Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Twitter is launching what it calls “a community-based approach to misinformation.”

The Birdwatch project first came to light last fall thanks to product sleuth Jane Manchun Wong. Now Twitter has launched a pilot version via the Birdwatch website.

The goal, as explained in a blog post by Twitter’s Vice President of Product Keith Coleman, is to expand beyond the labels that the company already applies to controversial or potentially misleading tweets, which he suggested are limited to “circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention.”

Coleman wrote that the Birdwatch approach will “broaden the range of voices that are part of tackling this problem.” That has brings a broader range of perspectives to these issues and goes beyond the simple question of, “Is this tweet true or not?” It may also take some of the heat off Twitter for individual content moderation decisions.

Users can sign up on the Birdwatch site to flag tweets that they find misleading, add context via notes and rate the notes written by other contributors, based on whether they’re helpful or not. These notes will only be visible on the Birdwatch site for now, but it sounds like the company’s goal is to incorporate them to the main Twitter experience.

“We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable,” Coleman said. “Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.”

Given the potential for plenty of argument and back-and-froth on contentious tweets, it remains to be seen how Twitter will present these notes in a way that isn’t confusing or overwhelming, or how it can avoid weighing in on some of these arguments. The company said Birdwatch will use rank content based on algorithmic “reputation and consensus systems,” with the code shared publicly. (All notes contributed to Birdwatch will also be available for download.) You read more about the initial ranking system here.

“We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors,” Coleman said. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”

In a year defined by economic and civil unrest, it should come as little surprise that workplace organizing has been on the upswing. The COVID-19 pandemic in particular (coupled with the ever-present effects of late capitalism) has brought longstanding questions of employment stability and safety to the forefront of many.

Of course, much of this dates to well before the pandemic was in full swing. In February, we noted that both scooter startup Spin and food delivery service Instacart voted to unionize. That same month, Kickstarter became one of the most prominent tech companies to form a union, with online code collaboration tool Glitch following suit in March.

Work place organizing is a broad and expansive topic in the world of technology. It’s a concept that is beginning to take hold in a diverse array of workplaces, ranging from contractors and factory workers at places like Amazon to salaried office jobs.

The subject was a no-brainer for this year’s TC Sessions: Justice on March 3, and we’ve pulled together some great speakers to discuss their experiences, while giving some guidance to those interested in potentially organizing at their own workplaces.

Clarissa Redwine is a Fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. A former senior design and technology outreach lead at Kickstarter, she now hosts Kickstarter Union Oral History, a series of interviews with union organizers. Grace Reckers is the lead Northeastern union organizer for the OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International Union). Parul Koul, who joined Google as a software engineer in 2019, is the executive chair of the Alphabet Workers.

Learn and discuss workplace organizing at TC Sessions: Justice on March 3. Grab a ticket to join the conversation!

 

 

As Google’s Privacy Sandbox remains under scrutiny over competition concerns, the tech giant has released an update claiming experimental ad-targeting techniques it’s developing as part of the plan to depreciate support for third party cookies on its Chrome browser show results that are “nearly as effective as cookie-based approaches”.

Google has been working on a technique — called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) — to target ads based on clustering users into groups with similar interests, which it claims is superior from a privacy perspective vs the current (dysfunctional) ‘norm’ of targeting individuals based on third parties tracking everything they do online.

It wants FLoCs to enable interest-based advertising to continue after it ends support for third party trackers.

However the proposal has alarmed advertisers who argue it’s anti-competitive. And earlier this month the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation of the Privacy Sandbox proposal after complaints from a coalition of digital marketing companies and others from newspapers and technology companies alleging Google is abusing a dominant position by depreciating support for third party trackers.

On the privacy front Google’s self-styled Privacy Sandbox isn’t exactly attracting effusive plaudits, either.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has, for example, dubbed FLoCs “the opposite of privacy-preserving technology” — warning in 2019 that the approach is akin to a “behavioral credit score”. It said then that the proposals risk sustaining discrimination against vulnerable groups of people, whose online activity would be pattern-matched with others without their say-so; and could also lead to leaking sensitive info about them to third parties — without offering web users any way to escape being put in a ‘interest based’ ad targeting bucket. 

