Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Since co-founding Heap, CEO Matin Movassate has been saying that he wants to take on the analytics incumbents. Today, he’s got more money to fund that challenge, with the announcement that Heap has raised $55 million in Series C funding.

Movassate (pictured above) previously worked as a product manager at Facebook, and I interviewed him after the startup’s Series B, he recalled the circuitous process normally required to collect and analyze user data. In contrast, Heap automatically collects data on user activity — the goal is to capture literally everything — and makes it available in a self-serve way, with no additional code required to answer new queries.

The company says it now has more than 6,000 customers, including Twilio, AppNexus, Harry’s, WeWork and Microsoft.

With this new funding, Heap has raised a total of $95.2 million. The plan is to fund international growth, as well to expand the product, engineering and go-to-market teams.

The Series C was led by NewView Capital, with participation from new DTCP, Maverick Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Alliance Bernstein Private Credit Investors and Sharespost) and existing investors (NEA, Menlo Ventures, Initialized Capital, and Pear VC). NewView founder and managing partner Ravi Viswanathan is joining the startup’s board of directors.

“Heap offers an innovative approach to automating a company’s analytics, enabling a variety of teams within an organization to obtain the data they need to make educated and, ultimately, smarter decisions,” Viswanathan said in a statement. “We are excited to team up with Heap, as they continue to develop their cutting edge software, expand their analytics automation offerings and help serve their growing numbers of customers.”

Congress has begun investigations into the power wielded by tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google – from their effect on the news media, to their impact on retail markets, to their handling of data. Unusual for these divided times, the concerns are bipartisan, with members of both parties suggesting that new legislation and regulation may be needed.

A number of big challenges are hurting consumers, including “serious breaches of privacy” and “loss of control of data,” Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, told CNBC.

This discussion of what Cicilline has called a “monopoly moment” is healthy and overdue. However, while Congress examines whether we should trust the tech titans with so much of our data and other assets, it would be great to see more urgency on another question: Can we trust the government itself with our data?

Federal and state government databases hold a treasure trove of sensitive, personal information that is used to collect taxes, administer benefits, register vehicles, or run elections. Not to mention the 434.2 million phone records on Americans that the National Security Agency collected last year, according to a government report.

Hackers, naturally, know that government sites are a rich target, and some of the largest cybersecurity breaches of recent years have taken place in the public sector.

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 24: A Department of Justice employee put up a poster of the seven indicted hackers prior to a news conference for announcing a law enforcement action March 24, 2016 in Washington, DC. A grand jury in the Southern District of New York has indicted seven Iranian who were employed by two Iran-based computer companies that performed work on behalf of the Iranian Government, on computer hacking charges related to their involvement in an extensive campaign of over 176 days of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In two separate incidents in June 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management discovered that attackers had stolen the Social Security numbers and other confidential information of 25.7 million current and former federal employees and contractors. The hackers’ haul even included 5.6 million fingerprints of job applicants who has undergone background investigations.

In 2016, the IRS said that 700,000 Social Security numbers were taken in a hack the year before.

In 2018, a “SamSam” ransomware attack shut down the city of Atlanta’s online systems, forcing the cancellation of court proceedings and preventing the collection of water bills and traffic fines. Last month, a ransomware assault has affected services in Baltimore and cost the city at least $18.2 million in lost or delayed revenue and direct restoration costs.

And then there are the foreign attempts to interfere with elections. U.S. officials have testified that Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21 states in 2016, though no actual votes are believed to have been affected.

Since free and fair elections are a core tenet of our democracy, voter registration pages and election systems are the most sensitive areas of state and municipal web infrastructure. Election databases also contain personally identifiable information such as names, ages, and addresses. As my company’s experience with various state governments show, these systems are constantly under attack.

In fact, we’ve seen up to two-thirds of state election agencies’ website traffic consist of malicious bots searching for data to steal or scrape. Even more disturbingly, we have also seen spikes in automated traffic attacking the websites as registration deadlines approach. These spikes slow down the performance of back-end databases, compromising the agencies’ overall ability to effectively conduct elections.

