Plume, the Denver-based startup that provides hormone replacement therapies and medical consultations tailored to the trans community, could not be launching at a time when the company’s services are more needed.

It’s no hyperbole to say that transgender citizens in the United States are under attack. Whether from government policies that are intended to defund their access to insurer-provided medical care, or actual physical assaults, transgender Americans are living in physically and politically perilous times.

That’s one reason why Matthew Wetschler and his co-founder Jerrica Kirkley founded Plume, which provides telehealth services tailored for the transgender community.

The two doctors met and became friends in medical school. From the earliest days, the two were inseparable, Dr. Wetschler recalled. “She and I spent nearly 12 hours a day together,” he said.

Dr. Jerrica Kirkley, Plume co-founder Image Credit: Plume

After medical school, Wetschler moved to the Bay Area to finish his residency at Stanford and then went on to run a consulting firm that worked primarily with digital health startups. Kirkley, who is transgender, focused on gender therapy in the trans community.

A little over a year ago the two began to discuss the potential for creating a primarily telehealth service for the trans community, Wetschler said.

“We have always shared a belief that the healthcare system can do better for patients and doctors,” he said. And almost no population is quite as exposed to the shortcomings of the current healthcare system as the transgender community.

“I had been increasingly interested in the telehealth space and the emerging trend of leveraging mobile technology to provide unparalleled access to clinical care at the touch of a button,” said Wetschler. “And many of the problems [Kirkley] was seeing with her patients involved finding doctors with expertise and safe sources of medications.”

In many instances, despite the duty of care that physicians have to maintain, transgender patients are subjected to discriminatory practices and even the denial of care. Roughly 20% of transgender patients who seek care are either denied that care or harassed because of their gender identity, Wetschler said.

Many patients don’t have access to the medications they need, which can lead to up to 30% of patients seeking out the medications they need on the black market.

It’s an issue for the more than 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender.

Plume provides a safe, on-demand service for patients that need it, said Wetschler. And does it for $99 per month.

The company doesn’t perform gender reassignment surgeries, but that’s about the only limitation on the care that the company offers. It can recommend local surgeons who will perform those procedures and it will provide consultations for patients or potential patients considering various hormone-related or surgical therapies. A majority of the Plume care team is transgender, according to Wetschler.

“What we’re proud of with Plume is that we offer a way of accessing this way of trans-specific care regardless of policy or insurance coverage,” said Wetschler. 

At the heart of Plume’s services is access to gender-affirming hormone therapy. “This is the fundamental medical treatment for the trans community,” Wetschler said. “The trans experience is unique in that for most it involves navigating a gender and cis-normative healthcare system that may not understand their experiences. It can be highly traumatic.”

Plume offers a medical evaluation, ongoing monitoring and lab assignments and prescriptions. Soon, the company will also provide medication delivery, as well.

For most Americans, there’s a presumption that medical care will be delivered in a non-judgmental and safe way (both psychologically and physically). For many trans Americans there’s a lack of comfort and risk that’s inherent in the end-to-end care experience. Plume is trying to solve for that.

Dr. Matthew Wetschler, Plume, co-founder Image Credit: Plume

Investors from the nation’s top venture capital firms, General Catalyst and Slow Ventures, believe in the company’s vision and have backed it with $2.9 million in seed financing. Springbank Collective is also an investor in the company.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Plume is building a healthcare service specifically for the transgender community

Mapillary, the Swedish startup that wants to take on Google and others in mapping the world via a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, has been acquired by Facebook, according to the company’s blog. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

The Mapillary team and project will become part of Facebook’s broader open mapping efforts. Mapillary also says its “commitment to OpenStreetMap stays.”

Writes Mapillary co-founder and CEO Jan Erik Solem (who also previously founded Polar Rose, a face recognition solution for mobile and web that Apple bought in 2010):

From day one of Mapillary, we have been committed to building a global street-level imagery platform that allows everyone to get the imagery and data they need to make better maps. With tens of thousands of contributors to our platform and with maps being improved with Mapillary data every single day, we’re now taking the next big step on that journey.

As Solem notes, Facebook is known to be “building tools and technology to improve maps through a combination of machine learning, satellite imagery and partnerships with mapping communities.” Mapping has immediate use-cases for the social networking behemoth, such as Facebook Marketplaces and its local business offerings, while another application is augmented reality.

This saw it recently acquire another European startup, Scape, news that TechCrunch broke in February. Founded in 2017, Scape Technologies was developing a “Visual Positioning Service” based on computer vision, which lets developers build apps that require location accuracy far beyond the capabilities of GPS alone. The technology initially targeted augmented reality apps, but also had the potential to be used to power applications in mobility, logistics and robotics. More broadly, Scape wanted to enable any machine equipped with a camera to understand its surroundings.

