Category: UNCATEGORIZED

With skyrocketing demand for consumer products and renewed research into its medicinal value, cannabis is having a moment.

The quasi-legalization of marijuana created a gold rush for into the industry and startups like Demetrix are reaping the benefits.

The company, founded by the famed U.C. Berkeley researcher Jay Keasling and helmed by former Amyris executive Jeff Ubersax, just raised $50 million in a new round of financing to continue its pursuit of isolating and brewing cannabinoids, the active chemical ingredients in the marijuana plant.

The money came from previous investor Horizons Ventures, the Hong Kong-based firm backed by real estate billionaire Li Kashing, and Tuatara Capital, a fund which invests in the legal cannabis industry.

The idea of using yeast to brew cannabinoids isn’t a new one and there are several companies active in the space. Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug based on one of the cannabinoids that’s found in the marijuana interest in the potential to identify and manufacture other pharmaceutically beneficial chemicals from the plant has grown.

Demetrix’s competitive advantage, according to Ubersax, is the company’s access to an exclusive license on Keasling’s research from Berkeley. The technology Keasling developed gives the company a unique ability to isolate and develop new cannabinoids and start screening them for utility.

“We’re providing high quality low cost access to these molecules that have traditionally come from plants,” says Ubersax. 

Demetrix expects the global market for cannabinoids to reach $100 billion by 2029, citing 2016 research from Ackrell Capital.

While it’s currently cheaper to just extract cannabinoids used in existing products from the plant itself, as the body of research grows around applications for the more rare cannabinoids found in smaller percentages in the plant itself, brewing the active chemicals will start to look more and more appealing.

Demetrix says it will use the money from the new financing to scale its operations and commercialize the first of the over 100 unique cannabinoids it believes can be applied to consumer and medical products.

“Demetrix’s mission is to help the world benefit from nature’s rarest ingredients, and we’re excited to partner with world-class investors like Tuatara Capital and Horizons Ventures to help global pharmaceutical, supplement, and consumer product companies deliver innovative products using cannabinoids,” said Demetrix CEO Jeff Ubersax, in a statement. “We’ve assembled a team of industry veterans, built a scalable technology platform, and are working with global regulatory organizations to quickly commercialize.”

The company has raised $61 million to date.

Here’s a thing that should have never been a thing: Bluetooth-connected hair straighteners.

Glamoriser, a U.K. firm that bills itself as the maker of the “world’s first Bluetooth hair straighteners“, allows users to link the device to an app, which lets the owner set certain heat and style settings. The app can also be used to remotely switch off the straighteners within Bluetooth range.

Big problem, though. These straighteners can be hacked.

Security researchers at Pen Test Partners bought a pair and tested them out. They found that it was easy to send malicious Bluetooth commands within range to remotely control an owner’s straighteners.

The researchers demonstrated that they could send one of several commands over Bluetooth, such as the upper and lower temperature limit of the device — 122°F and 455°F respectively — as well as the shut-down time. Because the straighteners have no authentication, an attacker can remotely alter and override the temperature of the straighteners and how long they stay on for — up to a limit of 20 minutes.

“As there is no pairing or bonding established over [Bluetooth] when connecting a phone, anyone in range with the app can take control of the straighteners,” said Stuart Kennedy in his blog post, shared first with TechCrunch.

There is a caveat, said Kennedy. The straighteners only allow one concurrent connection. If the owner hasn’t connected their phone or they go out of range, only then can an attacker target the device.

Here at TechCrunch we’re all for setting things on fire “for journalism,” but in this case the numbers speak for themselves. If, per the researchers’ findings, the straighteners could be overridden to the maximum temperature of 455°C at the timeout of 20 minutes, that’s setting up a prime condition for a fire — or at very least burn damage.

It’s estimated as many 650,000 house fires in the U.K. are caused by hair straighteners and curling irons left on. In some cases it can take more than a half-hour for these heated devices to cool down to safe levels. U.K. fire and rescue services have called on owners to physically pull the plug on their devices to prevent fires and damage.

Glamoriser did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication. The app hasn’t been updated since June 2018, suggesting a fix has yet to be put in place.