This evidence shows that the existential threat to government data is every bit as important as the security and privacy concerns driving the congressional investigation of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. But is enough being done?

Voting booths in polling place. Image courtesy Getty Images

More than three years after the devastating attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, a report by the General Accounting Office in November found that the agency had not implemented 29 of the 80 recommendations the government’s in-house auditor had made to shore up its cyber defenses.

In Atlanta, an audit determined that leading up to the ransomware attack, the city had ignored repeated warnings about flaws in its security posture, including a failure to address 1,500 to 2,000 severe vulnerabilities that the city’s Information Management and the Office of Information Security had identified.

Where control of data is concerned, it’s vital that the federal and state governments look themselves in the mirror just as hard as Congress is now assessing the tech giants. A few specific recommendations:

• Government agencies at all levels should conduct an exhaustive review of their cyber security capabilities and hold leaders personally responsible for ensuring they are up to snuff for constantly evolving threats.

• Beyond investigating the practices of a few companies, Congress also should focus energy on a long-overdue update of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 33-year-old law that makes it unlawful to break into a computer to access or alter information and, astoundingly, still serves as a legal guidepost in today’s new landscape of bots, malware, ransomware and other malicious attacks.

• The Trump administration should make sure to follow through with its May 2 executive order on cyber defense that promised to “grow the cybersecurity capability of the United States Government, increase integration of the federal cybersecurity workforce, and strengthen the skills of federal information technology and cybersecurity practitioners.” It also called for a “cybersecurity rotational assignment program” within the federal government that “will serve as a mechanism for knowledge transfer and a development program for cybersecurity practitioners.”

An important discussion is happening on Capitol Hill about the influence of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google in our lives and society. It would be hypocritical, however, to lose sight of how much of our data sits in government computer systems and that it also faces serious threat.

Facebook’s messaging app for under 13s, Messenger Kids — which launched two years ago pledging a “private” chat space for kids to talk with contacts specifically approved by their parents — has run into an embarrassing safety issue.

The Verge obtained messages sent by Facebook to an unknown number of parents of users of the app informing them the company had found what it couches as “a technical error” which allowed a friend of a child to create a group chat with them in the app which invited one or more of the second child’s parent-approved friends — i.e. without those secondary contacts having been approved by the parent of the first child.

Facebook did not make a public disclosure of the safety issue. We’ve reached out to the company with questions.

It earlier confirmed the bug to the Verge, telling it: “We recently notified some parents of Messenger Kids account users about a technical error that we detected affecting a small number of group chats. We turned off the affected chats and provided parents with additional resources on Messenger Kids and online safety.”

The issue appears to have arisen as a result of how Messenger Kids’ permissions are applied in group chat scenarios — where the multi-user chats apparently override the system of required parental approval for contacts who kids are chatting with one on one.

But given the app’s support for group messaging it’s pretty incredible that Facebook engineers failed to robustly enforce an additional layer of checks for friends of friends to avoid unapproved users (who could include adults) from being able to connect and chat with children.

The Verge reports that “thousands” of children were left in chats with unauthorized users as a result of the flaw.

Despite its long history of playing fast and loose with user privacy, at the launch of Messenger Kids in 2017 the then head of Facebook Messenger, David Marcus, was quick to throw shade at other apps kids might use to chat — saying: “In other apps, they can contact anyone they want or be contacted by anyone.”

Turns out Facebook’s Messenger Kids has also allowed unapproved users into chatrooms it claimed as safe spaces for kids, saying too that it had developed the app in “lockstep” with the FTC.

We’ve reached out to the FTC to ask if it will be investigating the safety breach.

Friends’ data has been something of a recurring privacy blackhole for Facebook — enabling, for example, the misuse of millions of users’ personal information without their knowledge or consent as a result of the expansive permissions Facebook wrapped around it, when the now defunct political data company, Cambridge Analytica, paid a developer to harvest Facebook data to build psychographic profiles of US voters.

