the ground-up autonomous vehicles to the city, although the company didn’t share when that might be.

Zoox says it selected Las Vegas because the region offers an opportunity to extend learning in a second dense urban environment and one that has diverse and unique use cases compared to driving in San Francisco. For instance, Las Vegas has reversible lanes, complex pick-up and drop-off zones, high temperatures and more night-time activity, the company said.

A new startup is clearing the way for other companies to better monitor and manage their risk and compliance with privacy laws.

Osano, an Austin, Texas-based startup, bills itself as a privacy platform startup, which uses a software-as-a-service solution to give businesses real-time visibility into their current privacy and compliance posture. On one hand, that helps startups and enterprises large and small insight into whether or not they’re complying with global or state privacy laws, and manage risk factors associated with their business such as when partner or vendor privacy policies change.

The company launched its privacy platform at Disrupt SF on the Startup Battlefield stage.

Risk and compliance is typically a fusty, boring and frankly unsexy topic. But with ever-changing legal landscapes and constantly moving requirements, it’s hard to keep up. Although Europe’s GDPR has been around for a year, it’s still causing headaches. And stateside, the California Consumer Privacy Act is about to kick in and it is terrifying large companies for fear they can’t comply with it.

Osano mixes tech with its legal chops to help companies, particularly smaller startups without their own legal support, to provide a one-stop shop for businesses to get insight, advice and guidance.

“We believe that any time a company does a better job with transparency and data protection, we think that’s a really good thing for the internet,” the company’s founder Arlo Gilbert told TechCrunch.

Gilbert, along with his co-founder and chief technology officer Scott Hertel, have built their company’s software-as-a-service solution with several components in mind, including maintaining its scorecard of 6,000 vendors and their privacy practices to objectively grade how a company fares, as well as monitoring vendor privacy policies to spot changes as soon as they are made.

One of its standout features is allowing its corporate customers to comply with dozens of privacy laws across the world with a single line of code.

You’ve seen them before: The “consent” popups that ask (or demand) you to allow cookies or you can’t come in. Osano’s consent management lets companies install a dynamic consent management in just five minutes, which delivers the right consent message to the right people in the best language. Using the blockchain, the company says it can record and provide searchable and cryptographically verifiable proof-of-consent in the event of a person’s data access request.

“There are 40 countries with cookie and data privacy laws that require consent,” said Gilbert. “Each of them has nuances about what they consider to be consent: what you have to tell them; what you have to offer them; when you have to do it.”

Osano also has an office in Dublin, Ireland, allowing its corporate customers to say it has a physical representative in the European Union — a requirement for companies that have to comply with GDPR.

And, for corporate customers with questions, they can dial-an-expert from Osano’s outsourced and freelance team of attorneys and privacy experts to help break down complex questions into bitesize answers.

Or as Gilbert calls it, “Uber, but for lawyers.”

The concept seems novel but it’s not restricted to GDPR or California’s upcoming law. The company says it monitors international, federal and state legislatures for new laws and changes to existing privacy legislation to alert customers of upcoming changes and requirements that might affect their business.

In other words, plug in a new law or two and Osano’s customers are as good as covered.

Osano is still in its pre-seed stage. But while the company is focusing on its product, it’s not thinking too much about money.

“We’re planning to kind of go the binary outcome — go big or go home,” said Gilbert, with his eye on the small- to medium-sized enterprise. “It’s greenfield right now. There’s really nobody doing what we’re doing.”

The plan is to take on enough funding to own the market, and then focus on turning a profit. So much so, Gilbert said, that the company is registered as a B Corporation, a more socially conscious and less profit-driven approach of corporate structure, allowing it to generate profits while maintaining its social vision.

The company’s idea is strong; its corporate structure seems mindful. But is it enough of an enticement for fellow startups and small businesses? It’s either dominate the market or bust, and only time will tell.

Maisie Williams, best known as ‘Arya’ on Game of Thrones, is preparing to take her startup Daisie to the next stage. Right now, the app works to connect creators with one another to work on each others’ projects, but now Williams wants to help those projects find an audience.

On the app, creators establish a profile, similar to other social networks, but the focus is not on gaining fans and likes, but rather on helping creators find collaborators for their art — whether that’s film, music, photography, or art, or anything else.

The actress-turned-entrepreneur spoke this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt SF about the decision to make Daise less focused on traditional “popularity” metrics.

“We didn’t want follower counts — I think that rewarding people for these typical kinds of metrics can be quite damaging, and can make you feel like just because you’re not popular then maybe you’re not talented. And that’s just not true. The thing about creative endeavors is that the things that are popular aren’t necessarily like the best things and just because something that you do isn’t liked by many people it doesn’t mean it’s not incredible.”

The startup passed 100,000 members earlier this year, and raised a seed round of $2.5 million. Now Daisie is looking to raise again, Williams said in passing, noting the startup would begin the fundraising process “soon.”

She also briefly touched on the plans to help creators take the next step in their journeys.