With objections piling up from on sides of the aisle (advertiser vs user) — and now active regulatory scrutiny of the competition issue — Google has its work cut out to sell its preferred replacement for tracking cookies to all the relevant stakeholders. Though advertisers (and competition regulators) currently seem front of mind for the tech giant.

In an update about the Privacy Sandbox proposals today, Google appears to be hoping to alleviate advertisers’ concerns that the demise of tracking cookies will degrade their ability to lucratively target Internet users — writing that tests of the FLoC technology suggest advertisers will continue to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising”.

It’s not clear how much test data was involved in Google generating that percentage, however. (We asked and Google did not have an immediate response.) So there’s zero meat on the bone of the ‘95% minimum’ claim.

Its spokesman did note that it will be opening up public testing in March — and expects advertisers to join in kicking FLoC’s tires then. So there’s clearly going to be more detail to come on this front.

“Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release in March and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2,” writes Chetna Bindra, group product manager for user trust and privacy in the blog post, adding: “If you’d like to get a head start, you can run your own simulations (as we did) based on the principles outlined in this FLoC whitepaper.”

It’s unsurprisingly that Google continues to emphasize the relative openness with which it’s developing the Privacy Sandbox proposals — as that may help it fight antitrust accusations. But it’s also noteworthy being as the adtech industry, which has been fighting to block/delay its depreciation of third party cookies, is busy spinning up its own contenders to replace trackers — and developing those competing proposals typically with a lot less transparency than Google.

Nonetheless, Google seems a whole more comfortable quantifying FLoC’s potential impact on ad revenue (tiny, per its latest claim) vs articulating what privacy gains Internet users might expect from the proposed shift from individual tracking to run behavioral ads to being stuck in labelled buckets to run behavioral ads.

Google’s blog post has a few fuzzy mentions — like “viable privacy-first alternatives” and ‘hiding individuals “in the crowd”’ — but there’s no metric or data offered on how much privacy users stand to gain if its preferred post-cookie future comes to pass.

Test results it published in October also focused on seeking to demonstrate to advertisers that FLoCs can deliver on other relevant ad metrics. Funnily enough, Internet users’ privacy — and what happens when degrees of privacy are lost — is rather harder for Google’s computer scientists to measure.

“The idea is to make it so that no one can reconstruct your cross-site browsing history,” said the company’s spokesman when we asked about how the proposal will improve users’ privacy standing.

“We’re trying to address non-transparent forms of tracking, across websites, with privacy-safe mechanisms for consumers, and make it so it can’t happen. And to do so while still enabling opportunity and fair compensation for publishers and advertisers. So it’s really not even a matter of trying to approximate a kind of privacy: We’re trying to address a root critical concern of users, full stop,” he added.

FLoCs are just one part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals. The company is working on a slew of aligned efforts to simultaneously replace various other key components of the adtech ecosystem. And it gives an overview of some of these in the blog post — covering proposals for (post-cookie) conversation measurement; ad-fraud prevention; and anti-fingerprinting.

Here it dwells briefly on retargeting/remarketing — referring to a new Chrome proposal (called Fledge) that it says it’s considering for a ‘trusted server’ model “specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets”. This will also be made available for advertisers to test later this year, Google adds.

“Over the last year, several members of the ad tech community have offered input for how this might work, including proposals from Criteo, NextRoll, Magnite and RTB House. Chrome has published a new proposal called FLEDGE that expands on a previous Chrome proposal (called TURTLEDOVE) and takes into account the industry feedback they’ve heard, including the idea of using a ‘trusted server’ — as defined by compliance with certain principles and policies — that’s specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets. Chrome intends to make FLEDGE available for testing through origin trials later this year with the opportunity for ad tech companies to try using the API under a “bring your own server” model,” it writes.

“Technology advancements such as FLoC, along with similar promising efforts in areas like measurement, fraud protection and anti-fingerprinting, are the future of web advertising — and the Privacy Sandbox will power our web products in a post-third-party cookie world,” it adds.

Discussing Fledge’s potential, Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent researcher and consultant, said there’s still a lot of uncertainty over how it might impact user privacy. “The Fledge experiment looks potentially interesting but it mixes in various proposals in this test. Such a mix would need to get a specific privacy assessment as the offered privacy qualities might be different than original claimed. Furthermore, the current tests will have many privacy precautions intended for the future, turned off initially. It will be tricky to gradually turn them on,” he told TechCrunch.

