Browsing Tag: Startups

It turns out GDPR was just the tip of the privacy iceberg. With California’s privacy law coming on line January 1st and dozens more in various stages of development, it’s clear that governments are taking privacy seriously, which means companies have to as well. New York startup BigID, which has been developing a privacy platform for the last several years, finds itself in a good position to help. Today, the company announced a $50 million Series C.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with help from SAP.io Fund, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and ClearSky. New investor Salesforce Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $96 million, according to Crunchbase.

In addition to the funding, the company is also announcing the formation of a platform of sorts, which will offer a set of privacy services for customers. It includes data discovery, classification and correlation. “We’ve separated the product into some constituent parts. While it’s still sold as a broad-based solution, it’s much more of a platform now in the sense that there’s a core set of capabilities that we heard over and over that customers want,” CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota told TechCrunch.

He says that these capabilities really enable customers to see connections in the data across a set of disparate data sources. “There are a lot of products that do the request part, but there’s nobody that’s able to look across your entire data landscape, the hundreds of petabytes, and pick out the data in Salesforce, Workday, AWS, mainframe, and all these places you could have data on [an individual], and show how it’s all tied together,” Sirota explained.

It’s interesting to see the mix of strategic investors and traditional venture capitalists that are investing in the company. The strategics in particular see the privacy landscape as well as anyone, and Sirota says it’s a case of privacy mattering more than ever and his company providing the means to navigate the changing landscape. “Consumers care about privacy, which means legislators care about it, which ultimately means companies have to care about it,” he said. He added, “Strategics, whether they are companies that collect personal data or those that sell to those companies, therefore have an interest in BigID .”

The company has been growing fast and raising money quickly to help it scale to meet demand. Starting in January 2018, it raised $14 million. Just six months later, it raised another $30 million and you can tack on today’s $50 million. Sirota says having money in the bank and seeing these investments helps give enterprise customers confidence that the company is in this for the long haul.

Sirota wouldn’t give an exact valuation, only saying that while the company is not a unicorn, the valuation was a “robust number.” He says the plan now it to keep expanding the platform, and there will be announcements coming soon around partnerships, customers and new capabilities.

Sirota will be appearing at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise on September 5th at 11 am on the panel “Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | BigID announces M Series C investment as privacy takes center stage

LinkedIn, with 645 million users in 200 countries, is the undisputed leader when it comes to being the world’s biggest network of professionals, a position that it uses to leverage products in areas like recruitment and e-learning. But in achieving that size, it hasn’t really developed products for a more targeted approach for specific verticals or audiences. And that has opened the field to a wide variety of startups to fill in the gaps and compete with it. Today, one of these hopefuls — a startup called RippleMatch that has built a recruitment platform to help organizations specifically to connect with recent graduates from more diverse backgrounds that match their needs — is announcing a Series A of $6 million to do just that.

The funding, which will be used to expand the platform, as well as for business development, is being led by G20 Ventures, with Work-Bench, and previous investors Accomplice, Bullpen Capital and AlleyCorp also participating.

The company is not disclosing its valuation, but from what I understand it’s a “material step up,” as it has been on a steady growth curve and counts companies like Pfizer, TripAdvisor and Qualtrics among its customer base. This is also the first significant outside money that it has raised. RippleMatch’s very first funding, in fact, was the signing bonus that co-founder Eric Ho received when he once got a job at Facebook. “It was the need to pay that back that led us to raising this Series A,” joked Andrew Myers, the other co-founder who is also the CEO.

Myers and Ho met and started the company when they were still students at Yale University. Ho was about to graduate, but Myers was still in the thick of his undergrad degree, which he still has yet to complete (and, as is the way of tech founders, may never finish).

The idea for the company came when Myers — who studied history and political science — was thinking about the predicament that a lot of his friends from back home in Colorado were facing in the working world.

Like Myers, they were also undergraduates. But unlike him, they were not at Yale nor any other top-shelf school that has the benefit not only of prestigious name recognition, but typically strong recruiting pipelines to some of the most competitive companies hiring graduates for lucrative entry-level positions.

“I was very cognisant of the divide coming from different socio-economic backgrounds,” Myers said in an interview. “I could see that a lot of my friends from home would be better hires for places than some of the people I knew at Yale. They just didn’t have the same opportunities. We didn’t think of this as a business venture in the early days; it was a problem that our friends had that I wanted to solve.”

