Every employee loves receiving their paycheck. It just so happens, though, that paying employees can be a royal pain, what with incredibly diverse labor laws across all 50 U.S. states. While large, Fortune 500 employers have a bevy of options, from traditional firms like ADP to newer entrants like Workday, small and medium businesses (SMBs) face the brunt of the challenge — too small to be attractive to the biggest players, but still responsible for following the complexity of U.S. labor law.

Gusto was founded to solve that problem for SMBs, and so far, it has seen strong adoption. The company crossed the 100,000 customer barrier in the past year, out of an estimated six million small businesses in the United States. “I feel like we are still at the beginning stages,” Gusto’s founder and CEO Josh Reeves told TechCrunch.

It may be early innings, but you wouldn’t know that from Gusto’s burgeoning cap table. The company announced today that it has raised $200 million of venture capital from wealth manager Fidelity Management & Research Company and Generation Investment Management, which was founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to create a vehicle for “sustainable” investments.

In addition to the new capital, Gusto has added its first independent board member in the form of Anne Raimondi, a current Asana and former SendGrid board member who was SVP of Operations for customer experience SaaS platform Zendesk.

The new infusion of capital will be used for scaling the company’s product and team. “I like to take complex systems and take them apart and make them better,” Reeves explained about both the complexity of payroll and the complexity of operating a growing workforce of his own.

While Gusto’s central product is payroll, Reeves sees two other product arcs he intends to develop more in the coming years as the company scales. One arc, which we talked about last year, is fintech features like Flexible Pay, a product that allows employees to receive their unpaid wages in advance, with the goal of reducing reliance on usurious payday lenders. The other product arc is healthcare and helping SMBs offer insurance benefits to their employees. “We want to be a force for universal healthcare,” Reeves said.

As Gusto explores additional products built around its payroll service, it has sought to expand its engineering R&D team. The company announced recently that it will open an R&D office in New York City in September, which it hopes will be able to both execute on these two products as well as others not yet planned. Today, Gusto has more than 1,000 employees in San Francisco and Denver.

That employee growth has also led to new executives joining the company recently. Danielle Brown, formerly head of diversity and inclusion at Google, has joined as chief people officer, and Fredrick Lee has joined as CISO from Square, where he similarly headed information security.

Asked about IPO plans, Reeves demurred, but did point out that the startup’s recent investor additions have been crossover funds that invest across public and private companies.

In addition to Fidelity and Generation, the round included participation from existing investors T. Rowe Price and Dragoneer (which led the Series C), as well as General Catalyst (which led Gusto’s Series A back when it was known as ZenPayroll). The company was founded in 2012.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SMB payroll startup Gusto raises 0M Series D, plans R&D expansion to NYC

Take a moment to imagine the most successful salesperson you know.

Is it someone you respect? Probably not. That, precisely, is the problem Bravado — a startup emerging from stealth today with $12 million in backing from Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Precursor Ventures, Village Global and Kindred Ventures — is working to solve.

Sahil Mansuri, Bravado founder and chief executive officer, got his start in sales. A gifted student, his father’s health issues forced him to land a job straight out of college that would make him a lot of money, and fast. When his career counselor suggested he search for an opportunity in sales, he envisioned a crowded office packed with obnoxious telemarketers, not a lucrative position in B2B sales in his hometown of San Francisco.

Mansuri grew to adore sales so much he built a company focused on evangelizing the profession. Before diving head-first into his own venture, Mansuri served as a vice president at SalesPredict, an eBay-acquired business that uses data to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. Before that, he worked his way up at Glassdoor, becoming the top-performing sales representative at the platform for submitting anonymous company reviews.

Although Mansuri’s parents, Indian immigrants, were initially horrified by their son’s career choice, they’ve since come around. His hope now is to help the general public develop a more favorable view of the sales profession, too.

“Sales has been transformative for my family,” Mansuri tells TechCrunch. “But when I say sales has a negative stigma, I know because I’ve lived it. That’s my life story.”

“Sales isn’t a profession that’s celebrated,” he added. “You can think of all these great engineers and product managers but you can’t think of any great people in sales.”

Bravado, yet to monetize its platform in any fashion, is focusing its efforts on building out its network. Currently, sales professionals can use the platform to develop credibility through the Bravado Credibility Score, which is based on customer testimonials recorded directly on a sales professional’s Bravado profile. The company is also helping sales workers develop their careers through networking events and workshops.

