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Darkstore raises $21 million Series B round
Darkstore, the tech-driven fulfillment solution to enable e-commerce companies to offer same-day delivery, just raised a $21 million Series B round led by EQT Ventures. The deal will bring EQT principal Laura Yao to Darkstore’s board of directors.
This Series B round comes less than one year after Darkstore raised a $7.5 million Series A round. In total, Darkstore has raised more than $30 million in funding.
Darkstore works by exploiting excess capacity in storage facilities, malls and bodegas and enables them to be fulfillment centers with just a smartphone. The idea is that brands without local inventory can store it in a Darkstore and then ship out same-day. Darkstore charges brands across three areas: fulfillment, storage and delivery.
“Consumer expectations are relentless,” Yao told TechCrunch via email. “We want things now, now, now. Obviously, it’s in a brand’s best interest to be able to meet those demands. The amazing team at Darkstore has built a platform-agnostic, cost-effective way for brands to do so, and in the process has unlocked a new revenue stream for urban infrastructure, and created valuable partnerships with last-mile delivery services.”
Currently, Darkstore has more than 600 fulfillment centers across 39 cities in the U.S., including Honolulu, Toledo, Ohio and Omaha, Neb.
Darkstore is unable to share the full roster of its customers, but it has worked with the likes of Nike, premium headphones maker Master & Dynamic, mattress startup Tuft & Needle and others. With the additional funding, Darkstore plans to grow the general team, as well as the management team.
Yao added, “We’ve worked with Lee [founder Lee Hnetinka] and the team for over a year and have been able to see this Darkstore flywheel come to life, and are excited to see what the future holds.”
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Cytora secures £25M Series B for its AI-powered commercial insurance underwriting solution
Cytora, a U.K. startup that developed an AI-powered solution for commercial insurance underwriting, has raised £25 million in a Series B round. Leading the investment is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Parkwalk and a number of unnamed angel investors.
A spin-out of the University of Cambridge, Cytora was founded in 2014 by Richard Hartley, Aeneas Wiener, Joshua Wallace and Andrzej Czapiewski — although both Wallace and Czapiewski have since departed.
Its first product launched in late 2016 to a number of large insurance customers, with the aim of applying AI to commercial insurance supported by various public and proprietary data. This includes property construction features, company financials and local weather, combined with an insurance company’s own internal risk data.
“Commercial insurance underwriting is inaccurate and inefficient,” says Cytora co-founder and CEO Richard Hartley. “It’s inaccurate because underwriting decisions are made using sparse and outdated information. It’s inefficient because the underwriting process is so manual. Unlike buying car or travel insurance, which can be purchased in minutes, buying business insurance can take up to seven days. This means operating costs for insurers are extremely high and customer experience isn’t good leading to a lack of trust.”
To illustrate how inefficient commercial insurance can be, Hartley says that for every £1 of premium that businesses pay to insurers, only 60 pence is set aside to pay total claims. The other 40 pence evaporates as the “frictional cost of delivering insurance.”
Powered by AI, Hartley claims that Cytora is able to distill the seven-day underwriting process down to 30 seconds via its API. This enables insurers to underwrite programmatically and build workflows that provide faster and more accurate decisions.
“Our APIs are powered by a risk engine which learns the subtle patterns of good and bad risks over time,” he explains. “This gives insurers a better understanding of the underlying risk of each business and helps them set a more accurate price. Both customers and insurers benefit.”
Typical Cytora customers are commercial insurers that are digitally transforming their underwriting process. Users of the software are either underwriters within insurance companies who are underwriting large commercial risks (i.e. an average insurance premium ~£500k and above) or business customers of insurance companies who are buying insurance direct online with an average premium of £1,000-£5,000.
“For the latter, our customers have built quotation workflows on top of Cytora’s APIs, enabling business owners to buy policies online in less than a minute without having to fill in a form,” says Hartley. “We require only a business name and postcode to issue a quote, which revolutionises the customer experience.”
To that end, Cytora generates revenue by charging a yearly ARR license fee, which increases based on usage and per line of business. The company says today’s Series B funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of its product suite and for scaling into new geographies.