Mapillary is also the latest “open” project to join and now be funded by Facebook. Last December, it quietly acquired U.K.-based Atlas ML, the custodian of “Papers With Code,” the free and open resource for machine learning papers and code.

Returning to Mapillary, the startup is keen to stress that it will continue being a “global platform for imagery, map data, and improving all maps.” “You will still be able to upload imagery and use the map data from all the images on the platform,” says Solem. It is also changing the license to permit commercial use:

Historically, all of the imagery available on our platform has been open and free for anyone to use for non-commercial purposes. Moving forward, that will continue to be true, except that starting today, it will also be free to use for commercial users as well. By continuing to make all images uploaded to Mapillary open, public, and available to everyone, we hope to enable new use cases, and grow the breadth of coverage and usage to benefit mapping for everyone. While we previously needed to focus on commercialisation to build and run the platform, joining Facebook moves Mapillary closer to the vision we’ve had from day one of offering a free service to anyone.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mapillary, the crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, has been acquired by Facebook

Over the past two decades, the venture capital industry has exploded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.

What began as a sleepy industry in Boston and Menlo Park has now expanded to dozens of cities the world over. The National Venture Capital Association estimates that VCs deployed more than $130 billion in 2018 and 2019, and thousands of new investors have joined the ranks in recent years to find the next great startups.

All that activity, though, poses a dilemma for founders: Who actively writes checks? Who is a leader in a specific market or vertical? Who has the conviction to underwrite pathbreaking investments? Who, ultimately, do you want to have by your side for the next decade as your startup grows?

There are lists that rank VCs by their exit returns. There are lists that rank young VCs by their potential. There are lists of VCs who claim investment interest in various sectors. There are lists that try to ferret out deal volume, impact and other quantitative metrics. There are internal lists at accelerators that share collective wisdom between founders.

All those lists and rankings have an important function to serve, but for all the compilations of investors out there, we couldn’t find a single one that publicly answered a simple yet vital question: Who are the VC investors who are leaders in specific verticals who should be a founder’s first stop during a fundraise?

Today’s venture industry is made up of thousands of investors with varying specialties, and far too many passive investors that are willing to participate in rounds but don’t actively participate in deals unless other investors have committed. Many don’t actively push to get deals done or don’t actively lead the charge to build a syndicate of investors.

With all that in mind, we’re excited to launch a new initiative that we hope will help answer those questions and help founders find that first check — The TechCrunch List.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be collecting data around which individual investors are actually willing to write the proverbial “first check” into a startup’s fundraising round and help catalyze deals for founders — whether it be seed, Series A or otherwise (i.e. out of your Series A investors, the first person who was willing to write the check and get the ball rolling with other investors). Once we’ve collected, cleaned and analyzed the data, we’ll publish lists of the most recommended “first check” investors across different verticals, investment stages and geographies, so founders can see which investors are potentially the best fit for their company.

Founders are used to being specialized; after all, they have to live and breathe their startups every single day. So it can be jarring to start talking to generalist investors who know little about a category and ask shallow questions only to render a judgment with irrelevant advice. One of the greatest impetuses for us to put together The TechCrunch List is that like founders, we also struggle to cut through the noise around the interests of individual VCs.

We’d argue that’s close to impossible. There is more spend on technology than ever before in history. Verticals are getting more competitive — market maps that used to have 10 to 50 companies have expanded to hundreds. The only way to compete today is to specialize, and that has never been more true for VCs.

In all, The TechCrunch List will publish the most recommended “first check” writers across 22 different categories, ranging from D2C & e-commerce brands to space, and everything in between. Through some data analysis around total investments in each space, we believe our 22 categories should cover the entirety or majority of the venture activity today.

To make this project a success and create a useful resource for founders, we need your help. We want to hear from company builders and we want to hear from them directly. We will be collecting endorsements submitted by founders through the form linked here.

Through the form, founders will be asked to submit their name, their startup, the stage of company, the name of the one “first check” investor they want to endorse and a couple of minor logistical items. We are asking founders here for their on-the-record endorsement. We ask that you limit your recommendations to one (1) person per fundraise round.

While many investors may have helped you in your journey, we are specifically interested in the person who most helped you get a round underway and closed. The one who catalyzed your round. The one who guided you through the fundraise process. The one investor you would ultimately recommend to other founders who are trying to find their VC champion.

