May Mobility, a Michigan-based startup that is operating autonomous shuttle services in three U.S. cities, has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Toyota Motor Corp.

The funding, which comes less than a year after May Mobility raised $22 million, will be used to expand every aspect of the company, including its AV shuttle fleet, as well as its engineering and operations staff.

May Mobility has 25 autonomous low-speed shuttles spread out between Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan and Providence, Rhode Island — the three cities in which it operates. The startup wants to build that number up to 25 vehicles per city, co-founder and COO Alisyn Malek told TechCrunch. That fleet size improves the economic picture for the startup and will begin to meaningfully impact transportation in that city.

This latest round does more than provide May Mobility with capital. The startup, which launched in 2017, has gained a customer as well. Toyota has picked May Mobility as one of its “autonomous driving providers for future open platforms,” according to the startup.

Toyota and May Mobility didn’t share specifics about what this partnership will lead to. But it will likely pair the startup’s autonomous vehicle technology with the Toyota e-Palette, a platform the automaker unveiled in 2018 at CES, the annual tech trade show in Las Vegas.

The e-Palette was presented as a concept vehicle, but really it’s a platform that fits into Toyota’s vision for a mobility ecosystem that will transition it from a company that just produces and sells cars to one that handles all aspects of moving people and things from point A to point B.

The e-Palette is designed for flexibility. The platform, which theoretically will be outfitted with autonomous vehicle technology, could be used as a shuttle, for delivering packages to customers or even as a roving mobile shop.

May Mobility will be working with Toyota to identify market opportunities, Malek said, adding that the company will be one of the automaker’s primary partners in co-development to bring those platforms out to market.

“They really believe in the transportation-as-a-service work that we’re doing and want to support that,” Malek said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Toyota leads million investment in autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility

Kustomer, a CRM startup that’s taking on the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce and many other bigger and older providers, has closed yet another round of funding — no less than its third fundraise of the year — as it continues to double down on its new approach to managing customers in today’s digital world.

The New York-based company has picked up another $60 million, a Series E led by new investor Coatue, with participation from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Battery Ventures. Other investors in the company include Redpoint Ventures, Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures and Social Leverage.

CEO Brad Birnbaum — who co-founded the company with Jeremy Suriel (the two worked together across a range of other places, including Airtime, Salesforce and AOL) — said the valuation is now “definitely above $500 million” but he declined to be more specific.

The New York-based company has been on a growth tear and has raised more than $161 million in the last 18 months (this $35 million raise and this $40 million raise were the other two 2019 rounds), and it has now racked up a total of $173.5 million in outside funding since it was founded in 2015.

“We’re exceeding all our business metrics and so we’re rapidly investing in the business,” Birnbaum said of the recent quick succession of funding rounds. A focus for the company will be to put more into its R&D and product development, also to use the funding to support the opening of its first European office in Q1 of next year.

Kustomer works with a variety of retailers and has seen a boost in its business with the proliferation of direct-to-consumer brands which — by foregoing the traditional retail channel — have found themselves needing to build out their own customer service operations. Current customers in that category are a who’s who of some of the more successful in the wider D2C trend: they include Glossier, Ring, ThirdLove, Rent the Runway, Sweetgreen, Glovo, Away and UNTUCKit.

In addition to those, Birnbaum said Kustomer has been working with government agencies, B2B companies and Fortune 50s, “a pretty diverse group.”

Companies like Zendesk and Salesforce built their businesses around the concept of really useful tools for customer service agents to use in largely traditional environments, where phone, email and possibly web-based chat made up the majority of inbound contact from customers.

But in the grand tradition of building something new from the ground up that reflects new digital patterns among consumers, rather than trying to tweak legacy products to be more updated, Kustomer has taken a different route with an “omnichannel” concept: the idea is to be able to capture conversations anywhere, whether it’s social media channels, messaging apps or — yes — phone, email and website chat, and bring them into a single customer view.

This is different from much of what is on the market today, he said, where different channels will generate different tickets, statuses and resolutions.

“We are the only company doing proper omnichannel, where you have a single threaded conversation that allows you to converse with customers in any channel you support,” he said. “To do that in a single threaded conversation sounds obvious, but I would challenge you to find others doing it the same way we do.”

A new version of its CRM platform, which will be coming out soon he said, will see Kustomer moving deeper into what he described as “RPA-like” business process automations. These are not just basic business rules based on key words, but a wider set of algorithms that can understand what a customer is asking and start to act on a set of mundane but routine tasks that customer service agents have to do regularly, such as reordering an item of clothing in a different size. It packages these and other AI-based functions together in a technology set it calls KustomerIQ.