The company is reportedly on the verge of being issued with a $5BN penalty by the FTC related to an investigation of whether it breached earlier privacy commitments made to the regulator.

Various data protection laws govern apps that process children’s data, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa) in the US and the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. But while there are potential privacy issues here with the Messenger Kids flaw, given children’s data may have been shared with unauthorized third parties as a result of the “error”, the main issue of concern for parents is likely the safety risk of their children being exposed to people they have not authorized in an unsupervised video chat environment.

On that issue current laws have less of a support framework to offer.

Although — in Europe — rising concern about a range of risks and harms kids can face when going online has led the UK government to seek to regulate the area.

recently published white paper sets out its plan to regulate a broad range of online harms, including proposing a mandatory duty of care on platforms to take reasonable steps to protect users from a range of harms, such as child sexual exploitation.

Customer reviews play a key role in helping people decide what to buy on consumer-focused marketplaces like Amazon or app stores, and the same tendency exists in the B2B world, where nearly half a trillion dollars is spent annually on software and IT purchases. TrustRadius, one of the startups capitalising on the latter trend with total feedback sessions today standing at close to 190,000 reviews, has now picked up a Series C of $12.5 million led by Next Coast Ventures with existing investors Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures also participating.

The funding, which brings the total raised by TrustRadius to $25 million (modest compared to some of its competitors) will be used to build more partnerships and use cases for its reviews, as well as continue expanding that total number of users providing feedback.

In addition to its main site — which goes up against a huge number of other online software comparison services like TrustPilot, G2 Crowd, Owler, and many others — TrustRadius is already working with vendors like LogMeIn, Tibco and more (including a number of huge IT companies that have asked not to be named).

TrustRadius mainly works with them on two tracks: to source a wider range of reviews from their existing customer bases to improve their profiles on the site; and then to help them use those reviews in their own marketing materials. Partnerships like these form the core of TrustRadius’s business model: people posting reviews or using the site to read them access it for free.

Vinay Bhagat, founder and CEO of TrustRadius, believes that his company’s mission — to help IT decision makers vet software by tapping into feedback from other IT buyers — has found particular relevance in the current market.

“I think that gravity is on our side,” he said in an interview. “If you think about how the tech industry is evolving and getting things done, IT decisions are getting decentralized and moving out of the CIO’s office. Millennials are ageing into positions of authority, and it means that the way people had previously bought software — by way of salespeople or on the basis of analyst reports — are changing. There is pent-up demand to hear the roar of peers and that’s where we come in.”

User-generated reviews have come under a lot of criticism in recent times. Regulators have been going after companies for not being vigilant enough about policing their platforms for “fake” reviews, either planted to big up a product, or by rivals to knock it down, or coming from people who are being paid to put in a good word. The argument has been that the marketplaces hosting those reviews are still bringing in eyeballs and product conversions based on that feedback, so they are less concerned with the corruption even if it longer term can likely sour consumers on the trustworthiness of the whole platform.

That belief is not wholly true, of course: Amazon for one has recently been making a huge effort to improve trust, by going after dodgy reviewers and setting up systems to halt the trafficking of counterfeit goods.

And Bhagat argued to me that it doesn’t hold for TrustRadius, either. The company has a focused enough mandate — B2B software purchasing — within a crowded enough field, that losing trust by posting blindly positive reviews would get it nowhere fast.

At the same time, he noted that the company has held a firm line with its customers on making sure that the “truth” about a product is made clear even if it’s not completely rosy, in the hopes that they can use that to work on improvements, and also provide more balanced feed back at the least from existing customers in order to give a more complete picture. (It also, like other reviews sites, makes people who provide feedback do so using professional credentials like work emails and LinkedIn profiles.)

That line has so far carried it into relationships with a number of software companies, which are using reviews as a complement to their own sales teams, and the papers and analysis published by analysts like Gartner and Ovum and Forester, to reach people who are weighing up different options for their IT solutions.