Runa Capital, an international VC firm HQ’d in Silicon Valley says it has now closed $70 million for its third fund aimed at backing early-stage startups in so-called ‘DeepTech’. Runa says it is aiming for a $135 million final target for Runa Fund III. Last year, its total funding in the U.S. increased by 30 percent, tallying just shy of $100 billion across more than 5,500 deals, according to PwC and CB Insights.

Runa already has $270 million under management from its first two funds and is best known for backing mobile banking startup Final (acquired by Goldman Sachs), web server NGINX (acquired by F5 Networks), the mobile app analytics French Capptain (acquired by Microsoft), and the cloud banking platform Mambu. Its most recent investment was Acumatica acquired by private equity fund EQT Partners.

Founders Serguei Beloussov, Ilya Zubarev and Dmitry Chikhachev launched Runa Capital in 2011 and raised $135 million for Runa I, followed by a second fund of the same size in 2015. Beloussov and Zubarev are serial entrepreneurs who created several global enterprise software companies including Acronis, Parallels and Acumatica.

Runa Capital typically invests between $1 million and $10 million in early-stage companies (largely Series A rounds) with a focus on deep tech, including machine intelligence and open-source; cloud business applications — and IT for regulated markets, such as fintech, edtech, and digital health. Another important area for Runa has been Quantum physics, and last year it established the Quantum Wave Fund, effectively a “materials science” arm for Runa. This backed quantum cryptography Swiss startup IDQuantique which was sold to SK Telecom.

In total, Runa has invested in 60+ companies in over 12 countries thus far — equally split between North America and Europe. In Europe, the fund tends to invest in tech-savvy Series A startups, particularly in the US. The fund has offices in Palo Alto, Berlin and Paris.

The move comes as last year showed the highest level of VC funding since the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century — $207 billion in over 14,000 deals around the world — a 21% year-over-year rise, much of it in to ‘deep tech’ startups.

According to Dealroom’s 2018 European trend report, European startups, European biotech companies and Israeli startups all received more VC money than ever last year — including over €8 billion poured into deep tech startups.

Amazon announced this morning a plan to invest over $700 million to retrain workers across the U.S. to allow them to move into skilled technical and non-technical roles across its corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network. The company’s goal is to “upskill” 100,000 of its U.S. employees for more in-demand jobs by 2025 — or, one in three of Amazon’s U.S. workers.

In particular, Amazon has its eye on job roles like data mapping specialist, data scientist, solutions architect, and business analyst, as well as logistics coordinator, process improvement manager and transportation specialist, it says. Based on a review of its workforce and U.S. hiring, these are the fastest-growing, highly skilled jobs over the past five years.

For example, data mapping specialists have seen job growth of 832% in the past five years, based on Amazon’s own data, while data scientists jobs grew 505%, solutions architect grew 454%, security engineer jobs grew 229%, and business analyst jobs grew 160%. Meanwhile, the highly-skilled job roles in customer fulfillment have grown by 400%.

Amazon’s U.S. workforce is expected to reach 300,000 employees this year, and it will reach 630,000 employees worldwide.

The retraining investment breaks down to around $7,000 per worker, and it one the largest corporate retraining programs to date.

The funding will be distributed across a range of programs, including both existing programs and new initiatives. It will also be focused on training people both with and without existing technical backgrounds.

These programs include the new Amazon Technical Academy, which will train non-technical Amazon employees with skills that allow them to transition to software and engineering careers; the new Associate2Tech program that will train fulfillment center associates to move into technical roles; and the new Machine Learning University, to train those with a tech background to branch into machine learning.

Amazon will also expand its Career Choice program, launched in 2012, which offers pre-paid tuition to fulfillment center associates who want to move into high-demand jobs; plus Amazon Apprenticeship, a Department of Labor certified program offering paid classroom training and on the job apprenticeships with Amazon; and its AWS Training and Certification programs focused on closing the skills gap.

“Through our continued investment in local communities in more than 40 states across the country, we have created tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S. in the past year alone,” said Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President, HR, in a statement released this morning. “For us, creating these opportunities is just the beginning. While many of our employees want to build their careers here, for others it might be a stepping stone to different aspirations. We think it’s important to invest in our employees, and to help them gain new skills and create more professional options for themselves. With this pledge, we’re committing to support 100,000 Amazonians in getting the skills to make the next step in their careers,” she added.