Fostering the next generation of sales professionals is the final piece of the Bravado business. Mansuri pointed out that none of the top 100 universities in the U.S. have sales majors, making it rather impossible for students to dream of becoming sales experts. Through Bravado’s sales mentorship program, students are provided sales curricula, the opportunity to be placed at companies in sales roles and a growing network of sales professionals. It’s a “mini pre-professional path to sales,” says Mansuri.

Diversity is important to the team, too. There’s a reason sales has a fratty reputation; it’s a predominately white and male field with fewer than 25% women and a serious lack of minorities and LGBTQ folks. Bravado is putting forth a content strategy in an attempt to highlight these issues and invite new faces into the sales community.

“We want to build a world in which the best talent, no matter what they look like, is like ‘I really want to be in sales because that’s an awesome career,’ ” Mansuri explained.

Bravado’s community includes 50,000 members and 1,000 sales teams from Salesforce, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Slack, WeWork, Uber, Oracle, IBM and others. The startup recently attracted an $8.5 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures’ Alex Bard and Annie Kadavy, a majority of which will be used to expand its membership base. When it comes time to make money, the company says it will attract dollars through a suite of to-be-developed “premium products.”

For Bravado to accomplish its goals, it must inspire the public to reimagine the salesperson stereotype, as well as encourage students across the U.S. to enter and redefine the sales field.

“Sales is perceived as a career for the leftovers,” Mansuri said. “We want to bring respect and credibility to the sales profession and share why it is that sales is a wonderful career.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Sales professionals get a bad rap — Bravado wants to change that

Tile — the company that makes popular square-shaped tags and other technology to help people keep track of physical belongings like keys and bags — has made more recent moves to link up with chipmakers, helping it expand to wireless headsets and other electronic and other connected items as part of a wider smart home strategy. Now, Tile is announcing a round of funding of $45 million to double down on those strategies and fulfill a plan to have its technology in millions of devices by the end of this year.

The growth equity is being led by Francisco Partners, with participation from previous investors GGV Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners and new backers Bryant Stibel and SVB Financial Group.

CJ Prober — who joined as CEO last year in part to develop Tile’s newer areas of business — said in an interview that the funding will help the startup be more aggressive in doubling down on these new opportunities.

“We’re seeing great business momentum, with the first embedded partner products from our strategic initiatives coming out this year,” he said. It now has partnerships with five semiconductor companies, including Qualcomm and most recently Nordic, which they integrate Tile functionality on to their hardware, he added. “All this is now paying off with great momentum.”

Prober would not comment on the company’s valuation with this round, except to say that it was definitely an up round. A spokesperson described the Series C as having “opened” with this $45 million commitment, which implies that there may be more funding coming, but Tile has declined to specify any more detail on this front. The startup had previously raised rounds in stages — as you can see by this timeline in PitchBook. For some more context, Tile’s last noted valuation (also in PitchBook) was around $166 million, but that was now more than two years ago, before the various initiatives and other changes at the company.

Tile is not disclosing any metrics on its market share or how many of its devices are now in use, but it typically is rated as the largest of a crowded market for item-tracking devices (with others in the space including TrackR (Adero), Chipolo, and more).

But it notes that its European business (a relatively new area of focus for Tile) has grown by 160% in the last quarter. That’s coming from a small base, though: Prober confirmed that the U.S. is still by far its biggest market in terms of sales and users.

And it also had a strong Prime Day on Amazon this year, doubling its unit sales (but didn’t provide hard numbers for comparison). It said it has exceeded projections for sign-ups for its Premium tier, which provides free battery replacements, 30-day location history, smart alerts (prompting you, for example, when you’ve left your keys somewhere), customer support and more for $30 for the year, or $3 per month.

The company has been planting a lot of seeds, and some of them have yet to sprout. Last year, Tile announced that it would take an investment from Comcast to help it develop new products for its wider connected consumer strategy.

Prober, however, described this as still in the “roadmapping phase” and would not get into specifics except to say that there are a number of different initiatives in the works. There also was a partnership with Google unveiled at the most recent I/O that will see its home devices also being able to be tracked by the Tile platform.

I asked Prober if he worries ultimately about whether large tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and the rest — which all want to “own” connected home customers and the ecosystem of hardware and services that they may use — are seen as opportunities or threats for Tile, given that it’s piggy backing on their platforms and devices. His and the company’s fundamental feeling — one that should be supported in the spirit of competition and consumer choice — is that having a cross-platform option is the way to go.

