Category: Tech news

As the pandemic unevenly roars on, Emily Melton, founder and managing partner of Threshold VC, is reflecting on a previous public health crisis: the Spanish flu.

She says the response just over a century ago prompted the rise of interventional medicine — treating illness through surgery or medicine only after symptoms manifest. Today, interventional medicine is the dominant mindset in Western healthcare. And, Melton, a lead investor in health tech startups including Livongo, Tia and Calibrate, says the care pathway ages well.

“What’s happening in our society? Chronic diseases, chronic pain, diabetes and obesity,” she said. “That doesn’t require a magic pill and there’s not just a surgery. Oftentimes, there’s therapeutic components, behavior changes and movable touch points.”

Enter personalized medicine. The buzzy yet powerful framing is growing in popularity among Silicon Valley startups. It’s a delivery system in which patients receive more holistic care that takes into account multiple symptoms or comorbidities. In hormonal health, for example, personalized medicine could add more data and specificity to which birth control someone takes, instead of the usual process of trial and error. Essentially, it’s the opposite of interventional medicine.

“We’re not just an arm or a leg, we’re not just obese or a diabetic or a pain sufferer,” Melton said. “How do we treat you as a whole person?”

A number of companies are using this approach to reinvent care for patients with musculoskeletal (MSK) medical conditions and chronic pain. These conditions are commonly treated with addictive opioids, a major public health concern. As an estimated 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, entrepreneurs are working on solutions that don’t resemble the cookie-cutter status quo. And the money market is certainly there: In 2017, the global MSK medical market was valued at $57.4 billion; the market for chronic pain, which overlaps with MSK medicine, is expected to hit $151.7 billion in value by 2030.

“Oftentimes it’s not new ideas, it’s conflating a number of factors that come together at one moment in time that allow exponential change that makes a startup work,” Melton said, of the boom and recent activity in MSK medicine. Today, we’ll focus on three startups taking different approaches to help people suffering from chronic pain and MSK-related conditions: Clearing, PeerWell and Hinge Health.

Clearing

Avi Dorfman says going direct to consumers is the most effective way to treat chronic pain, so he founded Clearing. The digital health startup worked with a medical advisory board of physicians and researchers from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and NYC’s Hospital for Special Surgery to create an opioid-free solution for people struggling with pain.

Last month, Clearing raised a $20 million seed round led by Bessemer and Founders Fund. Melton also invested in the round on behalf of Threshold.

Clearing offers four products: prescription compound cream that includes FDA-approved ingredients, CBD cream for topical discomfort, nutraceuticals to supplement joint health, and a directory of prerecorded, at-home exercises. It currently is available to patients in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.

The EU for all its lethargy, faults and fetishization of bureaucracy, is, ultimately, a good idea. It might be 64 years from the formation of the European Common Market, but it is 29 years since the EU’s formation in the Maastricht Treaty, and this international entity is definitely still acting like an indecisive millennial, happy to flit around tech startup policy. It’s long due time for this digital nomad to commit to one ‘location’ on how it treats startups.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, this is a unique moment in time. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the acceptance of technology globally, especially in Europe. Thankfully, tech companies and startups have proven to be more resilient than much of the established economy. As a result, the EU’s political leaders have started to look towards the innovation economy for a more sustainable future in Europe.

This moment has not come soon enough.

The European tech scene is still lagging behind its US and Asia counterparts in numbers of startups created, talent in the tech sector, financing rounds, and IPOs / exits. It doesn’t help, of course, that the European market is so fractionalized, and will be for a long time to come.

But there is absolutely no excuse when it comes to the EU’s obligations to reform startup legislation, taxation, and the development of talent, to “level the playing field” against the US and Asian tech giants.

To put it bluntly: The EU can’t seem to get its shit together around startups.

Consider this litany of proposals.

Starting as far back a 2016 we had the Start-Up and Scale-Up Initiative. We even had the Scale-Up Manifesto in the same year. Then there was the Cluj Recommendations (2019), and the Not Optional campaign for options reform in 2020.

Indeed, I’ve even contributed a few thoughts myself. In 2013 I was a “Special Rapporteur” to the European Commission’s “Startup Europe Initiative” supported by Vice President Neelie Kroes (at the time) and wrote the very first report that – more or less – became the foundation of all that came afterwards.

Let’s face it, the community of VC´s, founders, and startup associations in Europe has been saying mostly the same things for years, to national and European leaders.

Finally, this year, we got something approaching a summation of all these efforts.

Portugal, which has the European presidency for the first half of this year, took the bull by its horns and created something approaching a final draft of what the EU needs.

After, again, intense consultations with European ecosystem stakeholders, it identified eight best practices in order to level the playing field covering the gamut of issues such as fast startup creation, talent, stock options, innovation in regulation and access to finance. You name it, it covered it.

These were then put into the Startup Nations Standard and presented to the European Council at Digital Day on March 19th, together with the European Commission’s DG CNECT and its Commissioner Tierry Breton. I wrote about this at the time.

Would the EU finally get a grip, and sign up for these evidently workable proposals?

It seemed, at least, that we might be getting somewhere. Some 25 member states signed the declaration that day, and perhaps for the first time, the political consensus seemed to be forming around this policy.