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It’s a new era for fertility tech
Women’s health has long been devoid of technological innovation, but when it comes to fertility options, that’s starting to change. Startups in the space are securing hundreds of millions in venture capital investment, a significant increase to the dearth of funding collected in previous years.
Fertility entrepreneurs are focused on a growing market: couples are choosing to reproduce later in life, an increasing number of female breadwinners are able to make their own decisions about when and how to reproduce, and overall, around 10% of women in the US today have trouble conceiving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Startups, as a result, are working to improve various pain points in a women’s fertility journey, whether that be with new-age brick-and-mortar clinics, information platforms, mobile applications, wearables, direct-to-consumer medical tests or otherwise.
Although the investment numbers are still relatively small (compared to, say, scooters), the trend is up — here’s the latest from founders and investors in the space.
VCs want to help you get pregnant
Clue, a period and ovulation-tracking app, co-founder and CEO Ida Tin talks at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
This fall, TechCrunch received a tip that SoftBank, a prolific venture capital firm known for its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, was investing in Glow, a period-tracking app meant to help women get pregnant. Max Levchin, Glow’s co-founder and a well-known member of the PayPal mafia, succinctly responded to a TechCrunch inquiry regarding the deal via e-mail: “Fairly sure you got this particular story wrong,” he wrote. Glow co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Huang did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time.
Needless to say, some semblance of a SoftBank fertility deal got this reporter interested in a space that seldom populates tech blogs.
Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin, the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.
The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.
“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”
Dadi, Extend Fertility and FertilityIQ are among a growing list of startups in the fertility space to crop up in recent years. FertilityIQ, for its part, provides a digital platform for fertility patients to research and review doctors and clinics. The company also collects data and issues reports, like this one, which ranked businesses by fertility benefits. Anderson-Bialis launched the platform with his wife, co-founder Deborah Anderson-Bialis, in 2016 after the pair overcame their own set of infertility issues.
Anderson-Bialis said he has recently fielded requests from seed, Series A and growth-stage investors interested in exploring the growing fertility market. His company, however, has yet to raise any outside capital. Why? He doesn’t see FertilityIQ as a venture-scale business, but rather a passion project, and he’s skeptical of the true market opportunity for other businesses in the space.
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Peltarion raises $20M for its AI platform
Peltarion, a Swedish startup founded by former execs from companies like Spotify, Skype, King, TrueCaller and Google, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Euclidean Capital, the family office for hedge fund billionaire James Simons. Previous investors FAM and EQT Ventures also participated, and this round brings the company’s total funding to $35 million.
There is obviously no dearth of AI platforms these days. Peltarion focus on what it calls “operational AI.” The service offers an end-to-end platform that lets you do everything from pre-processing your data to building models and putting them into production. All of this runs in the cloud and developers get access to a graphical user interface for building and testing their models. All of this, the company stresses, ensures that Peltarion’s users don’t have to deal with any of the low-level hardware or software and can instead focus on building their models.
“The speed at which AI systems can be built and deployed on the operational platform is orders of magnitude faster compared to the industry standard tools such as TensorFlow and require far fewer people and decreases the level of technical expertise needed,” Luka Crnkovic-Friis, of Peltarion’s CEO and co-founder, tells me. “All this results in more organizations being able to operationalize AI and focusing on solving problems and creating change.”
In a world where businesses have a plethora of choices, though, why use Peltarion over more established players? “Almost all of our clients are worried about lock-in to any single cloud provider,” Crnkovic-Friis said. “They tend to be fine using storage and compute as they are relatively similar across all the providers and moving to another cloud provider is possible. Equally, they are very wary of the higher-level services that AWS, GCP, Azure, and others provide as it means a complete lock-in.”
Peltarion, of course, argues that its platform doesn’t lock in its users and that other platforms take far more AI expertise to produce commercially viable AI services. The company rightly notes that, outside of the tech giants, most companies still struggle with how to use AI at scale. “They are stuck on the starting blocks, held back by two primary barriers to progress: immature patchwork technology and skills shortage,” said Crnkovic-Friis.
The company will use the new funding to expand its development team and its teams working with its community and partners. It’ll also use the new funding for growth initiatives in the U.S. and other markets.