“Our customers have different devices, products from different companies and it’s our job to ensure that Tile works well across all of those,” he said. “We see ourselves a little bit like Switzerland, which is also something that our customers and partners appreciate.”

While we’re seeing a surge of new communications technologies and protocols — 5G being perhaps the one we are hearing about most at the moment — Tile is sticking to Bluetooth for now.

“We love what Bluetooth enables for our customers in terms of the form factor, the cost and profile of the device and the power consumption,” said Prober. “We’re constantly evaluating different alternatives, and if there is an alternative we would consider that, but in our view that doesn’t exist right now.”

It’s a choice that its investors are also supporting.

“Tile pioneered the smart location category,” said Andrew Kowal, partner with Francisco Partners, in a statement. “With Bluetooth technology projected to be included in nearly 30 billion devices shipping in the next five years, Tile is poised to deliver an embedded finding solution for a rapidly expanding market. We are extremely excited to be partnering with Tile as the company enters the next chapter of its growth story.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tile finds another M to expand its item-tracking devices and platform

Drip Capital, a startup that helps small and medium-sized exporters secure working capital, has raised $25 million to expand its reach globally.

The Series B financing round for the two-and-a-half-year-old startup was led by Accel and Boosts Total Venture. In an interview with TechCrunch, Neil Kothari, co-founder and co-CEO of the startup, said Drip Capital has also raised $55 million in debt funding over the last two years, making the startup’s total raise $100 million.

Exporters worldwide have to wait for about 60 days (if not more) before they get paid. This creates an immense challenge for millions of small and medium-sized exporters who don’t have any savings to process additional orders until they get paid from their previous clients.

“Despite the fact that they’re reputable, credit-worthy businesses, over half of them still get turned down by banks for the capital they need. We invested in Drip to change this,” said Arun Mathew, a partner at Accel.

After signing up to the platform, an exporter can submit their invoices and open a credit line to finance their next orders.

Drip Capital works with investors and lenders in developed markets to help exporters secure financing. The startup, which has more than 800 exporters and importers on its platform, said it has already issued loans worth more than $500 million to date.

Unlike many other online lenders that take no risk liabilities of the flowing capital, Kothari said Drip invests much of its own money in lending, too. “We have skin in the game. This adds tremendous credibility.”

The startup, whose platform is being used for trading in 60 countries, will use the capital to expand its global footprint. It plans to launch in the UAE, Mexico and the United States in the coming months.

“With new funding in place, we can replicate the model we’ve created in India with other geographies by scaling the product, engineering, sales and marketing teams,” the startup said.

Drip Capital also intends to expand its offerings to importers, adding a new option that will allow businesses to make more purchases from international markets and increase their sales.

Many established companies such as Honeywell, Sam’s Club, TJ Maxx, Whole Foods and Zara have purchased goods from exporters that have received financing through Drip, the startup said.

Drip Capital, of course, isn’t the only platform that helps exporters get paid faster. But larger companies tend to do it all and optimize the supply chain for the biggest companies in the world. Drip Capital is focusing on a niche market.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Drip Capital raises M to help exporters access working capital

Hipcamp uses technology to get people away from technology.

The San Francisco-based startup provides a “people-powered platform” that unlocks access to private land for camping, glamping or just a beautiful spot to park your RV, as described by Alyssa Ravasio, founder and chief executive officer. Amid explosive growth in emerging markets, including Florida and Texas, the company has attracted a $25 million Series B investment at a valuation of $127 million.

Andrew Chen, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has led the round and will join Hipcamp’s board of directors as part of the deal. Caterina Fake of Yes VC, Sarah Tavel of Benchmark, August Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also participated in the financing, which brings Hipcamp’s total funding to $41.8 million. We first covered Hipcamp in 2014, when the nascent startup raised a $2 million seed round led by AlphaTech.

A self-described internet nerd and avid camper, Ravasio loves the outdoors, as you might’ve guessed. She founded Hipcamp after becoming frustrated with the complex process that is identifying and booking campsites across the U.S.

“I couldn’t believe how difficult the whole process was,” Ravasio told TechCrunch. “I had one camping trip where I spent five hours doing research and almost gave up … I realized camping was broken and the internet could fix it.”