“AI is a big area of focus for us,” he said.

While Kustomer had already raised a lot of money in recent times, there was another reason that the startup chose to take more: the investor itself.

Birnbaum describes Coatue as “one of the most modern and prolific investors, and by that I don’t mean the cash but their network and people, which are tremendous.” The idea is that Coatue is making many introductions and opening doors for Kustomer as it continues to scale.

“Kustomer’s differentiated, omnichannel approach is fundamentally reshaping the industry standard as trends in customer service continue to shift and consumers seek increasingly personalized interactions with brands,” said Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont, who is now on the startup’s board. “We look forward to working with Brad and his team as they continue to execute their strategic growth plan.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Kustomer raises M for its omnichannel-based CRM platform

A lot of companies talk about the value of your data, and about helping you get more control over the information you share, but Toronto-based Delphia is unique in aiming to build a viable, sustainable and scalable way to take a person’s data and turn that into real monetary gain. It’s not aiming to do this by putting a price tag on your social graph — instead, Delphia wants to pool the resources of a large group of individuals to derive real economic power through collective action.

“If you’re going to create a solution that effectively captures the value from our data, then it has to be one where we are going to aggregate it together, act as a collective,” explained Delphia CEO Andrew Peek in an interview.

Other attempts, Peek notes, have often focused on individual data in terms of its value to advertisers — and in that arrangement the value of an individual’s data is actually quite low. Delphia, by contrast, is looking to the capital markets, and hopes to replicate and improve upon a model that has and continues to work. Hedge funds and other large institutional investors use machine learning algorithms based on user data all the time, but users don’t have any active participation in this process, either in terms of the data they contribute or in terms of reaping any significant reward.

Delphia wants to change that by launching an app that will allow individuals to opt in to doing this kind of investment themselves, working together with other users. Users will also go beyond what these hedge funds can accomplish by actively providing additional info on top of what’s available via their passive participation through traditional online signals, which should translate to an advantage in investments.

“We ask you a series of questions every day, usually pertaining to current events,” Peek says. “So, Apple puts up the new AirPods, or Nike puts up the Colin Kaepernick ad — something’s happening every day. For us, that’s an opportunity to engage. But once we do, like, we really want to learn a little bit more about you. So there’s a handful of questions, those generate points. And then there are also points that you generate from connecting accounts: That could be connecting anything from a Twitter profile, to a Venmo account, to your phone’s location history to your Amazon purchase history — YouTube, Reddit, etc.”

This data will help Delphia make strategic picks in the stock market on behalf of their overall user base. It’ll collect fees, but will redistribute half of those back to its users who are investing their data, something which Peek notes will allow people to participate without even putting in any money. Users can also contribute funds, however, as with a traditional investment vehicle — though Delphia will be strictly focused on retail investing at launch, while it works on the trickier issue of institutional investment with regulators. For now, operating in a retail investment environment means all of its users can participate without any special requirements.

As mentioned, Delphia’s model requires that there’s a certain volume of users on the platform participating before it can work as designed by the data scientists on the team, who have published academically regarding the company’s model. That’s why they’re kicking off their public launch today with a sign-up page, with the goal of achieving a critical mass of 100,000 pre-registered users before officially launching their app. They’ve also built the calculator below, which is designed to show how their model will work based on the volume of users they sign up, as compared to more traditional retail investment advisor and robot-advisors.

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Delphia’s model is definitely ambitious, and it also requires a lot of trust on the part of users, something Peek freely admits. The difference, he says, is that their model only works so long as they continue to earn that trust, as users have to continue to participate to ensure their advantage remains in place. It’s also worth noting that there doesn’t seem to be any realistic way of putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to data generation and sharing, but Delphia’s vision does re-introduce an element of control, as well as a way for those who might be locked out of traditional stock market investing to participate in generating true economic power.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Delphia wants to turn your data into investment capital through collective action

Flow, a startup that helps brands and retailers build a cross-border e-commerce business, has raised $37 million in Series B funding.

CEO Rob Keve said that thanks to the magic of social media and digital marketing, many direct-to-consumer brands are reaching consumers around the world. However, the actual shopping experience for those consumers often leaves a lot to be desired — even if there are international purchase options, the shipping is usually slow or expensive, and the site might also fail to integrate with local payment services.