Indeed, a body set up to shepherd the initiative (the European Startup Nations Alliance) was even announced by Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa which, he said, would be tasked with monitoring, developing and optimizing the standards, collecting data from the member states on their success and failure, and reporting on its findings in a bi-annual conference aligned with the changing presidency of the European Council.

It would seem we could pop open a chilled bottle of DOC Bairrada Espumante and celebrate that Europe might finally start implementing at least the basics from these suggested policies.

But no. With the pandemic still raging, it seemed the EU’s leaders still had plenty of time on their hands to ponder these subjects.

Thus it was that the Scaleup Europe initiative emerged from the mind of Emmanuel Macron, assembling a select group of 150-plus of Europe’s leading tech founders, investors, researchers, corporate CEOs and government officials to do some more pondering about startups. And then there was the Global Powerhouse Initiative of DG Research & EU Innovation Commissioner Mariya Gabriel.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to go through this process all over again, with the EU acting as if it had the memory span of a giant goldfish.

Now, I’m not arguing that all these collective actions are a bad thing. But, by golly, European startups need more decisive action than this.

As things stand, instead of implementing the very reasonable Portuguese proposals, we will now have to wait for the EU’s wheels to slowly turn until the French presidency comes around next year.

That said, with any luck, a body to oversee the implementation of tech startup policy that is mandated by the European community, composed of organizations like La French Tech, Startup Portugal and Startup Estonia, might finally seem within reach.

Admittedly there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Commissioner Mariya Gabriel has responsibility for innovation and startups in the EU, and has a good reputation for getting things done. She also has the backing of President Van der Leyen to build a pan-European Innovation Ecosystem using the EIT (€3 billion budget) the EIC (€10 Billion budget) and the EIE (€500 million).

However, to anyone from the outside, it feels again as if the gnashing of EU policy teeth will have to go on yet longer. With the French calling for a ‘La French Tech for Europe’ and the Portuguese having already launched ESNA, the efforts seem far from coordinated.

In the final analysis, tech startup founders and investors could not care less where this new body comes from or which country launches it.

After years of contributions, years of consultations, the time for action is now.

It’s time for EU member states to agree, and move forward, helping other member states catch up based on established best practices.

It’s time for the long-awaited European Tech Giants to blossom, take on the US-born Big Tech Giants, and for Europe to finally punch its weight.

Stock in many American companies, like Amazon, Alphabet or Tesla, can host hundreds or thousands of dollars per share. Fractional trading, or buying part of a single share through a brokerage, makes them more accessible—at least to people within the United States. Investors in other countries, however, often have to pay high fees through interactive brokers. Gotrade makes fractional trading of U.S. stocks available to people in 150 countries, and charges a minimum of just one dollar.

The startup announced it has raised $7 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, with participation from Social Leverage, Y Combinator, Picus Capital and Raptor Group. The round also included angel investors like Matt Robinson, co-founder of GoCardless; Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, former chief product officer of Skyscanner; Frank Strauss, former head of Deutsche Bank’s global digital business; and Joel Yarbrough, Asia-Pacific head at Rapyd.

GoTrade was founded in 2019 by David Grant, Norman Wanto and Rohit Mulani. Its app launched three months ago and is currently invite-only. Gotrade claims sign-ups have grown 20% week-on-week, and it now has more than 100,000 users spread across the world. About 65% of Gotrade’s users have traded stocks before, while the rest are first-time investors.

Mulani, the company’s chief executive officer, told TechCrunch that the idea for Gotrade was planted when he became interested in American stocks, but discovered many barriers to trading.

“When I was 18, I actually looked to get access in Singapore, and banks were charging $30 per trade. Effectively, the market taught me that I could not get into the market. Fast forward ten years, I decided to look into it again, and the banks were still charging $25 a trade,” he said. “On top of that, their user interfaces were something I didn’t want to look at. So we decided to build a brokerage platform where anyone can get access.”

“Fractional trading actually came a bit later,” he added. “That was the real MVP for us because fractional really makes investing accessible to anyone globally since all you need is one dollar.”

Robinhood, SoFi and Stash all feature fractional trading, but Mulani said those apps are primarily used by U.S. residents. On the other hand, Gotrade is not available to U.S. residents because of financial regulations, so its main competitors are interactive brokers, Saxo Bank and eToro.

Gotrade does not charge commission, custody, inactivity or dividend fees. Instead, it monetizes by collecting a small fee on the currency exchange from deposits, and interest generated from uninvested cash in brokerage accounts. The app is free to use, but plans to add a premium paid subscription program and virtual debit card that users can link to their accounts.

Many of Gotrade’s users are people who have invested in their local stock markets, but weren’t able to trade U.S. stocks before. They vary widely in age, but 25 to 34-year-olds are the app’s biggest segment, and the average account size is about $500.

Gotrade acts as an introducing broker to Alpaca Securities LLC, a U.S. stock brokerage that is regulated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and serves as an intermediary. Alpaca Securities splits its stock inventory into fractions, and Gotrade users can decide how many fractions they want to buy. The app also allows them to set a budget, and automatically calculates the amount of fractional shares they can afford through notional value trading.

