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Before Ram Palaniappan founded Earnin, he developed a system for employees at a payments company called UniRush, where he spent eight years as president. If you needed money before payday, he would write you a check from his checking account and when payday rolled around, employees would reimburse him.

Despite being paid what Palaniappan thought were fair wages, his workers often found themselves in a bind, needing access to wages they couldn’t expect to see in their own bank accounts for days.

“This is such a core pain point,” Palaniappan told TechCrunch. “Over three-fourths of the country live paycheck to paycheck … It’s an issue of fairness. We all have gotten used to getting paid every two weeks, but most employees would rather be paid before they work.”

Palaniappan decided to transform what he had been doing as a favor to employees into a real business with Earnin (formerly known as Activehours), a startup that helps hourly, gig and salary workers track their earnings and transfer them to their checking accounts in real time using a mobile application. Today, the company is announcing a $125 million Series C funding from top-tier investors DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, March Capital Partners, Coatue Management and Ribbit Capital. Palaniappan declined to disclose the valuation.

Earnin founder and chief executive officer Ram Palaniappan

Here’s how it works: An employee signs up on the Earnin app and connects their bank account. Earnin infers the person’s pay cycle and debits their account the amount they’ve borrowed on their payday. Earnin charges no fees or interest; instead, it operates on a pay it forward revenue model some would balk at. Earnin users have the option to “tip” the app after each transaction and that tip, in turn, is used to fund the next user’s withdrawal. If a user tips more than Earnin thinks is reasonable for the given withdrawal, it will notify the user and give them the option to dial back the tip amount.

What the company has found is that users are usually more than happy to contribute to the Earnin community of workers.

“So often, people are trying to help each other out,” Palaniappan said. “That’s the most powerful piece — how much support the community is providing to each other.”

Earnin was launched in 2014 and has previously raised $65 million in venture capital funding. With the latest investment, it will expand its engineering and product teams across its offices in Palo Alto — where it’s headquartered — as well as in Cincinnati and Vancouver.

The app, often among the App Store’s top 10 financial apps, has more than 1 million downloads, the company says, and is used by employees at more than 50,000 companies — many of which check the app every day. Palaniappan says its users are working more than 15 million hours per week. If each user works an estimated 40 hours per week, that means the app has roughly 375,000 weekly active users.

He added that the startup’s growth in the last four years has been “quite remarkable.” Given the investor support it’s received, it’s likely to step into “unicorn” territory soon. Ribbit Capital, for example, is a leading fintech investing firm with capital invested in Coinbase, Revolut, Gusto, Wealthfront, NuBank, Brex and more.

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Boosted has scored some serious cash as it looks to move beyond the world of electric skateboards to conquer new forms of personal transportation.

The startup announced today that it has closed a $60 million round of Series B funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and iNovia Capital. Stanford’s StartX and Bay Meadows also participated in the round. Boosted has now raised north of $70 million.

The company founded in 2012 is the most recognizable name in the quickly crowding field of electric skateboards, but Boosted is now looking to grow its ambitions to new personal transportation verticals in the “light vehicle type” category.

So, does this mean Boosted is building a scooter?

Well, that certainly seems like a serious possibility, though we mainly just have a statement from Khosla Ventures partner Samir Kaul to go off of at the moment.

“From day one, Boosted has been built as a scalable light electric vehicle company that can expand its portfolio to all kinds of vehicle form factors, including perfecting the vehicle types we see on the street today, and introducing others that are more novel,” Kaul wrote in a release. “We’re very much looking forward to 2019 and sharing what is coming next..”

The company’s bread-and-butter has long been their longboards, but they switched things up a little bit this year when they introduced the $749 Boosted Mini S. The shortboard shrunk the company’s form factor but more critically lowered the cost of entry to their line of products.

The company also pushed further into the high-end with the $1,599 Boosted Stealth. More interestingly, the new line of hardware started being built entirely in-house. The wheels, the decks and the trucks are all Boosted-built.

With $60 million in fresh funding, investors are obviously channeling some of their newfound excitement in bike and scooter transportation platforms into the Boosted brand. While the on-demand platforms have largely been the ones gathering venture cash to date, Boosted has developed a pretty solid brand name for itself in the electric skateboard space, one that can probably step into new vehicle verticals with a certain level of prestige already attached.

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After a long year fighting underage use of its products, Juul Labs has today struck a deal with Altria Group, the owners of Philip Morris USA and makers of Marlboro cigarettes.

The deal values Juul at $38 billion, according to Bloomberg, and injects the company with a fresh $12.8 billion in exchange for a 35 percent stake in Juul Labs.