“TrustRadius has become an integral part of today’s economic cycle”, said Bill Wagner, CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “Software buyers today need detailed reviews to make sure that the product works for a business professional like themselves. TrustRadius provides that in a transparent way, so buyers can make confident decisions, even about enterprise-grade software.”

The recent swing in the digital world towards data protection and people getting increasingly aware of how their own personal details are used in ways they never intended, has presented an interesting challenge for the world of online services. Most of us don’t like getting marketing and will generally opt out of any “yes, I consent to getting updates from XYZ and its partners!” boxes — if we happen to spot them amid the dark patterning of the net.

TrustRadius and companies like it have an opportunity through that, though: by targeting IT buyers who have to make complicated purchasing decisions and most likely more than one, and in a way that ensures each purchase works with the rest of an existing tech stack, they represent one of the rare cases of where a user might actually want to hear more.

Indeed, one of the company’s plans longer term is to continue developing how it can work with its users through that IT lifecycle by providing suggestions of software based on previous software purchases and also what that user’s feedback has been around a past purchase.

“From day one we have been deal with complex purchasing decisions,” Bhagat said. “Buying technology that will be used to run your business is not the same as buying an app that you use casually. It can be make or break for your company.”

Jukedeck, a pioneering AI startup out of the UK which could interpret video and automatically set music to it, has reportedly been acquired by hot social media startup TikTok. Jukedeck was previously a TechCrunch London 2015 Battlefield winner.

Jukedeck had raised £2.5M, largely from Cambridge Innovation Capital, but also included investors Parkwalk Advisors, Backed VC and Playfair Capital who were the most recent investors.

Founder and CEO Ed Newton-Rex changed his LinkedIn profile recently to say he was now working for TikTok’s parent company Bytedance as director of its AI Lab since April this year, according to industry news outlet Musically.

Newton-Rex famously rapped his pitch:

We have reached out to Newton-Rex for confirmation, however, several of his colleagues have also now updated their LinkedIn profiles to reveal that they also all now work for Bytedance.

This includes David Trevelyan and Pierre Chanquion (previously senior software engineers, music production R&D at Jukedeck; now senior software engineers at Bytedance’s AI Lab); Katerina Kosta and Gabriele Medeot (formerly machine learning researchers at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researchers at Bytedance); and Marco Selvi (formerly senior software engineer and machine learning researcher at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researcher at Bytedance).

Jukedeck’s site is now offline and its homepage replaced by a message saying “We can’t tell you more just yet, but we’re looking forward to continuing to fuel creativity using musical AI!” – indicating that Jukedeck’s technology for adding music to videos is likely to be used by Bytedance inside TikTok.

Newton-Rex has often talked about putting the power of music composition into the hands of the masses, and TikTok clearly has scale.

The social music app has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower.

Genie AI, a legal tech startup and Entrepreneur First alumni, has raised £2 million in funding. The round is a combination of equity and a U.K. government grant, and will be used to continue development of the company’s “intelligent” contract editor for law firms and an upcoming product targeting GDPR compliance.

Leading the £1.2 million equity investment is Connect Ventures, with participation from a number of angel investors, including former President of the Supreme Court Lord Neuberger and Professor Jun Wang at UCL. The £800,000 grant was awarded by UK Research and Innovation.

“Lawyers always tell us ‘I know I’ve done something like that before,’ but in large firms it’s a real pain to dig past drafting out of emails, document management systems and the minds of senior lawyers,” says Genie AI co-founder and CEO Rafie Faruq. “SuperDrafter solves this by automatically curating relevant knowledge from around the firm, and recommending clauses to lawyers as they draft, in real time”.

The broader idea is that SuperDrafter can enable lawyers to benefit from the “collective intelligence” — both past and present — of an entire law firm. It does this by machine reading thousands of documents confidentially and then analyses variations of the same clause to deuce market standards and allow lawyers to negotiate the best deal for their clients.

In addition, Genie AI claims that SuperDrafter does not require a human to tag or train the required data. Instead, the algorithm “learns by itself”.