The investment follows Amazon’s raising of its minimum wage to $15 for all U.S. employees last year, after the retailer was increasingly under attack for how its workers were treated and paid. Senator Bernie Sanders, in particular, had called out Amazon for engaging in “corporate welfare,” noting that Amazon wages were so low that workers couldn’t take care of their families — meaning thousands were on government subsidy programs, like food stamps.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later challenged other retailers to follow his lead, and raise their minimum wages too. But that’s easier said than done as Amazon is so far ahead that its nearest e-commerce competitor, Walmart, is losing $1 billion this year on its e-commerce division as it tries to catch up.

The news also comes at a time when the role of technology’s impact on jobs is starting to take shape. As warehouses become more automated and jobs, overall, become more technology-dependent, it makes sense that Amazon would want to look internally to fill these new roles.

A marketplace dominated by Slack and Microsoft Teams, along with a host of other smaller workplace communication apps, might seem to leave little room for a new entrant, but Swit wants to prove that wrong. The app combines messaging with a roster of productivity tools, like task management, calendars and Gantt charts, to give teams “freedom from integrations.” Originally founded in Seoul and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Swit announced today that it has raised a $6 million seed round led by Korea Investment Partners, with participation from Hyunadi Venture Investment Corporation and Mirae Asset Venture Investment.

Along with an investment from Kakao Ventures last year, this brings Swit’s total seed funding so far to about $7 million. Swit’s desktop and mobile apps were released in March and since then more than 450 companies have adopted it, with 40,000 individual registered users. The startup was launched last year by CEO Josh Lee and Max Lim, who previously co-founded auction.co.kr, a Korean e-commerce site acquired by eBay in 2001.

While Slack, which recently went public, has become so synonymous with the space that “Slack me” is now part of workplace parlance at many companies, Lee says Swit isn’t playing catch up. Instead, he believes Swit benefits from “last mover advantage,” solving the shortfalls of other workplace messaging, collaboration and productivity apps by integrating many of their functions into one hub.

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“We know the market is heavily saturated with great unicorns, but many companies need multiple collaboration apps and there is nothing that seamlessly combines them, so users don’t have to go back and forth between two platforms,” Lee tells TechCrunch. Many employees rely on Slack or Microsoft Teams to chat with one another, on top of several project management apps, like Asana, Jira, Monday and Confluence, and email to communicate with people at other companies (Lee points to a M.io report that found most businesses use at least two messaging apps and four to seven collaboration tools).

Lee says he used Slack for more than five years and during that time, his teammates added integrations from Asana, Monday, GSuite and Office365, but were unsatisfied with how they worked.

“All we could do with the integrations was receive mostly text-based notifications and there were also too many overlapping features,” he says. “We realized that working with multiple environments reduced team productivity and increased communication overhead.” In very large organizations, teams or departments sometimes use different messaging and collaboration apps, creating yet more friction.

Swit’s goal is to covers all those needs in one app. It comes with integrated Kanban task management, calendars and Gantt charts and at the end of this year about 20 to 30 bots and apps will be available in its marketplace. Swit’s pricing tier currently has free and standard tiers, with a premium tier for enterprise customers planned for fall. The premium version will have full integration with Office365 and GSuite, allowing users to drag-and-drop emails into panels or convert them into trackable tasks.

While being a late-mover gives Swit certain advantages, it also means it must convince users to switch from their current apps, which is always a challenge when it comes to attracting enterprise clients. But Lee is optimistic. After seeing a demo, he says 91 percent of potential users registered on Swit, with more than 75 percent continuing to use it every day. Many of them used Asana or Monday before, but switched to Swit because they wanted to more easily communicate with teammates while planning tasks. Some are also gradually transitioning over from Slack to Swit for all their messaging (Swit recently released a Slack migration tool that enables teams to move over channels, workspaces and attachments. Migration tools for Asana, Trello and Jira are also planned).

In addition to “freedom from integrations,” Lee says Swit’s competitive advantages include being developed from the start for small businesses as well as large enterprises that still frequently rely on email to communicate across different departments or locations. Another differentiator is that all of Swit’s functions work on both desktop and mobile, which not all integrations in other collaboration apps can.

