is the world’s biggest startup campus and it’s based in Paris. Director Roxanne Varza at TechCrunch Disrupt back in December 2016. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Station F director Roxanne Varza is joining us at to give us an update and tell us about future plans. If you aren’t familiar with Station F, it starts with a beautiful building. Originally built in 1929, it is now classified as a historical monument. But now, it’s also a high-tech building and a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem. Varza has managed to create a community of entrepreneurs, VC funds and big tech companies that work, share knowledge and collaborate. In addition to Station F’s own Founders Program and Fighters Program, you can become a Station F member by joining a partner program. Facebook, Naver (Line), Ubisoft, Microsoft and all run their own incubator from Station F. And it’s been working really well as there are over one thousand startups based at Station F. Station F is also a great signal for the international tech community. If you head over to its , you can see that plenty of head of states and major tech CEOs come to Station F whenever they visit Paris, from Jack Dorsey to newly elected president of Ukraine Vlodomyr Zelensky. Around one third of Station F startups come from abroad and 600 members don’t even speak French. More recently, Station F unveiled , a co-living space for Station F members. Station F is creating a lifestyle and has become a cultural phenomenon for Paris. And I can’t wait to see what’s next. to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12. In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup. Roxanne Varza is Director of STATION F, the biggest startup campus in the world with more than 1.000 startups, located in Paris. She is originally from Silicon Valley. Before joining she led Microsoft Ventures Paris and TechCrunch France. She also worked for several London-based startups and cofounded StarHer, Tech.eu and Failcon France. Prior to her current role, Roxanne was the lead for Microsoft’s start-up activities in France, running both Bizspark and Microsoft Ventures programs for 3 years. She was also Editor of TechCrunch France from 2010-2011 and has written for several publications including Business Insider and The Telegraph. In April 2013, Business Insider listed her as one of the top 30 women under 30 in tech. She has also been listed in additional rankings by Business Insider, Vanity Fair and Le Figaro, The Evening Standard and more. Roxanne also co-founded StartHer (ex Girls in Tech Paris) and is the co-organizer of the Failcon Paris conference. More recently, she co-founded Tech.eu, a European tech media backed by Dave McClure, Adeo Ressi, Daniel Waterhouse and more. Prior to TechCrunch, Roxanne worked for the French government’s foreign direct investment agency helping fast-growing startups develop their activities in France. Roxanne has spoken, moderated, mentored and judged numerous startup events and programs throughout Europe and also helps European startups with content and communications. Roxanne is trilingual and holds degrees from UCLA, Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. She is also an epilepsy advocate.

has launched a new utility-scale energy storage product called Megapack modeled after the giant battery system it deployed in South Australia as the company seeks to provide an alternative to natural gas “peaker” power plants. Megapack is the third and largest energy storage system offered by Tesla. The company also sells the residential Powerwall and the commercial Powerpack systems. Megapack, which in a blog post, is the latest effort by the company to retool and grow its energy storage business, which is a smaller revenue driver than sales of its electric vehicles. Of the $6.4 billion in total revenue posted in the second quarter, just $368 million was from Tesla’s solar and energy storage product business. Tesla did deploy a record 415 megawatt-hours of energy storage products in the second quarter, an 81% increase from the previous quarter, according to Tesla’s second-quarter earnings report that was released July 24. Powerwalls are now installed at more than 50,000 sites. The Megapack offering could provide an even bigger boost if Tesla can convince utilities to opt for it instead of the more common natural gas peaker plants used today. And it seems it already has. Tesla’s Megapack will provide 182.5 MW of the upcoming 567 MW . The so-called Megapack was specifically designed and engineered to be an easy-to-install utility-scale system. Each system comes fully assembled — that includes battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls — with up to 3 megawatt-hours of energy storage and 1.5 MW of inverter capacity. The system includes software, developed by Tesla, to monitor, control and monetize the installations, the company said in a blog post announcing Megapack. All Megapacks connect to Powerhub, an advanced monitoring and control platform for large-scale utility projects and microgrids, and can also integrate with Autobidder, Tesla’s machine-learning platform for automated energy trading, the company said. Megapack was inspired by Tesla’s Hornsdale project, which combined its 100 MW Powerpack system with Neoen’s wind farm near Jamestown in South Australia. The Tesla Powerpack system stored power generated by the wind farm and then delivered the electricity to the grid during peak hours. The facility in its first year. Today, the go-to option for utilities are natural gas “peaker” power plants. Peaker power plants are used when a local utility grid can’t provide enough power to meet peak demand, an occurrence that has become more common as temperatures and populations rise. Tesla hopes to be the sustainable alternative. And in states like California, which have ambitious emissions targets, Tesla could gain some ground. Instead of using a natural gas peaker plant, utilities could use the Megapack to store excess solar or wind energy to support the grid’s peak loads.