“When drafting documents, lawyers typically start from a template, a document from a negotiating party, or an “automated” first draft using a questionnaire. Next, in order to tailor or negotiate the contract as it goes back and forth, lawyers typically have to search for past wording or tweak certain clauses and there are always thousands of variations of the same clause,” explains Faruq.

“[Using SuperDrafter], lawyers can now do this in one click, by simply loading in a document and viewing recommended clauses for each part of the contract. This gives lawyers the collective intelligence of the firm at their fingertips”.

The upshot, says Faruq, is that Genie AI’s solution makes contract drafting not just significantly faster but also much more robust. “More interestingly, our clients are increasingly using SuperDrafter not just for efficiency, but to win the best deal in every matter,” he adds. “Contracts specify commercial relationships, and we can get you the best terms, predicted from hundreds of thousands of past examples”.

The intelligent contract editor is being piloted with law firms Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons and Withers, where it is being used to draw up lengthy contracts within banking and finance. “We believe the complexity lends itself to AI-assisted drafting, where machines can augment lawyers with the collective intelligence of millions of past examples,” says Faruq.

Meanwhile, Genie AI is already working on a second product. Dubbed “Anonymiser”, the software can be used SuperDrafter or standalone and with will automatically redact confidential information from contracts so than companies can comply with GDPR regulation and preserve client confidentiality.

We’ve reached a new milestone in the long road to getting AI-based self-driving systems to be truly autonomous.

Daimler and Bosch have now received approval from German regulators to run their automated driverless parking function without a human safety driver behind the wheel — making this the world’s first fully automated driverless SAE Level 4 parking function to be officially approved for everyday use. The nod comes four years after the companies started working together on the technology.

“This decision by the authorities shows that innovations like automated valet parking are possible in Germany first,” Bosch board member Dr. Markus Heyn said in a statement. “Driverless driving and parking are important building blocks for tomorrow’s mobility. The automated parking system shows just how far we have already progressed along this development path.”

Level 4 is a designation by SAE that means the vehicle can handle all aspects of driving in certain conditions without human intervention. Up to now, there have been other Level 4 trials in the works, but all of them have involved people behind the wheel as a back-up.

Bosch, one of the largest automotive tech and hardware suppliers in the world, handles the infrastructure piece of the automated parking function, which works in concert with Daimler’s vehicle tech on its Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Users access the autonomous valet service via a smartphone app.

Bosch and Daimler started developing fully automated driverless parking in 2015. That initial partnership included car2go, the car-sharing unit of Daimler. The companies debuted the so-called automated valet parking function in 2017 at the parking garage of the Mercedes-Benz Museum. The following year, and after intensive testing, museum visitors were able to test the automated parking service with one important caveat: a human safety driver was always behind the wheel.

Visitors were able to reserve vehicles from the facility using a smartphone app. Their vehicle would arrive autonomously to a designated pick-up spot in the parking garage. Once visitors were through with the vehicle, they could deliver it to the drop-off zone. The vehicle would then drive itself to its assigned parking spot, guided by the garage’s infrastructure and onboard sensors.

The pilot program was rather narrow in scope and restricted by the inclusion of a safety driver. But it served an important purpose for Bosch, Daimler and even other companies hoping to deploy automated driving functions in Germany.

Germany doesn’t have an official approval process for automated driving functions without a human driver. From the outset, Bosch and Daimler included authorities from Stuttgart and the state of Baden-Württemberg’s transportation ministry along with with experts from the German certification authority TÜV Rheinland.

As one might expect, the group assessed the safety of Bosch and Daimler’s parking function. But the process also helped regulators come up with a guidelines for testing and approval criteria that can be applied beyond this pilot project in one parking garage in Stuttgart.

For instance, Bosch and Daimler tested lighting concepts on the vehicles pilot project. The companies used turquoise lighting to indicate that a vehicle was in automated driving mode and informed passers-by and other road users that the vehicle is driving itself. The recently issued SAE standard 3134 reflects Bosch and Daimler’s insights on these lighting tests.

