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What could Google’s parent company Alphabet, and the wealth management office of the likes of Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, understand better than the need for a service to manage all the data their companies are collecting?

As regulations in Europe begin to take effect (and European regulators show their teeth), companies like Collibra, which just raised $100 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion from new investor CapitalG (the growth equity investment fund from Alphabet) and returning backers like Iconiq (the family office of Dorsey, Zuckerberg, et al.), are only going to become more important.

Indeed, the recent $57 million fine from France’s data protection watchdog is only a taste of what could be in store for companies like Facebook and Google for non-compliance with new privacy laws. Companies like Collibra and its competitors like Alation, Adaptive Insights, Datum and Informatica are reaping the benefits of this by providing software to oversee how the data that companies are collecting is handled.

The company got its first big boost back in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis when big banks were confronted with a whole new slew of regulations. Collibra is used to track what data is stored where and how, and to ensure that the data is being processed in ways that align with laws on the books.

Collibra’s new round is something of a victory lap for the company — which is coming off a record revenue year, according to a statement.

The company said it would use the new funding to add new products and push sales and marketing.

“Collibra is putting organizations back in control of their data, helping them comply with changing legislation, embrace emerging technologies and capture the information that will enable them to design services and solutions built for the future,” said Derek Zanutto of CapitalG. “We look forward to partnering with Collibra and marrying Google and Alphabet’s machine learning and AI expertise with Collibra’s leadership in data collaboration, workflow management and risk management.”

Collibra says it has more than 300 customers across industries like financial services, healthcare, retail and technology.

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Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn International is backing Carbon Relay, a Boston-based startup emerging from stealth today that’s harnessing the algorithms used by companies like Facebook and Google for artificial intelligence to curb greenhouse gas emissions in the technology industry’s own backyard — the data center.

Already, the computing demands of the technology industry are responsible for 3 percent of total energy consumption — and the addition of new technologies like Bitcoin to the mix could add another half a percent to that figure within the next few years, according to Carbon Relay’s chief executive, Matt Provo.

That’s $25 billion in spending on energy per year across the industry, Provo says.

A former Apple employee, Provo went to Harvard Business School because he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur and start his own business — and he wanted that business to solve a meaningful problem, he said.

Variability and dynamic nature of the data center relating to thermodynamics and the makeup of a facility or building is interesting for AI because humans can’t keep up.

“We knew what we wanted to focus on,” said Provo of himself and his two co-founders. “All three of us have an environmental sciences background as well… We were fired up about building something that was true AI that has positive value… the risk associated [with climate change] is going to hit in our lifetime, we were very inspired to build a company whose technology would have an impact on that.”

Carbon Relay’s mission and founding team, including Thibaut Perol and John Platt (two Harvard graduates with doctorates in applied mathematics) was able to attract some big backers.

The company has raised $6 million from industry giants like Foxconn and Boston-based angel investors, including Dr. James Cash — a director on the boards of Walmart, Microsoft, GE and State Street; Black Duck Software founder, Douglas Levin; Karim Lakhani, a director on the Mozilla Corporation board; and Paul Deninger, a director on the board of the building operations management company, Resideo (formerly Honeywell).

Provo and his team didn’t just raise the money to tackle data centers — and Foxconn’s involvement hints at the company’s broader goals. “My vision is that commercial HVAC systems or any machinery that operates in a business would not ship without our intelligence inside of it,” says Provo.

What’s more compelling is that the company’s technology works without exposing the underlying business to significant security risks, Provo says.

“In the end all we’re doing are sending these floats… these values. These values are mathematical directions for the actions that need to be taken,” he says. 

Carbon Relay is already profitable, generating $4 million in revenue last year and on track for another year of steady growth, according to Provo.

Carbon Relay offers two products: Optimize and Predict, that gather information from existing HVAC devices and then control those systems continuously and automatically with continuous decision making.

“Each data center is unique and enormously complex, requiring its own approach to managing energy use over time,” said Cash, who’s serving as the company’s chairman. “The Carbon Relay team is comprised of people who are passionate about creating a solution that will adapt to the needs of every large data center, creating a tangible and rapid impact on the way these organizations do business.”