User accounts are protected up to $500,000 by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), and money goes through counterparties regulated in Singapore, like Rapyd, and the United States, including Alpaca and First Republic Bank. To protect users, Gotrade works only with fully-funded cash accounts without any margin facility. Mulani explained that a margin account effectively means people are borrowing money to invest, while a fully-funded account means that a user can only invest the money they have already deposited in their account. FINRA and Securities Exchange Commission regulations also mean accounts under $25,000 can only day trade, or buy and sell a security on the same day, up to three times every five trading days.

Like many investment apps aimed at first-time or relatively new traders, Gotrade includes educational content, like pop-ups with definitions for investment terms, and news articles about publicly-traded companies. Its new funding will be used for hiring and product development, with a strong focus on adding more in-app content.

In a statement, LocalGlobe partner Remus Brett said, “Over the past 100 years, U.S. stocks have delivered average annual returns of 10%. With compounding, an investment of $1,000 back then would be worth $13 million today. These returns have fueled wealth creation in the U.S. and other developed markets but most of the world has missed out. We believe Gotrade has the potential to help the world’s 99% gain access the same benefits that the 1% have. We are incredibly excited to be joining Rohit, David and Norman on this journey.”

Podcast downloads have boomed over the last year, and Kayak co-founder and tech entrepreneur Paul English became an avid, daily listener. But anyone who loves podcasts knows that podcast discovery can be challenging. Even the top streaming apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify lack robust discovery tools — so last week, when Spotify acquired the podcast discovery app Podz, it validated the industry’s growing need for an easier way to uncover new shows.

Today, English launched Moonbeam, a podcast discovery app that blends machine learning and human curation to present personalized recommendations. This might sound like what Podz is doing, creating a newsfeed-style stream of content that users might like. But Moonbeam ups the ante by creating a creator-friendly platform, allowing podcast hosts to select clips of their show to feature on the app, too. The app also lets fans send a tip to the creator if they like their show enough (Moonbeam won’t take a cut, but there’s still that pesky in-app purchase fee for podcasters to consider).

Image Credits: Moonbeam (opens in a new window)

“Podz is one approach for discovery, but I think that there needs to be a lot of people working on this problem,” English told TechCrunch. “One thing that I think differentiates Moonbeam from Podz is that we have human editors.”

English was inspired by TikTok, which has become so ubiquitous in part because of its sophisticated discovery algorithm. As an engineer, he would often redesign apps for fun, like Instagram or Twitter. But as he became interested in podcasting, he wanted to create an app that works like TikTok, but helps people find new podcasts. On the Beam section of the app, which is the equivalent of the For You page on TikTok, users are presented with clips of about a few minutes long. Based on how you interact with them, the algorithm learns what kind of podcasts you might want to see.

Image Credits: Moonbeam (opens in a new window)

“Machine learning can find better content for you than your friends can. We might find someone in Germany who has the same funny sense of humor you do, which might be a bit different than even your closet friends,” said English. “Machine learning is all about user clustering, where we find users that interacted with Moonbeam in ways similar to you. If we find users who like similar things that you like, we can share shows that they listen to on Moonbeam.”

But what’s tricky about apps like Moonbeam is that it will only get better as more people use the app. In its early stages — to be fair, the app launched today — many of the podcast recommendations come from relatively established shows. But with so many podcasts in existence (not every show is produced by NPR!), the challenge isn’t discovering “This American Life.” It’s finding emerging creators that might not get a shot in the podcasting industry without the backing of a major production studio. That’s what makes TikTok so valuable for creators — it’s very possible to become a viral sensation over night. What if there was an app that did that for podcasters?

Moonbeam plans to roll out software updates every two weeks, which will introduce a series of tools that allow listeners to interact with the teams behind their favorite podcasts. The first of these features — which is already in-app — is tipping. Soon, fans and podcasters alike will be able to make their own clips to share on the app. For now, podcast hosts who navigate to Moonbeam’s website can claim their show and create clips of it. It’s a bit clunkier to navigate than an app like Headliner, but it’s functional.

“There’s going to be a whole bunch of other tools we’re adding between the listener and the host,” said English. “Building that relationship is really important, and we want to do it directly in the player. We don’t want you to have to go to Facebook or some other site.”

Moonbeam can also function as a podcatcher, since you can listen to full episodes in the app and search for specific shows, even if they don’t appear on your Beam – but while podcatchers are abundant, good discovery apps aren’t. Hopefully, Moonbeam can help change that.

Archer Aviation is ramping up its defense against claims by rival Wisk Aero that it misappropriated trade secrets. Archer, which unveiled its Maker eVTOL earlier this month, alleged in a court filing late Wednesday that Wisk learned of Archer’s aircraft design weeks before it filed its patent design application – effectively reversing claims that it stole Wisk’s design.

Wisk claimed in its April lawsuit that its design is nearly identical to Archer’s, and that the similarities are the result of a former Wisk employee (who was later hired by Archer) stealing proprietary work files. In this new filing, Archer alleged that it shared its plans for a 12-rotor tilting design with Geoff Long, a senior engineer at Wisk, whom Archer was considering recruiting. Archer alleges that Long shared Archer’s plans with Wisk executives weeks before Wisk filed its patent application.

