Category: UNCATEGORIZED

17 Apr 2019

Airbase launches with $7M Series A to simplify spending control systems

Airbase is a startup with a plan to change the way you think about accounting around spending. Instead of multiple workflows, it wants to create a simpler one involving, well, Airbase. It’s a bold move for any startup to take on something as entrenched as financials, but it’s giving it a shot, and today the company launched with a $7 million Series A investment.

First Round Capital was lead investor. Maynard Webb, Village Global, BoxGroup and Quiet Capital also participated. The deal closed at the end of November last year. This is the first external funding for the company, which company founder and CEO, Thejo Kote had bootstrapped previously with $300,000 of his own money.

“At a high level, Airbase is the first all-in-one spend management system. It replaces a number of different systems that companies use to manage how they spend money,” Kote told TechCrunch.

He knows of what he speaks. Prior to starting this company, Kote co-founded Automatic, a startup that he sold to SiriusXM for more than $100 million in 2017. As a founder, he saw just how difficult it was to track the vast variety of spending inside a company from supplies to subscriptions to food and drink.

“Think about the hundreds of things that companies spend money on, and the way in which the management of that happens is a pretty broken process today,” he said. For starters, it usually involves some sort of approval request in a tool like Slack, Jira or Google forms.

Once approved, the person requesting the expense will put that on a company credit card, then have to submit expense reports at the end of each month using a tool like Expensify. If you purchase from vendor, then that involves an invoice and that has to be processed and paid. Finally it would need to be reconciled and accounted for in accounting software. Each step of this process ends up being time-consuming and costly for an organization.

Kote’s idea was to take this process and streamline it by removing the friction, which he saw as being related to the disparate systems in place to get the work done. He believed by creating a single workflow on a unified, single platform he could create a smoother system for everyone involved.

He is putting that single system in between the bank and the accounting system including a virtual Airbase Visa card to take the place of physical cards. Request for spending happens inside Airbase instead of an external tool. When the virtual card gets charged, bookkeeping and reconciliation gets handled in Airbase and pushed to your accounting package of choice.

Airbase workflow. Diagram: Airbase

This could be a difficult proposition for companies with existing systems in place, but could be attractive to startups and small companies whose accounting systems have not yet hardened. Perhaps that’s why most of Airbase’s customers are startups or SMBs with between 500 and 5000 employees, such as Gusto, Netlify and Segment.

Bill Trenchard, General Partner at lead investor First Round Capital says he has seen very little innovation in this space and that’s what drew him to Airbase. “Airbase has taken a bold step forward to create an entirely new paradigm. It delivers a real solution to the biggest problems finance teams face as their companies grow,” Trenchard said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2017 and has 22 employees today. It has a sales office in San Francisco, but other employees are spread across four countries.

17 Apr 2019

Wattpad partners with Sony Pictures Television in first-look deal for original programming

Wattpad, the online storytelling community whose authors’ works have been turned into Netflix movies, TV shows for Hulu and projects for other studios both in the U.S. and worldwide, announced today a new partnership with Sony Pictures Television. The deal gives Sony a first-look option for up-and-coming Wattpad stories — in other words, a way to snag the next big teen hit that already has a built-in fan base.

Wattpad says it will work with Sony to help it to identify the popular stories on its platform from the half a billion story uploads it has seen to date. The company uses its “Story DNA” machine learning technology alongside human curation to quickly identify the most promising IP and storytellers on Wattpad.

The technology helps deconstruct stories by analyzing things like sentence structure, word use and grammar, with the goal of helping to uncover the next best seller. It’s used today to help identify stories to turn into films, TV shows, books, and other digital projects.

Key to Wattpad’s ability to make these business deals is its online community, which today includes over 70 million monthly users, who spend over 22 billion minutes engaged with its original stories uploaded to its site.

This sizable community helped make Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth” movie a success, where the original story behind the film had already been read 19 million times by users worldwide.

Wattpad’s “Light as a Feather,” produced for Hulu along with AwesomenessTV and Grammnet, has been Emmy-nominated, and just got renewed for a second season.

Wattpad’s “After,” launched in theaters on April 12. It’s based on Harry Styles fan fiction and is something of a “50 Shades..” for a younger demographic. Before it became five-book series, it first racked up over a billion reads on Wattpad’s site.

