Did you miss the deadline to compete in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on Oct. 2-4? Cheer up buckaroo. You may be down, but you’re not out. You have one last chance for Startup Battlefield glory.

“Tell me more,” we hear you cry. Buy a demo table and exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF for a chance to win a Wild Card entry to Startup Battlefield. Out of all the startups exhibiting in the Alley, our team of TechCrunch editors will select two standouts as Wild Card teams. Those teams will compete head-to-head in Startup Battlefield for $100,000 equity-free cash, the Disrupt Cup and plenty of investor and media attention.

Yes, it’s a longshot, but sometimes longshots pay off. Just ask the folks at RecordGram. Not only did the company reap the many benefits of exhibiting in Startup Alley, but it also earned a Wild Card slot and won the Startup Battlefield championship.

Whether or not you earn a Wild Card or compete in Startup Battlefield, exhibiting in Startup Alley offers almost infinite opportunity. More than 10,000 attendees will be on hand, and they’ll be hungry to explore everything Startup Alley has to offer. It’s a networking paradise where you just might connect with future customers, investors, partners, advisors, employees and marketers. Plus, with 400 media outlets attending, plenty of journalists will be trolling for great stories.

Caleb John, founder and CEO of Cedar Robotics, met hundreds of people demonstrating his company’s tech in Startup Alley. He calls the experience “one of the coolest things we’ve ever done.”

Of course, you get all the other benefits associated with your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. Three full days of programming across all four Disrupt stages including the Main stage where you’ll hear a lineup of amazing speakers. You also receive access to interactive workshops, the complete attendee list via Disrupt Mobile App, CrunchMatch, our attendee-networking platform, networking parties, the TechCrunch After Party and exclusive video content access once the conference ends.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on Oct. 2-4. Come exhibit in Startup Alley for your chance to win one of two Wild Card spots and your last opportunity to compete in Startup Battlefield. Go for it!

Not quite ready for prime time on the Disrupt Main stage? No worries. Why not apply for our TC Top Picks program? Our TC Top Picks receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, VIP treatment and plenty of media and investor exposure.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Win a Wild Card to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2019

Many, many startups have tried to work their way into the U.S.’s $76 billion wedding market. But Zola is one of the few that’s truly carved a path in this massive industry.

That’s why we’re so thrilled to have Shan-Lyn Ma, CEO of Zola, join us at Disrupt SF in October.

After graduating with an MBA from Stanford, Ma climbed the ranks at Yahoo, going from a marketing intern to Senior Product Marketing manager in three years. She moved on to Gilt Groupe as a Senior Director of Product before creating and launching Gilt’s Food and Wine business, Gilt Taste.

She then spent a year as Chief Product Officer for chloe + isabel inc. before leaving to start a little wedding ecommerce website called Zola in 2013.

Today, Zola has raised more than $140 million from big name investors such as Thrive Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Canvas Ventures, and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. According to Pitchbook, Zola’s valuation was $650 million as of its latest funding round in 2018.

Part of Zola’s success comes from the fact that it started in a single vertical and continuously added features and products that consolidate the wedding planning process under one roof.

The company launched as a simple wedding registry platform, letting couples choose their future gifts and then letting guests log in and buy those gifts through the platform. Over time, however, Zola continued to build upon that momentum to create a one-stop shop for weddings.

Today, Zola users have access to all kinds of resources, including invitations, menus, programs, thank you notes, etc., as well as matching you with wedding planners and other wedding vendors. Oh, and of course there’s a shopping platform for wedding gowns, jewelry, etc.

In just over five years, it has become the de facto platform for couples to plan and execute their wedding. More than half a million couples have used Zola to manage their registry or guest list, and common problems in ecommerce, like holding inventory or dealing with returns, is significantly minimized due to Zola’s model.

In short, there is plenty to learn from Ma at TechCrunch Disrupt, and we can’t wait!

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available at an early bird rate here.

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Zola founder and CEO Shan-Lyn Ma is coming to Disrupt SF

Rohan Silva is obsessed with social mobility and why certain groups are so under-represented in the technology industry.

He co-founded Second Home, a coworking space looking to bring together disparate civic-minded, cultural, creative and commercial entrepreneurs at sites in Lisbon, London and (now) Los Angeles, and he has spent years examining how gender, race and class impact access to technology as a now-reformed politician. Throughout that work though, one area that he says he overlooked was accessibility and entrepreneurship focused on people with disabilities.

“At Second Home, we pride ourselves on having a diverse community. I can count on one hand the number of founders with disabilities we have in our community, so there is definitely something going profoundly wrong,” Silva says.

Enlisting the help of the European venture capital fund Atomico, Silva has set up a micro-investment fund of £100,000 to tackle the problem.

“It’s a large amount compared to what I have and a small amount compared to most venture capital funds,” he explains. “The much bigger prize here is the ability to fund technologies that have the opportunities to improve the lives of people with disabilities.”

Silva isn’t alone. Organizations like Not Impossible Labs, a Los Angeles-based company, and startups like OrCam Technologies, eSight, B-Temia, Kinova Robotics, Open Bionics, Voiceitt and Whill are harnessing technology to bring solutions to people with disabilities across the world.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Assistive technologies will be a billion dollar market, and investors are only now addressing it

Managing people is perhaps the most challenging thing most people will have to learn in the course of their professional lives – especially because there’s no one ‘right’ way to do it. But Ottawa-based startup Fellow is hoping to ease the learning curve for new managers, and improve and reinforce the habits of experienced ones with their new people management platform software.

