Flux, the London fintech that offers a platform for banks and merchants to power digital receipts and rewards, has unveiled its first partnership with an online-only merchant. The London-based company has managed to sign up Just Eat, the online marketplace for takeout food and delivery.

As of today, Just Eat’s U.K. customers will be able to receive digital itemised receipts directly in their Flux-supported banking app immediately after placing an order. At launch, this will include challenger banks Starling and Monzo, with the service rolled out across Flux’s other existing bank partner, Barclays launchpad, later this year.

“We’re always looking for ways to harness innovative technology to give our customers more ease, choice and convenience,” says Fernando Fanton, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Just Eat UK, in a statement. “We’re delighted to be the first in our sector to roll out Flux digital receipts ensuring customers can see exactly what they’ve ordered from the 30,000+ restaurants we work with across the U.K., directly within their banking apps”.

Although Just Eat is the first online marketplace to partner with Flux, the online takeout marketplace joins a number of other Flux-supported food and drink brands. They include household names such as KFC, schuh, EAT.,and Costa Coffee.

“The truth is online merchants have never been the focus for us because we thought the value gap was smaller than it is,” Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa tells me. “When we reflected on how to break into the market, the clear win was with offline merchants who are constantly seeking ways to build a digital link to their customers and provide them with better experiences. Meeting Just Eat at the end of April opened our eyes to the different value that we can bring to online merchants starting with more convenient experiences for customers trying to remember what they bought”.

With that said, Barbosa cautions me not to expect a flood of online marketplaces signing up to Flux just yet. “Our current focus is to offer customers a diverse set of retail partnerships,” she says. “That’s also why after Costa or KFC we didn’t stop everything to focus on coffee shops or fast food chains. Having said that, we learnt a lot with Just Eat on how to provide value for online merchants and are really excited to on-board other pure online players before year end”.

Eventually Flux wants to work with all U.K. merchants but in the short term the company maintains it needs to continue proving to the market that a solution like Flux can add value to “all verticals and businesses”.

“The conversation has moved on a lot from the early days,” says Barbosa. “Just 6 months ago, Tier 1 merchants thought Flux was a vision, valuable for smaller players but hard to execute at scale. The progress we’ve been making with the biggest banks and merchants moved the conversation from ‘are you sure this is possible’ to ‘tell me what you did for KFC and how it applies to me’.

“Sales cycles can be challenging but we’re proud to be constantly improving our metrics from first conversation to live, but it’s no small feat. Now that we’ve grown the team more, we’ve had the time to focus on an exciting interface we’re calling Marvin that will help merchants of all sizes on-board faster which we’ll be beta testing soon”.

Meanwhile, although the current focus remains building receipt infrastructure and on-boarding merchants, Flux’s long term vision is much broader. By bridging the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up in your bank statement or mobile banking app, the startup can offer new types of experiences for consumers that go beyond loyalty schemes, and card-linked offers.

In the future this might include letting you easily track your eating out habits, right down to item-level rather than just merchant category, as part of your general health goals. It is in this context that on-boarding Just Eat starts to look a little more interesting.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Flux, the digital receipts and rewards platform, adds support for online takeout marketplace Just Eat

Thirty-three-year-old founder of personalized medicine company DotLab, Heather Bowerman, wants to shake up the women’s health industry with what she believes to be a better, cheaper, less painful test for endometriosis.

Her company has just completed a Yale University -led validation study and raised $10 million in Series A funding from CooperSurgical, TigerGlobal Management, Luxor Capital Group and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to bring a new, non-invasive diagnostic test to market.

Endometriosis is an often painful disorder in which tissue begins to grow outside of the uterus and into a woman’s ovaries, fallopian tubes and pelvis. The disease may affect up to one in 10 women of childbearing years and about half of all women who experience infertility, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

However, even with clear symptoms of the disease, doctors often try to test for endometriosis as a last resort. The only way currently to test for it is through an invasive laparoscopic procedure, which comes with risks like internal bleeding, infections and hernia.

Called DotEndo the new DotLab test eliminates that risk with a simple diagnostic test. “The rationale for using our test is to test as early as possible and also to use it non-invasively,” Bowerman told TechCrunch.

The CEO was also quick to point out DotEndo is not a genetic test, as there are plenty of tests out on the market helping women discover possible genetic markers around fertility. Rather, it’s a physician-ordered diagnostic test you would take through a lab to find out if you have this specific disease.

“The revolutionary technology behind DotLab’s endometriosis test could improve the lives of the hundreds of millions of women affected by this debilitating disease which has been under-researched and deprioritized for too long,” Bowerman said in a statement.

While there has been some innovation in the space lately — U.S. regulators just approved a new pill to treat endometriosis pain — Bowerman is right in that we definitely still have a long way to go in diagnosing and curing the disease and that will take a lot more capital from investors in the future.

Meanwhile, the next step for DotLab will be to get its test into the hands of physicians, with the hope they recommend DotEndo right off the bat to patients exhibiting symptoms.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | With a fresh million in the bank, DotLab hopes to bring endometriosis test to market