This isn’t the only Bosch-Daimler project in the works. The companies formed a partnership in 2017 to bring fully autonomous vehicles to urban roads “by the start of the next decade.” Last year, the companies announced plans to pilot a robotaxi service in San Jose, California.

The robotaxi trials, which will use automated Mercedes-Benz S Class vehicles, are supposed to begin in the second half of 2019 in a geofenced area in the San Carlos and Stevens Creek corridor between downtown and west San Jose. The pilot will use an on-demand ride-hailing service app operated by Daimler Mobility Services.

The rides will all be monitored by a safety driver.

Meanwhile, Bosch is building a $1.1 billion facility designed to produce semiconductors used in self-driving cars, smart homes and smart city infrastructure. The Dresden-based chip fab is set to start producing silicon commercially in 2021, and construction is supposed to be completed in 2019.

Visionaries Club, a new European VC focussing on B2B, is disclosing that it has raised two micro funds of €40 million each, aimed at pre-seed/seed and Series B, respectively. The Berlin-based VC firm is founded by Sebastian Pollok and Robert Lacher.

Pollok was a VC at e.ventures in San Francisco and also founded Amorelie, which exited to to Pro7Sat.1 Media Group at a valuation over $100m in 2018. Lacher was previously founding partner of La Famiglia, where he is said to have been an early investor in companies such as FreightHub, Coya, Asana Rebel, OnTruck, and Personio.

LPs in Visionaries Club include numerous successful European founders, such as Hakan Koc (Auto 1 Group), Jochen Engert and Daniel Krauss (Flixbus), Johannes Reck (GetYourGuide), Dominik Richter (Hello Fresh), and Florian Gschwandtner (Runtastic).

Investors in the funds also include family businesses of Markus Swarovski, Shravin Mittal, Felix Fiege (Fiege Logistics), Christian Miele, Max Viessmann (Viessmann Group), and members of the Siemens, Henkel and Bitburger families.

In an email Q&A with Pollok and Lacher, we dug a little more into Visionaries Club’s remit, its steadfast focus on B2B, why it is doing seed and Series B but not Series C, and the pair’s views on Brexit.

TechCrunch: Why B2B?

RL: We believe the next big wave of disruption will happen in the B2B space, with the potential to re-shape the backbone of our European economy. Reinventing the B2B IT stack is the here-and-now opportunity since there is no reason for any part of the value chain not to be digitized in the long run if there is potential to streamline and automate processes.

SP: In the past 15 years we had a great wave and momentum of consumer-driven companies. But if you look at our European industry landscape, our true DNA are especially those industrial world market leaders that we’re famous for. Most of them run a profitable business, but often fail to manage the digital transformation on their own. That´s where we see the opportunity for us!

With our network-driven approach, we want to bridge the information asymmetry of “what´s possible” in the technology startup space and “what is actually needed” in the industrial space. With Visionaries Club, we bring those two worlds together to fuel the next wave of disruption.

TC: Visionaries Club has two funds, one for pre-seed/seed and one for later growth rounds, and plans to invest in B2B startups across Europe. On the seed fund, can you be more specific regarding the size of cheque you write and the types of companies, technologies, business models or B2B sectors you are focussing on?

SP: Sure! We are planning to invest between €500K to €1.5M into great B2B founders in the pre-seed and seed stage taking around 10% ownership in their companies. We love to look at technologies that kill inefficiencies across the B2B value chain and create a significant (10x) improvement – starting from sourcing and procurement platforms, modular production systems, warehouse automation, new digitally-enabled logistics platforms to more digital after-sales solutions.

RL: The nice thing about these technologies is that almost every company has a supply chain and the same problems: So most technologies here are relevant across verticals and create big market opportunities to tap into for startups. Great examples of recent European champions in this space are Celonis for process mining, UiPath for RPA or Graphcore in the AI-driven processor space – all of them B2B fast scalers, and all of them relevant across verticals. And the next generation is in the starting blocks with companies like Munich-based Arculus which has re-invented production with a modular approach already serving their first customers Audi and Porsche and now expanding to other verticals.