Our main goal is to help founders, dreamers and company builders find investors who will invest in them today, and with your help, we think we can. The TechCrunch List is not meant to identify every possible investor under the sun who might make an investment within a space, nor just the big household-name VCs whose reputations can sometimes seem more linked to their follower counts on Twitter as opposed to their bold term sheets.

Our hope is that this can be a go-to resource for founders looking to fundraise going forward, and with that in mind, we are very determined to improve the glaring representation gaps in the venture industry. It’s no secret that the world of VC still looks like a country-club membership roster, dominated by white men with strong opinions and loud voices. Looking at the data, it’s clear that there are groups that are particularly underrepresented, with only a small portion of the industry made up of Black, Latinx and female investors, for example.

We want to amplify these voices and we want to hear particularly from founders of color, female founders and other underrepresented groups. We also want to make sure our recommended investor lists are sufficiently representative and highlight underrepresented investors who might not have had equal opportunities in the past.

We want to help builders wade through the BS politics and fundraising annoyances that founders complain to us about on a daily basis, and help them identify qualified leads that are actually active, engaged and specialized and are the best fit to help founders raise money and grow now.

Thank you for your support. We’re excited to build The TechCrunch List with you — and for you.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Who’s writing first checks into startups?

The venture capital industry is less transparent today than at any time in recent memory.

For all the talk about expanding access and improving its sordid record on diversity, in reality, it has never been harder for founders to figure out who can even write a check to their startups in the first place.

When I first returned to TechCrunch after my second stint in venture capital, my first piece was entitled “The loss of first check investors.” While working in the venture capital industry, it was maddening to see — particularly at the pre-seed and seed stages — how few investors were really willing to go out on a limb and invest in founders before another VC had committed a check.

It’s only gotten worse in the past two years since that article, and the complexity comes from a number of different places. As our investigation showed more than a year ago, fewer and fewer venture rounds are being announced through SEC Form D filings.

There are almost no publicly accountable datasets left indicating who is writing checks in the venture industry and which companies are receiving those checks. While stealthiness is valid in the early days of a startup, the excuse wears thin after years.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How we’re rebuilding the VC industry

Conduct an online search and you’ll find close to one million websites offering their own definition of DevSecOps.

Why is it that domain experts and practitioners alike continue to iterate on analogous definitions? Likely, it’s because they’re all correct. DevSecOps is a union between culture, practice and tools providing continuous delivery to the end user. It’s an attitude; a commitment to baking security into the engineering process. It’s a practice; one that prioritizes processes that deliver functionality and speed without sacrificing security or test rigor. Finally, it’s a combination of automation tools; correctly pieced together, they increase business agility.

The goal of DevSecOps is to reach a future state where software defines everything. To get to this state, businesses must realize the DevSecOps mindset across every tech team, implement work processes that encourage cross-organizational collaboration, and leverage automation tools, such as for infrastructure, configuration management and security. To make the process repeatable and scalable, businesses must plug their solution into CI/CD pipelines, which remove manual errors, standardize deployments and accelerate product iterations. Completing this process, everything becomes code. I refer to this destination as “IT-as-code.”

Why is DevSecOps important?

Whichever way you cut it, DevSecOps, as a culture, practice or combination of tools, is of increasing importance. Particularly these days, with more consumers and businesses leaning on digital, enterprises find themselves in the irrefutable position of delivering with speed and scale. Digital transformation that would’ve taken years, or at the very least would’ve undergone a period of premeditation, is now urgent and compressed into a matter of months.

The keys to a successful DevSecOps program

Security and operations are a part of this new shift to IT, not just software delivery: A DevSecOps program succeeds when everyone, from security, to operations, to development, is not only part of the technical team but able to share information for repeatable use. Security, often seen as a blocker, will uphold the “secure by design” principle by automating security code testing and reviews, and educating engineers on secure design best practices. Operations, typically reactive to development, can troubleshoot incongruent merges between engineering and production proactively. However, currently, businesses are only familiar with utilizing automation for software delivery. They don’t know what automation means for security or operations. Figuring out how to apply the same methodology throughout the whole program and therefore the whole business is critical for success.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Implement DevSecOps to transform your business to IT-as-code

Three years ago almost to the day, Intercom announced that it was bringing former Intuit exec Karen Peacock on board as COO. Today, she got promoted to CEO, effective July 1. Current CEO and company co-founder Eoghan McCabe will become Chairman.

As it turns out, these moves aren’t a coincidence. McCabe had been actively thinking about a succession plan when he hired Peacock. “When I first started talking to Eoghan three years ago, he shared with me that his vision was to hire someone as COO, who could then become the CEO at the right time and he could transition into the chairman role,” Peacock told TechCrunch .