Still following? Archer also says that it hired a third party to conduct a forensic analysis, which found no evidence of any of the allegedly stolen documents on Archer’s systems or the devices belonging to the former Wisk-now-Archer employee.

The filing was made in response to an injunction Wisk filed in May, requesting that the court immediately prohibit its rival from using any of the 52 trade secrets it alleges were stolen. It’s a request that could have potentially catastrophic effects on Archer, as the company itself admits in the filing. Archer argues that approving the injunction would take it “offline indefinitely” and pose a “grave danger” to Archer and its network of partners and suppliers.

“Wisk’s legal and media blitz is threatening to derail Archer’s anticipated merger and its business partnerships and compelling Archer to redirect significant resources to defend this lawsuit,” Archer says in the filing. The company further requested that if an injunction should be granted, it should also require a $1.1 billion bond – which Wisk would have to pay should the court ultimately side with Archer.

Wisk, in response to the filing, sent the following statement to TechCrunch: “Archer’s latest filing is full of inaccuracies and attempts to distract from the serious and broad scope of misappropriation claims it faces. The filing changes nothing. We look forward to continuing our case in court to demonstrate Archer’s improper use of Wisk’s intellectual property.”

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under case no. 5:21-cv-2450.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 24, 2021. There’s an ocean of tech news to get through today, but up top if you care about the advertising market, head here first. Google is pushing back cookiegeddon, and the decision could impact companies from the smallest startup to, well, Google. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Instagram’s slow embrace of computers continues: After a long history of being a mobile-first, or mobile-only product, Instagram is now testing the “ability to create a Feed post on Instagram with [a] desktop browser,” the company told TechCrunch. As a PC user, huzzah.
• BuzzFeed is going public: Digital media company BuzzFeed is going public via a SPAC at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Want to know why it’s worth that much? We’ve got you covered. (Don’t forget that BuzzFeed raised hundreds of millions of dollars while private.)
• How some companies are working on vaccine passports despite the controversy: TechCrunch’s Ron Miller dove into the world of vaccine passports, the tech companies that are backing them and how they’re handling a dicey political environment. It’s a great read.

Startups/VC

• Doubling down on crypto: The a16z investing house is redoubling its bet in the crypto economy with a new $2.2 billion fund. And the venture capital firm is going to do more than just write checks: It intends to take part in crypto projects and even help clear regulatory brush for the sector. It’s a big commitment.
• Visa tries again: After Visa’s deal to acquire fintech API provider Plaid died, you might have thought that the American payments giant would have thrown in the towel on big deals. Nope. Visa is dropping $2.15 billion to buy Tink, a company that TechCrunch described as “a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interfaces,” or APIs.
• Don’t trip about Tripp’s (virtual) trips: Tripp, a startup that wants to provide mental-health services via VR that mimic psychedelic experiences sans drugs, has just raised $11 million. If that sounds far out, understand that some startups are flat-out working with psychedelic drugs for different therapeutic approaches to mental health. So, this is the less aggressive version of the idea. Because VR is pretty neat, we dig it.
• The intersection of no-code, automation and humans: That’s where Tonkean plays. The company’s software helps ops teams at startups build automated business logic across applications, allowing data to flow between them. And it allows for humans to be in the loop, separating its offerings from what UiPath and other RPA companies offer. Oh, and Tonkean just closed a $50 million round.
• The online video boom powers JW Player to $100M in new capital: While not quite yet a unicorn, JW Player’s nine-figure round caught TechCrunch’s attention. The company sells a video platform for publishers and others, and it had a good 2020. COVID led to a boom in video watching, so the company’s recent growth is not a huge surprise. And now it has a tower of new capital to fuel even more expansion.

Reform your startup’s meeting culture

Meetings should have a clear purpose, but at many startups, they’ve become a way to perform in front of a crowd instead of share information.

Workplace politics can make the matter even more complicated: How secure do you feel declining a meeting invitation from a co-worker, or worse yet, from a manager?

“Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies,” says Chuck Phillips, co-founder of MeetWell. “Very few employees decline meetings, even when it’s obvious that the meeting is going to be a doozy.”

Changing your meeting culture is difficult, but given that 26% of workers plan to look for a new job when the pandemic ends, startups need to do all they can to retain talent. Here are four actionable steps that will help you boost productivity and say goodbye to poorly run, lazily planned meetings.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Today was a big day for Microsoft, so we’ll start there, yeah? Here are TechCrunch’s notes from the day’s Windows 11 event:

• Android apps are coming to Windows: Via the Amazon store, but still. Microsoft’s effort over time to make its operating system more open reached a new zenith today with the news that Windows 11 will support a host of Android apps. We want to play with it before we grade it, but the idea is super neat.
• We hope you like Teams: Microsoft is all-in on Teams, so much so that it’s getting the Windows treatment. TechCrunch reports that “Windows 11 will have Microsoft Teams built in, in a bid to compete more directly with communication platforms like Apple’s FaceTime.” Honestly, Teams is way better than Skype was, so that sounds fine. It does prickle our antitrust early warning system, however.
• It’ll be a Windows Christmas: Per Microsoft, Windows 11 should land later this year. In time for Christmas, it turns out. So if you are a gamer or a corporate drone or merely someone who prefers the Microsoft approach to computing, get hyped. The new build is coming your way, and quickly. If you can’t wait, there are leaks out there. But don’t install those on a computer with data you actually need.