As Google’s Privacy Sandbox remains under scrutiny over competition concerns, the tech giant has released an update claiming experimental ad-targeting techniques it’s developing as part of the plan to depreciate support for third party cookies on its Chrome browser show results that are “nearly as effective as cookie-based approaches”.

Google has been working on a technique — called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) — to target ads based on clustering users into groups with similar interests, which it claims is superior from a privacy perspective vs the current (dysfunctional) ‘norm’ of targeting individuals based on third parties tracking everything they do online.

It wants FLoCs to enable interest-based advertising to continue after it ends support for third party trackers.

However the proposal has alarmed advertisers who argue it’s anti-competitive. And earlier this month the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation of the Privacy Sandbox proposal after complaints from a coalition of digital marketing companies and others from newspapers and technology companies alleging Google is abusing a dominant position by depreciating support for third party trackers.

On the privacy front Google’s self-styled Privacy Sandbox isn’t exactly attracting effusive plaudits, either.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has, for example, dubbed FLoCs “the opposite of privacy-preserving technology” — warning in 2019 that the approach is akin to a “behavioral credit score”. It said then that the proposals risk sustaining discrimination against vulnerable groups of people, whose online activity would be pattern-matched with others without their say-so; and could also lead to leaking sensitive info about them to third parties — without offering web users any way to escape being put in a ‘interest based’ ad targeting bucket. 

With objections piling up from on sides of the aisle (advertiser vs user) — and now active regulatory scrutiny of the competition issue — Google has its work cut out to sell its preferred replacement for tracking cookies to all the relevant stakeholders. Though advertisers (and competition regulators) currently seem front of mind for the tech giant.

In an update about the Privacy Sandbox proposals today, Google appears to be hoping to alleviate advertisers’ concerns that the demise of tracking cookies will degrade their ability to lucratively target Internet users — writing that tests of the FLoC technology suggest advertisers will continue to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising”.

It’s not clear how much test data was involved in Google generating that percentage, however. (We asked and Google did not have an immediate response.) So there’s zero meat on the bone of the ‘95% minimum’ claim.

Its spokesman did note that it will be opening up public testing in March — and expects advertisers to join in kicking FLoC’s tires then. So there’s clearly going to be more detail to come on this front.

“Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release in March and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2,” writes Chetna Bindra, group product manager for user trust and privacy in the blog post, adding: “If you’d like to get a head start, you can run your own simulations (as we did) based on the principles outlined in this FLoC whitepaper.”

It’s unsurprisingly that Google continues to emphasize the relative openness with which it’s developing the Privacy Sandbox proposals — as that may help it fight antitrust accusations. But it’s also noteworthy being as the adtech industry, which has been fighting to block/delay its depreciation of third party cookies, is busy spinning up its own contenders to replace trackers — and developing those competing proposals typically with a lot less transparency than Google.

Nonetheless, Google seems a whole more comfortable quantifying FLoC’s potential impact on ad revenue (tiny, per its latest claim) vs articulating what privacy gains Internet users might expect from the proposed shift from individual tracking to run behavioral ads to being stuck in labelled buckets to run behavioral ads.

Google’s blog post has a few fuzzy mentions — like “viable privacy-first alternatives” and ‘hiding individuals “in the crowd”’ — but there’s no metric or data offered on how much privacy users stand to gain if its preferred post-cookie future comes to pass.

Test results it published in October also focused on seeking to demonstrate to advertisers that FLoCs can deliver on other relevant ad metrics. Funnily enough, Internet users’ privacy — and what happens when degrees of privacy are lost — is rather harder for Google’s computer scientists to measure.

“The idea is to make it so that no one can reconstruct your cross-site browsing history,” said the company’s spokesman when we asked about how the proposal will improve users’ privacy standing.

“We’re trying to address non-transparent forms of tracking, across websites, with privacy-safe mechanisms for consumers, and make it so it can’t happen. And to do so while still enabling opportunity and fair compensation for publishers and advertisers. So it’s really not even a matter of trying to approximate a kind of privacy: We’re trying to address a root critical concern of users, full stop,” he added.