The growth of Airbnb and other big travel startups has given a fillip to the wider travel industry, and today several smaller startups in the short-term property sector are announcing that they have merged to tackle the opportunity with more scale. The UK’s BnbBuddy and The London Residents Club, along with both Hintown from Italy and RentExperience from Portugal — all companies that help manage properties that are listed on platforms like Airbnb — have combined to form a new startup called . Going into the merger, all four were profitable, having all been boostrapped from day one. But Michael Allen, the MD of the BnbBuddy, said that now the combined entity is using its scale and raising outside funding to grow the business. Altido is looking to raise a Series A in the tens of millions of dollars. It is not disclosing its valuation currently although the fact that it already has an international presence and profitability have helped it in this area, Allen said. The combined company will have about 1,700 properties under management in 21 European destinations, which it will be using as the anchor for an aggressive push both on existing markets as well as other parts of Europe and beyond. There is a long way to go: as a point of comparison, when — which provides services to manage rentals of private homes on Airbnb and other services — in March, the number of properties managed on its platform had reached 100,000 across 70 countries. Other competitors will include the platforms themselves where these properties are getting listed: as Airbnb inches to an IPO, it’s adding ever more services and features to its platform to diversify its revenue streams and also bring in more revenues per customer. (As we’ve said before, that could also make Altido and others like it acquisition targets.) The growth of Altido’s individual businesses up to now has been on the back of the massive growth surge we’ve seen around platforms — marketplaces, to be more precise — that help people easily list and rent out travel accommodation in private homes as an alternative to hotels; and would-be visitors to find, book and pay for these in an efficient and reliable way, alongside a wider growth of self-catering accommodations that exist as alternative to traditional hotels. The wider market for “homesharing”, as the first of these categories is sometimes called, has become massive — with Airbnb, the outsized startup leading the charge, now valued at $35 billion — and it now accounts for some 20 percent of the supply of rooms globally by Altido’s estimate. Some property owners are happy to play host and run and manage their own listings on these platforms — which include the likes of Airbnb, Homeaway and VRBO, and many others — but a big part of the scaling of these services has come by way of third-party management companies that handle different aspects of those listings, from cleaning before and after guests and stocking kitchens and bathrooms with consumables; to managing the relationship with the visitors; to managing the listings themselves. Altido provides an end-to-end service for those who do not want to play host, alongside a business where it also helps maintain and manage service apartments and aparthotels and guesthouses. Today the companies that make up Altido rely on third-party platforms to disseminate all those listings, but longer-term, the plan will be to build out more services to offer listings directly as well, alongside more technology to help hosts and other management companies optimise pricing and details around the properties themselves to make them more attractive. “We see tech as a big enabler,” Goncalo Ribeiro, the founder of RentExperience, said in an interview. He said that his company already has proprietary algorithms that it uses to help calculate property risk factors, which it already uses and will roll out across the whole of the merged company, and the different operations have already been building technology to help onboard properties more efficiently. Areas that it hopes to address include “regulation risk, potential growth rates, historic market data, marketing calculations and more. Any decision we take we want to be proven by data.”

Hot on the heels of Indian delivery startup — at a unicorn valuation, no less — so its close rival Grofers has also pulled in capital after it announced a $200 million raise to battle its local competition and international giants Amazon and Walmart. The round is the largest in India’s online grocery sector to date, and it was led by Vision Fund, which continues to make major bets on the nation’s growing internet economy. KTB, and existing investors Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital also took part. Five-year-old works with more than 5,000 stores in . In an interview with TechCrunch, Albinder Dhindsa, cofounder and CEO of Grofers, said the startup will use the fresh capital to expand to new markets and bring its service to “hundreds of millions of Indian consumers,” although he didn’t specify exact launch cities. Dhindsa said that Grofers does not want to expand to new cities for the heck of it. Instead the startup focused on entering a city and growing its business profitable there. Grofers is already profitable in Delhi and will soon be profitable in Kolkata, he said. In Southern Indian markets such as Bengaluru, the startup is working to gain foothold. The startup is rivaled by a number of players, including BigBasket, which raised its round earlier this month from Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, the U.K.’s and Alibaba. The duo also faces competition from , and delivery startup Swiggy, which . However, more concerning for them is the growing ambitions of Amazon India and both of which are quickly expanding their businesses in India. Amazon’s Pantry and Prime Now services jointly have a presence in more than 100 cities, while Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy has publicly expressed an intention to pilot a fresh foods business in the nation. Dhindsa argued that these players are not really a significant competitor to Grofers yet. The foods and grocery market is growing in India. According to some estimates, it will in sales in 2023 with digital-based services seen as an important vector for growth. This is likely only the start now that SoftBank’s Vision Fund has entered the space through this deal with Grofers. Other investments in India from the near-$100 billion fund include , , Flipkart — although the fund exited after the Walmart sale — Paytm, and . With , you can bet that there’s a lot more to come.

If you thought Uber’s initial public offering last week would deter fellow venture-backed technology companies from pursuing the public markets in 2019, you thought wrong. , yet another multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley “unicorn,” has filed to go public. The cloud-based cybersecurity platform valued at $3.3 billion in 2018 revealed its IPO Tuesday afternoon. The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CRWD.” According to the filing, it intends to raise an additional $100 million, though that figure is typically a placeholder amount. To date, has raised $480 million in venture capital funding from Warburg Pincus, which owns a 30.3% pre-IPO stake, Accel (20.3%) and CapitalG (11.2%). As we’ve come to expect of these companies, CrowdStrike’s financials are a bit concerning. While its revenues are growing at an impressive rate, from $53 million in 2017 to $119 million in 2018 to $250 million in the year ending January 31, 2019, its spending is far outweighing its gross profit. Most recently, the company posted a gross profit of $163 million on total operating expenses of about $300 million. CrowdStrike is not yet profitable. Its total losses are increasing year-over-year from $91 million in 2017, to $135 million in 2018 and $140 million in 2019. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the business was founded in 2011 by chief executive officer George Kurtz and chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch, former McAfee executives. CrowdStrike, which develops security technology that looks at changes in user behavior on networked devices and uses that information to identify potential cyber threats, has reportedly pondered an IPO for some time. The business sells its endpoint protection software to enterprises on a subscription basis, competing with Cylance, Carbon Black and others. In its S-1, CrowdStrike makes a case for its offering based on the rise of cloud computing and the growing threat of cybersecurity breaches. It estimates a total addressable market worth $29.2 billion by 2021. “We founded CrowdStrike in 2011 to reinvent security for the cloud era,” the company writes. “When we started the company, cyberattackers had a decided, asymmetric advantage over existing security products. We turned the tables on the adversaries by taking a fundamentally new approach that leverages the network effects of crowdsourced data applied to modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, or AI, cloud computing, and graph databases.”