TC: The Visionaries Club growth fund is targeting Series B and is designed to enable you to double down on the most promising startups in your portfolio and even later stage startups you haven’t yet invested in. Related to this, you explicitly say you have chosen Series B as you want to avoid overcrowded Series A rounds. What is your thinking here?

RL: There has been a significant influx of capital into the European VC ecosystem in the last two years with most VCs having raised bigger funds with €100 – 350M in size focusing on the Series A stage as an entry point. First and foremost: This is an amazing development for founders and our ecosystem, since great founders can choose with which fund they want to team up.

SP: At the same time the VC landscape has become a red ocean for the many Series A focused VCs competing for the same stage and ownership, with the value propositions of many funds being rather similar. We want to stay out of this game and build a complementary VC product for the early growth stage where B2B tech founders can choose one of the Tier I European or US funds as a lead while we co-invest with a smaller check bringing in our industrial LP network to help them scale.

TC: You say that the importance of money has decreased in venture capital and that in 2019 access and network has become the most important currency to get into the best deals. How do you plan to access to the most promising companies Europe and what makes your network standout (because, frankly, every new VC is trading on the same promise)?

SP: Fair point! What separates us from other VCs is that we really have 1) only leading entrepreneurs as investors in our fund 2) that these entrepreneurs are both from the old and new economy and 3) that we take our approach also to the early growth stage.

As to our seed fund: Our 12 unicorn founders are great satellites and scouts in the market to access deals via their entrepreneurial networks early before they get “into the market” for fundraising. At the same time they have already been a great support in our past investments joining board meetings and helping young teams to transition from a seed to a growth company because they have just went through this same process themselves.

RL: As to our growth fund: We believe our biggest USP is the family business entrepreneur network from the industrial space as we can help B2B companies refine their product market fit and scale within our network. Lead gen in B2B is one of the most difficult challenges for startups, since you don’t win customers via digital channels such as Facebook. It is a “foot on the ground” business – we can help companies build those relationships faster.

Compared with typical publicly-listed corporates, family business entrepreneurs have an entrepreneurial DNA themselves, make fast decisions, are willing to take bigger risks and think long-term: All ingredients which make them a great sparring partner for B2B entrepreneurs in their growth stage.

TC: Both funds are relatively small, and you say this is deliberate. What are the advantages of a micro fund and also the disadvantages?

RL: It gives us more agility to co-invest with other great funds instead of competing which is good for founders because it is all about getting the most value-add on board. We also do not expose founders to a signaling risk at the early stage since we only lead Seed rounds and then support our founders in raising their Series A with one of the larger Tier I founds from our network while keeping our pro-rata share.

On the downside: It gives us less management fee ;) But since this is really not what we’re optimizing for anyway that’s ok. We also put our own money into the funds and want to keep our Visionaries Club team small and agile.

TC: Is Brexit good or bad for European tech or arguably just bad for the U.K.? Perhaps you can provide your perspective on Brexit as an early-stage VC firm based in Europe but outside of the United Kingdom.

SP: It’s bad for both ecosystems! Take the Oxbridge-London triangle alone where you have some of the world’s best researchers and technologists and where one of the most important assets is a direct line of cooperation between ground-breaking research on the one hand and leading industrial corporates on the other side as key driver to commercialize promising technologies. We have now seen the first corporates from Germany and France re-locating or closing down their UK offices which will make it tougher to collaborate. As to our goal of helping to form more European champions this is a very sad development.

On the other hand the London startup & VC ecosystem has matured and brought up amazing funds and entrepreneurs to back the next generation of founders. We hope that the VC and startup ecosystem will ignore Brexit wherever it can and see this still as a collaborative European play to be successful: We promise that we will try to do that whenever possible!

The cyber libel trial against Maria Ressa, the CEO and executive editor of independent media startup Rappler, started today in Manila, in a case that will be closely watched because of its implications for press freedom in the Philippines. Also on trial is Reynaldo Santos Jr, a former researcher and writer for the site. If convicted, both potentially face years in jail.