Next up, a little from Google:

• Google and Jio team up for a budget smartphone: The JioPhone Next, a low-cost Android smartphone, could help the next few hundred million folks in India get online with faster service if the telco and American tech giant have their way. Jio wants more mobile subscribers, and Google wants more internet users, period. Call it a match made in heaven, provided that the hardware is good.

And to close out, one for the Zoomers:

• Ephemeral tunes? In today’s TikTok world, having access to popular music is a must for social networks. So it’s not a surprise to see Snap close a multiyear deal with Universal Music Group. Snapper, rejoice!

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch is building a shortlist of the top growth marketers in tech. If you’re a founder, we’d love to hear who you’ve worked with. Fill out the survey here.

Here’s one of the many excellent recommendations we’ve received:

Name of marketer: Dylan Max

Name of recommender: Kris Rudeegraap, Sendoso

Recommendation: “Dylan Max’s creativity is what sets him apart from 99% of those that practice growth marketing. One of his first campaigns went viral on LinkedIn. We ran a special campaign where we sent real cans of Spam to the best marketers and salespeople (our target demographic), with the idea that traditional spamming has become impersonal and we’re out to change that. Those that were nominated could “spam” other marketers or salespeople in their network, leading to a viral sensation that took over LinkedIn. We got a ton of business from it and our sales team still lists it as one of the most creative ways to leverage direct mail and gifting. Today it is still LinkedIn’s most viral grassroots campaign in the B2B space. Dylan is part of a rare breed of growth marketers, excelling in many different marketing channels including SEO, paid search, conversion rate optimization (CRO) and A/B testing. Dylan also spun up our first ever ABM campaign where we leveraged hypertargeted social media ads to earn seven-figure revenue on less than $20,000 of ad spend. I love his hackiness and he needs to be on this list.”

Regularly testing waterways and reservoirs is a never-ending responsibility for utility companies and municipal safety authorities, and generally — as you might expect — involves either a boat or at least a pair of waders. Nixie does the job with a drone instead, making the process faster, cheaper and a lot less wet.

The most common methods of testing water quality haven’t changed in a long time, partly because they’re effective and straightforward, and partly because really, what else are you going to do? No software or web platform out there is going to reach into the middle of the river and pull out a liter of water.

But with the advent of drones powerful and reliable enough to deploy in professional and industrial circumstances, the situation has changed. Nixie is a solution by the drone specialists at Reign Maker, involving either a custom-built sample collection arm or an in-situ sensor arm.

The sample collector is basically a long vertical arm with a locking cage for a sample container. You put the empty container in there, fly the drone out to the location, then submerge the arm. When it flies back, the filled container can be taken out while the drone hovers and a fresh one put in its place to bring to the next spot. (This switch can be done safely in winds up to 18 MPH and sampling in currents up to 5 knots, the company said.)

Image Credits: Reign Maker

This allows for quick sampling at multiple locations — the drone’s battery will last about 20 minutes, enough for two to four samples depending on the weather and distance. Swap the battery out and drive to the next location and do it all again.

For comparison, Reign Maker pointed to New York’s water authority, which collects 30 samples per day from boats and other methods, at an approximate cost (including labor, boat fuel, etc) of $100 per sample. Workers using Nixie were able to collect an average of 120 samples per day, for around $10 each. Sure, New York is probably among the higher cost locales for this (like everything else) but the deltas are pretty huge. (The dipper attachment itself costs $850, but doesn’t come with a drone.)

It should be mentioned that the drone is not operating autonomously; it has a pilot who will be flying with line of sight (which simplifies regulations and requirements). But even so, that means a team of two, with a handful of spare batteries, can cover the same space  that would normally take a boat crew and more than a little fuel. Currently the system works with the M600 and M300 RTK drones from DJI.

Image Credits: Reign Maker

The drone method has the added benefits of having precise GPS locations for each sample and of not disturbing the water when it dips in. No matter how carefully you step or pilot a boat, you’re going to be pushing the water all over the place, potentially affecting the contents of the sample, but that’s not the case if you’re hovering overhead.

In development is a smarter version of the sampler that includes a set of sensors that can do on-site testing for all the most common factors: temperature, pH, troubling organisms, various chemicals. Skipping the step of bringing the water back to a lab for testing streamlines the process immensely, as you might expect.

Right now Reign Maker is working with New York’s Department of Environmental Protection and in talks with other agencies. While the system would take some initial investment, training, and getting used to, it’s probably hard not to be tempted by the possibility of faster and cheaper testing.

Ultimately the company hopes to offer (in keeping with the zeitgeist) a more traditional SaaS offering involving water quality maps updating in real time with new testing. That too is still in the drawing-board phase, but once a few customers sign up it starts looking a lot more attractive.

Sneaker and streetwear empire GOAT just doubled its valuation in a massive new raise.