“That means if people integrate multiple apps into a desktop app or web browser, they might not be able to use them on mobile. So if they are looking for data, they have to search app by app, channel by channel, product by product, so data and information is scattered everywhere, hair on fire,” Lee says. “We provide one centralized command center for team collaboration without losing context and that is one of our biggest sources of customer satisfaction.”
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Boosted, the startup that got its beginnings with electric skateboards, has officially taken its first stab at electric scooters with the launch of the Boosted Rev.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks riding the Rev around the streets of San Francisco and, as I put in the headline, it’s fast, durable, fun and really heavy — 46 pounds to be exact. If this were part of a shared scooter model, the weight wouldn’t matter, but bringing it up and down a few flights of stairs on the daily isn’t ideal.

It weighs so much, Boosted CEO Jeff Russakow told me, because of the power it’s packing.

“But you are giving up about seven or eight pounds to do it,” Russakow said. “But, I mean, you’re getting six times the power and years and years of durability in return for it does have a little more weight.”

It’s worth noting that I don’t have to bring the scooter inside. The Boosted Rev is capable of being locked to a bike rack, but, you know, bolt cutters are things that exist.

Boosted Rev, which retails for $1,599, features all-wheel drive, dual-wheel motors (1500 watts each), is able to travel up to 24 mph with a range of 22 miles, and climb and descend 25%-grade hills. Rev is also designed to handle thousands of miles per year for several years. Thanks to the dual motors, it hauls ass up hills. Seriously, I was busting up the hills of San Francisco at 19 mph.

The Rev has three ride modes that respectively max out at 12, 18 and 24 mph. Unlike many other scooters on the market, Rev features wide air-filled tires to help with shock absorption and traction. The Rev also features three different breaking mechanisms: the hand brake, electric brake and foot brake. In my experience, the electric brake worked well enough to not need any of the other brakes, but it was still nice to have the hand brake for some peace of mind.

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“If you look at standing kick scooters today, with no disrespect, they’re more of a toy, or a leisure grade product that was never really intended to be riding over real streets and potholes with a Mack truck behind you,” Russakow said. “So we started out saying if you were to make an electric scooter that was a vehicle, how would you design it. And so that was everything from the amount of power to the type of frame to the range to the type of wheels to the throttle to making it incredibly durable — mechanically, electrically, environmentally. So it’s more similar to a car or a motorcycle, in terms of its vehicle quality. And we always knew from day one, that’s the vehicle we wanted to make. Can it climb hills cannot stop on a dime, can it handle all weather, will go for tens and tens of thousands of miles a year and have very little maintenance?”

It’s true. The scooters out there from the likes of Bird, Lime, Skip, Scoot and others are not in the same arena as Boosted. This becomes clear from the moment you step on the Boosted Rev. The Rev feels sturdy, handles bumps in the road well and makes it easy to keep up with cars.

What’s unique about Boosted’s scooter is its thumb wheel for accelerating and decelerating. The idea is to be able to do everything you need to do with one hand. That way, when you need to signal, you can just use your left hand without having to worry about giving up braking for signaling.

The two main caveats for me come down to the weight of the scooter and safety. The safety bit has more to do with riding any micromobility vehicle on busy city streets and the fear of a car or truck mowing me down. Also, because this scooter goes so fast, the possibility of severely injuring myself if I fly off the scooter drastically increases.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note a technical, but inconsistent difficulty with the Rev. Sometimes I had to reboot the scooter or fold and stow it and then unfold it to get it to accelerate. Boosted said I had a pre-production unit, so perhaps that’s why.

But the Rev is not the only scooter you can buy. Bird, for example recently got in to selling scooters direct to consumers, and then there are the likes of Ninebot, Xiaomi, Unagi, Jetson and many others.

The market for ownership, Russakow said, is “a different but bigger market.”

“It’s been great to see scooter share because people get exposed to scooters as commute options,” Russakow said. “But we think we’re serving the by-far largest market.”

If I were in the market for an electric scooter (I’m not) and lived somewhere where I didn’t have to lug the scooter up and down the stairs on the daily (I don’t), I would buy the Boosted Rev for its sheer power up hills and top speed.

GDPR, and the newer California Consumer Privacy Act, have given a legal bite to ongoing developments in online privacy and data protection: it’s always good practice for companies with an online presence to take measures to safeguard people’s data, but now failing to do so can land them in some serious hot water.