Keve said that he and CTO Mike Bryzek co-founded the Hoboken, N.J.-based startup to solve this problem: Flow sits on top of existing e-commerce platforms, so that the shopper’s experience (whether that’s a website, app or distributed buy button) is automatically tailored to their location, with local pricing and payment options.

Plus, thanks to Flow’s relationships with carriers, international shipping should be timely and affordable. And even if a business already has international shipping deals and distribution centers, they can still use Flow to manage the logistics.

Founded in 2015, the company said it’s now seeing 200% year-over-year client growth, with customers including online brands like MVMT Watches, as well as omni-channel businesses like MZ Wallace and Charles & Colvard.

With this new funding, Flow has raised around $55 million total. The Series B was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from American Express Ventures and Latitude Ventures. NEA Venture Partner Liza Landsman (former president of Jet.com) is joining Flow’s board of directors.

“Cross-border shopping is a rapidly growing area of e-commerce, and more companies are investing in their cross-border strategy to capture that international demand,” Landsman said in a statement. “Flow is a premier vendor in this space, and their platform delivers strategic advantages for brands and retailers entering or expanding into international markets. Our team is excited to support Flow’s rapid growth.”

Keve told me that Flow will use the money to expand its sales and marketing team, and to improve the product. For example, he said he wants to continue developing the artificial intelligence that Flow uses to classify products (necessary for calculating duty and tax costs).

He also said he wants to continue building out Flow’s services business. While it’s important for the company to offer “a turnkey platform,” the technology is also “married” to Flow’s expertise about the strategies that work in each country.

“There’s services and knowledge that is very country-specific and even category-specific,” Keve said. “That is always going to be a matter of consulting and advising and sharing best practices … We will continue to be investing in that layer of expertise.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Flow raises M to simplify international e-commerce

Synchronize your watches, dust off your passports and pack your bags, startuppers. Disrupt Berlin 2019 kicks off in just seven short days. Thousands of you — representing more than 50 countries — will arrive in Berlin ready to learn, exhibit, compete and network for two action-packed days.

Good news for professional procrastinators and last-minute decisions makers. Buy a late registration pass to Disrupt Berlin now, and you can still save up to €200 over the onsite ticket price.

There’s so much to do in just two days — how will you spend your time at Disrupt?

Hear from the leading names, minds, makers and shakers of the early-stage startup community. These are the folks who’ve dreamed, launched, pivoted, scaled and succeeded. And they’ll be on hand to share how they did it. Here are just two of the presentations we have on tap for you. You’ll find the complete schedule of events and presentations in the Disrupt Berlin ’19 agenda.

How to Fit Blockchain into Your Startup Strategy: Chances are, you keep hearing about this “blockchain” thing — and maybe you’re ignoring it but deep down, you know you should probably think about how it could help your startup. To help you with that and maybe demystify blockchain a bit, too, we’ll be joined by Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation), Ash Egan (Accomplice VC) and Ashley Tyson (Web3 Foundation) — all of whom have deep roots in the blockchain community.

From Startup Battlefield to IPO: In 2010, Cloudflare participated in one of the very first Disrupt Battlefields and a few months ago, the company made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. In this conversation with Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince, we’ll talk about Cloudflare’s path to an IPO, the unique challenges it faced, and what’s next for the company.

And speaking of Startup Battlefield, don’t miss this epic throwdown as a cadre of the very best startups takes the Main Stage to launch to the world. They’ll pitch to an expert panel of judges and vie for the Disrupt Cup, $50,000 and potentially life-altering investor and media attention.

Enjoy watching startuppers compete? Get this — we’re holding the TC Hackathon finals on the Extra Crunch Stage. The 10 finalists chose from a range of sponsored challenges — each with its own cash prize. Then they endured a grueling, sleep-deprived 24 hours to create and code a working product that solves a real-world problem.

Be there as they power through a two-minute pitch to a panel of expert judges. And stick around to see who earns the title of best over-all hack — along with $5,000 — from the TechCrunch editors.

Network among hundreds of outstanding startups in Startup Alley, our exhibition hall. That’s also where you’ll find the TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors chose these companies — fine startups one and all — to represent the best in these tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, and CRM/Enterprise.

You have just seven days before all glorious heck breaks loose in the form of Disrupt Berlin 2019. Don’t miss out on the opportunity, the fun, the connection and the community. Buy your pass today and save up to €200. We’ll see you in Berlin!

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

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Disrupt Berlin 2019 opens in just one week