Using AI to cut out the recruiter

RippleMatch’s approach is relatively straightforward: The company has built a platform that takes a potential candidate through a relatively quick set of questions about his/her career and geographical ambitions, interests and so on, along with a copy of the candidate’s resume.

It then combines these with basic information about a candidate’s GPA and test scores. Taking all that and combining it with more information sources outside of the candidate’s own input, it comes up with some 300 data points that it crunches together to match candidates with job and internship opportunities. On the employer side, it not only sources job vacancies of the moment, but also works on matching an employer’s wider hiring strategy with this trove of people — the idea being that it’s bringing up possibilities that the employer might have otherwise passed over or not even seen to begin with.

Myers says that the matching algorithms that RippleMatch has built, which include the ability to ascertain what people might directly and indirectly be best suited to do, essentially cut out the “middle man” in the process — that is, the recruiter, as well as potentially the relationships and pipelines that may already exist, thus leveling the playing field for everyone, making it just as likely that an employer will discover their next star hire from a small college in the Midwest as from Stanford.

As Mike Troiano, the partner at G20 who led the firm’s investment in RippleMatch, describes it, a school’s name recognition and networking prowess aren’t the only things standing in the way of qualified candidates getting a look in the door. His daughter was having a hard time getting a response from a company she contacted for an internship and when they put together her LinkedIn profile, they realised that she simply lacked the professional network to figure out if there was someone to contact and help.

Indeed, while LinkedIn has proven to be a strong starting point for many professionals in their career progression, its shortcomings are most obvious in more specific examples like these. (It was one reason that LinkedIn made a big push some years ago to start trying to bring younger users on to the platform, to work on ways of getting them to start building up their profiles and networks.)

RippleMatch is part of a growing number of startups that have been identifying and (for their purposes) exploiting these kinds of holes in LinkedIn’s wider platform. Another startup that has been building a platform also aimed at graduates and specifically at trying to help source more diverse pools of candidates is Handshake (which itself raised $40 million less than a year ago).

Handshake takes a different approach in that it offers job boards and proactively works with universities and recruitment organizations and offers users a social network / community of sorts from which to source advice and exchange information. All this has helped boost that company’s database to 14 million people as of last year, likely more now that it’s opened up access to all university students in the U.S.

Others that have been pecking away at the LinkedIn hegemony include the likes of Triplebyte, another well-capitalised recruitment startup that specifically targets software engineers. The startup has built its own assessment platform (used by RippleMatch to recruit, incidentally) which its CEO and co-founder Harj Taggar also believes can help level the playing field between those who are coming from big-name companies and schools and those who are not, focusing solely on a person’s ability to code. LinkedIn might have millions of profiles of engineers to Triplebyte’s thousands, but the key with the smaller company is that it has profiles of people “who are actively job searching,” which he notes stands in contrast to the unsolicited contacts that many people get on LinkedIn, just by virtue of being there. “We’re getting two times the rate of responses that recruiting teams see on LinkedIn,” Taggar claimed. It’s now ramping up with a premium tier aimed at those recruiting at scale.

RippleMatch is still at a relatively small and early stage of its life in comparison to these two. While it has partnerships with some 1,200 diversity focused organizations on campuses to bring in more candidates, and today some 60% of its candidate pool are from underrepresented backgrounds, the company today only has about 100,000 candidates in total on the platform, and agreements with 60 companies that tap RippleMatch to find them. But, at a time when the economic, societal and geographic rifts seem insurmountable in countries like the U.S., it’s more important than ever to work on ways to help close those gaps, paving the way for a big opportunity for tech-based solutions like RippleMatch’s.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | RippleMatch nabs M for a diversity-focused graduate recruitment platform powered by AI

Scooter startup Lime is ending the juicer model in Paris. The company has announced that it will stop working with freelancers to recharge scooter batteries at night. Lime is switching to Amazon’s model by partnering with third-party companies.

Lime has often been criticized for relying on freelancers to take care of its scooters. As Libération reported back in May, the company used to pay freelancers €20 per scooter and slowly decreased that amount to €5 per scooter.

Juicers received a notification today telling them that their accounts will be deactivated in 45 days. The company probably doesn’t want to end the juicer program overnight so that freelancers have enough time to look for another job.

After that, Lime isn’t going to hire all juicers directly. The company is now looking for third-party companies that can help them manage the scooter fleet in Paris.

Lime says that those companies will have to comply with multiple quality and safety standards. For instance, the company will first select companies that use electric vehicles and renewable electricity. Based on wording, it seems like it doesn’t mean that all partners have to use electric vehicles and renewable electricity.