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Verbit, a transcription startup with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Viola Ventures. Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital, Vintage Venture Partners and ClalTech also participated in this round. The company, which currently focuses on the legal and academic sector, uses both its custom machine learning models and freelancers to offer an accuracy guarantee of over 99 percent. In total, the company has now raised $34 million.

Tom Livne, Verbit’s CEO and co-founder, told me that he used to be a lawyer and saw how the quality and turnaround time of traditional transcription services could be improved with the help of machine learning. While this is a huge but very fragmented market, Livne argues there hasn’t been a lot of innovation here. “There is no innovation and technology in this market,” he said. “So we came up with this idea to build a technological transcription company.”

The company started out with the three founders, but today, Verbit has more than 70 employees and more than 100 customers. These include a number of law firms, but Livne also found that there is a big market for good transcription in academia, where accessibility laws often require these institutions to provide transcriptions of their classes and lectures. Coursera, Stanford and Harvard now use its service. Livne says Verbit now has millions of dollars in revenue, and by the end of the year he hopes to get to tens of millions of dollars.

Today, Verbit’s automated system — which the company customizes and retrains for all new customers based on their specific needs and contexts — gets to about 90 percent accuracy. Then, its army of freelancers sets to work on those automated transcripts to look for mistakes — and fixes them. All of those fixes then flow back into the model, which then (ideally) gets better over time.

Livne stressed that he believes that his company is not setting out to destroy jobs but that Verbit is creating thousands of new jobs for the freelancers that support its service. “We are not here to replace the human,” he said. “We are here to give them tools to make their job better and easier and we are actually reducing the barrier to entry to be a transcriber. Think about Verbit as an Uber for transcription.”

Recently, Verbit also launched a live transcription service for media firms that also uses a human-in-the-loop process to offer transcriptions with a delay of only a few seconds. It’s no surprise, then, that the company plans to add new verticals to its lineup as well, though it’s still considering its options. Livne noted that the company is looking at insurance and financial firms, as well as media and medical use cases. “But right now, we have very high demand from academia and law, so we need to support it on a larger scale,” he said. The company is also looking at adding support for other languages.

That’s where the new funding comes in. Verbit plans to hire aggressively, especially in its New York office, with a focus on sales, marketing and customer success.

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A little over two years after Lyndra Therapeutics Inc. first unveiled its technology for time-delayed drug delivery through a simple pill, the company has raised $55 million to continue developing the technology for public consumption.

By creating a new kind of ultra long-acting drug-delivery mechanism in pills, the company claims it can remove the need for patients to follow strict guidelines for taking their medication.

Following doctors’ prescriptions for medication is a problem in emerging markets and among elderly patients, and the new technology has implications for treating pretty much everything.

Developed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory of Dr. Robert Langer, Lyndra was co-founded by Langer and Amy Schulman, a former lawyer for the pharmaceutical industry and a partner recruited to run the LS Polaris Innovation fund established by Polaris Partners in 2014 to invest in healthcare companies.

Polaris led the company’s most recent round of financing, which also included new investors like the Chinese private equity giant HOPU Investments, Gilead Sciences, Invus, Orient Life and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which initially provided funding for Dr. Langer’s research out of MIT).

Lyndra has raised the money as it continues along the path toward developing a pill to treat schizophrenia. Phase II trials for the pill, which are required before it can be approved by U.S. regulators, are expected to begin next year. The company said it also will be developing other drug candidates that are developed internally and through partnerships over the coming years.

“Lyndra’s long-acting therapies have the potential to address a diversity of disease states,” said Robert Langer, co-founder and Board Member of Lyndra Therapeutics. “The ability to move from daily to weekly administration of an oral drug is groundbreaking. I believe Lyndra’s long-acting oral pill will be truly transformative.”

For investors like the Gates Foundation it was the company’s early work around anti-malarial drugs and HIV that likely attracted attention.

When the company first unveiled its technology back in 2016, publications like The Guardian hailed it as a breakthrough in drug delivery.