FLoCs are just one part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals. The company is working on a slew of aligned efforts to simultaneously replace various other key components of the adtech ecosystem. And it gives an overview of some of these in the blog post — covering proposals for (post-cookie) conversation measurement; ad-fraud prevention; and anti-fingerprinting.

Here it dwells briefly on retargeting/remarketing — referring to a new Chrome proposal (called Fledge) that it says it’s considering for a ‘trusted server’ model “specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets”. This will also be made available for advertisers to test later this year, Google adds.

“Over the last year, several members of the ad tech community have offered input for how this might work, including proposals from Criteo, NextRoll, Magnite and RTB House. Chrome has published a new proposal called FLEDGE that expands on a previous Chrome proposal (called TURTLEDOVE) and takes into account the industry feedback they’ve heard, including the idea of using a ‘trusted server’ — as defined by compliance with certain principles and policies — that’s specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets. Chrome intends to make FLEDGE available for testing through origin trials later this year with the opportunity for ad tech companies to try using the API under a “bring your own server” model,” it writes.

“Technology advancements such as FLoC, along with similar promising efforts in areas like measurement, fraud protection and anti-fingerprinting, are the future of web advertising — and the Privacy Sandbox will power our web products in a post-third-party cookie world,” it adds.

Discussing Fledge’s potential, Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent researcher and consultant, said there’s still a lot of uncertainty over how it might impact user privacy. “The Fledge experiment looks potentially interesting but it mixes in various proposals in this test. Such a mix would need to get a specific privacy assessment as the offered privacy qualities might be different than original claimed. Furthermore, the current tests will have many privacy precautions intended for the future, turned off initially. It will be tricky to gradually turn them on,” he told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.

Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Stockholm, and Sweden generally, will capture how the country is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic.

The deadline is the end of this week.

We’d like to know how Sweden’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.

Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).

The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.

You can fill out the survey here.

Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.

What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?

This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.

https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/

For example, here is the recent survey of London.

You are not in Sweden, but would like to take part? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to your country next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.

The survey is covering almost every country on in the Union for the Mediterranean, so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com

(Please note: Filling out the survey is not a guarantee of inclusion in the final published piece).

This morning, investor and SPAC raconteur Chamath Palihapitiya announced two new blank-check deals involving Latch and Sunlight Financial.

Latch, an enterprise SaaS company that makes keyless entry systems, has raised $152 million in private capital, according to Crunchbase. Sunlight Financial, which offers point of sale financing for residential solar systems, has raised north of $700 million in venture capital, private equity and debt.

We’re going to chat about the two transactions.

There’s no escaping SPACs for a bit, so if you are tired of watching blind pools rip private companies into the public markets, you are not going to have a very good next few months. Why? There are nearly 300 SPACs in the market today looking for deals, and many will find one.

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Think of SPACs are increasingly hungry sharks. As a shark get hungrier while the clock winds down on its deal-making window, it may get less choosy about what it eats (take public). There are enough SPACs on the hunt today that they would be noisy even if they were not time-constrained investment vehicles. But as their timers tick, expect their dealmaking to get all the more creative.

This brings us back to Chamath’s two deals. Are they more like the Bakkt SPAC, which led us to raise a few questions? Or more akin to the Talkspace SPAC, which we found pretty reasonable? Let’s find out.

Keyless locks = Peloton for real estate

Let’s start with the Latch deal.

New York-based Latch sells “LatchOS,” a hardware and software system that works in buildings where access and amenities matter. Latch’s hardware works with doors, sensors and internet connectivity.

The company has raised a number of private rounds, including a $126 million deal in August of 2019 which valued the company at $454.3 million on a post-money basis, according to PitchBook data. The company raised another $30 million in October of 2020, though its final private valuation is not known.

As Chamath tweeted this morning, Latch is merging with TS Innovation Acquisitions Corp, or $TSIA. The SPAC is associated with Tishman Speyer, a commercial real estate investor. You can see the synergies, as Latch’s products fit into the commercial real estate space.

Up front, Latch is not a company that is only reporting future revenues. It has a history as an operating entity. Indeed, here’s its financial data per its investor presentation:

Doing some quick match, Latch grew 50.5% from 2019 to 2020. Its software revenues grew 37.1%, while its hardware top line expanded over 70% during the same period. So, the company’s revenue mix shifted more towards hardware incomes in 2020.