As wild as it sounds, the race is on to build a functioning space internet — and SpaceX is taking its biggest step yet with the launch of 60 (!) satellites tomorrow that will form the first wave of its Starlink constellation. It’s a hugely important and incredibly complex launch for the company — and should be well worth launching. A Falcon 9 with the flat Starlink test satellites (they’re “production design” but not final hardware) is vertical at launchpad 40 in Cape Canaveral. It has completed its static fire test and should have a window for launch tomorrow, weather permitting. Building satellite constellations hundreds or thousands strong is seen by several major companies and investors as the next major phase of connectivity — though it will take years and billions of dollars to do so. OneWeb, perhaps SpaceX’s biggest competitor in this area, just in funding after in March of a planned 650. Jeff Bezos has announced that Amazon will join the fray with the proposed 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper. Ubiquitilink has . And plenty of others are taking on smaller segments, like lower-cost or domain-specific networks. Needless to say it’s an exciting sector, but today’s launch is a particularly interesting one because it is so consequential for SpaceX. If this doesn’t go well, it could set Starlink’s plans back long enough to give competitors an edge. The satellites stacked inside the Falcon 9 payload fairing. “Tight fit,” pointed out CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX hasn’t explained exactly how the 60 satellites will be distributed to their respective orbits, but founder and CEO Elon Musk did note on Twitter that there’s “no dispenser.” Of course there must be some kind of dispenser — these things aren’t going to just jump off of their own accord. They’re stuffed in there like kernels on a corncob, and likely each have . A pair of prototype satellites, Tintin-A and B, have been in orbit since early last year, and have no doubt furnished a great deal of useful information to the Starlink program. But the 60 aboard tomorrow’s launch aren’t quite final hardware. Although Musk noted that they are “production design,” COO Gwynne Shotwell has said that they are still test models. “This next batch of satellites will really be a demonstration set for us to see the deployment scheme and start putting our network together,” she said at the Satellite 2019 conference in Washington, D.C. — they reportedly lack inter-satellite links but are otherwise functional. I’ve asked SpaceX for more information on this. It makes sense: If you’re planning to put thousands (perhaps as many as 12,000 eventually) of satellites into orbit, you’ll need to test at scale and with production hardware. And for those worried about the possibility of overpopulation in orbit — it’s absolutely something to consider, but many of these satellites will be ; at 550 kilometers up, these tiny satellites will naturally de-orbit in a handful of years. Even OneWeb’s, at 1,100 km, aren’t that high up — geosynchronous satellites are above 35,000 km. That doesn’t mean there’s no risk at all, but it does mean failed or abandoned satellites won’t stick around for long. Just don’t expect to boot up your Starlink connection any time soon. It would take a minimum of 6 more launches like this one — a total of 420, a happy coincidence for Musk — to provide “minor” coverage. This would likely only be for testing as well, not commercial service. That would need 12 more launches, and dozens more to bring it to the point where it can compete with terrestrial broadband. Even if it will take years to pull off, that is the plan. And by that time others will have spun up their operations as well. It’s an exciting time for space and for connectivity. No launch time has been set as of this writing, so takeoff is just planned for Wednesday the 15th at present. As there’s no need to synchronize the launch with the movement of any particular celestial body, T-0 should be fairly flexible and SpaceX will likely just wait for the best weather and visibility. Delays are always a possibility, though, so don’t be surprised if this is pushed out to later in the week. As always you’ll be able to watch the launch , but I’ll update this post with the live video link as soon as it’s available.