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Zynga to acquire Small Giant Games, the maker of Empires & Puzzles, for $700M
Social game developer Zynga has entered into an agreement to acquire Small Giant Games, the startup behind the popular mobile game Empires & Puzzles, in a deal expected to total $700 million.
Zynga, which has tumbled since its 2011 Nasdaq initial public offering, will initially acquire 80 percent of Small Giant Games for $560 million, composed of $330 million in cash and $230 million of unregistered Zynga common stock. Zynga will fund part of the transaction with a $200 million credit facility.
“We’ve been impressed by the quality and momentum of Empires & Puzzles as we add another Forever Franchise into Zynga’s portfolio,” Zynga chief executive officer Frank Gibeau said in a statement. “Small Giant has created an innovative game that delivers a unique player experience that engages over the long term.”
The deal is expected to close on January 1. Zynga will purchase the remaining 20 percent of Small Giant over the next three years “at valuations based on specified profitability goals.”
Helsinki-based Small Giant Games had raised $52 million in equity funding from EQT Ventures, Creandum, Spintop Ventures, Profounders and others since it was founded in 2013. The company reported $33 million of revenue for Empires & Puzzles, its most popular game, 10 months after its launch in 2017. Small Giant, which is also behind Alliance Wars and Season 2: Atlantis, says they exceeded 2017’s revenue just four months into 2018.
“Our studio was founded on the idea that small, skillful teams can accomplish giant things, and I am confident that partnering with Zynga is the right next step in our evolution,” Small Giant CEO Timo Soininen said in a statement. “We will now operate as a separate studio within Zynga, maintaining our identity, culture and creative independence. By leveraging the expertise and support from the wider Zynga team, we will amplify the reach of Empires & Puzzles and the new games in our development pipeline.”
Zynga, founded in 2007, is the developer of FarmVille, Zynga
Zynga expects to bring in $243 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018.
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Valued at $500M, investors say HeadSpin is ‘one of the fastest-scaling software companies’ ever
HeadSpin has closed a $20 million Series B, valuing the provider of mobile application performance software at $500 million. New investors ICONIQ Capital, Battery Ventures and EQT Ventures participated in the funding round. Existing backers GV, Telstra Ventures, Danhua Capital, Nexus Ventures Partners and NextWorld Capital did not participate.
The company emerged from stealth last year with Manish Lachwani at the helm. Lachwani was the former principal architect of the Amazon Kindle, chief technology officer of mobile gaming company Zynga and co-founder and chief technology officer of Google-acquired Appurify, which helped developers automate testing and optimization of their mobile apps and websites.
He’s been in the application performance management business for a long time; under his leadership, Palo Alto-based HeadSpin has quickly grown into one of the fastest growing, though relatively unknown, startups in Silicon Valley.
“What HeadSpin has been able to achieve in its first three years is remarkable, and it has already attracted dozens of major clients across the mobile ecosystem,” ICONIQ partner Will Griffith said in a statement. “The company is quickly becoming the new standard of record for all mobile ecosystem players going forward. It’s one of the fastest-scaling software companies we’ve seen.”
HeadSpin works with Tinder, DocuSign and some 200 other app providers, allowing the companies to test and monitor their apps in real-time and on real devices before, during and after an app is released. The AI-enabled platform gives developers the ability to experience their app just as any regular user would and highlights high priority issues so companies can quickly resolve customer’s problems at scale.
Founded in 2015, HeadSpin says it expects to double revenue in 2018 but did not disclose any financial metrics.
Chief technology officer Brien Colwell is the other half of the company’s founding team. Colwell is the founder and former CEO of Nextop.io, a Y Combinator graduate and app optimization startup. Colwell and Lachwani are joined by HeadSpin’s head of product Sriram Krishnan, Tinder’s former head of international growth. Krishnan joined HeadSpin in October 2017 after working with HeadSpin’s toolset in his role at the app-based dating company.
“When I signed up for HeadSpin, I found out how phenomenal the product was,” Krishnan told TechCrunch .
“A lot of what we built was predicated on the fact that the mobile ecosystem is still very new,” he added. “If you think about the apps world, it’s only been around 10 years … It’s the Wild West out there when it comes to understanding performance.”