Today, Wattpad works with a range of entertainment partners worldwide for similar deals, including iflix, eOne, Huayi Brothers Korea, SYFY, and others, and has turned its stories into projects at Universal Cable Productions (NBCU), Hulu, Netflix, and elsewhere.

Sony Pictures TV already had a relationship with Wattpad, before today’s news.

Last year, it acquired the series “Death is My BFF” from Katerina E. Tonks, which has over 62 million reads on the site. Lindsey Rosin (“Cruel Intentions”) is slated to write the series.

“Our entertainment partners all over the world have seen the power of our data-backed approach to IP discovery and development.” said Aron Levitz, Head of Wattpad Studios, in a statement. “Wattpad stories are some of the most innovative and creative that have ever been written. The stories and diverse voices on Wattpad deserve to be heard all over the world. And our partnership with Sony does just that: bringing Wattpad stories to new and existing fans all over the planet,” he said.

The Sony deal will be overseen by Eric Lehrman, Wattpad’s Head of Content Development and Production, the company says.

Wattpad is represented by UTA, who helped broker the deal.

 

17 Apr 2019

Alsid raises $14.7 million to secure your Active Directory installation

French startup Alsid has raised a $14.7 million funding round (€13 million). The company is working on a security solution to protect your Microsoft Active Directory installation and make sure a hacker can’t access your system.

Idinvest Partners is leading today’s round. Existing investors 360 Capital Partners and Axeleo Capital are also participating.

If you have a corporate laptop or if you access files on your corporate network, chances are your company uses Active Directory. Most companies uses this this directory service to manage users and their access rights. Whenever you enter your login and password on your corporate laptop, macOS or Windows check the Active Directory to see if you have the rights to use this laptop and various corporate services.

Big companies have a hard time managing this directory. They acquire other companies, merge directories and don’t realize that some users end up with very generous access rights. Hackers take advantage of that.

There are some solutions to scan your directory and fix vulnerabilities, but they require admin access. They create a risk as much as a solution. Alsid has a completely different approach.

“We operate like an employee working remotely. Our system asks a lot of questions to the directory and detects issues,” co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Gras told me in 2017. The company creates a normal user account, connects to your corporate network with a VPN and uses Microsoft’s API to attack your own Active Directory.

Alsid then generates reports with detailed steps to protect a directory. And of course, the company tries to monitor the directory as often as possible. You can deploy Alsid locally or in the cloud.

The company uses a software-as-a-service approach and currently monitors 3 million Active Directory users. Many big companies already use the service, such as Groupe Accor, Orange, Sanofi and Unibail-Roadmco-Westfield.

17 Apr 2019

Meet the first judges for The Europas Awards (27 June) and enter your startup now!

I’m excited to announce that The Europas Awards for European Tech Startups is really shaping up! The awards will be held on 27 June 2019, in London, UK on the front lawn of the Geffrye Museum in Hoxton, London — creating a fantastic and fun, garden party atmosphere in the heart of London’s tech startup scene.

TechCrunch is once more the exclusive media sponsor of the awards and conference, alongside new ‘tech, culture & society’ event creator The Pathfounder.

Here’s how to enter and be considered for the awards.

You can nominate a startup, accelerator or venture investor which you think deserves to be recognized for their achievements in the last 12 months.

*** The deadline for nominations is 1 May 2019. ***

For the 2019 awards, we’ve overhauled the categories to a set that we believe better reflects the range of innovation, diversity and ambition we see in the European startups being built and launched today. There are now 20 categories including new additions to cover AgTech / FoodTech, SpaceTech, GovTech and Mobility Tech.

Attendees, nominees and winners will get discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.

The Europas “Diversity Pass”

We’d like to encourage more diversity in tech! That’s why, for the upcoming invitation-only “Pathfounder” event held on the afternoon before The Europas Awards, we’ve reserved a tranche of free tickets to ensure that we include more women and people of colour who are “pre-seed” or “seed stage” tech startup founders to join us. If you are a woman or a person of colour, apply here for a chance to be considered for one of the limited free diversity passes to the event.

The Pathfounder event will feature premium content and invitees, designed be a ‘fast download’ into the London tech scene for European founders looking to raise money or re-locate to London.

The Europas Awards

The Europas Awards results are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself.

But key to it is that there are no “off-limits areas” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs.