, the SaaS applications performance management platform, announced a major update to that platform today. Instead of ripping off the band-aid all at once, the company has decided to take a more measured approach to change, giving customers a chance to ease into it. The new platform, called One has been designed to replace the original platform, which was developed over the previous decade. The company says that by moving slowly to the new platform, customers will be able to take advantage of new features that it couldn’t have built on the old platform without having to learn a new a way of working. Jim Gochee, chief product officer at New Relic says that all of the existing tooling and functionality will eventually be ported over or reimagined on top of New Relic One.”What it is under the covers for us is a new technology stack and a new platform for our offering. We are still running our existing technology stack with our existing products. So we’re [essentially] running two platforms in two stacks in parallel, but all of the new stuff is going to be built on New Relic One over time,” he explained. By redesigning the existing platform from scratch, New Relic created a new, modern, more extensible model that will allow it to plug in new functionality more easily over time, and eventually even allow customers to do the same thing. For now, it’s about changing what’s happening under the hood and providing a new user experience in a redesigned user interface. “New Relic One is very pluggable and extensible, which makes it easier for our own teams to build on, and to extend and expand, and also down the road we will eventually get to the point where partners and customers will be able to extend our UI themselves, which is something that we’re very excited about,” he said. Among the new features is support for AWS Lambda, the company’s serverless offering. It also enables users to search across multiple accounts. It’s not unusual for customers to be monitoring multiple accounts and sub-accounts. With New Relic One, customers can now search across these accounts and find if issues have cascaded more easily. In a blog post introducing the new platform, CEO Lew Cirne acknowledged the growing complexity of the monitoring landscape, something the new platform has been specifically designed to address. “Unlike today’s fragmented tools that can deliver a bag of charts and metrics with a bunch of seemingly unrelated numbers, New Relic One is designed to cut through complexity, provide context, and let you see across artificial organizational boundaries so you can quickly find and fix problems,” Cirne wrote. Nancy Gohring, a senior analyst at 451 Research says this flexibility is a key strength of the new approach. “One of the most important updates here is the reworked data model which allows New Relic to offer customers more flexibility in how they can search the operations data they’re collecting and build dashboards. This kind of flexibility is more important in modern app environments that are more complex and dynamic than they used to be. Everyone’s environment is different and digging for the cause of a problem is more complicated than it used to be,” Gohring told TechCrunch. The new ability to search across accounts should help with that. She concedes that having parallel platforms is not ideal, but sees why the company chose to go this route. “Having two UIs is never great. But the approach New Relic is taking lets them get something totally new out all at once, rather than spending time gradually introducing it. It will let customers try out the new stuff at their own pace,” she said. New Relic One goes live tomorrow, and will be available at no additional cost to New Relic subscribers.

Daniel Wu Contributor is a privacy counsel and legal engineer at . He holds a JD from Harvard University, and is a PhD candidate for Social Policy and Sociology at The Harvard Kennedy School. More posts by this contributor This week on Extra Crunch, I am , looking at how 200+ companies are creating more access and affordability. Yesterday, I focused on startups trying to , from property acquisition to management and operations. Today, I want to focus on innovations that improve housing inclusion more generally, such as efforts to pair housing with transit, small business creation, and mental rehabilitation. These include social impact-focused interventions, interventions that increase income and mobility, and ecosystem-builders in housing innovation. Nonprofits and social enterprises lead many of these innovations. Yet because these areas are perceived to be not as lucrative, fewer technologists and other professionals have entered them. New business models and technologies have the opportunity to scale many of these alternative institutions — and create tremendous social value. Social impact is increasingly important to , with brands like having created loyal fan bases through purpose-driven leadership. While each of these sections could be their own market map, this overall market map serves as an initial guide to each of these spaces. Social impact innovations These innovations address:

, the “micro-mobility” startup that operates an e-scooter service on the streets of a growing number of European cities, has unveiled a range of new scooters and a first e-bike more suited to rentals. The company is also revealing plans to expand to another 150 cities and towns, having ratcheted up 2 million rides in eight months since launching. Voi currently operates in 18 cities in nine European countries — including Stockholm, Madrid, Copenhagen, Paris, Lyon and Lisbon — and with will open up in Germany, Belgium, Poland and Italy this summer. In a call, Voi CEO and co-founder Fredrik Hjelm told me the new hardware rollouts are part of the Swedish company’s plans to become a broader micro-mobility play with a range of travel options that meet the demands of people living in urban areas and the sustainability concerns of city and town authorities. The new e-scooters have been designed and engineered in-house using data collected and other learnings from riders during Voi’s relatively short lifespan. Voi’s main new model, dubbed “Voiager 2,” is said to be designed for maximum durability as well as future recycling (should and when it full apart or be superseded). The body is cast in one single piece of 5mm high-grade aluminium, coupled with performance enhancements thanks to a custom electric powertrain and 10″ wheels. There’s also a kickstand to prevent the e-scooter from falling over when parked (a common sight in some cities) and a three-wheel version particularly suitable for slippery conditions. The Voiager 2’s display features “Advanced Rider Assistance System (ARAS) functions,” such as navigation support, alerts and notifications. The idea, explained Hjelm, is to avoid riders having to juggle looking at their mobile phone or to continuously stop to navigate. The Internet of Things (IoT) Telematics unit is integrated into the body of the scooter. Hjelm says the Voiager 2 is Voi’s first scooter based on the Voi modular scooter architecture (VOI MSA), which allows for easy service, repair and upgrades. There’s also a swappable battery to reduce scooter downtime, as well as reduce the environmental impact and cost of charging scooters. Overall, the design is not just intended to improve the e-scooter experience for consumers and city authorities but should go someway to addressing concerns around the questionable unit economics of micro-mobility services. See also: In a bid to launch at speed and test the market, companies have used off-the-shelf consumer-grade e-scooters that aren’t durable enough to withstand the battering they receive through shared commercial use and being left outside in varied weather conditions. They’re also not designed with rental logistics in mind and even something as simple as a hot swappable battery can reduce the cost of running an e-scooter service since more scooters remain in motion, potentially increasing revenue per scooter. There’s also a reduction in the cost of collecting dead batteries for re-charging as they are de-coupled from the scooter itself. Voi Cargo A second model, the new “Voiager 1” has been designed for the German market. This month the German government will green light e-scooters for use on its roads. Hjelm thinks Germany will quickly become one of the world’s biggest e-scooter markets and its new rugged scooter features brakes and indicator lights that meet strict German regulations, which the Voi CEO believes are likely to be adopted elsewhere. Voi is also unveiling the Voi Bike and Voi Cargo. The former is an e-bike that has been adapted for sharing and meets European e-bike regulations. It can travel at 25km/h fully assisted and is suitable for longer distances than e-scooters. Voi Cargo is a three-wheel electric cargo bike that caters specifically to riders who have to carry bulky loads, such as groceries or children. The bike has a large box on the front which features three-point seatbelts. Meanwhile, Voi isn’t the only European e-scooter startup developing its own hardware. Flash — the stealthy mobility startup has talked up its own hardware product plans, while Berlin’s is also developing a proprietary model of electric scooters specifically designed for the sharing market. Other competitors in Europe include and Taxify’s . Silicon Valley’s Bird and Lime also operate in Europe.