The GOAT Group parent company shared today that it has raised $195 million in a Series F raise valuing the fashion giant at some $3.7 billion. The raise was led by a handful of hedge funds and P/E firms including Park West Asset Management, Franklin Templeton, Adage Capital Management, Ulysses Management and funds & accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates.

GOAT has surgically defined a corner of fashion commerce outside of Amazon’s purview while growing the appeal of street wear and sneakers to a broader audience of consumers. GOAT Group has now raised just shy of $500 million in total.

This round more than doubles the $1.8 billion valuation GOAT Group reached in its Series E fundraise last year. Like other online marketplaces, GOAT saw major growth last year, expanding its audience of buyers and sellers while seeing 100% year-over-year growth in its sneaker business and 500% year-over-year growth for its newer apparel business.

GOAT details some 30 million “members” and 600,000 sellers across its platform. In a press release, the company detailed its peer-to-peer marketplace has reached some $2 billion in gross merchandise volume.

In many industries, Databricks has become synonymous with modern data warehousing and data lakes. Since it’s exactly these technologies that are at the core of what modern businesses are doing around operationalizing their data, data engineering and building machine-learning models — and since Databricks is at the forefront of startups that offer these services on a SaaS-like platform, who better to join us at TC Sessions: SaaS on October 27 than Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi.

Ghodsi co-founded Databricks together with a handful of partners in 2013 with the idea of commercializing the open-source Apache Spark analytics engine for big data processing. As is the case with so many open-source companies, Ghodsi, who has a Ph.D. from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and whose research focused on distributed computing, was one of the original developers of the Spark engine. At Databricks, he first served as the company’s VP of Engineering and Product Management before being named CEO in 2016.

Under his leadership, Databricks has reached a $28 billion valuation and has now raised a total of $1.9 billion. The company’s bets on open source, data and AI are clearly paying off and unlike some of its competitors, Databricks has done a good job staying ahead of the trends (and had a bit of luck given that some of those trends, including the rise of machine learning, really benefitted the company, too).

Despite consistent rumors of Microsoft and others trying to acquire the company in recent years, Ghodsi and his board have clearly decided that they want to remain independent. Instead, Databricks has shrewdly partnered with all of the big cloud players, starting with Microsoft, which actually gave the service the kind of prime placement in its Azure cloud computing service and user interface that was previously unheard of. Most recently, the company brought its platform to Google Cloud.

Ghodsi will join us at TC Sessions: SaaS to talk about building his company, raising funding at crazy valuations and what the future of data management in the AI space looks like.

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In my role at CloudBlue, Fortune 500 companies often approach me for help with solving technology challenges while shifting to a subscription business model, only to realize that they have not taken crucial organizational steps necessary to ensure a successful transition.

Subscriptions scale better, enhance customer experience and hold the promise of recurring and more predictable revenue streams — a pretty enticing prospect for any business. This business model is predominant in software as a service (SaaS), but it is hard to find an industry that doesn’t have a successful subscription story. A growing number of companies in sectors ranging from automotive, airlines, gaming and health to wellness, education, professional development and home maintenance have been introducing subscription services in recent years.

However, businesses should be aware that the subscription model is much more than simply putting a monthly or annual price tag on their offering. Executives cannot just layer a subscription model on top of an existing business. They need to change the entire operation process, onboard all stakeholders, recalibrate their strategy and create a subscription culture.

While 70% of business leaders believe subscriptions will be key to their future, only 55% of companies believe they’re ready for the transition. Before talking technology, which is an enabler, companies should first address the following core issues to holistically plan and switch to a recurring revenue model.

Get internal stakeholders involved

Legacy companies accustomed to pay-as-you-go models may assume shifting to a subscription model is just a sales issue. They are wrong. Such a migration will affect nearly all departments across an organization, from product development and manufacturing to finance, sales, marketing and customer service. Leaders must therefore get all stakeholders motivated for the change and empower them to actively prepare for the transformation. The better you prepare, the smoother the transition.

But as we know, people naturally do not like change, even if it is for their own good. So it can be a formidable task to secure the cooperation of all internal stakeholders, which, depending on the size of your company, could number in the thousands.

After years of solely focusing on its mobile product, Instagram is at long last thinking about letting users post from their computers. A number of Twitter uses noticed that the test feature had gone live Thursday, and Instagram confirmed the test to TechCrunch.

“We know that many people access Instagram from their computer,” an Instagram spokesperson said. “To improve that experience, we’re now testing the ability to create a Feed post on Instagram with their desktop browser.”

Why now? Apparently over the course of the pandemic, the company saw a rise in people cruising Instagram from their computers rather than their phones.

To see if the test is live for you, head to Instagram in your browser and look for a new “plus” icon in the icon tray on the top right. The test isn’t available to everyone and it only allows users to create posts for the main feed.

The new test feature is the company’s most recent sign of life for its desktop product: Instagram added the ability to view Stories on the web in 2017 and added direct messaging to desktop late last year.

“… We haven’t found any evidence that the Instagram desktop web experience cannibalizes engagement from the native apps,” a data scientist with Instagram observed with the launch of web messaging.

“In fact, it’s quite the opposite — users who use both interfaces spend more time on each interface, compared to users who use each interface exclusively.”