Here’s what Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns had to say in a prepared statement:

We understand the controversy and skepticism that comes with an affiliation and partnership with the largest tobacco company in the US. We were skeptical as well. But over the course of the last several months we were convinced by actions, not words, that in fact this partnership could help accelerate our success switching adult smokers. We understand the doubt. We doubted as well.

He goes on to explain the strict criteria Juul Labs had for a potential investor, particularly one from the Big Tobacco space. For one, Altria entered into a standstill agreement that limits the company’s ownership in Juul to 35 percent. Altria must also use its database and its distribution network to get the message of Juul out to current smokers.

For the past year, many have seen Juul as a dangerous toy for teenagers. In November, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced new measures for the e-cig industry meant to keep the products out of the hands of teens. One of those measures includes restricting the sale of flavored non-combustible tobacco products beyond the usual cigarette flavors of tobacco and menthol.

But after nearly a year of playing defense, this new deal marks a bit of an offensive push from Juul Labs. The company has always stressed that its main goal is to give smokers a meaningful alternative to combustible cigarettes. Partnering with Big Tobacco may not seem like the best way to do that, optically speaking. But Altria has agreed to a few measures that would get information about Juul into the hands of actual smokers, including:

• providing Juul with access to its retail shelf space, meaning that Juul’s tobacco and menthol products will be merchandized right alongside Altria combustible cigarettes
• Altria will include direct communications about Juul to adult smokers through cigarette pack inserts and mailings via Altria companies’ databases
• Altria will support Juul via its logistics and distribution networks, as well as its sales team which works with more than 230,000 retail locations

In the release, Altria said that part of the reason for the investment is simply that the organization understands change is coming to the tobacco industry.

Howard Willard, Altria’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, had this to say in a prepared statement:

We are taking significant action to prepare for a future where adult smokers overwhelmingly choose non-combustible products over cigarettes by investing $12.8 billion in JUUL, a world leader in switching adult smokers. We have long said that providing adult smokers with superior, satisfying products with the potential to reduce harm is the best way to achieve tobacco harm reduction. Through JUUL, we are making the biggest investment in our history to achieve that goal. We strongly believe that working with JUUL to accelerate its mission will have long-term benefits for adult smokers and our shareholders.

Altria has made a few big moves lately, including acquiring a 45 percent stake in cannabis company Cronos earlier this month. The company also announced this month that it would discontinue its own e-cig products, including all MarkTen and Green Smoke e-vapor products, and VERVE oral nicotine products.

“This decision is based upon the current and expected financial performance of these products, coupled with regulatory restrictions that burden Altria’s ability to quickly improve these products,” read the press release. “The company will refocus its resources on more compelling reduced-risk tobacco product opportunities.”

Now we know that those opportunities look like an extra-long thumb drive called Juul.

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Gamelearn, which develops video games to deliver corporate training, has scored $5 million in Series A funding. Participating in the new financing round is previous backer Kibo Ventures, along with Oak3Capital, All Iron Ventures, UL Invest, and Inveready.

The Madrid-based startup says that will use the new capital to boost the company’s production of “serious games” and reinforce its international presence. It currently has customer base of 2,000 clients, spanning 50 countries. Those clients include LG, Thyssen Krupp, UPS, Hyundai, P&G, KPMG, Tetrapak, and Merck&Co.

Founded in 2007, Gamelearn is attempting to shake up the corporate training industry via its in-house developed game-based learning solutions and gamification for corporations. Its video games and simulators are designed to “train, communicate, inform, raise awareness and engage” employees. The company’s founders are Ibrahim Jabary, Mai Apraiz and Eduardo Monfort, each of whom has experience in corporate training.

Their take is that the startup’s bespoke video games and simulators can be used to meet a plethora of corporate needs, such as internal communication, digital transformation, management of change, leadership training, negotiation, time management, customer service, product training, project management or compliance.

“Corporate training is boring and non-engaging,” Gamelearn co-founder Mai Apraiz tells me. “Only 30 percent of e-learning courses are completed, meaning 3 out of 4 dollars invested in e-learning are wasted by corporations around the world. We create fun and engaging training experiences that allow our clients to achieve a 93 percent completion rate”.

Apraiz says these experiences are delivered through high-quality content, gamification, and simulation in a single product, which, she claims, no other company does. “The quality of our games is the best in the market. You can compare our products by checking our competitors’ websites against our own. That’s why we are the most awarded game-based learning company in the world”.

Proof that European tech companies are increasingly thinking globally, including pan-European, Gamelearn not only sells its products globally, but offers “Customer Success” support in 4 different languages, and the startup’s games are translated into a dozen different languages.

On Gamelearn’s business model, Apraiz says the company sells licenses to play its games on the Gamelearn platform or on other commercial Learning Management Systems that it integrates with. “We sell projects as well as subscriptions,” she adds.

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