That could be due to strong hardware installation fees, which could later result in software revenues; the company claims an average of a six-year software deal, so hardware revenues that are attached to new software incomes could lowkey declaim long-term SaaS revenues.

While some were quick to note that the company is far from pure-SaaS — correct — I suspect that the model that will get some traction amongst investors is that this feels a bit like Peloton for real estate. How so? Peloton has large hardware incomes up-front from new users, which convert to long-term subscription revenues. Latch may prove similar, albeit for a different customer base and market.

Per the deal’s reported terms, Latch will be worth $1.56 billion after the transaction. And the combined entity will have $510 million in cash, including $190 million from a PIPE — a method of putting private money into a public entity — from “BlackRock, D1 Capital Partners, Durable Capital Partners LP, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Chamath Palihapitiya, The Spruce House Partnership, Wellington Management, ArrowMark Partners, Avenir and Lux Capital.”

Goalsetter, a platform that helps parents teach their kids financial literacy, announced the raise of a $3.9 million seed round this morning, led by Astia.

PNC Bank, Mastercard, US. Bank, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Elevate Capital, Portfolia’s First Step and Rising America Fund and Pipeline Angels also participated in the round. The round also saw participation from a handful of individual investors including Robert F Smith, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Baron Davis, Sterling K. Brown, Ryan Bathe, CC Sabathia and Amber Sabathia.

Goalsetter launched in 2019 out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Founded by Tanya Court, who lost over $1 million in the 2001 bubble burst, the platform teaches financial literacy to children of all ages, helping them learn economic concepts, lingo and the principles of financial health.

After long stints at Nickelodeon and ESPN, Court understands deeply how kids learn and what keeps their attention. She vowed to make sure that her children were never ignorant of what it takes to protect their wealth and create more.

The app also allows parents to give allowance through the app, and even pay out their own specified amount for every quiz question the kid gets right in the app. Plus, family and friends can give ‘goal cards’ instead of gift cards, helping kids save for the things they really want in the future.

The company recently launched a debit card for kids, as well, letting parents control the way the card is used and even lock it until their kids have passed the week’s financial literacy quiz.

Families save an average of $120 a month on the platform, and Court says that two families saved over $10,000 in the last year.

The company is also launching a massive campaign next week for Black History Month with the goal of closing the wealth gap among Black children and kids of color through financial education.

“It’s one thing to put a debit card into your teenager’s hands,” said Court. “That’s great. That teaches them how to spend money. It’s another thing to teach kids the core concepts about how to build wealth, or to know the difference between putting your money into an investment account, or putting your money into a CD versus a mutual fund versus a savings account. We teach what interest rates are, and what compound interest means. Our focus is on is financial education because it’s not enough to teach kids how to spend.”

Goalsetter raised $2.1 million in 2019 and now adds this latest round to that for a total of $6 million raised. This latest round was oversubscribed, giving Court the opportunity to be super selective about her investors.

“Every single one of these investors has a demonstrated commitment prior to people marching in the streets in April, to social justice and to investing in diversity and inclusion initiatives and people,” said Court. “Every single one of them. That was really important because we were oversubscribed and we had the luxury of being able to pick who our investors were. Every one of the investors that we invited to our table were investors who we knew invited folks who look like us in 2019 and 2018 and 2017 to their table.”

Liz Meyerdirk made a name for herself at Uber as the Senior Director & Global Head of Business Development for the company’s Uber Eats business and she’s now turning her attention to women’s health as the new chief executive of The Pill Club.

The move comes at a perilous time for the remote delivery of women’s healthcare as the Supreme Court has taken steps to limit the provision of sexual healthcare to women in recent months.

“Women’s health care has never been more tested than right now,” Meyerdirk noted in a blog post announcing her new role. “COVID-19 has upended access to care; dozens of states have—and continue—to try and limit women’s choice; and last year, the Supreme Court voted to uphold the rollback of the ACA contraceptive mandate decision, a stunning move that could end up impacting as many as 126,000 women who previously received covered contraception through employer-based health insurance.”

A seasoned corporate executive, Meyerdirk is hoping to navigate The Pill Club through these treacherous times. “These events have shown that reliable, safe, and affordable access to women’s health and birth control is
just one more vulnerability in our health care system,” Meyerdirk wrote.