As an increasing number of startups sell investors on mobile apps that help consumers prioritize well-being and mindfulness, other startups are looking for a more immersive take that allows users to fully disconnect from the world around them.

Tripp has been building immersive relaxation exercises that seek to blend some of the experiences users may find in guided meditation apps with more free-form experiences that allow users to unplug from their day and explore their thoughts inside a virtual reality headset while watching fractal shapes, glowing trees and planets whir past them.

As the name implies, there have been some efforts by the startup to create visuals and audio experiences that mimic the feelings people may have during a psychedelic trip — though doing so sans hallucinogens.

“Many people that will never feel comfortable taking a psychedelic, this is a low-friction alternative that can deliver some of that experience in a more benign way,” CEO Nanea Reeves tells TechCrunch. “The idea is to take mindfulness structures and video game mechanics together to see if we can actually hack the way that you feel.”

The startup tells TechCrunch they’ve closed a $11 million in funding led by Vine Ventures and Mayfield with participation from Integrated, among others. Tripp has raised some $15 million in total funding to date.

Image via Tripp

VR startups have largely struggled to earn investor fervor in recent years, as major tech platforms have sunsetted their virtual reality efforts one-by-one leaving Facebook and Sony as the sole benefactors of a space that they are still struggling to monetize at times. While plenty of VR startups are continuing to see engagement, many investors that backed companies in the space five years ago have turned their attention to gaming and computer vision startups with more broad applications.

Reeves says that the pandemic has helped consumers dial into the importance of mindfulness and mental health awareness, something that has also pushed investors to get bolder in what projects in the space that they’re backing.

Tripp has apps on both the Oculus and PlayStation VR stores and subscription experiences that can be accessed for a $4.99 per month subscription.

The company provides a variety of guided experiences, but users can also use the company’s “Tripp composer” to build their own visual flows.

Beyond customization, one of Tripp’s major sells is giving consumers deeper, quicker meditative experiences, claiming that users can alleviate stress with sessions as short as eight minutes inside their headset.

The startup is also exploring the platform’s use in enterprise in-office wellness solutions. Tripp is currently in the midst of clinical trials to study the software platform’s effectiveness as a therapeutic device.

The company says that users have gone through over 2 million sessions inside the app so far.

When the pandemic struck last year, the fundraising world turned upside down. Due to shifting priorities, investors had to commit to taking care of their portfolio companies, the majority of which were led by white men.

Any funding opportunities we had in the pipeline evaporated. This was especially true for investors considering attempts to reach new and underrepresented founders.

But the fundraising market came back pretty quickly in 2020 — for some. And though we are thrilled to have closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round in the middle of a pandemic, the challenges we faced in the past continued. The spotlight only turned back on minority founders after the Black Lives Matter movement took off last summer, and we began to pursue fundraising again in late 2020. We could tell by how investors interacted with our pitch deck or asked us questions that they already had preconceived ideas about us and our business.

We were in our second year of running Handsome and had traction similar to, if not better than, other male-centric startups that were getting funded, yet we still ran into friction when fundraising. The hard part was that we didn’t have any concrete evidence as to why, or the extent to which, fundraising was harder for minority and female teams outside of our apparent challenges and personal experiences. Men are allowed to have a vision or an idea on the back of a cocktail napkin, while women need to have fully established businesses and revenue streams.

The evidence is in the analytics

DocSend, a tool that we and thousands of other startups use to send out pitch decks to investors, analyzed how investors interact with pitch decks. A recent DocSend study confirmed our hunch, finding that investors do indeed scrutinize the decks of businesses founded by women and minorities differently.

For instance, their data showed investors spent 20% longer on the business model section of decks from all-female teams at the pre-seed stage than all-male teams. While more time spent on a particular section of a deck may seem to indicate more interest, it can actually be a sign of greater scrutiny and skepticism.

When you look at the makeup of the average VC you are pitching to, it is likely a middle-aged white man. When pitching Handsome — something that’s reimagining the education and community of the beauty industry — you can imagine that most VCs don’t understand the value and opportunity at hand. Although beauty is a $190 billion global industry ($60 billion alone in the U.S.), investors who don’t follow this industry might have a hard time understanding how big it is, how the industry works, and how our business fits into this thriving market. Even further, investors might completely discredit our business because of the “beauty” label.

All these factors can lead to more time spent analyzing the business model — and its viability — articulated in our pitch deck. In reality, VCs are busy, and if they’re spending more time on the fundamentals of your business, they don’t understand it. It’s more likely they are looking for ways that your business won’t work. And, frankly, we are not business school graduates or Stanford alumni, so investors who want to de-risk their portfolios will spend more time looking at our deck to gauge if we know how to build a business.

More than goodwill is needed for lasting change

Despite all this, we believe that most of the time, investors don’t even know they are acting on these biases. They don’t realize they may have already written you off, which is part of the problem. Awareness of a subconscious bias is the first step toward making positive change. Investors may think they’re widening the funnel simply by taking a meeting or providing mentorship over coffee when, subconsciously, they’ve already counted you out.