As a former entrepreneur turned independent designer, gets the startup life. He often describes himself as a second co-founder for his clients, unafraid of 2AM phone calls and prepping pitch decks for investors. He’s a “full stack” creative director based in Oakland, CA with a passion for tackling cultural tension. Learn more about why design runs in his blood, his branding philosophy, and more. On his ideal client: “There are certain values that we have to have in line. The number one value is that they don’t view their people as resources, they view them as people. If I start to get the inkling that a founder isn’t necessarily great at managing their teams and their people, empowering them or removing obstacles, it’s probably going to be difficult for us to figure out customer empathy. Number two, design is an investment, not an expense.” “Phil has worked with us to create and shape a number of impact brands like 100% Human at Work – and hundreds of visual presentations that have inspired hundreds of entrepreneurs to do something bigger in their lives.” Jean Oelwang, London, UK, CEO, Virgin Unite On the power of branding: “I get to be able to shape culture because that’s what brands are able to do. You can build a really great product and introduce it into the market and that’ll have it’s own life cycle until trends change. Brands can last a lifetime. I think that’s the only way that I can make a mark on the world, even if my name isn’t on the company. If it’s contributing to the brand, I’ve scaled my potential impact in the world.” Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering with whom founders love to work, based on and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already. The Interview Yvonne Leow: Tell me about your background. How did you get into design and branding? Phil Weiner: So I actually didn’t study design. I’m self-taught designer. I come from a pretty cool line of designers. My grandfather drew the “I Love Lucy” heart and did album artwork for Motown Records, and typography. My mom’s also a graphic designer. She’s been with The Washington Post and The NY Daily News for years. She just retired. The first thing they actually told me was “Don’t go to school for design. Go to school for business. Because if you don’t understand business, you don’t understand design.” So I went to school for econ and math. I studied design in “the streets”. I started my first company when I was 21 years old. It was an early version of Hired.com. When you don’t have any money, you have to do things yourself and be creative so I learned everything from basically failing. I know a lot about what startups are going through, whether it’s designing a pitch deck, selling a product, A/B testing, or trying to convert traffic on a webpage. I ended up selling that first company, which was a recruiting business that was based on scraping Linkedin for what we call, “The most placeable candidate.”

, a Seattle-based startup that offers a cloud-agnostic AI automation platform for enterprises, today announced a $25 million Series B funding round led by Norwest Partners. Madrona, Gradient Ventures, Work-Bench, Osage University Partners and Rakuten Ventures also participated in this round. While the company started out as a marketplace for algorithms, it now mostly focuses on machine learning and helping enterprises . “It’s actually really hard to productionize machine learning models,” CEO Diego Oppenheimer told me. “It’s hard to help data scientists to not deal with data infrastructure but really being able to build out their machine learning and AI muscle.” To help them, Algorithmia essentially built out a machine learning DevOps platform that allows data scientists to train their models on the platform and with the framework of their choice, bring it to Algorithmia — a platform that has already been blessed by their IT departments — and take it into production. “Every Fortune 500 has an AI initiative but they are bogged down by the difficulty of managing and deploying ML models,” said Rama Sekhar, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, who has now joined the company’s board. “Algorithmia is the clear leader in building the tools to manage the complete machine learning lifecycle and helping customers unlock value from their R&D investments.” With the new funding, the company will double down on this focus by investing in product development to solve these issues, but also by building out its team, with a plan to double its headcount over the next year. A year from now, Oppenheimer told me, he hopes that Algorithmia will be a household name for data scientists and, maybe more importantly, their platform of choice for putting their models into production. “How does Algorithmia succeed? Algorithmia succeeds when our customers are able to deploy AI and ML applications,” Oppenheimer said. “And although there is a ton of excitement around doing this, the fact is that it’s really difficult for companies to do so.” The company previously raised a $10.5 million Series A round . It’s customers now include the , a number of U.S. intelligence agencies and Fortune 500 companies. In total, over 90,000 engineers and data scientists are now on the platform.

, the Poland-founded healthcare booking platform that now processes 1.5 million bookings every month globally, has closed €80 million in Series E financing. The round is led by One Peak Partners and Goldman Sachs Private Capital, with existing investors Piton Capital and ENERN Investments also participating, and brings total raised to date to around €130 million. Founded in 2012, as it stands to day DocPlanner’s offering has two pillars: a consumer-facing marketplace and reviews site, and cloud software for private healthcare providers, including individual doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals. The marketplace operates in 15 countries and lists more than 2 million healthcare professionals. It has also garnered 2.4 million patient reviews. The DocPlanner SaaS is designed to enable doctors and clinics to optimise their “patient flow,” reduce no-shows, and digitize the administrative side of their practices. The premise is that digitisation can reduce a provider’s non-patient facing workload and ultimately improve healthcare outcomes for patients. Meanwhile, DocPlanner says the Series E will be deployed to help it continue penetrating core markets in Europe and Latin America with its SaaS-based marketplace offering. The company will also continue invest in R&D to offer additional software to doctors and clinics. It currently has 1,000 employees globally across offices in across offices in Warsaw, Barcelona, Istanbul, Rome, Mexico City and Curitiba. A large recruitment drive is also underway, with over 100 openings. Once again, DocPlanner is talking up the possibility of further acquisitions, too. The company says it is on the lookout for young, innovative cloud-based software companies to help accelerate growth. Previous acquisitions include buying competitors in Turkey and Spain, in 2014 and 2016, respectively.