“It’s actually where the company is heading right now,” said Williams. “We want to work on partnerships where our users can have like a real brief from a real client, and pitch their ideas, then get them made — and have a budget and be paid for their work which is — one of the most difficult things within the creative industry is to get paid for what you’re doing,” she said.

“At the moment we’ve got a really wonderful community that’s thriving and creating these amazing projects. But in terms of transferring that into the real world and helping people actually get jobs — these partnerships are going to be really really great for that,” she said.

The global cybersecurity market is booming: Cybersecurity-related spending is on track to surpass $133 billion in 2022, and the market has grown more than 30x in 13 years. But it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. Some industry watchers have claimed that the cybersecurity market is a bubble about to burst. To understand the debate, it’s important to look beyond traditional supply and demand metrics.

On the one hand, the demand for cybersecurity solutions is huge. Organizations are increasingly investing in cybersecurity, as evidenced by a recent report by Gartner Group showing security spending is outpacing IT spending. Security departments are expanding in size and budget, and, at the helm, security decision-makers are gaining respect more than ever before. With ever-dynamic cybersecurity risks and regulations, it is clear to most C-suite leaders that there’s more to be protected and more on the line.

Security is taking on a new shape within organizations. Generally, security buyers are investing in various categories in order to protect their organizations. Moreover, security is often integrated into new business initiatives and used as a competitive advantage. Across the different approaches to security, the resounding sentiment is clear — no one wants to be breached. However, this preparation for a cyber doomsday might be disproportionate to how breaches affect the bottom line.

Well-publicized security incidents in recent years resulted in little long-term effect on the bottom line. Equifax has regained its full market cap less than two years following the “incident of the century,” and Sony, a $70 billion-plus giant, incurred “catastrophic” damages of less than $100 million after proprietary, sensitive and even embarrassing data was stolen. It seems that companies deal with their worst-case breach scenarios without enduring severe financial losses that were once believed to devastate companies. So, are security departments just crying wolf? If so, could the demand for solutions decrease?

On the other hand, let’s think about the supply: The landscape of cybersecurity solutions and services is strikingly saturated. Still, this busy frontier continues to attract founders and investors alike, with 300+ new startups launching every year and VCs investing in cybersecurity at a record high of $5.3 billion in 2018. Further, many cybersecurity startups are able to raise large rounds of funding, with exceedingly high valuations, despite having little market traction. But even when funding is pouring in, it is not easy for the cybersecurity business to survive, let alone successfully exit. Dave DeWalt, the former CEO of FireEye, said it well: “We are in this situation where there are just too many vendors and too few can be sustained.”

With overvaluation of startups, market saturation and the seemingly less-than-catastrophic impact of breaches, it’s no wonder why some are worried about the cybersecurity industry. I, for one, don’t think the bubble will pop anytime soon.

Unique factors make cybersecurity a formidable market. To highlight a few: Government and defense investing serve as anchors that continually fuel growth. For example, the U.S. 2019 President’s Budget includes $15 billion for cybersecurity-related activities, and France has committed to 4,000 cyber headcount by 2025. This type of demand is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Besides, increased compliance and regulatory requirements such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) calls for action from companies and propels awareness and sales even further. On top of that, the industry is dynamic and keeps reinventing itself. New categories emerge in spaces like Zero Trust and IoT security to address threats that are growing in scope and sophistication. The future-forward mindset in the industry is so strong that sci-fi writers are employed to predict cyber threat scenarios as well as inject innovation into cyber defense.

While these factors contribute to the strength of the industry, they are not the primary elements that will prevent the cybersecurity bubble from bursting. The answer does not lie in where cybersecurity is today, but where it is going next. In the foreseeable future, cybersecurity will face unique threats that will fuel its growth even further:

• Customer impact: High magnitude attacks geared toward B2C companies could lead to massive customer churn and bottom-line damage. Once consumers feel the effects, they will fear working with companies they don’t trust. The awareness level of consumers to cybersecurity and privacy is already raising the bar for companies to beef up their security efforts. As a result of higher customer expectations and intensified regulation, many companies will further invest in security and the market will keep expanding, respectively.
• Economic impact: In its Global Risk Report 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF) listed cyber threat as one of the most critical risks threatening the world economy. In the near-term, companies will likely incur paralyzing attacks that will shut down daily operations, causing unprecedented loss of revenue eclipsing the breaches we’ve witnessed thus far. These crippling cyberattacks will lead to direct growth in cybersecurity spend.
• Civil-life impact: Attacks on developed countries could interrupt electricity, water supply and more, causing massive civil-life disorder. In addition, the rise of IoT and autonomous machinery in our day-to-day will not only expand the attack surface, but also threaten lives. The safety of people will pressure political bodies into creating regulatory requirements to bolster security for embedded technologies and scrutinizing how smart devices are secured.

It is true that the security market is highly fragmented, some companies are overvalued and not every new security tool will be a big success. But as our world becomes more software-driven, cybercrime will inevitably intensify, leading to new matter entering the security bubble. This will propel security into a significantly larger market at an even greater rate, visible by investors, leadership teams and company boards. Instead of bursting, the cybersecurity market will only keep developing and growing.