The complete list of categories is here:

  1. AgTech / FoodTech
  2. CleanTech
  3. Cyber
  4. EdTech
  5. FashTech
  6. FinTech
  7. Public, Civic and GovTech
  8. HealthTech
  9. MadTech (AdTech / MarTech)
  10. Mobility Tech
  11. PropTech
  12. RetailTech
  13. Saas/Enterprise or B2B
  14. SpaceTech
  15. Tech for Good
  16. Hottest Blockchain Project
  17. Hottest Blockchain Investor
  18. Hottest VC Fund
  19. Hottest Seed Fund
  20. Grand Prix
    Timeline of The Europas Awards deadlines:

* 6 March 2019 – Submissions open
* 1 May 2019 – Submissions close
* 10 May 2019 – Public voting begins
* 18 June 2019 – Public voting ends
* 27 June 2019 – Awards Bash

Amazing networking

We’re also shaking up the awards dinner itself. Instead of a sit-down gala dinner, we’ve taken on your feedback for more opportunities to network. Our awards ceremony this year will be in the setting of a garden lawn party where you’ll be able to meet and mingle more easily with free-flowing drinks and a wide-selection of street food (including vegetarian/vegan). The ceremony itself will last approximately 75 minutes, with the rest of the time dedicated to networking. If you’d like to talk about sponsoring or exhibiting, please contact dianne@thepathfounder.com

Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.

The Europas Awards have been going for the last ten years and we’re the only independent and editorially driven event to recognise the European tech startup scene. The winners have been featured in Reuters, Bloomberg, VentureBeat, Forbes, Tech.eu, The Memo, Smart Company, Cnet, many others and of course, TechCrunch.

• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers

• Key Founders and investors attending

• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters

Meet the first set of our 20 judges:


Brent Hoberman
Executive Chairman and Co-Founder
Founders Factory


Videesha Böckle
Founding Partner
signals Venture Capital


Bindi Karia
Innovation Expert + Advisor, Investor
Bindi Ventures


Christian Hernandez
Christian Hernandez Gallardo
Co-Founder and Venture Partner at White Star Capital

17 Apr 2019

Lyric raises $160 million Series B led by Airbnb

Lyric, a platform for folks who struggle to decide between a hotel and an Airbnb, has today announced the close of a $160 million Series B financing led by none other than Airbnb . Other investors who participated in the round include Tishman Speyer, RXR Realty, Obvious Ventures, SineWave, Dick Costolo, Adam Bain, as well as existing investors Barry Sternlicht, NEA, SignalFire, FifthWall and Tusk Ventures.

Lyric is a hospitality platform for business travelers. The company secures its own inventory in multi-family residential buildings through partnerships with landlords. From there, the company brings in its designers to beautify the place and pack it full of amenities, including coffee from a local roaster and a fully functional kitchen.

You can think of Lyric as a premium operator,” said cofounder and CEO Andrew Kitchell. “We do everything from selecting locations to bringing in a brand and design team to managing every single room every single day. We’re a modern hotel operator with a meaningfully different supply.”

[gallery ids="1813701,1813700,1813698,1813697"]

The startup uses a proprietary app called Tidy to manage room cleanings. The app not only walks cleaners through the process of getting a rental ready for the next customer or day, but also has them take photographs to verify that the room is up to standard. Cleaners are not employed in house, but rather Lyric partners with local vendors for room cleanings and maintenance. The company also uses tech to help determine what locations work best in a given city for a Lyric rental.

One of the biggest differences between Airbnb and Lyric is that Lyric is more of a premium hotel operator, putting the latter in lockstep with landlords rather than pitted against them. Lyric argues to landlords that it can be an anchor tenant in a new building, which means the landlord can avoid at least some of their inventory just sitting unrented. It can also be seen as an amenity for other tenants, who can put up their visitors at a discount on a different floor in their very building.

Here’s what Airbnb’s President of Homes Greg Greeley had to say:

At Airbnb, we have seen how hospitality entrepreneurs like the team at Lyric can help deliver amazing experiences and help guests feel like they can belong anywhere in the world. Lyric has combined the latest technology, strong partnerships with the real estate community and cutting-edge design, and we are excited to support their work.

This financing comes at an interesting time for the hospitality market. While Airbnb disrupts hotels, the lines are being blurred around what is a hotel and what is a rental. We’ve already seen big acquisitions in the space — see AccorHotel’s $170 million acquisition of OneFineStay — as well as big players enter it. WeWork launched a co-living product called WeLive in 2016.