, the Danish fintech that offers a “business spending platform” that lets companies easily issue employees with cards and manage expenditure, has raised a hefty $56 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Stripes, the New York-based growth fund, with participation from existing investors, Kinnevik, Creandum and Founders. I understand that the new funding values the company at a little under half a billion dollars and brings the total amount raised to $79 million. Founded in 2015 by ex-Tradeshift early employees Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, Pleo aims to transform business expense processes so that employees aren’t left out of pocket waiting to be reimbursed or have to jump through too many bureaucratic hoops trying to make company purchases. The platform consists of “smart” company cards paired with software and mobile apps to automatically match receipts and track company spending in real-time. The Pleo MasterCard is a prepaid card that can be charged up and handed out to employees, either physically or virtually. This is then coupled with Pleo’s backend system and apps. Features of the software includes the ability to categorise spending automatically and capture receipts associated with each transaction. Pleo also eliminates expense reports and automates bookkeeping tasks via integrating directly with various accounting software providers. Meanwhile, the prepaid element means no waiting to be reimbursed for expenses and less waiting for approval, which is traditionally a real pain-point for employees and companies alike. In a call, Pleo co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom tells me that the fast-growing startup is helping to create a whole new product category: Pleo is neither a business bank account or simply accounting or expenses management software. Instead, the company’s “business spending platform” has elements of both but is as much about enabling and embracing a change in company culture than simply better financial technology. “We are helping to export Nordic company culture,” he says, in reference to a more flat company hierarchy where employees are empowered to take more responsibility and have greater autonomy. The Pleo platform’s features and the transparency it affords means that more employees can be given company cards underpinned by micro-budgets and spending limits for the things they need to purchase in order to get on with the job. Likewise, Rindom says that forward thinking companies are also recognising that bestowing more trust with employees and less pain-points with regards to expense reimbursement is also a potential recruiting and retention tool. He says that while a company’s chief financial officer is typically the buyer of Pleo, the product itself is targeting employees, who remain its biggest advocate. To that end, more than 3,500 companies have switched to Pleo across the U.K., Denmark, Germany and Sweden. Its customers include Airsorted, The Tab, Lyst, Yoyo, Pizza Pilgrims and Roskilde Festival amongst others, with “hundreds” of businesses joining Pleo every month. Pleo says it will use the new funding to expand and more than triple its headcount, from 120 to 400 employees by the end of 2020. It also plans to accelerate product development with the aim to service “the entire purchase process” for SMEs across the whole of Europe. This will include adding credit, invoices, mobile payments, a vendor marketplace, VAT reclaims and more. “While we are competing with banks in this one area we are not aiming to become one,” adds Rindom in a statement. “We remain committed to providing the best product in the market for business spending. We haven’t touched the funds from our Series A round less than a year ago, yet we see enormous potential and demand for Pleo”.

, the London-headquartered company that lets you book on-demand — now including massage, osteopathy, facial, and nail services — has raised $10 million in Series B funding. The round, which includes an earlier $4.5 million equity crowdfund, is led by Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV). Two of previous backers, Passion Capital and Felix Capital, also followed on. In a call, Urban founder Jack Tang told me the fund raise will be used by the company to accelerate its goal of becoming a “one-stop shop” for on-demand wellness services, with new product categories planned, including fitness. Tang has also talked about adding digital only well-ness offerings, harnessing the skills of its practitioners where a face-to-face booking isn’t needed, in addition to a planned content push. This, he believes, will help Urban to launch in further cities and countries in the future but with lower user acquisition costs since its brand will already be known. The company currently operates in several U.K. cities along with Paris. Related to this Series B, Urban has already begun the process of recruiting a team of 30 engineers in Lithuania at its Vilnius office. The Lithuania team will work on all aspects of the platform, including the client-facing apps, the practitioner business software, Urban’s corporate offering and data science projects. A security failing that left Urban’s customer database exposed was (and subsequently plugged), and Tang says that much better systems have been put in place since to ensure nothing like that ever happens again. He also explained that by expanding the company’s engineering base, more people will be solely dedicated to security. Meanwhile, Tang says that the move into wellness services beyond massage has helped Urban to get near to profitability and significantly improve unit economics. The new services have been well received by Urban’s customer base, with 80 percent of new service revenue driven by existing customers. Therefore, the fundraise, he says, isn’t about plugging gaps in revenue but about doubling down on the company’s mission to empower “city-dwellers” to prioritise their wellbeing. With that said, Tang also cautioned that in the U.K. we are entering a “silent recession,” citing various macro economic data, including that related to consumer spending. Brexit, he thinks, is also a factor. Therefore, he says that it is important for Urban to remain in a strong position to weather any economic storm when discretionary spending will inevitably contract.