Finally, Lime says that former juicers will get some opportunities to become Lime employees. The company will also try to help some of them create a formal company to keep working with Lime.

This structure is quite reminiscent of Amazon in France. Amazon doesn’t hire delivery persons directly. They partner with third-party companies. Libération also reported that Amazon takes advantage of that relationship to foster productivity at all costs. If your company doesn’t perform well enough, Amazon just stops giving you packages to deliver.

Back in June, the City of Paris announced that it would clamp down on scooter startups. There are just too many of them currently operating in Paris. The city plans to select two or three companies and give them a license to operate.

It’s clear that Lime wants to improve its processes to get a license. Paris said that it would select companies based on how they pay workers charging scooters overnight and how they handle broken scooters.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Lime stops working with freelancers in Paris

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company formerly known as WeWork is considering slashing its valuation as it looks to woo public market investors.

The company is reportedly considering a valuation of somewhere in the $20 billion range for its initial public offering, a figure that’s far less than the $47 billion valuation it received when it raised its last round of private funding.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | We Company reportedly mulls slashing its valuation ahead of its initial public offering

“You are what what you’re eating eats,” says Matthew Wadiak, cofounder and CEO of Cooks Venture and former Blue Apron COO.

The company, which just received $12 million in funding, is looking to rethink the way we grow crops, feed our livestock, and ultimately take better care of our planet. The strategy is three-fold.

First, Cooks Venture partners with small farms to set up regenerative agricultural practices from its own IP, which it has also set up at its own 800-acre farm. This includes determining which types of plants will protect the soil itself and sequester carbon in the ground. It also includes measuring soil carbon, nutrition and other biological factors to promote biodiversity and stave off pest populations. According to the company, leading climate scientists believe that if this process was carried out for all farms across the globe, climate change could be reversed.

But regenerative agriculture as a product is just a small slice of what Cooks Ventures is all about. After all, what is Cooks Venture actually growing on its farm? The answer is chicken feed. But not the same old chicken feed that’s been around for generations.

Cooks Venture chicken feed is grown specifically for Cooks Venture chickens, which have been selected over many, many generations of Heritage chickens to have the best digestive health, and are given unrestricted access to the outdoors. All in all, it took more than a decade to isolate the genetic lines that have resulted in Cooks Venture chickens, called Heirloom chickens. These chickens are also more heat resistant, meaning that they can be raised in unusually hot places once the company looks to expand globally.

Because these chickens are able to eat a more diverse diet, with more fiber and protein than the chicken feed used on other chicken farms, they are higher in omegas, healthier and taste better, according to Wadiak. Moreover, Cooks Venture has managed to scale up its operations, including its own processing facility, to distribute upwards of 700,000 chickens per week.

Obviously, Cooks Venture’s main revenue model is selling chickens. The company is currently working with FreshDirect, Golden Gate Meat Company, and has more retail partnerships to announce soon, alongside sales of the chickens on its website.

But the funding will also go towards building out the upstream and downstream revenue models. Upstream, Cooks Venture wants to partner with farmers to not only build out regenerative agricultural practices, but to show them that they can actually grow more calories per acre (and thus make more money) by using these regenerative processes. The IP around how to do this — which crops to grow, which trees and ponds to leave in place, and how to rotate those crops — is a valuable product.

Downstream, the company wants to work with chicken farmers or companies who are interested in proliferating the Cooks Ventures genetic lines throughout the world.

In this way, Cooks Venture is the first vertically integrated agricultural company to operate solely on regenerative agriculture.

Wadiak says the greatest challenge to Cooks Venture is educating people around regenerative agtech and mobilizing those people to move the needle against old-school, economically unsound and environmentally unfriendly agricultural systems.

“97 percent of agriculture in America is crops and most of those crops are going to animal feed,” said Wadiak. “Unless we address the animal feed system in our country and the lobbying and political misrepresentation in those systems, it’s very challenging to change the food system and create regenerative systems.”

He added that America’s farmers make up two percent of the voting population, whereas billions of dollars are spent lobbying congressman to vote for proliferating subsidies in corn and soy.

The $12 million in financing was provided by AMERRA Capital Management.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cooks Venture picks up million to rethink agriculture from the ground up

Terramera, a Canadian company selling bio-pesticides and seed treatments to reduce the use of chemicals in agriculture, has raised $45 million in its latest round of financing.

The round was led by strategic investor Ospraie Ag Science and the company’s previous backer, Seed2Growth Ventures.