Before co-founding Rappler, Ressa, a Time Magazine Person of the Year for her work exposing corruption and fighting misinformation, served as CNN’s bureau chief in Manila and then Jakarta. Ressa is an outspoken critic of the Philippine’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, and Rappler has often reported critically on Duterte’s administration. In turn, Duterte has accused Rappler of being funded by the CIA and publishing fake news.

Both Ressa and Santos were arrested earlier this year on cyber libel security charges for an article published in 2012 that reported on the alleged ties between Supreme Court Justice Renato Corona, who was impeached in 2011, and wealthy businessmen including Wilfredo Keng. Keng filed the cyber libel complaint against Ressa and Santos in 2017.

The five year gap between the publication of the article and Keng’s complaint is an important issue in the trial, because there is usually only a one-year prescriptive period for ordinary libel in the Philippines’ penal code. In order to charge Ressa and Santos, the Department of Justice extended that period to 12 years for cyber libel, which Rappler counsel J.J. Disini has argued could impact constitutionally-protected rights.

Prior to Ressa’s arrest, Rappler’s registration was revoked by the Philippines’ Securities and Exchange Commission, for allegedly breaking a law that prohibits overseas ownership of media companies, though Rappler said its investors, including Omidyar Network and North Bridge Media, used Philippine Depositary Receipts, which do not give voting rights or board membership and have also been used by other companies like ABS-CBN, the national broadcaster.

There’s a new fintech startup in the U.S. that is inching closer to the unicorn status. New York City-headquartered MoneyLion, which provides customers both financial advice and access to loans and other services, said today it has raised $100 million in a new round to accelerate its growth in the U.S. market.

The Series C round million for the six-year-old startup was led by Edison Partners and Greenspring Associates, MoneyLion said. MetaBank and FinTech Collective also participated in the round, while Capital One made a strategic investment.

MoneyLion also raised $60 million in venture capital and debt in Q2 2018, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. This was not previously disclosed. This means MoneyLion has raised over $200 million to date, with its current round valuing the startup at nearly $1 billion, a person familiar with the matter said.

MoneyLion, which describes itself as a mobile bank, operates a part lending, part savings and part wealth management app. The all-in-one platform allows users to connect all their bank accounts and credit cards and receive personalized advice on how to better spend their money and also secure loans from within the app.

The startup makes most of its money from subscription services — that cost $19.99 per month — it sells to consumers, Dee Choubey, founder and CEO of MoneyLion, told TechCrunch in an interview. The subscription offering bundles banking, core investment management, and access to financing.

Choubey didn’t say how many subscribers MoneyLion has, but noted that more than 5 million customers use the app. This includes free users, who are able to access some core banking features at no cost.

MoneyLion will use the new capital refine its subscription offerings, finance model, and add new features to keep its existing users enticed to the platform, Choubey said. The app bandied out over $12 million in cashback rewards to its members and 70% of its users saw their credit score climb up by 30 points.

“You will see us investing heavily in broker dealer capabilities, training capabilities, and stock investing capabilities. We think of ourselves approaching financial services just like Netflix approaches content. We want to keep users hooked to the platform,” he said.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Chris Sugden, Managing Partner at Edison Partners, said MoneyLion has focused the last one year on bringing the entire bank offerings to its platform. And this “comprehensive, bundling, first class opportunities around banking and financial literacy” for customers is what attracted him to the startup, he said.

As traditional banks make slow moves to help the growing financial needs of its customers, a growing number of fintech startups have emerged over the years across the globe to fill the gap. In many parts of the world, including the U.S., “neo banks” are helping small and medium sized businesses automate their finances and access many additional features.

On some fronts, MoneyLion competes with a handful of players such as Chime, another mobile bank that raised $200 million earlier this year, investment service Acorn, which has more than 3.5 million users, and online money lender SoFi, which quietly raised $500 million two months ago.