Of the many categories in the tech world, none is more ferociously competitive than enterprise. For decades, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce, to name a few of the giants, have battled to deliver the tools businesses want to become more productive and competitive. That market is closing in on $500 billion in sales per year, which explains why hundreds of new enterprise startups launch every year and dozens are acquired by the big incumbents trying to maintain their edge. Last year alone, the and included IBM’s acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion, SAP paying $8 billion for Qualtrics, Microsoft landing GitHub for $7.5 billion, Salesforce acquiring MuleSoft for $6.5 billion and Adobe grabbing Marketo for $4.75 billion. No startup category has made more VCs and founders wildly wealthy, and none has seen more mighty companies rise faster or fall harder. That technology and business thrill ride makes enterprise a category TechCrunch has long wanted to tackle head on. (September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center) will take on the big challenges and promise facing enterprise companies today. TechCrunch’s editors, notably Frederic Lardinois, Ron Miller and Connie Loizos, will bring to the stage founders and leaders from established and emerging companies to address rising questions like the promised revolution from machine learning and AI, intelligent marketing automation and the inevitability of the cloud, as well as the outer reaches of technology, like quantum and blockchain. We’ll enlist proven enterprise-focused VCs to reveal where they are directing their early, middle and late-stage investments. And we’ll ask the most proven serial entrepreneurs to tell us what it really took to build that company, and which company they would like to create next. All throughout the show, TechCrunch’s editors will zero in on emerging enterprise technologies to sort the hype from the reality. Whether you are a founder, an investor, enterprise-minded engineer or a corporate CTO / CIO, will provide a valuable day of new insights and great networking. Tickets are now available for . Want to bring a group of people from your company? Get an when you purchase four or more tickets at once. Are you an early-stage startup? We have a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event. Students are invited to apply for a . Additionally, for each ticket purchased for TC Sessions: Enterprise, you will also be registered for a complimentary Expo Only pass to on October 2-4. Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? and a member of our sales team will contact you.

It’s not looking great for ride-hailing giant Uber (NYSE: UBER). Today, Uber closed its second day of trading down more than 18.8% from its IPO price at $37.25 per share, with a market cap of $62.2 billion. Uber, which was previously valued at $72 billion by venture capitalists on the private market, priced its stock at $45 a share for an $82.4 billion valuation last week. On day one, Uber closed at $41.57 a share. In a , Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees today that, “like all periods of transition, there are ups and downs. Obviously, our stock did not trade as well as we had hoped post-IPO. Today is another tough day in the market, and I expect the same as it relates to our stock.” Moving forward, Khosrowshahi urged employees to focus on the long-term. He also pointed to the comebacks both Facebook and Amazon made post-IPO. Lyft has similarly suffered on the public market since its IPO in March. Lyft closed the day at $48.15, with a market cap of $13.8 billion.

Daniel Wu Contributor is a privacy counsel and legal engineer at . He holds a JD from Harvard University, and is a PhD candidate for Social Policy and Sociology at The Harvard Kennedy School. More posts by this contributor In this section of , I am digging into the 200+ companies impacting the key of developing and managing housing. Innovations have reduced costs in the of the housing development and management process. I explore innovations in each of these phases, including construction, land, regulatory, financing, and operational costs. Reducing Construction Costs This is one of the developers face, by rising building material costs and labor shortages.

Bill Nye has a hot take on global warming. (YouTube screen grab via Last Week Tonight) Bill Nye has finally reached his burning point. The famed “Science Guy,” who used far-less-salty language while explaining science to children during his television heyday on PBS, wants us all to “grow the f— up” now because the planet is on fire and this is serious. Nye shows up in the latest episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO in which the host spends 20 minutes talking about the challenges facing the environment and the terrifying headlines everyone sees — and apparently glosses over — on a daily basis. Oliver uses news clips to illustrate some of the ridiculous debate surrounding the Green New Deal while also spelling out just what the piece of legislation would hope to achieve when it comes to climate action. Nye first shows up at the 10:20 mark of the video below to explain “the complicated logic behind carbon pricing.” “When we release carbon, say, by burning coal or driving an SUV, all of us pay for that in the form of things like fires, floods and crop failures. Putting a fee on carbon creates incentives to emit less carbon, and, more importantly, it also incentivizes the development of low-carbon technology, which is huge, because that’s vital to reducing emissions globally. And because for some reason, John, you’re a 42-year-old man who needs his attention sustained by tricks, here’s some f—ing Mentos and a bottle of Diet Coke. Happy now?” Nye returns at the 18:30 mark, but he’s clearly run out of patience, so he resorts to burning a plastic globe and unleashing a few F-bombs to get his point across. “I’ve got an experiment for you. Safety glasses on. By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees. What I’m saying is the planet’s on f—ing fire. There are a lot of things we could do to put it out — are any of them free? No, of course not! Nothing’s free, you idiots! Grow the f— up. You’re not children anymore. I didn’t mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12. But you’re adults now, and this is an actual crisis, got it? Safety glasses off, motherf—ers.” Watch the full video here:

After as the first meat replacement patty to roll out nationally with one of the largest fast food chains, has raised $300 million in capital. The financing brings the company’s total equity raise to $750 million — and provides a sizable pool of funds to draw from as it continues to compete with rival,. Both companies are looking to provide plant-based replacements for animal proteins, but while has focused on consumers in the grocery store, Impossible Foods has focused on restaurants and business-to-business sales. That focus paid off earlier this year with the announcement of the Impossible Whopper, and its subsequent nationwide rollout only a month later. The Impossible Burger is now sold in more than 7,000 restaurants in the U.S. and Europe and has been a top-selling item and a driver of new foot traffic, according to the company. However, since it’s actually driving new foot traffic to restaurants, the product’s impact as a meat replacement is arguable. There’s no data from the company on whether people are actually buying less meat, or whether new customers are entering stores. Investors don’t seem to mind. And given the success of Beyond Meat’s public offering earlier this year, has a benchmark it can reference to illustrate the appetite institutional investors have for meat replacement companies. Indeed, even corporate America has taken notice, with in the coming years. Previous investors Temasek, the investment arm of the Singaporean government, and the personal venture fund of Hong Kong multi-billionaire Li Ka-shing, led the new financing, which also included a host of celebrity investors. Jay Brown, Kirk Cousins, Jay-Z, Trevor Noah, Alexis Ohanian, Kal Penn, Katy Perry Questlove, Ruby Rose, Phil Rosenthal, Jaden Smith, Serena Williams, will.i.am and Zedd also joined the financing round, making Impossible Foods officially the coolest cap table I’ve ever seen (no offense to Beyond Meat backer Leonardo DiCaprio). Institutional investors like Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Google Ventures, Sailing Capital and Open Philanthropy Project also back the company. The presence of Impossible Foods’ Asian investors point to the hunger for protein replacements on the continent where the quality of meat is an issue and rising demand is putting increasing pressure on companies looking to feed the continent’s newly wealthy consumers more high-quality protein. There’s a compelling reason to hope that both companies succeed in their mission to reduce demand for animal protein around the world. Animal husbandry and industrial farming (which is kind of a huge problem). And it seems that the strategy is working in Asia. Sales across the continent are rising, according to the company, in restaurants across Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau. Founded in 2011 by former pediatrician and Stanford biochemistry professor Dr. Patrick O. Brown, Impossible Foods’ plant-based burger may be the second . Impossible Foods is also hiring extensively in Oakland, Calif., where the company has its largest plant. It has already added to its executive team since the new funding, bringing on Sheetal Shah, a former chief operations officer at Verifone, to oversee the company’s manufacturing, supply chain and logistics.

Lena Begun is an accomplished pianist who founded Play At Work in 2013. (Igor Khodzinskiy Photo) Lena Begun has been playing music since the age of 5. She attended a school for gifted children in Moscow and eventually received a masters degree from the Russian Academy of Music. The accomplished pianist is now bringing her gift to tech workers in the Seattle area who take a break at work for , a music lessons company started by Begun. Begun has worked with recording teams for the internationally renowned Russian National Symphony Orchestra and Bolshoi Theater Orchestra. She came to the United States in 2000 and eventually launched Play At Work in 2013. “I came to Seattle as a single mother with my daughter, and basically started from scratch,” Begun said. “It’s a success story for me and I’m very proud of it.” The impetus for Play At Work was rooted in Begun’s desire to spend more time with her daughter at night. All of her private music lessons were happening in the evening, and Begun was looking for a way to maintain that career, but to do it during normal working hours. “This kind of work-life balance that we promote at the workplace? I started with myself,” she said. “I just wanted to have the same balance for my own life.” Plat At Work offers lessons in a variety of instruments. (Igor Khodzinskiy Photo) Play At Work offers one-on-one instruction in the workplace, and bills it as a benefit to the employee, who can take a break from work to learn or brush up on an instrument. The employer gets to allow a perk that is said to improve mood and performance — much like massages, fitness classes, free food, and others benefits frequently offered by tech companies. Begun started by offering piano lessons by herself at Google in Seattle, and her business grew to a waiting list of 40 would-be students. She brought on other instructors teaching other instruments, including choir, and now between Google and Facebook, Play At Work teaches about 100 students. It’s a benefit for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to find the time to take music lessons, especially if they have children or other obligations that mean they have to be right home after work. Panjak Kakkar is a software engineer at Google and he’s been taking piano lessons for about five years. He has a background in Indian classical music, vocals as well as harmonium. He tinkered with the piano a bit before beginning formal lessons with Play At Work. “I do weekly lessons, though work responsibilities sometimes mean I have to miss,” said Kakkar, who takes his lesson in a dedicated room with heavy soundproofing at Google’s Kirkland offices. “Lena is very patient and adapts her style to fit the student’s preferences and level. She also picks music that adapts based on those two things, which makes the lessons tractable and very enjoyable.” Apart from the achievement of getting progressively better at playing the piano, Kakkar said that every lesson leaves him mentally refreshed. “Playing and learning the piano is a meditative experience for me,” he said. “It de-stresses me and helps me sleep better, code better, feel better.” Laurie Betts Hughes is the artistic director for Play At Work’s corporate choirs. (Igor Khodzinskiy Photo) Begun is at Google every day, and the Play At Work website shows seven other instructors, who mostly visit once a week. Students range from beginner to quite accomplished, Begun said, and rates are $45 for a half-hour lesson. While she’s already teaching at two tech giants, and has tried to get in the door at Amazon, Begun said the workplaces do not have to be high-tech. At Facebook, Marianne Giesemann has been a product designer on the News Feed team for a bit over a year and a half. She had no prior experience playing music, aside from a bit of singing for which she had no formal training, but she’s been taking ukulele lessons through Play At Work for almost a year. “I saw some posters at work and I thought it was a really cool perk,” said Giesemann, who meets with guitar instructor Chris Gibson once a week in a soundproofed music room. Giesemann is already able to play two types of ukuleles and now she’s starting with guitar. She admits she has a long way to go technically, but the experience has been great. “It’s really awesome to take a break and do something completely different than work,” Giesemann said. “To have fun and learn something new, something creative. It really makes me excited to go to work whenever I have a class that day.”