As it faces an uncertain legal environment on some fronts, the company couldn’t be in a better position financially.

The Pill Club, which is profitable and now has a $100 million run rate, is now ready for its closeup with Meyerdirk at the helm.

The company has managed to make its mark in the crowded world of online prescriptions and refill fulfillment by focusing specifically on women’s health and ensuring that those services are available to as many potential patients as possible.

“We’re now serving hundreds of thousands of women nationwide with 20% on Medicaid,” says Meyerdirk. “We prescribe in 43 states and the District of Columbia.”

For Meyerdirk, the background she had in logistics and fulfillment from her time at Uber Eats made the transition to the pill prescription and delivery service natural.

“There is a heavy logistics element to it,” said Meyerdirk.

As Meyerdirk takes the reins of the company, she said there’s a few areas that The Pill Club will expand into beyond its focus on birth control and contraception. “There are areas that our customers are asking for,” Meyerdirk said.

These areas include, initially, dermatology. Last year the company launched a delivery service for contraceptives and women’s hygiene products like pads and tampons.

As it continues to expand its product suite, it’s also growing its executive staff. The company not only added Meyerdirk, but also David Hsu as chief financial officer and Jeremy Downs as senior vice president of growth. Hsu joins the company from Honey, where led the $4 billion acquisition negotiations with PayPal, and Downs comes from Uber Eats, where he spent five years leading growth.

“We need sustained, long-term access to women’s health care, not just a bridge while the pandemic persists; and we need coverage for essential health services like birth control and prenatal care, regardless of whether or not you’re insured,” Meyerdirk wrote. “Reproductive care has and continues to be an essential part of our business, but there are countless opportunities to serve women in all of their life stages from puberty to menopause.”

Virgin Orbit isn’t slowing down after joining the exclusive club of small launch companies that have made it to orbit – the company just announced that it’s flying a payload on behalf of customer the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNAF). This is the first ever satellite being put up by the Dutch Ministry of Defense, and it’s a small satellite that will act as a test platform for a number of different communications experiments.

The satellite is called ‘BRIK-II’ – not because it’s the second of its kind, but rather because it’s named after Brik, the first airplane ever owned and operated by the RNAF. This mission is one of Virgin Orbit’s first commercial operations after its successful test demonstration, and will fly sometime later this year. It’s also being planned as a rideshare mission, with other payloads expected to join – likely from the U.S. Department of Defense, which is working with Virgin Orbit’s dedicated U.S. defense industry subsidiary VOX Space on planning what they’ll be adding to the mission load out.

This upcoming mission is actually a key demonstration of a number of Virgin Orbit’s unique advantages in the launch market. For one, it’ll show how the U.S. DOD and its ally defense agencies can work together in the space domain when launching small communications satellites. Virgin Orbit is also going to use the mission as an opportunity to show off its “late-load integration” capabilities – effectively, how it can add a payload to its LauncherOne rocket just prior to launch.

For this particular flight, there’s no real reason to do a late-load integration, since there’s plenty of lead time, but part of Virgin’s appeal is being able to nimbly add satellites to its rocket just before the carrier jet that flies it to its take-off altitude leaves the runway. Demonstrating that will go a long way to help illustrate how it differentiates its services from others in the launch market including Rocket Lab and SpaceX.

A startup called BlackCart is tackling one of the key challenges with online shopping: an inability to try on or test out the merchandise before making a purchase. That company, which has now closed on $8.8 million in Series A funding, has built a try-before-you-buy platform that integrates with e-commerce storefronts, allowing customers to ship items to their home for free and only pay if they choose to keep the item after a “try on” period has lapsed.

The new round of financing was led by Origin Ventures and Hyde Park Ventures Partners, and saw participation from Struck Capital, Citi Ventures, 500 Startups, and several other angel investors including Christian Sullivan of Republic Labs, Dean Bakes of M3 Ventures, Greg Rudin of Menlo Ventures, Jordan Nathan of Caraway Cookware, and First National Bank CFO Nick Pirollo, among others.

BlackCart founder Donny Ouyang had previously founded online tutoring marketplace Rayku before joining a seed stage VC fund, Caravan Ventures. But he was inspired to return to entrepreneurship, he says, after experiencing a personal problem with trying to order shoes online.