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Siilo injects $5.1M to try to transplant WhatsApp use in hospitals
Consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp are not only insanely popular for chatting with friends but have pushed deep into the workplace too, thanks to the speed and convenience they offer. They have even crept into hospitals, as time-strapped doctors reach for a quick and easy way to collaborate over patient cases on the ward.
Yet WhatsApp is not specifically designed with the safe sharing of highly sensitive medical information in mind. This is where Dutch startup Siilo has been carving a niche for itself for the past 2.5 years — via a free-at-the-point-of-use encrypted messaging app that’s intended for medical professions to securely collaborate on patient care, such as via in-app discussion groups and being able to securely store and share patient notes.
A business goal that could be buoyed by tighter EU regulations around handling personal data, say if hospital managers decide they need to address compliance risks around staff use of consumer messaging apps.
The app’s WhatsApp-style messaging interface will be instantly familiar to any smartphone user. But Siilo bakes in additional features for its target healthcare professional users, such as keeping photos, videos and files sent via the app siloed in an encrypted vault that’s entirely separate from any personal media also stored on the device.
Messages sent via Siilo are also automatically deleted after 30 days unless the user specifies a particular message should be retained. And the app does not make automated back-ups of users’ conversations.
Other doctor-friendly features include the ability to blur images (for patient privacy purposes); augment images with arrows for emphasis; and export threaded conversations to electronic health records.
There’s also mandatory security for accessing the app — with a requirement for either a PIN-code, fingerprint or facial recognition biometric to be used. While a remote wipe functionality to nix any locally stored data is baked into Siilo in the event of a device being lost or stolen.
Like WhatsApp, Siilo also uses end-to-end encryption — though in its case it says this is based on the opensource NaCl library
It also specifies that user messaging data is stored encrypted on European ISO-27001 certified servers — and deleted “as soon as we can”.
It also says it’s “possible” for its encryption code to be open to review on request.
Another addition is a user vetting layer to manually verify the medical professional users of its app are who they say they are.
Siilo says every user gets vetted. Though not prior to being able to use the messaging functions. But users that have passed verification unlock greater functionality — such as being able to search among other (verified) users to find peers or specialists to expand their professional network. Siilo says verification status is displayed on profiles.
“At Siilo, we coin this phenomenon ‘network medicine’, which is in contrast to the current old-fashioned, siloed medicine,” says CEO and co-founder Joost Bruggeman in a statement. “The goal is to improve patient care overall, and patients have a network of doctors providing input into their treatment.”
While Bruggeman brings the all-important medical background to the startup, another co-founder, Onno Bakker, has been in the mobile messaging game for a long time — having been one of the entrepreneurs behind the veteran web and mobile messaging platform, eBuddy.
A third co-founder, CFO Arvind Rao, tells us Siilo transplanted eBuddy’s messaging dev team — couching this ported in-house expertise as an advantage over some of the smaller rivals also chasing the healthcare messaging opportunity.
It is also of course having to compete technically with the very well-resourced and smoothly operating WhatsApp behemoth.
“Our main competitor is always WhatsApp,” Rao tells TechCrunch. “Obviously there are also other players trying to move in this space. TigerText is the largest in the US. In the UK we come across local players like Hospify and Forward.
“A major difference we have very experienced in-house dev team… The experience of this team has helped to build a messenger that really can compete in usability with WhatsApp that is reflected in our rapid adoption and usage numbers.”
“Having worked in the trenches as a surgery resident, I’ve experienced the challenges that healthcare professionals face firsthand,” adds Bruggeman. “With Siilo, we’re connecting all healthcare professionals to make them more efficient, enable them to share patient information securely and continue learning and share their knowledge. The directory of vetted healthcare professionals helps ensure they’re successful teamplayers within a wider healthcare network that takes care of the same patient.”
Siilo launched its app in May 2016 and has since grown to ~100,000 users, with more than 7.5 million messages currently being processed monthly and 6,000+ clinical chat groups active monthly.
“We haven’t come across any other secure messenger for healthcare in Europe with these figures in the App Store/Google Play rankings and therefore believe we are the largest in Europe,” adds Rao. “We have multiple large institutions across Western-Europe where doctors are using Siilo.”
