It’s that time of year again. When startup founders fret for weeks on end as the long-awaited Demo Day approaches. Investors pore through lists of startups participating in various accelerator programs and have their associates ping dozens of founders for coffee meetings.

Demo Day season is upon us. Soon Y Combinator’s latest cohort of startups will pitch to investors for two days, beginning August 19, and 500 Startups, another San Francisco-based accelerator program for early-stage companies, will host its own Demo Day on August 22.

We’ll report live from YC’s Demo Day next month. For now, here’s a closer look at all the startups finishing out 500 Startups’ latest program. As a reminder, through its four-month seed program, the 500 Startups seed fund invests $150,000 in participating companies in exchange for 6% equity. The companies below include a mix of fintech, digital health, edtech and e-commerce businesses, 33% of which 500 Startups says are women-led and 40% have Black or Latinx founders.

• Alluva: Rewards individual users for their blockchain and crypto price predictions.
• AMPAworks: An inventory management tool focused on hospitals. The startup uses computer vision AI to track and manage inventory in real time.
• BeatDapp: Helps music labels and artists track their songs to collect royalties by providing real-time audit reports of streaming-play counts.
• BlackCart: A try-before-you-buy app for fashion e-commerce stores.
• Blue Studios: The Peloton of STEM education focused on teaching 1 billion kids STEM skills.
• Blue Wire: A sports podcasting network.
• Bytez: Helps developers and data scientists work faster.
• Chemtech: An AI-product for manufacturing plant automatization.
• Crash: A tool to help people launch their career.
• Curie: A camera-based AI shopping assistant.
• Dispatchr: Helps electric utilities prevent wildfires, catastrophes and crippling outages.
• Docket: A system of record and workflow management SaaS for legal teams.
• EINO: An AI platform that produces predictive and historical insights on localized population movement and their intention in urban areas for enterprise business users.
• EZFarming: A marketplace that helps farmers finance their business and sell their produce.
• FitzyTV: An internet TV platform designed to help consumers watch and record all their streaming TV channels across multiple services.
• Gentem: A tool that provides instant claims reimbursements for physicians.
• Glyph: A digitally knit shoe company.
• Hearo Live: Turns passive media into a powerful, live social experience for games, sports, streaming and more.
• Heartex: Helps companies quickly build AI products and features.
• HYVE: Helps users navigate their social media universe by allowing them to follow more people.
• InnerTrends: A data science service for SaaS that uncovers insights in customer onboarding, retention and engagement without the need for data scientists.
• KIKI: The first app that pays you for having fun. A social marketplace where you can meet people, and buy and share experiences with them.
• Lucidact Health: An AI assistant for nurses and case managers to help them know what to do faster and eliminate errors.
• Nanno: The first on-demand childcare app that lets parents book vetted sitters nationwide.
• Nanogrid: Building advanced cost calculation technology that enables home energy companies to ensure their customers get the most value out of their products.
• NewoldStamp: An email signatures platform that turns every employee’s email into a marketing tool.
• Renaissance: Allows users to earn loyalty points by listening to music.
• Resonado: Reimagining audio systems for businesses with patented Flat Core Speaker technology.
• RestAR: 3D capturing and product visualization for e-commerce using AI with any mobile device.
• Rovilus: Developing safe and reliable battery packs for industrial vehicles and light electric aircraft.
• Send4: Enables retailers to offer a seamless post-purchase experience to their customers.
• Sharebee: A vertically integrated marketplace where anyone can book moving and storage in a couple of minutes for half of the traditional price.
• Tradespace: A global IP marketplace for companies to buy, sell, license and invest in technology.
• Visionful: Connects smart cities and autonomous vehicles leveraging AI and computer vision to provide full automation for parking and traffic monitoring.
• Voogy: An IP to domain name database that allows companies to track and discover the anonymous web visitors that do not convert into their sales funnel.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Meet 500 Startups’ 25th batch of startups

Employee engagement isn’t just about the morale of individual workers—it also enables broader workforce productivity and leads to better business outcomes. In fact, research conducted by The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) argues that an understanding of the role employee engagement plays in driving morale and productivity is critical to business success.

At Slack, my team of researchers and analysts spends time studying how people work and what they need to do their best work. We consistently find that an important signal of employee engagement lies in how people feel about the tools they use at work.

Good tools can enable both productivity as well as increase morale. We’ve done research to learn more about successful and thriving Slack teams, and what it is about Slack that enables them to do better work.

These teams don’t just talk about how Slack improves efficiency, but also how it builds community and in some ways modernizes the company. We also found that the top three emotions people associate with Slack are happy, fun and easy, which you might not expect from a productivity tool.