The technology depends in part on the novel structure of the pill itself. Encapsulated within a digestible pill is a star-shaped structure that has six arms folded in on itself. As stomach acid dissolves the casing for the pill the arms unfold and release their payload over time. As the star unfolds it expands in size so it can remain in the stomach rather than being pushed down the digestive tract. Eventually the arms break off and the remaining pieces of the pill are naturally expelled — like undigested food.

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British startup venture builder Entrepreneur First is eyeing additional expansion in Asia, where its operation is now as large as it is in Europe, as it expands its reach in 2019. But despite serving a varied mixture of markets, the company said its founders are a fairly unified breed.

The Entrepreneur First (EF) program is billed as a “talent investor.” It matches prospective founders and, through an accelerator program, it encourages them to start and build companies that it backs with financing. The organization started in London in 2011, and today it is also present in Paris and Berlin in Europe and, in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong and (soon) Bangalore. To date, it says it has graduated more than 1,200 founders who have created more than 200 companies, estimated at a cumulative $1.5 billion on paper.

Those six cities cover a spread of unique cultures — both in general life and startup ecosystems — but, despite that, co-founder Matthew Clifford believes there’s actually many commonalities among its global founder base.

“It’s really striking to me how little adjustment of the model has been necessary to make it work in each location,” Clifford — who started EF with Alice Bentinck — told TechCrunch in an interview. “The outliers in each country have more in common with each other and their fellow compatriots… we’re uncovering this global community of outliers.”

Despite the common traits, EF’s Asia expansion has added a new dimension to the program after it announced a tie-in with HAX, one of the world’s best-known hardware-focused accelerator programs, that will see the duo co-invest in hardware startups via a new joint program.

“We saw early that hardware was a much more viable part of the market in Asia than it is traditionally seen in Europe [and] needed a partner to accelerate the talent,” Clifford said.

Already, the first four beneficiaries of that partnership have been announced — AIMS, BIOPSIN, Neptune Robotics and SEPPURE — each of which graduated the first EF cohort in Hong Kong, its fourth in Asia so far. Going forward, Clifford expects that around three to five startups from each batch will move from EF into the joint initiative with HAX. The program covers Asia first but it is slated to expand to EF’s European sites “soon.”

Entrepreneur First held its first investor day in Hong Kong this month

Another impending expansion is EF’s first foray into India via Bangalore, which starts this month, and there could be other new launches in 2019.

“We’ll continue to grow by adding sites, but we are not in a rush,” Clifford said. “The most important thing is retraining quality of talent. It may be six months until we add another site in Asia, but there’s no shortage of places we think it will work.

“We operate a single global fund,” he added. “We’re a talent investor and we believe there are strong network effects in that. The people who back us are really betting on the model… [that it’s] an asset class with great returns.

While it appears that its global expansion drive is a little more gradual than what was previously envisaged — backer and board member Reid Hoffman told TechCrunch in 2016 that he could imagine it in 50 cities — Clifford said EF isn’t raising more capital presently. That previous investment coupled with management fees is enough fuel in the tank, he said. The organization also operates a follow-on fund, but it has one major exit to date, Pony Technology, the AI startup bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million.

Still, with hundreds of companies in the world with EF on the cap table, Clifford said he is bullish that his organization can target an international-minded breed of entrepreneur worldwide. The impact he sees is one that will work regardless of any local constraints placed on them.

“With our global network of capital, we always want capital, not talent, to be the limiting factor. Our goal is to make being ‘an EF company’ more relevant to your identity as a startup regardless of your location,” he told TechCrunch.

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Despite a number of well-publicized hiccups, venture capitalists are betting another $500 million on health insurance provider Clover Health, TechCrunch has learned.

Existing investor Greenoaks Capital led the round, according to the startup, which confirmed it was closing a new round of capital in the coming weeks. Clover Health has raised a total of $925 million to date, garnering a valuation of $1.2 billion with a $130 million Series D funding in 2017. The company, backed by Alphabet’s venture arm GV, Sequoia Capital, Floodgate, Bracket Capital, First Round Capital and more, declined to disclose its latest valuation.