Now — to underscore the urgency and demand in the market — one of the bigger companies helping organizations navigate those rules is announcing a huge round of the funding. OneTrust, which builds tools to help companies navigate data protection and privacy policies both internally and with its customers, has raised $200 million in a Series A round of funding led by Insight that values the company at $1.3 billion.

It’s an outsized round for a Series A, being made at an equally outsized valuation — especially considering that the company is only three years old — but that’s because, according to CEO Kabir Barday, of the wide-ranging nature of the issue, and OneTrust’s early moves and subsequent pole position in tackling it.

“We’re talking about an operational overhaul in a company’s practices,” he said in an interview. “That requires the right technology and reach to be able to deliver that at a low cost.” Notably, it said it wasn’t actually in search of funding — it’s already revenue generating and could have grown off its own balance sheet — although he noted that having the capitalization and backing sends a signal to the market and in particular to larger organizations of its stability and staying power.

Currently, OneTrust says that it has around 3,000 customers across 100 countries, and the plan will be to continue to expand its reach geographically and to more businesses. Funding will also go towards the company’s technology: it already has 50 patents filed and another 50 applications in progress securing its own IP in the area of privacy protection.

The company offers technology and services covering three different aspects of data protection and privacy management.

Its Privacy Management Software helps an organization manage how they collect data as well as generate compliance reports in line with how a site is working relative to different jurisdictions. Then there is the famous (infamous) service that lets internet users set their preferences for how they want their data to be handled on different sites. The third is a larger database and risk management platform that assesses how various third-party services (for example advertising providers) work on a site and where they might pose data protection risks.

These are all provided either as a cloud-based software as a service, or an on-premises solution, depending on the customer in question.

OneTrust has an interesting backstory that sheds some light on how it was founded and how it identified this problem relatively early.

Alan Dabbiere, who is the co-chairman of OneTrust, had been the chairman of Airwatch — the mobile device management company acquired by VMware (Airwatch’s CEO and founder, John Marshall, is OneTrust’s other co-chairman). In an interview, he told me that it was when they were working on Airwatch — where Barday had worked on consulting, integration and engineering services — that they began to see just how a smartphone “could be a quagmire of information.”

“We could capture apps that an employee was using so that we could show them to IT to mitigate security risks,” he said, “but that actually presented a big privacy issue. If you have dyslexia or if you use a dating app, you’ve now shown things to IT that you shouldn’t have.”

He admitted that in the first version of the software, “we weren’t even thinking about whether that was inappropriate, but then we quickly realised that we needed to be thinking about privacy.” He says that it was Barday who first brought that sensibility to light, and “that is something that we have evolved from,” he added. After that, and after the VMware sale, it seemed a no-brainer that he and Marshall would come on to help the new startup grow.

Although, Airwatch made a relatively quick exit, the plan, he added, was to stay the course at OneTrust, with a lot more room for expansion in this market.

Indeed, there is an obvious opportunity to expand not just its funnel of customers, but to add in more services, such as proactive detection of malware that might leak customers’ data (such as in the recently-fined breach at British Airways), as well as tools to help stop that once identified. While there are a million other companies also looking to fix those problems today, what’s interesting is the point from which OneTrust is starting: by providing tools to organizations simply to help them operate in the current regulatory climate as good citizens of the online world.

This is what caught Insight’s eye with this investment. “OneTrust has truly established themselves as leaders in this space in a very short timeframe, and are quickly becoming for privacy professionals what Salesforce became for salespeople,” said Richard Wells of Insight. “They offer such a vast range of modules and tools to help customers keep their businesses compliant with varying regulatory laws, and the tailwinds around GDPR and the upcoming CCPA make this an opportune time for growth. Their leadership team is unparalleled in their ambition and has proven their ability to convert those ambitions into reality.”

He added that while this is a big round for a Series A it’s because it is something of an outlier — not a mark of how Series A rounds will go soon.

“Investors will always be interested in and keen to partner with companies that are providing real solutions, are already established and are led by a strong group of entrepreneurs,” he said in an interview. “This is a company that has the expertise to help solve for what could be one of the greatest challenges of the next decade. That’s the company investors want to partner with and grow, regardless of fund timing.”

European fintech startup N26 is now accepting customers in the U.S. The company is launching a bank account with a debit card that should provide a better experience compared to traditional retail banks.