Realizing the opportunity for a “try before you buy” type of service, Ouyang first built BlackCart in 2017 as a business-to-consumer (B2C) platform that worked by way of a Chrome extension with some 50 different online merchants, largely in apparel.

This MVP of sorts proved there was consumer demand for something like this in online shopping shopping.

Ouyang credits the earlier version of BlackCart with helping the team to understand what sort of products work best for this service.

“I think, in general, for try-before-you-buy, anything that’s moderate to higher price points, lower frequency of purchase, where the customer makes a considered purchase decision — those perform really well,” he says.

Two years later, Ouyang took BlackCart to 500 Startups in San Francisco, where he then pivoted the business to a B2B offering it is today.

The startup now provides a try-before-you-buy platform that integrates with online storefronts, including those from Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Big Commerce, SalesForce Commerce Cloud, WordPress, and even custom storefronts. The system is designed to be turnkey for online retailers and takes around 48 hours to set up on Shopify around a week on Magento, for example.

BlackCart has also developed its own proprietary technology around fraud detection, payments, returns, and the overall user experience, which includes a button for retailers’ websites.

Because the online shoppers aren’t paying upfront for the merchandise they’re being shipped, BlackCart has to rely on an expanded array of behavioral signals and data in order to make a determination about whether the customer represents a fraud risk. As one example, if the customer had read a lot of helpdesk articles about fraud before placing their order, that could be flagged as a negative signal.

BlackCart also verifies the user’s phone number at checkout and matches it to telco and government data sets to see if their historical addresses match their shipping and billing addresses.

After the customer receives the item, they are able to keep it for a period of time (as designated by the retailer) before being charged. BlackCart covers any fraud as part of its value proposition to retailers.

BlackCart makes money by way of a rev share model, where it charges retailers a percentage of the sales where the customers have kept the products. This amount can vary based on a number of factors, like the fraud multiplier, average order value, the type of product and others. At the low end, it’s around 4% and around 10% on the high-end, Ouyang says.

The company has also expanded beyond home try-on to include try-before-you-buy for electronics, jewelry, home goods, and more. It can even ship out makeup samples for home try-on, as another option.

Once integrated on a website, BlackCart claims its merchants typically see conversion increases of 24%, average order values climb by 51%, and bottom-line sales growth of 27%.

To date, the platform been adopted by over 50 medium-to-large retailers as well as e-commerce startups, like luxury sneaker brand Koio, clothing startup Dia&Co, online mattress startup Helix Sleep, cookware startup Caraway, among others. It’s also under NDA now with a top 50 retailer it can’t yet name publicly, and has contracts signed with 13 others who are waiting to be onboarded.

Soon, BlackCart aims to offer a self-serve onboarding process, Ouyang notes.

“This would be later, end of Q2 or early Q3,” he says. “But I think for us, it will still be probably 80% self-serve, and then larger enterprises will want to be handheld.”

With the additional funding, BlackCart aims to shift to paying the merchant immediately for the items at checkout, then reconciling afterwards in order to be more efficient. This has been one of merchants’ biggest feature requests, as well.

The funding will also allow BlackCart to expand its remotely distributed 10-person team to around 50 by year-end, including engineers, product specialists, customer support staff, and sales.

More broadly, it aims to quickly capitalize on the growth in the e-commerce market, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“[We want to] take advantage of the favorable macroeconomic situation to scale as quickly as possible,” Ouyang explains. “We’re hoping to get to around $250 million in transactions through our platform by the end of 2021. And this would be driven by both engineering and sales hires, and just pushing it up,” he says.

Longer-term, Ouyang envisions adding more consumer-facing features to BlackCart’s platform, like on-demand returns where a courier comes to the house to pick up your return, for example.

“Our firm is excited to partner with BlackCart as it makes try-before-you-buy the standard in online shopping,” said Prashant Shukla of Origin Ventures, who now sits on BlackCart’s board, as result of the new financing. “Its underwriting technology provides merchants with peace of mind, and its best-in-class consumer experience delivers significant sales and conversion lifts. Digital Native generations expect to be able to shop online exactly as they would in a retail store, and BlackCart is the only company providing this experience,” he adds.