Lyric is currently available in 13 markets and cofounder and CEO Andrew Kitchell says that the company is operating legally in every one of them. The company provides Studios, 1BR and 2BR units, with a starting price around $200/night, depending on the market.

With the new funding, Lyric hopes to expand its operations and go from its current 500 units across 13 markets to 1000 units by the end of the year. Lyric has raised a total of $185 million.

17 Apr 2019

Evernote fixes macOS app bug that allowed remote code execution

Evernote has fixed a vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker to run malicious code on a victim’s computer.

Dhiraj Mishra, a security researcher based in Dubai, reported the bug to Evernote on March 17.  In a blog post showing his proof-of-concept, Mishra showed TechCrunch that a user only had to click a link masked as a web address, which would open a locally stored app or file unhindered and without warning.

Evernote spokesperson Shelby Busen confirmed the bug had been fixed, and said the company “appreciates” the contributions from security researchers.

The researcher ‘popped calc’ as a way to demonstrate a remote code execution bug in Evernote (Image: supplied)

MITRE, the vulnerability database keeper, issued an advisory under CVE-2019-10038.

The bug could allow an attacker to remotely run malicious commands on any macOS computer with Evernote installed. Since the fix went into effect, Evernote now warns users when they click a link that opens a file on their Mac.

A similar local file path traversal bug was revealed Tuesday in Electronic Arts’ Origin gaming client.

Evernote was forced to reset close to 50 million passwords after a breach in 2013, and later caused controversy by changing its privacy policy that allowed employees to access user data. The company later walked back the policy change after user complaints.

17 Apr 2019

Stripe acquires Touchtech, updates APIs to prep for strong customer authentication in Europe

Stripe, the payments powerhouse that is now valued at $22.5 billion, has made an acquisition to help it gear up for new regulations in Europe that will be rolled out later this year to improve security in online transactions. It has acquired Touchtech Payments, a startup out of Ireland that works with banks to help them build and manage Strong Customer Authentication, a verification process that will typically require customers to provide two different forms of authentication from card holders in order to process transactions. SCA will be required on most transactions in Europe from September 14 of this year.

Alongside this, Stripe itself is updating its APIs, partly in line with these changes. This will include a new default payments API, a new checkout, and upgraded billing.

The financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. Touchtech had raised less than $500,000, according to Pitchbook data, and it will work out of Stripe’s offices in Dublin.

SCA is part of PSD2, a wider payments directive that has been getting implemented across Europe. The basic idea is that, from September, people buying items will be required to provide two forms of verification when making online transactions — for example entering a code from their phones or another connected device like a wearable; a biometric scan; or a separate PIN. But there are also a number of exceptions — for example, purchases under €30 and recurring billing around subscriptions are both exempt, as are transactions with merchants that a customer might add to a white list. That makes putting SCA in place and running it quite complex.

John Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and president, said that a similar directive put in place in India had a chilling effect on the market after it wasn’t handled well.

“There was a 25 percent drop in sales overnight when the changes came into effect in India,” he said in an interview. “So we think SCA is a huge deal. It’s European-wide, and not an option. People are sleepwalking into it, and it’s not getting as much dialogue as it merits.”

Interestingly, the acquisition will mark an interesting change for Stripe, which has been built on connections with merchants and other customers that take digital payments for goods and services: Touchtech interfaces with banks and others that handle card payments — meaning it will be the first time that Stripe is developing a service that is not merchant-facing, but bank-facing. Collison said that this does not mark a bigger change in Stripe’s strategy, but more a consequence of the complexity that will need to be handled something that banks and cardholders, not merchants, will need to address. “Don’t read too much into this!” he said to me.

Touchtech’s current customers include so-called “challenger” banks like N26 and fintech startups like Transferwise, so it will be interesting to see how and if aligning with Stripe will widen that scope to cover more incumbent providers.

“We have broad ambitions for Touchtech,” Collison said.

The updates to Stripe’s APIs, Collison said, are mainly coming to account for SCA and the triggers it will effect for verification, and also how these will impact other parts of the payment sequence, such as how payments will work with Apple Pay and Google Pay. Stripe notes that it is not mandatory for those using Stripe’s current API’s to update immediately, although those doing business in Europe will need to eventually anyway. “When major regulatory changes are introduced in a new market covered by Stripe, the Payment Intents API will allow merchants to upgrade their checkout flows with little-to-no disruption, significantly reducing the burden of migrations for merchants,” Stripe notes. 