Led by Carl Casale, a former Monsanto executive, Ospraie Ag Science has backed several manufacturers of bio-pesticides and organic crop management products including Marrone BioInnovations and Agrospheres.

Vancouver-based Terramera first came to prominence with a line of Neem-based pesticides that are sold in retailers across North America (including Target). That product targets bedbugs, mites and other household pests and funguses.

The company’s latest product is Actigate, and capital from its latest round will be used to boost research and development and sales and marketing, according to a statement.

“We are on the path to reduce global synthetic chemical loads in agriculture by 80% by 2030 with Actigate,” said Karn Manhas, Terramera founder and chief executive, in a statement.

According to the company, Actigate increases the efficacy of both biopesticides and traditional chemical pesticides to reduce the use of chemicals in . farming.

“Terramera’s Actigate platform shifts the paradigm, making biopesticides more effective and competitive,” said Casale in a statement. “There is also a huge opportunity to create value and reinvent conventional inputs to have greater impact, while reducing cost, waste and effects on the environment.”

The funding comes just a few months after Terramera’s acquisition of the technology and intellectual property portfolio of Exosect Limited.

That patent portfolio, which includes a range of compositions designed to improve delivery of organic and chemical seed treatments seems to have been a boon to Terramera’s own technology development.

“The acquisition of this IP portfolio will open up new opportunities and complement Terramera’s proprietary Actigate Targeted Performance technology,” Manhas, said at the time. “The IP portfolio enhances development of safer and more effective plant protection products, enabling our vision of creating a world with affordable, clean food for everyone.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Terramera raises million for its technology to reduce the use of chemicals in agriculture

If you’re the founder of an early-stage startup here’s a big, fat reminder about one of the great experiences you can have at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Apply to our TC Top Picks program for a chance to step into the startup spotlight.

If you’re selected, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and a bunch of other perks (more on those in a minute). Here’s the first low bar for entry.

TechCrunch editors will accept applications from early-stage startups that fall into one of the following tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

They’ll thoroughly review every application and then select up to five startups they feel represent the very best in each category. Want a sense of what our editors look for? Here’s the list of the TC Top Picks from Disrupt Berlin 2018.

Now, about those other perks we mentioned. All Top Picks get one full day to exhibit in Startup Alley, plus three Founder passes, access to the full conference and all programming across four stages, including Startup Battlefield, our epic pitch competition with a $50,000 prize. You’ll also receive invitations to VIP events, like the investor reception where you’ll have the opportunity to connect with top-tier investors and global press.

You also get the complete attendee list (via TC Events Mobile App) and CrunchMatch — our business networking platform, use of the Startup Alley Exhibitor Lounge and access to exclusive video content after the conference ends.

Here’s another huge perk — one that offers long-term marketing benefits.  Each Top Pick startup will be interviewed by a TechCrunch editor live on the Showcase Stage. We’ll record that interview and promote it on our social media platforms. That video will drive traffic to your site and be a great talking point whenever you pitch potential customers and investors.

And in a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, every early-stage startup that exhibits in Startup Alley has a shot at being chosen as a Wild Card. Why is that a good thing? Because Wild Cards get to compete in the Startup Battlefield.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Looking for investor love, media attention and international recognition? Then apply to be a TC Top Pick. We can’t wait to see what you’ve got.

Bonus: Want to launch your start up on a global stage? You can use the same application form to apply to Startup Battlefield.

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 | Is your startup TC Top Picks material? Apply to exhibit for free at Disrupt Berlin 2019

Milkbasket, a Gurugram-based micro-delivery startup, is in talks to close a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprints in milk, groceries, fruits, and vegetables delivery market that has attracted the attention of many in recent months including Amazon India.

The four-year-old startup is in advanced stages of talks with private equity funds to raise more than $50 million, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The round, Series C, is likely to close within the next two months, they said. A spokesperson of Milkbasket, which has raised $26 million to date, declined to comment.

Milkbasket, which operates in Bangalore, Gurugram, Noida, and Ghaziabad, and Hyderabad, allows users to order their daily supplies until midnight and delivers it in the early morning hours. It has also started a subscription service for users who need the same set of items delivered to them everyday.

In a recent interview with Indian newspaper Economic Times (paywalled), the startup executives said they are not trying to get items instantly to customers but focus on recurring supplies that need to reach people’s doorsteps at certain hours of the day, thereby mimicking how a traditional milkman and paperboy operate to lower delivery costs.