A lot of talk has been made about verifying valuable items on an immutable blockchain, but the main pioneer in this space has been Verisart, which appeared a few years ago to use a blockchain to create certification for the fine art and collectibles market. But despite the blockchain hype of the last few years, Verisart eschewed the fund-raising bonanza, preferring instead to perfect its model and build partnerships.

That changes today with the news that it has raised $2.5 million in seed financing in a round led by Galaxy Digital EOS VC Fund. Further investment has come from existing investors Sinai Ventures and Rhodium. The funding will be used to expand Verisart’s commercial platform for authentication and further expand in the art world.

Co-Founder and CEO Robert Norton commented: “With this new round of funding, we’re able to scale our business and ramp up our partnership integrations. The art world is quickly realizing that blockchain provides a new standard in provenance and record-keeping and we’re looking forward to extending these services to the industry.”

The $325mm Galaxy EOS VC Fund is a partnership between Galaxy Digital, a blockchain-focused merchant bank, and Block.one, the publisher of EOSIO, the blockchain protocol.

The funding will go towards extending the product and engineering team and launching a suite of premium services aimed at artists, galleries and collectors. The company recently appointed Paul Duncan, formerly the founding CTO of Borro, the online lending platform for luxury assets, to lead the engineering team.

In 2015, Verisart was the first company to apply blockchain technology to the physical art and collectibles market. It’s also working with some of the world’s best-known artists including Ai Wei Wei and Shepard Fairey to certify their works of art. In 2018, Verisart won the ‘Hottest Blockchain DApp’ award at The Europas, the European tech startup awards.

It’s also been the first blockchain certification provider on Shopify to offer digital certification for limited editions, artworks and collectibles.

Other players are now entering this growing blockchain-for-art market. Codex Protocol is a new startup also putting art on the blockchain.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Publisher adtech startups Taboola and Outbrain merge in $850M deal to take on Google and Facebook

The content recommendation rivals — who are, shall we say, not exactly known for the high quality of their recommendations — are merging to form a single company.

While the companies describe the deal as a merger, the combined entity will be called Taboola, with Taboola’s founder Adam Singolda securing the CEO slot. Further, Taboola is paying Outbrain investors $250 million in cash plus a 30% share of the combined companies.

2. Here’s everything Microsoft announced at today’s Surface event

Most of the rumors panned out: There was a new version of the Surface Laptop, including the addition of a USB C port and a 15-inch model. The Surface Pro got a USB C port as well, along with improved studio microphones. And there’s the new Surface Pro X, which finds the company utilizing Microsoft’s new SQ1 chip.

3. Introducing the Startup Battlefield companies at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019

This year’s batch covers rapid cholera detection, developer tools, strawberry-picking robots, regulatory monitoring and more.

4. Uber launches a shift-work finder app, Uber Works, starting in Chicago

This is a new app for matching = workers with shifts, called Uber Works. The app does this matching in partnership with staffing agencies, and it offers workers the carrot of more timely payments.

5. Will Smith just dropped $10K on a startup that pitched him onstage at Disrupt

It’s true: I interviewed Will Smith and Ang Lee about their new movie “Gemini Man,” and it turned into a mini-startup pitch competition.

6. In a new filing, the venture firm Mithril Capital says it has been under assault by its former general counsel

The firm has been characterized in news reports by Recode as being in a complete state of disarray — and, more recently, for reportedly being investigated by the FBI for financial misconduct. Mithril is now drawing a line from those stories to former employee Crystal McKellar.

7. How Bongo, the ‘Netflix of Bangladesh,’ won the local video streaming market with just $10M

The on-demand video service began life as a channel on YouTube in 2014 before expanding as a standalone app to users a year later. Now, of the 96 million people in Bangladesh who are online today, 75 million of them are subscribed to either Bongo’s YouTube channel or to its app. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Notarize, a startup that enables people to get documents notarized online, announced today that it has partnered with Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the U.S. Guaranteed Rate’s new product, called FlashClose, integrates Notarize’s real estate API and allows customers to close real estate transactions and execute mortgages online.

The service is available in all 50 states. Notarize’s products, including its consumer app, connect users to a notary public by video call to witness e-signatures and notarize documents. Its enterprise solutions include business and real estate APIs. Guaranteed Rate, which has had almost $25 billion in total loan volume this year, is now the largest lender that uses Notarize.

Notarize, which has raised $47 million in funding so far from investors including Polaris Partners, Lennar Corporation and Realogy Holdings, currently helps customers process real estate deals worth a total of about $1.5 billion online each month. Through partnerships like the one it has with Guaranteed Rate, it has added more than 50,000 realtors and title agents as users in the last three months.

Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Notarize, tells TechCrunch that 90% of people start searching for homes online and 60% apply for mortgages online, but many real estate and lending companies still require their customers to complete the closing process on paper. Allowing them to complete the entire process online can give companies like Guaranteed Rate a major advantage over competitors.

In a prepared statement, Guaranteed Rate COO Nikolaos Athanasiou said “We are thrilled to announce this integration with Notarize for FlashClose, which puts even more power in the hands of homebuyers—wherever and however they want to close.”