Even though the barriers are being lowered, minority founders just starting out still have a hard time getting their foot in the door. Most underrepresented founders don’t have an established network, making it difficult to get even an initial introduction. That’s why these founders aren’t getting meetings. So even with more investor goodwill, founders are still unable to access the capital they need to grow their businesses.

It takes time and effort to enact meaningful changes. Truly committed people are going to work on these issues over the coming years and decades. It’s only on a longer time scale that we’re going to be able to tell whether investors promising change have delivered. Changing the demographics of the founders you fund requires year in, year out consistency, again and again and again.

Only then will we see a time when the future of great ideas is not hindered by the demographics of the people building businesses out of those ideas.

A code repository used by the New York state government’s IT department was left exposed on the internet, allowing anyone to access the projects inside, some of which contained secret keys and passwords associated with state government systems.

The exposed GitLab server was discovered on Saturday by Dubai-based SpiderSilk, a cybersecurity company credited with discovering data spills at Samsung, Clearview AI and MoviePass.

Organizations use GitLab to collaboratively develop and store their source code — as well as the secret keys, tokens and passwords needed for the projects to work — on servers that they control. But the exposed server was accessible from the internet and configured so that anyone from outside the organization could create a user account and log in unimpeded, SpiderSilk’s chief security officer Mossab Hussein told TechCrunch.

When TechCrunch visited the GitLab server, the login page showed it was accepting new user accounts. It’s not known exactly how long the GitLab server was accessible in this way, but historic records from Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases, shows the GitLab was first detected on the internet on March 18.

SpiderSilk shared several screenshots showing that the GitLab server contained secret keys and passwords associated with servers and databases belonging to New York State’s Office of Information Technology Services. Fearing the exposed server could be maliciously accessed or tampered with, the startup asked for help in disclosing the security lapse to the state.

TechCrunch alerted the New York governor’s office to the exposure a short time after the server was found. Several emails to the governor’s office with details of the exposed GitLab server were opened but were not responded to. The server went offline on Monday afternoon.

Scot Reif, a spokesperson for New York State’s Office of Information Technology Services, said the server was “a test box set up by a vendor, there is no data whatsoever, and it has already been decommissioned by ITS.” (Reif declared his response “on background” and attributable to a state official, which would require both parties agree to the terms in advance, but we are printing the reply as we were not given the opportunity to reject the terms.)

When asked, Reif would not say who the vendor was or if the passwords on the server were changed. Several projects on the server were marked “prod,” or common shorthand for “production,” a term for servers that are actively used. Reif also would not say if the incident was reported to the state’s Attorney General’s office. When reached, a spokesperson for the Attorney General did not comment by press time.

TechCrunch understands the vendor is Indotronix-Avani, a New York-based company with offices in India, and owned by venture capital firm Nigama Ventures. Several screenshots show some of the GitLab projects were modified by a project manager at Indotronix-Avani. The vendor’s website touts New York State on its website, along with other government customers, including the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Indotronix-Avani spokesperson Mark Edmonds did not respond to requests for comment.

Read more:

• Volkswagen says a vendor’s security lapse exposed 3.3 million drivers’ details
• Peloton and Echelon profile photo metadata exposed riders’ real-world locations
• Zocdoc says ‘programming errors’ exposed access to patients’ data
• Amazon’s Ring Neighbors app exposed users’ precise locations and home addresses
• How Jamaica failed to handle its JamCOVID scandal

Snap today announced a multi-year deal with Universal Music Group, one of the largest music companies in the world. From Queen to Justin Bieber, users can clip songs from the expansive UMG catalog to use in their Snaps and on Spotlight, the app’s TikTok competitor.

This announcement comes after Snapchat added its Sounds feature in October, which lets users enhance their Snaps with music that Snap has licensed. Snap says that since then, over 521 million videos have been created using Sounds, which have been viewed over 31 billion times.

Of course, Snapchat’s investment in music is a direct response to the growth of music on TikTok. Last year, Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album “Rumours” re-entered the Billboard charts after “Dreams,” a song on the record, went viral on TikTok. Dance trends also often go viral on TikTok, which can correlate with a boost in sales for the artist whose song is featured. So, the more music that’s licensed by apps like TikTok and Snapchat, the more opportunity there is for another Nathan Apodaca moment, which means free publicity for the platform.

Already, gen Z artists like Olivia Rodrigo have leveraged these social platforms to promote their new music. On Snap, over 10 million videos were created using her song “Driver’s License,” Snap reports. Rodrigo was also the first artist to use AR Lenses on Snapchat to promote her record-breaking debut “Sour,” but to be fair, she also shared AR effects on Instagram.

Olivia Rodrigo sings about “deja vu” on her new album, and you might also be getting deja vu from Snap’s announcement. TikTok also struck a deal with UMG in February. And before that, in November, TikTok announced a new licensing agreement with Sony. Meanwhile, Snap’s portfolio of music partners include Warner Music Group, Sony Music Publishing, and more.

These deals aren’t exclusive — you can make a video with “deja vu” on Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram alike. When it comes to deals like these, it’s a constant battle of reactionary one-upmanship. If TikTok makes a deal with UMG, Snapchat needs to strike a deal with UMG as well to remain competitive, which is what we’re seeing today. As our friend Olivia would say, it’s brutal out here.