The startup, which focused on just delivering milk in its early years, is increasingly exploring new categories to enter, and might soon begin delivering prescribed medicine in some cities, one of the people said. Milk delivery is now a small portion of the startup’s business.

It competes with BigBasket and Grofers, both of which are heavily backed and locked in a fierce battle to gain market share. Many more startups are entering micro-delivery territory. Naspers and Tencent-backed Swiggy launched a new service called “Go” yesterday that will enable people in Bangalore to have anything delivered to them.

Google-backed Dunzo is also increasingly gaining popularity and slowly expanding to more cities across India. FreshToHome, a startup that delivers meat and vegetables, recently started to offer milk delivery in select places.

Last month, Amazon launched Fresh to offer fresh fruits and vegetables in parts of Bangalore. The company is increasingly expanding its fulfilment centers across the nation to offer its customers a wider selection of items, Siddharth Nambiar, Director of Prime Now in India, told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

The foods and grocery market is growing in India. According to some estimates, it will reach $869 billion in sales in 2023, with digital-based services seen as an important vector for growth.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s Milkbasket in talks to raise over M

Reefknot Investments, a joint venture between Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign fund, and global logistics company Kuehne + Nagel, announced today the launch of a $50 million fund for logistics and supply chain startups. The firm is based in Singapore, but will look for companies around the world that are raising their Series A or B rounds.

Managing director Marc Dragon tells TechCrunch that Reefknot will serve as a strategic investor in its portfolio companies, providing them with connections to partners that include EDBI, SGInnovate, Atlantic Bridge, Vertex Ventures, PSA unBoXed, Unilever Foundry and NUS Enterprise, in addition to Temasek and Kuehne + Nagel .

Dragon, a veteran of the supply chain and logistics industry, says Reefknot plans to invest in about six to eight startups. It is especially interested in companies that are using AI or deep mind tech, digital logistics and trade finance to solve problems that range from analyzing supply chain data and making forecasts to managing the risk of financing trade transactions. Data from Gartner shows that about half of global supply chain companies will use AI, advanced analytics or the Internet of Things in their operations by 2023.

“There is a high level of expectation from vendors that because of technology, there will be new methods to do analytics and planning, and greater visibility in terms of information and product, materials and goods flowing throughout the supply chain,” says Dragon.

Reefknot will also establish a think tank that will work with industry experts and government organizations on forums, research and exploring new logistics and supply chain business models that startups can bring into fruition.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Reefknot Investments launches million fund to invest in logistics and supply chain startups

There’s an arms race in retail to produce better coffee, and one startup, Bellwether Coffee, thinks it has the solution for retailers to sell the very best beans.

The business, headquartered in Berkeley, is today announcing a $40 million Series B financing led by DBL Partners and SolarCity co-founders Peter and Lyndon Rive. The round brings its total funding to $56 million, including a $10 million Series A last summer.

The hardware and software business manufactures tech-enabled zero-emission commercial coffee roasters designed to sit in cafes, grocery stores, on college campuses and any other place people buy coffee. Purchase of a roaster, which are sold for $75,000 or leased for $1,000 per month, comes with access to an online marketplace for coffee beans. The goal is to give coffee shops the power to roast their own beans, forgoing the middle men that have historically sold wholesale pre-roasted beans at a premium to cafes around the world.

“We want to create this connected coffee experience from the farm in Ethiopia all the way to the roaster at the cafe and the customer,” Bellwether chief executive officer Nathan Gilliland tells TechCrunch.

With roughly 140 customers, Bellwether plans to expand manufacturing capabilities and grow its customer-facing team with the infusion of venture capital funding. After growing revenues 6x in 2019, the startup is also unlocking its global ambitions, with launches in Southeast Asia and Europe scheduled for next year.

Gilliland credits the company’s growth to a larger movement at play: The “premiumization of coffee,” in which consumers are in search of higher quality cups of joe.

“You saw it happen with wine, you saw it in craft beer,” he said. “You were drinking Bud Light and now you’re drinking craft beer. You see it in higher-end grocery stores pushing out these products; it’s the premiumization of the category.”

“Thirty years ago, everyone drank Folgers, then Starbucks changed how everyone thought about coffee in the 80s, then Blue Bottle took it to the next step and that’s the backdrop,” he added.

Bellwether was founded in 2013 by Ricardo Lopez. The company is also backed by FusionX, Congruent Ventures, Coffee Bell, Tandem Capital, Spindrift Equities, XN Ventures, Balius Partners and Hardware Club.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bellwether Coffee, ‘the fastest-growing company in coffee,’ raises M Series B