In 2013, Ravasio learned to code and built the first iteration of the Hipcamp platform, a comprehensive database of campsites that earns money by taking a commission made from each booking it facilitates. Today, the company has grown to 40 employees, with campsites in 300,000 sites across the U.S. and plans to expand internationally soon.

“We’re committed to getting people outside, and that’s really the guiding light of our expansion plans,” she said.

As for long-term plans, an Airbnb acquisition wouldn’t make sense, Ravasio explained: “I think going public and making Hipcamp a company that anyone can buy and own part of is exciting to me”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Andreessen Horowitz values camping business Hipcamp at 7M

LIV, a Prague-based company that wants to make VR gaming more fun to watch, and in turn bring players and spectators closer together, has picked up $1 million in funding. That’s a pretty modest raise as far as ambitious upstarts go — and LIV is certainly ambitious. However, the list of backers includes noteworthy names, such as the founder of Oculus (and designer of Oculus Rift), Palmer Luckey.

Other investors in LIV include Jaroslav Beck, CEO and co-founder of Beat Games (the studio behind VR streaming hit Beat Saber); early-stage VC Seedcamp; accelerator Techstars; Prague’s Credo Ventures; VR company VIVE; and mixed reality production specialist Splitverse.

Founded in 2016, LIV is betting on the premise that VR gaming represents an entirely new platform, and it is new platforms with nascent ecosystems where the biggest opportunities lie. Furthermore, while the watching of video game live streams shows no signs of abating — made popular via sites such as Twitch — the spectator experience hasn’t transitioned very gracefully to VR.

“Creating content in VR is incredibly hard, there are no tools for it, and no shareable content form factor that conveys the experience of being in VR,” says LIV co-founder AJ Shewki, who was previously a competitive gamer under the moniker “Dr Doom.”

“LIV empowers developers and content creators to grow their audience through shareable VR content. Developers integrate our SDK, and content creators are then able to create content with those games and experiences using the LIV App. The content format is called ‘Mixed Reality Capture’ (MRC).”

The “Mixed Reality Capture” experience is inevitably best watched rather than conveyed through the written word (you can see an example below). However, what MRC essentially does is inject a live video or, alternatively, a 3D avatar of the player’s body, inside the video game stream so spectators experience not only what the player sees (the classic VR first-person perspective) but can also follow the “real-world” movements the player makes to execute moves within the game. As a player moves their arms, for example, their avatar can be seen replicating the same moves based on sensor data pulled from the VR gear the player is wearing.

It is this ability to closely watch and potentially learn from the best players that has made video game streaming so popular. But, argues Shewki, the move to VR was initially a backwards step in this regard, as it required additional technology to close the gap between player and spectator.

“The LIV App gives streamers the tools to broadcast themselves as themselves, or as their favourite avatars, inside any of the 100s of games that we support. We support hundreds if not thousands of avatars, including the popular Japanese VRM avatar format,” says Shewki.

“The LIV App also brings utilities like stream chat, stream alerts, scene controls and camera controls natively into the headset using our proprietary 3D overlay system, built specifically with performance in mind (which in VR is already a scarce resource). The LIV SDK is integrated by developers to get their games LIV-ready. We support Unity, Unreal as well as custom engines, and have done integrations with all of them.”

Longer term, Shewki says he wants LIV to not only enable a better live-streaming experience but to evolve into what the company is describing as a “real-time audience interaction platform” for VR streamers and games developers. The thinking here is that spectators of VR can also become participants beyond the simple chatroom experience that exists today.

Dubbed “LIV Play” and targeting a closed alpha release by the end of the year, the idea is to give audiences the ability to influence what happens in-game and in real time, such as purchasing health potions when a player most needs them or spawning extra monsters when they least expect it.

“Our hypothesis was: If we give viewers more engaging ways to participate, as opposed to what you have today with chat, polls and donations, they will,” explains Shewki. “We ran experiments with Beat Saber where we let audiences replace cubes with bombs and do more fun donations. Our experiment results over 120 days were incredible. Week 1 and 2: 700% higher revenue/minute through higher engagement. It petered out to 300% higher rev/min at 120 days, where it’s stayed.”

In other words, take the same monetisation approach that we have seen in games like Fortnite and apply it to the audience side of live-gaming spectatorship. “Creativity is our only limit here,” enthuses Shewki.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | LIV, a startup making VR gaming more interactive for audiences, raises M from Oculus founder and Seedcamp