San Francisco-based Clover Health was founded in 2014 by chief executive officer Vivek Garipalli, the former founder of New Jersey healthcare system CarePoint Health; and Kris Gale, who served as the startup’s chief technology officer until transitioning into an adviser role in December 2017. As part of its latest funding round, the company told TechCrunch it’s promoting Andrew Toy, its chief technology officer since early 2018, to the role of president and CTO. He will also join its board of directors.

Varsha Rao, Airbnb’s former chief operating officer, joined the company in September 2017 as COO.

The tech-enabled health insurer differentiates itself from incumbents by collecting and analyzing health and behavioral data to lower costs and improve medical outcomes for its members. It’s part of a new cohort of heavily funded insurtech startups, including Devoted Health and Bright Health, both of which similarly provide Medicare Advantage plans. Devoted Health, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, raised a $300 million Series B funding round three months ago. Bright Health, for its part, brought in a $200 million Series C in late November at a $950 million valuation. It’s backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, NEA and Redpoint Ventures, among others.

Founded in 2014, Clover Health is years older than its aforementioned counterparts. The business, though supported by top-tier investors and plenty of capital, has struggled in the past to shrink its losses. In 2015, Clover Health posted a net loss of $4.9 million only to increase it 7x the following year to $34.6 million, according to financial documents obtained by Axios. At the time, Clover Health had 20,600 Medicare Advantage members, earning it $184 million in taxpayer revenue. According to reporting from CNBC, the company had initially planned to double its membership base each year but was only able to expand from 20,000 in 2016 to 27,000 in September 2017.

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Sandbox’s magic happens in a largely empty room. The gear mounted onto the walls (VR headsets, PC backpacks and tracked toy assault rifles) gives more than a little indication that there’s more afoot, but nothing really clicks until your team is strapped in and the headsets shove you into a fast-paced wave shooter.

The startup, which has seven locations in Asia and North America, has taken plenty of people through the sweat-inducing experience, including quite a few high-profile investors who are ready to buy into Sandbox’s vision for VR.

Sandbox VR just closed a $68 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with further participation from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM and Alibaba, as reported by Business Insider.

Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Sandbox VR comes more than five years after the firm made a big bet on Oculus VR. At the time, Oculus helped stroke enthusiasm behind the idea that regular consumers would soon be strapping into their own VR gear. While the company has seen some major progress toward that vision beneath Facebook, it still hasn’t entirely kept pace with the white-hot expectations that some investors had set toward that vision.

In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen still sees plenty of opportunity in the home, but is excited about what can be enabled when VR can break free of some of its constraints.

“I think we’ve run the experiment that in-home needs to actually have a kind of different form factor, you want the hardware to be more like $200 or the same as a console,” Chen tells TechCrunch. “I think we’re going to see location-based VR split off and be its own form factor with larger spaces that are intrinsically multi-social with real people there and premium hardware like motion capture and haptic vests.”

The Hong Kong-founded company is hardly the first VR startup to bet on premium experiences in retail locations; startups like The Void have also raised significant capital with high-profile partners like Disney thrusting them into highly trafficked locations, but Sandbox’s investors see the company’s strengths in its scalability.

“We tried everything, what we really liked about [Sandbox] was that really though about archetyping this as modest-sized rooms that you could really put anywhere,” Chen said. “So it’s this really scalable thing that you could imagine putting inside of a mall or a boutique retail location. You could scale a single location to having 10 or 20 rooms the way a movie theater might have 12 screens.”

Sandbox’s $68 million round comes in the midst of a general market cool-down around VR, but as more and more investors look to adjacent technologies like augmented reality, the startup’s backers see its strengths in terms of the bond with users. For Mike Maples, a partner at Floodgate, the investment represents his first in the virtual reality space.

“A lot of AR startups are getting more attention because people say, AR can be on all the phones and it has broader distribution,” Maples said. “When I experienced this product I felt like people are going to say, ‘This product rocks my world.’” 

You can read more about how Sandbox VR linked up with its investors in this Medium post from the company’s chief product officer (hint: the story involves In-N-Out).

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