If you’re familiar with N26, the product that is going live today won’t surprise you much. Customers in the U.S. can download a mobile app and create a bank account from their phone in just a few minutes. It’s a true bank account with ACH payments, routing and account numbers.

A few days later, you receive a debit card that you can control from the mobile app. Every time you make a transaction, you instantly receive a push notification telling you how much money you just paid. You can set up your PIN code, customize limits, turn on and off online payments, ATM withdrawals or payments abroad.

And that’s about all there’s to know. But what about fees? Basic N26 accounts are free. There’s no monthly fee and no minimum balance. There’s no fee on transactions in a foreign currency and you get two free ATM withdrawals per month.

N26 is going to progressively roll out signups over the summer as a sort of beta program. If you’ve signed up to the waitlist, you’ll get an invitation over the coming hours, days and weeks. There are currently 100,000 people on the waitlist. N26 will then open signups to everyone later this summer.

When N26 rolls out its final product in a couple of months, the company says that it plans to automatically find and reimburse fees the ATM operators are charging. N26 cards in the U.S. work on the Visa network instead of Mastercard.

Just like Chime, N26 will also try to let you get paid up to 2 days early if you get paid via direct deposit. Instead of waiting a couple of days to clear those transactions, N26 will go ahead and top up your account.

White label

Behind the scene, there are a few differences between N26 in Europe and N26 in the U.S. While N26 has a full-fledged banking license in Europe, the company has partnered with Axos Bank who is acting as a white-label partner in the U.S.

Axos Bank essentially manages your money for you, and N26 acts as the interface between customers and their bank accounts. As a result, you get an FDIC-insured account.

N26 first partnered with a third-party company in Europe as well. But it was a costly deal that wasn’t meant to stick around. The startup got a banking license in Germany that was good for Europe at large. In the U.S., it’s a different story as the market is not as unified as in Europe — it’s complicated to get a license to operate in all 50 states.

“We looked at 30 players, we did some due diligence and we're happy to partner with Axos Bank. The deals that you get in the U.S. for white-label banks are much more favorable than in Europe,” N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “It’s a setup for the longer term. It’s good for a couple million customers,” Stalf added later in the conversation.

Just a start

N26 is already planning more features for the U.S. The company plans to roll out two premium plans — N26 Metal and then N26 Black.

And it sounds like there will be some changes when it comes to perks for premium users. “We took that to a separate level,” Stalf said.

Another feature, shared Spaces are finally arriving in the coming months. Spaces are sub-accounts designed to put money aside. You can swipe money from one Space to another or you can set up automated rules.

Eventually, you’ll be able to share a Space with other people so that you can save money and spend money together. It’ll work “like a WhatsApp group,” Stalf said.

N26 currently has 3.5 million customers in Europe and has raised over $500 million in total so far. There are now a thousand people working for N26 in Berlin, 60 employees in New York, 80 people in Barcelona and a small team of 5 to 10 people starting soon in Vienna.

“It went from being a small company to being an international company,” Stalf said.

Sonder, which rents serviced apartments akin to boutique hotels, has raised $225 million at a valuation north of $1 billion, the company announced this morning.

News of the round, which brings Sonder’s total raised to date to more than $400 million, follows an April report from The Wall Street Journal that the business was closing in on its unicorn round. Valor Equity, Westcap and Nicolas Pritzker via Tao Capital Partners have co-led the round with participation from Fidelity, Atreides Capital, ARod Corp, Spark Capital and Greenoaks Capital.

The Airbnb competitor says it tripled the number of rentable units in its online marketplace last year with more than 8,500 spaces in 20 cities around the world available today. San Francisco-based Sonder expects a $400 million revenue run rate by the end of 2019, representing 4x growth year-over-year.

“The future of hospitality will be dynamic,” writes Sonder co-founder and chief executive officer Francis Davidson in a statement. “It will demand flexibility. And that’s what our diverse, unique and adventure-seeking world is like too. That’s why, while our spaces will continue to take on new forms and expand to exciting neighborhoods around the world, a Sonder will always be unforgettable.”

As Airbnb gears up for an initial public offering or direct listing expected in the next year, investors look to new investment opportunities in the space. Indian hotel startup Oyo recently secured new cash, including a large investment from Airbnb itself. Additionally, boutique hotel company Life House attracted $40 million and Mint House raised $15 million to provide a better hotel experience.