Fellow has raised $6.5 million in seed funding, from investors including Inovia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Garage Capital and a number of angels. The funding announcement comes alongside the announcement of their first customers, including Shopify (disclosure: I worked at Shopify when Fellow was implemented and was an early tester of this product, which is why I can can actually speak to how it works for users).

The Fellow platform is essentially a way to help team leads interact with their reports, and vice versa. It’s a feedback tool that you can use to collect insight on your team from across the company; it includes meeting supplemental suggestions and templates for one-on-ones, and even provides helpful suggestions like recommending you have a one-on-one when you haven’t in a while; and it all lives in the cloud, with integrations for other key workplace software like Slack that help it integrate with your existing flow.

Fellow co-founder and CEO Aydin Mirzaee and his co-founding team have previous experience building companies: They founded Fluidware, a survey software company, in 2008 and then sold it to SurveyMonkey in 2014. In growing the team to over 100 people, Mirzaee says they realized where there were gaps, both in his leadership team’s knowledge and in available solutions on the market.

“Starting the last company, we were in our early 20s, and like the way that we used to learn different practices was by using software, like if you use the Salesforce, and you know nothing about sales, you’ll learn some things about sales,” Mirzaee told me in an interview. “If you don’t know about marketing, use Marketo, and you’ll learn some things about marketing. And you know, from our perspective, as soon as we started actually having some traction and customers and then hired some people, we just got thrown into it. So it was ‘Okay, now, I guess we’re managers.’ And then eventually we became managers of managers.”

Mirzaee and his team then wondered why a tool like Salesforce or Marketo didn’t exist for management. “Why is it that when you get promoted to become a manager, there isn’t an equivalent tool to help you with that?” he said.

Concept in hand, Fellow set out to build its software, and what it came up with is a smartly designed, user-friendly platform that is accessible to anyone regardless of technical expertise or experience with management practice and training. I can attest to this first-hand, since I was a first-time manager using Fellow to lead a team during my time at Shopify – part of the beta testing process that helped develop the product into something that’s ready for broader release. I was not alone in my relative lack of management knowledge, Mirzaee said, and that’s part of why they saw a clear need for this product.

“The more we did research, the more we figured out that obviously, managers are really important,” he explained. “70% of customer engagements are due to managers, for instance. And when people leave companies, they tend to leave the manager, not the company. The more we dug into it the more it was clear that there truly was this management problem –  management crisis almost, and that nobody really had built a great tool for managers and their teams like.”

Fellow’s tool is flexible enough to work with specific management methodologies like setting SMART goals or OKRs for team members, and managers can use pre-set templates or build their own for things like setting meeting talking points, or gathering feedback from the colleagues of their reports.

Right now, Fellow is live with a number of clients including Shoify, Vidyard, Tulip, North and more, and it’s adding new clients who sign up on a case-by-case basis, but increasing the pace at which it onboard new customers. Mirzaee explained that it hopes to open sign ups entirely later this year.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fellow raises .5M to help make managers better at leading teams and people

Fungible, a startup that wants to help data centers cope with the increasingly massive amounts of data produced by new technologies, has raised a $200 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners and its existing investors. As part of the round, SoftBank Investment Advisers senior managing partner Deep Nishar will join Fungible’s board of directors.

Founded in 2015, Fungible now counts about 200 employees and has raised more than $300 million in total funding. Its other investors include Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Redline Capital and Walden Riverwood Ventures. Its new capital will be used to speed up product development. The company’s founders, CEO Pradeep Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet, say Fungible will release more information later this year about when its data processing units will be available and their on-boarding process, which they say will not require clients to change their existing applications, networking or server design.

Sindu previously founded Juniper Networks, where he held roles as chief scientist and CEO. Serlet was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple before leaving in 2011 and founding Upthere, a storage startup that was acquired by Western Digital in 2017. Sindu and Serlet describe Fungible’s objective as pivoting data centers from a “compute-centric” model to a data-centric one. While the company is often asked if they consider Intel and Nvidia competitors, they say Fungible Data Processing Units (DPU) complement tech, including central and graphics processing units, from other chip makers.

Sindhu describes Fungible’s DPUs as a new building block in data center infrastructure, allowing them to handle larger amounts of data more efficiently and also potentially enabling new kinds of applications. Its DPUs are fully programmable and connect with standard IPs over Ethernet local area networks and local buses, like the PCI Express, that in turn connect to CPUs, GPUs and storage. Placed between the two, the DPUs act like a “super-charged data traffic controller,” performing computations offloaded by the CPUs and GPUs, as well as converting the IP connection into high-speed data center fabric.

This better prepares data centers for the enormous amounts of data generated by new technology, including self-driving cars, and industries such as personalized healthcare, financial services, cloud gaming, agriculture, call centers and manufacturing, says Sindu.

In a press statement, Nishar said “As the global data explosion and AI revolution unfold, global computing, storage and networking infrastructure are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Fungible’s products enable data centers to leverage their existing hardware infrastructure and benefit from these new technology paradigms. We look forward to partnering with the company’s visionary and accomplished management team as they power the next generation of data centers.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fungible raises 0 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund to help companies handle increasingly massive amounts of data