Technology overall has impacted how, for how long, and from where we work, as well as our efficiency in getting things done. Engaging employees with technology isn’t just about supplying more robust software, but giving people tools that they look forward to using everyday as much as their preferred personal apps.

When products and technology reflect the nuances of human communication, while at the same time making information more accessible, employees feel more connected — both with the workplace and with their co-workers – resulting in a stronger, more trusting relationships and better performance.

So, how can we challenge ourselves to set higher expectations for the work products we build and use every day, and what would it look like to bring more humanity, fun and delight into the tools we use for work? Here are some principles to keep in mind.

Add emotional context to improve communication

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The roles tools play in employee engagement

Serverless development has largely been a lonely pursuit until recently, but Serverless, Inc. has been offering a free framework for intrepid programmers since 2015. At first, that involved development, deployment and testing, but today the company announced it is expanding into monitoring and security to make it an end-to-end tool — and it’s available for free.

Serverless computing isn’t actually server-free, but it’s a form of computing that provides a way to use only the computing resources you need to carry out a given function — and no more. When the process is complete, the resources effectively go away. That has the potential to be more cost-effective than having a server that’s always on, regardless of whether you’re using it or not. That requires a new way of thinking about how developers write code.

While serverless offers a compelling value proposition, up until Serverless, Inc. came along with some developer tooling, early adherents were pretty much stuck building their own tooling to develop, deploy and test their programs. Today’s announcement expands the earlier free Serverless, Inc. Framework to provide a more complete set of serverless developer tools.

Company founder and CEO Austen Collins says that he has been thinking a lot about what developers need to develop and deploy serverless programs, and talking to customers. He says that they really craved a more integrated approach to serverless development than has been available until now.

“What we’re trying to do is build this perfectly integrated solution for developers and developer teams because we want to enable them to innovate as much as possible and be as autonomous as possible,” Collins told TechCrunch. He says at the same time, he recognizes that operations need to connect to other tools, and the Serverless Framework provides hooks into other systems, as well.

The new tooling includes an integrated environment, so that once you deploy, you can simply click an error or security event and drill down to a dashboard for more information about the issue. You can click for further detail to see the exact spot in the code where the issue occurred, which should make it easier to resolve more quickly.

While no tool is 100% comprehensive, and most large organizations, and even individual developers, will have a set of tools they prefer to use, this is an attempt to build a one-stop solution for serverless developers for the first time. That in itself is significant, as serverless moves beyond early adopters and begins to become more of a mainstream kind of programming and deployment option. People starting now probably won’t want to cobble together their own toolkits, and the Serverless, Inc. Framerwork gives them a good starting point.

Serverless, Inc. was founded by Collins in 2015 out of a need for serverless computing tooling. He has raised more than $13.5 million since inception.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Serverless, Inc. expands free Framework to include monitoring and security

Another hopeful among Europe’s so-called challenger banks — startups taking on the big names in consumer banking by targeting niche groups of users with a more modern set of tools to manage users’ money — has raised a sizeable round of funding to expand its business.

Atom Bank — which targets mainly millennial-aged consumers (current slogan: “It’s all about you, you, you”) with mobile-first savings accounts and mortgages as well as small business loans — has raised a further £50 million in funding. It’s not disclosing its valuation officially, but sources confirm it’s £530 million (or around $660 million at current rates), up from £450 million previously.

“What’s important to customers is good products, good service and good value so that’s where we’ve spent the majority of our time and energy,” said Mark Mullen, Atom’s CEO, in a statement. “We’re growing our team here in the North East and will add 50 new roles this year to help us expand the range of products and services we offer, starting with Instant Access savings in the autumn. More than ever we are convinced of the importance of Atom’s role to drive positive change in UK banking.”

This latest round included investments from banking giant BBVA — which led its last round of £149 million in 2018 — as well as Toscafund, Woodford Patient Capital Trust and funds advised by Perscitus LLP. Other high-profile investors have included the likes of musician and embracer of all things future technology, will.i.am.

The startup was co-founded by one of the industry’s earlier “banking disruptors” — Anthony Thomson, who previously co-founded one of the first entities to challenge the dominance of High Street banks in the U.K., Metro Bank. Atom’s rise mirrors a larger trend in Europe, and especially in the U.K., of what are collectively referred to as challenger banks.