The checkout, meanwhile, will also now automatically handle SCA requirements for merchants, Stripe said. It will be customizable to account for repeat versus one-time purchases.

The upgrade to the billing, Stripe said, will now automatically identify which purchases will require SCA and trigger the subsequent scripts. This will mainly impact those businesses that take recurring payments, for example for subscriptions.

Longer term, while this is a European directive, other countries such as Mexico and Australia are also considering similar regulations. With fraud a growing problem, it’s likely that this isn’t the end of the story for how customers, banks, merchants and companies like Stripe that have traded on their simplicity handle adding more tools like this underneath the hood.

17 Apr 2019

Aidoc, the AI solution for medical imaging analysis, raises $27M Series B

Aidoc, the Tel Aviv startup using AI to analyse medical scans, has raised $27 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Square Peg Capital and brings total funding to date to $40 million. The company’s previous backers include Israeli VC TLV Partners, Magma Ventures and Emerge.

Offering a solution aimed at radiologists — and already deployed commercially across 100 sites — Aidoc claims to be able to detect high-level visual abnormalities from various types of medical scans. The idea is that by working in tandem with humans, it’s able to flag the most critical and urgent cases where a faster diagnosis and treatment could save lives.

Initially providing support for CT scans, the Israeli startup recently reached its millionth analysed patient scan. It says it is adding support for oncology and X-ray. The oncology solution will automatically and instantly detect, measure and compare tumour size with past scans as soon as the radiologist opens the image. I’m also told that another feature on the upcoming roadmap is support MRI scans.

Meanwhile, Aidoc has grown its team from 5 people to 60 since we last covered the company in early 2017. It has also taken part in a number of published clinical studies in various journals and has had its algorithms cleared by the FDA and achieve European CE marks.

“From the 100 sites we’re already working with, mounting evidence is demonstrating real value to patients,” says Aidoc co-founder and CEO Elad Walach. “We feel a responsibility to get this technology into as many hospitals as possible, as soon as possible”. The company aims to be deployed in 500 hospitals within the next two years.

Walach says that Aidoc is working with the American College of Radiology DSI to continuously monitor the performance of the company’s commercially deployed solution. The aim is to provide public visibility on the real-life clinical impact, which he argues is crucial for the continued adoption of AI technologies within medical practice.

17 Apr 2019

Sweden’s Engaging Care raises €2.5M seed to scale patient communication and improve outcomes

Engaging Care, the Swedish heathtech startup founded by Annica Belfrage and Charlotta Tönsgård (who was previously CEO of online doctor app Min Doktor), has raised €2.5 million in seed funding. The round is co-led by two European venture capital firms: Connect Ventures and Crowberry Capital.

It follows the company’s €800,000 pre-seed funding in July from a number of well-known European investors. They include Neil Murray’s The Nordic Web Ventures, Hampus Jakobsson (venture partner at BlueYard Capital and co-founder of TAT, which sold to Blackberry for $150 million), and Sophia Bendz (Atomico Partner and former Global Marketing Director at Spotify).

Aiming to digitise healthcare beyond traditional electronic medical record systems, Engaging Care is developing a SaaS and mobile apps to enable healthcare providers to better connect and communicate with patients. Its first product, launched late last year, is a communications platform that allows healthcare providers to share information and interact with patients in a secure way.

The SaaS is already deployed with several paying customers who use the platform on a daily basis for both their healthcare professionals and patients.

“Interaction between healthcare professionals and patients is generally speaking still a very analog activity,” Egaging Care CEO Tönsgård tells me. “The work is centered around exchanging information at face-to-face meetings. Our healthcare professionals are a scarce and expensive resource, and sometimes their time is wasted in a careless way”.

Tönsgård argues that digital technology is the solution, and that new digital tools such as Engaging Care enable the knowledge built up by healthcare teams to be accessible to more patients “faster and easier”. This in turn frees up medical professionals to spend more time on the things that actually matter. “Our tool allows healthcare teams to have a reliable place to collect knowledge and communicate effectively with their patients,” she says.

As one example, the Organ Transplant Unit at Sweden’s Skåne University Hospital are using the Engaging Care application to complement face-to-face knowledge sharing with a digital library accessible to both patients and their team 24/7. This is enabling patients to have more autonomy over their healthcare and make better informed decisions.