She said while the idea was always there, they didn’t feel the need to rush the process. “We were just looking for whatever the right time was, and it wasn’t something we were expected to do in the first year or two. And now is really the right time to transition with all of the momentum that we’re seeing in the market,” she said.

She said as McCabe makes the transition away from running the company he helped found, he will still be around, and they will continue working together on things like product and marketing strategy, but Peacock brings a pedigree of her own to the new role.

Not only has she been in charge of commercial aspects of the Intercom business for the past three years, prior to that she was SVP at Intuit where she ran small business products that included QuickBooks, and grew it from a $500 million business to a hefty $2.5 billion during her tenure.

McCabe says that experience was one of the reasons he spent six months trying to convince Peacock to become COO at Intercom in 2017. “It’s really hard to find a leader that’s as well rounded, and as unique as Karen is. You know she doesn’t actually fit your typical very experienced operator,” he said. He points to her deep product background, calling her a “product nerd,” and her undergraduate degree in applied mathematics from Harvard as examples.

In spite of the pandemic, she’s taking over a company that’s still managing to grow. The company’s business messenger products, which enable companies to chat with customers online, have become increasingly important during the pandemic with many brick-and-mortar businesses shut down and the majority of business is being conducted digitally.

“Our overall revenue is $150 million in annual recurring revenue, and a supporting data point to what we were just talking about is that our new business to up market customers through our sales teams has doubled year over year. So we’re really seeing some quite nice acceleration there,” she said.

Peacock says she wants to continue building the company and using her role to build a diverse and inclusive culture. “I believe that [diversity and inclusion] is not one person’s job, it’s all of our jobs, but we have one person who’s the center post of that (a head of D&I). And then we work with outside consulting firms as well to just try and stay in a place where we understand all of what’s possible and what we can do in the world.”

She adds, “I will say that we need to make more progress on diversity and inclusion. I wouldn’t step back and pat ourselves on the back and say we’ve done this perfectly. There’s a lot more that we need to do, and it’s one of the things that I’m very excited to tackle as CEO.”

According to a February Wall Street Journal article, less than 6% of women hold CEO jobs in the U.S. Peacock certainly sees this and wants to continue to mentor women as she takes over at Intercom. “It is something that I’m very passionate about. I do speak to various different groups of up and coming women leaders, and I mentor a group of women outside of Intercom,” she said. She also sits on the board at Dropbox with other women leaders like Condoleezza Rice and Meg Whitman.

Peacock says that taking over during a pandemic makes it interesting, and instead of visiting the company’s offices, she’ll be doing a lot of video conferences. But neither is she coming in cold to the company having to ramp up on the business side of things, while getting to know everyone.

“I feel very fortunate to have been with Intercom for three years, and so I know all the people and they all know me. And so I think it’s a lot easier to do that virtually than if you’re meeting people for the very first time. Similarly, I also know the business very well, and so it’s not like I’m trying to both ramp up on the business and deal with a pandemic,” she said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Intercom announces the promotion of Karen Peacock to CEO

DoorDash has confirmed that it is raising “approximately $400 million” in a Series H round of funding.

Earlier today, Axios reported that the company was looking for a roughly $400 million round at a post-money valuation of $16 billion. DoorDash clarified in a statement provided to TechCrunch that the valuation is slightly under the $16 billion mark.

The round was expected, though the final valuation of the deal came in $1 billion higher than earlier reports had indicated.

DoorDash, the popular American food delivery company, has aggressively raised capital throughout its life, including a huge Series G in late 2019 that valued it near $13 billion. According to the company, new investors Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity led the round, along with what it described as “existing investors, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates.”

That DoorDash raised more capital from private investors is itself a quirk of 2020; the company privately filed to go public earlier this year, plans that were pushed back likely due to COVID-19, and the pandemic’s ensuing economic unrest. But DoorDash is nothing if not capital-hungry, and raising an IPO-sized haul of cash from private investors is not only on-brand, but essential, given the nature of the company’s business.

The domestic food-delivery giant is at war with Uber’s Uber Eats service, the Postmates delivery service and the Grubhub-Just Eat Takeaway hybrid. This highly competitive market keeps capital requirements high.

It’s not exactly clear that DoorDash actually needed to take the money or hold off on a public listing. Other companies, like Vroom, were undeterred by what looked like weak economics in their core businesses and made the jump to public markets. Perhaps DoorDash will go public soon, as well, this new capital be damned. But if it does use its new check to hold off on going public, the question becomes what market conditions is DoorDash waiting for?

Update: I tweaked the headline on this piece. It should now be clearer.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DoorDash confirms 0M raise, IPO timing unclear