On the security front, as well flagging the ISO 27001 certification the company has gained, he notes that it obtained “the highest NHS IG Toolkit level 3” — aka the now replaced system for organizations to self-assess their compliance with the UK’s National Health Service’s information governance processes, claiming “we haven’t seen [that] with any other messaging company”.
Siilo’s toolkit assessment was finalized at the end of Febuary 2018, and is valid for a year — so will be up for re-assessment under the replacement system (which was introduced this April) in Q1 2019. (Rao confirms they will be doing this “new (re-)assessment” at the end of the year.)
As well as being in active use in European hospitals such as St. George’s Hospital, London, and Charité Berlin, Germany, Siilo says its app has had some organic adoption by medical pros further afield — including among smaller home healthcare teams in California, and “entire transplantation teams” from Astana, Kazakhstan.
It also cites British Medical Journal research that found that of the 98.9% of U.K. hospital clinicians who now have smartphones, around a third are using consumer messaging apps in the clinical workplace. Persuading those healthcare workers to ditch WhatsApp at work is Siilo’s mission and challenge.
The team has just announced a €4.5 million (~$5.1M) seed to help it get onto the radar of more doctors. The round is led by EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investors. It says it will be using the funding to scale up its user base across Europe, with a particular focus on the UK and Germany.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, EQT Ventures’ Ashley Lundström, a venture lead and investment advisor at the VC firm, said: “The team was impressed with Siilo’s vision of creating a secure global network of healthcare professionals and the organic traction it has already achieved thanks to the team’s focus on building a product that’s easy to use. The healthcare industry has long been stuck using jurassic technologies and Siilo’s realtime messaging app can significantly improve efficiency
and patient care without putting patients’ data at risk.”
While the messaging app itself is free for healthcare professions to use, Siilo also offers a subscription service to monetize the freemium product.
This service, called Siilo Connect offers organisations and professional associations what it bills as “extensive management, administration, networking and software integration tools”, or just data regulation compliance services if they want the basic flavor of the paid tier.
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Beamery closes $28M Series B to stoke support for its ‘talent CRM’
Beamery, a London-based startup that offers self-styled “talent CRM”– aka ‘candidate relationship management’ — and recruitment marketing software targeted at fast-growing companies, has closed a $28M Series B funding round, led by EQT Ventures.
Also participating in the round are M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and existing investors Index Ventures, Edenred Capital Partners and Angelpad Fund. Beamery last raised a $5M Series A, in April 2017, led by Index.
Its pitch centers on the notion of helping businesses win a ‘talent war’ by taking a more strategic and pro-active approach to future hires vs just maintaining a spreadsheet of potential candidates.
Its platform aims to help the target enterprises build and manage a talent pool of people they might want to hire in future to get out ahead of the competition in HR terms, including providing tools for customized marketing aimed at nurture relations with possible future hires.
Customer numbers for Beamery’s software have stepped up from around 50 in April 2017 to 100 using it now — including the likes of Facebook (which is using it globally), Continental, VMware, Zalando, Grab and Balfour Beatty.
It says the new funding will be going towards supporting customer growth, including by ramping up hiring in its offices in London (HQ), Austin and San Francisco.
It also wants to expand into more markets. “We’re focusing on some of the world’s biggest global businesses that need support in multiple timezones and geographies so really it’s a global approach,” said a spokesman on that.
“Companies adopting the system are large enterprises doing talent at scale, that are innovative in terms of being proactive about recruiting, candidate experience and employer brand,” he added.
A “significant” portion of the Series B funds will also go towards R&D and produce development focused on its HR tech niche.
“Across all sectors, there’s a shift towards proactive recruitment through technology, and Beamery is emerging as the category leader,” added Tom Mendoza, venture lead and investment advisor at EQT, in a supporting statement.
“Beamery has a fantastic product, world-class high-ambition founders, and an outstanding analytics-driven team. They’ve been relentless about building the best talent CRM and marketing platform and gaining a deep understanding of the industry-wide problems.”
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Service Partner One is a Berlin-headquartered startup that is bringing the booking and management of various office management services online, via its website and/or iPad and iPad app combo.