“One of the challenges when it comes to the digitization of healthcare is the high workload that already exists. For that reason, we will continue to release new features that lower the threshold for adoption, making it easier for professionals to integrate our tools into their day-to-day work,” adds Tönsgård.

“We believe that safe, scalable communication is the key to increase the efficiency of healthcare long term, while also helping patients to become more aware and independent about their own health. One specific feature we’ll be focusing on the next months is to enable patients and healthcare professionals to prepare physical meetings beforehand. Our trials with clinics show that this is an important path to both more efficient meetings and meetings with higher quality”.

17 Apr 2019

Super raises $20M to fix the home services and repairs market with its subscription service

Home owners in the US spend upwards of $300 billion annually on home repairs and maintenance — a huge sum that often comes with another, more hidden cost: the stress of finding reliable tradespeople, managing those jobs, and (in the worst-case scenario) picking up the pieces if things go wrong.

Now, a startup called Super has built what it believes is a “fix” for that problem: a subscription service for maintenance and repair services for your property. Today, it’s announcing a Series B of $20 million to continue scaling that business across the US after growing its business 400 percent each year for the past two years.

The funding is being led by Aquiline Technology Growth (ATG), with participation Munich Re Ventures, Liberty Mutual from the insurance industry, Moderne Ventures, Joe Lonsdale’s firm 8VC, the Qatar Investment Authority and Solon Mack Capital. It’s an impressive mix, as it underscores Super’s traction and credibility among those close to its field: Munich Re Ventures and Liberty Mutual are insurance powerhouses; Aquiline and Moderne focus on insurance and real estate startups, QIA has extensive investments in the construction sector, and Solon Mack is the family office of the Mack real estate entrepreneurs.

Jorey Ramer, the founder and CEO of Super, said he came up with the idea for Super after he sold his previous company, Jumptap — an advertising network acquired by Millennial Media (which is now part of Verizon by way of its acquisition of AOL, just like TechCrunch). Having been an apartment renter and dweller for all of his adult life, he found himself buying property when he moved to the Bay Area, and it came with more than a little reluctance because of the headache of taking care of his new home.

“I liked being a renter,” he said in an interview. “You pay a fee, and you know what to expect.” (Indeed, “Super” is double word play meaning “great” but also the nickname for the superintendent that often handles the maintenance and repair in an apartment building.)

Looking at the state of the market, he said he wasn’t very happy with the services that were already out there offering to provide maintenance and care, which he found were too entrenched in their old way of doing things (something that I’d agree with from personal experience as a homeowner in England, by the way).

“These companies have prioritized costs over service,” he said. “Yes, they have built service provider networks, but they are not service providers that you would invite into your own home if you were finding them directly. The whole system creates incentives to do the least amount of work possible, or upsell work that you just don’t need. They are deeply ingrained systems that needed to be reinvented from scratch.”

And that is what Super is aiming to do. Right now, the company provides links through to vetted providers of repair and maintenance services that are priced in tiers of $20, $60 or $90 per month depending on levels of service (for example: appliance, home, premium home; breakdown coverage; expanded coverage, and so on). Today there is a $75 copay on all repairs and other work, but as the company continues to hone its business model and relationships with suppliers — including those who might sell its service to home owners such as the companies selling the actual homes — that is likely to change.

“The long term vision,” Ramer said, “is eventually to cover 100 percent of your repair and maintenance in your home. You will never have to pay for anything because everything will be included in the subscription.”

Super is touching on an emerging but very interesting point here. Just as companies like Uber and Lyft have helped change the conversation about the future of transportation services, companies like Opendoor are changing the dynamics and conventions around how people buy and sell — and potentially own — homes. That’s presenting a big opportunity to rethink every stage of that process, bringing in new players like Super, and old players like Angie’s List that are now taking new approaches; to also reconsider not just what they offer to the market, but what channels they use to find customers. (It’s an area that Amazon, unsurprisingly, is also eyeing up, since the home is the ultimate platform for just about everything else it offers to the market in terms of products and services.)

Ramer said that while Super today is primarily selling directly to homeowners, there are many options open in the future for how its service might be bundled with others, be they buying the property, or buying insurance, or even buying the white goods and other things that will eventually fill those homes.

“Super has developed an effective, convenient platform to provide premium care and repair services for homeowners,” said Max Chee of ATG in a statement. “Super is tackling an industry that is ripe for innovation with a smart, technology-forward approach, and we are excited to work with Jorey and the rest of the team at Super to help continue that exciting trajectory.”