Atom, founded several years ago, was one of the first, but there are now a number of others building banking offerings — sometimes on top of more legacy infrastructure, which they take as white-label services — that appeal to younger earners and savers because of lower fees, more flexibility in how money can be moved and borrowed and perks aimed specifically at their demographic. Others include Monese, Monzo, Revolut, Starling, N26 and Tandem.

Atom says that in the last year its total lending, covering both homeowners and small businesses, was up by 76%, to £2.4 billion, with deposings accounting for £1.8 billion of that (up from £1.4 billion). Atom says it gets applications of up to £20 million of business loans and £10 million of residential mortgage each week.

All good signs, but the crowded market of challengers, alongside bigger banks finally getting their new business strategies in order, is in part what is spurring this investment and what the company plans to do with it.

In November 2018, Atom announced that it would be partnering with a fintech startup called Thought Machine — founded by an ex-Googler several years ago — to migrate all of its banking technology to Thought Machine’s Blockchain-based platform called Vault. The plan has been to move Atom’s operations into the cloud, and to a much more modern set of infrastructure, to reduce the costs to run it, and also to start to introduce new services — although Atom doesn’t specify when.

Still, it appears that the company’s current metrics and the progress it’s had so far in its Thought Machine migration is encouraging investors.

“This latest raise recognises the enormous progress that we have made on our journey to disrupt UK banking, and is a clear signal of our investor’s support for our future plans,” said Bridget Rosewell, Atom’s chairwoman, in a statement.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | UK challenger bank Atom raises another £50M from BBVA and more at £530M valuation

Microsoft is making a $1 billion bet on OpenAI, the company formed by notable founders including Elon Musk and Sam Altman three years ago with the aim of doing research and development work to steer the growth of artificial intelligence toward the “friendlier” end of the spectrum, in order to help mitigate what Musk sees as a potential existential threat from AI if it isn’t developed responsibly while it grows in capability.

On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a multiyear “exclusive computing partnership” that will include the two companies building new AI supercomputing technologies for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, and OpenAI will also port its existing services to work on Azure. Microsoft will also now be “OpenAI’s preferred partner” when it comes to the commercialization of new AI technologies it develops in the future.

All the talk of “exclusivity” and “preference” in this announcement is particularly interesting because one of OpenAI’s founding principles was to “freely collaborate” among other AI researchers, and make both its work and patents available to others. But there are some caveats, including that there is OpenAI Inc. the nonprofit organization, and its for-profit corporate subsidiary OpenAI LP, and that its current charter includes a provision that out of “safety and security concerns” it may reduce its public publishing of its work as it moves forward.

The goal of this partnership for Microsoft seems to be to provide it an edge in building out a broad-scale Azure AI platform, and ensure its supercomputing technologies are involved in the development of artificial general intelligence. OpenAI benefits because Microsoft will be party to its principles around developing advances in AGI safely and with humanity’s interest in mind — and there’s the $1 billion, too.

This $1 billion isn’t a lump-sum up-front investment — instead, it’s a total amount that can be delivered anytime over the next decade, in installments that correspond with funding efforts on OpenAI’s side that feed back into Microsoft’s own AI ambitions, as detailed by The New York Times.

While the exact breakdown of the nature of the investment wasn’t made public, an account apparently belonging to CTO Greg Brockman on HackerNews said that it was “a cash investment.”

Update (11:30am PT): long after the press releases hit the wire at 6am this morning, OpenAI contacted us with a bit more detail about the announcement. Here is the statement we received from OpenAI co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman: “It’s a cash investment into OpenAI LP. It uses a standard capital commitment structure, to be called as we need it. We plan to spend it in less than five years, and possibly much sooner.”

At its launch, OpenAI noted that it had $1 billion committed from Musk, Altman and co-founder Brockman, as well as Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (this makes the Azure angle here particularly interesting), Infosys and YC Research, though it did not anticipate spending that much in the ensuing few years.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Microsoft invests billion in OpenAI in new multiyear partnership

As more companies turn to Airbnb for Work to arrange work trips, the vacation rentals, homes and experiences business is making things easier for business travelers.

The company already provides thousands of listings catered to business travelers, complete with flexible access, personal kitchens for home-cooked meals and/or on-site laundry. Now, customers can easily locate those listings with Airbnb’s new search capabilities for business trips.

Airbnb’s work trip toggle, available globally as of today, allows guests to customize their search results for work travel and make more informed booking decisions by immediately filtering out vacation homes and other less convenient offerings. Airbnb is relying partly on social recommendations to ensure the correct listings — which includes entire homes, Airbnb Plus homes and boutique hotels — are showcased, including listings that have positive ratings from business travelers specifically.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Airbnb introduces new search tools for business travelers