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Bespoke Post says it has more than 100,000 subscribers signed up to receive a monthly “box of awesome” (that’s what it calls its bundles of curated men’s products). Next up: Creating brands and products of its own.

It’s a common move for retailers and ecommerce companies to launch their own brands, but it sounds like Bespoke Post isn’t just looking to create generic versions of stuff you’re already buying.

Instead, it says its “brand development studio” the Foundry will identify opportunities for men’s products that don’t exist, work with manufacturers to create those products and improve them with feedback from Bespoke Post customers.

The company is also unveiling its first new brand, Base Light, which creates grooming products for men, starting with a line of bar soaps. How is this different from any other soap? Bespoke Post says the bars are handmade in the United States, without “harsh” ingredients like synthetic dyes, parabens, sulfates or phthalates.

Base Light soaps are available for purchase individually, or as part of the company’s Refresh Grooming Box. There are also plans to launch Base Light-branded face wash, face scrub, face moisturizer, shampoo, conditioner, body wash and beard oil products this fall.

“Each month, we deliver hundreds of thousands of unique box experiences filled with everything from apparel and grooming products to home goods and cocktail kits,” said Bespoke Post co-founder Rishi Prabhu in the announcement. “We know the kinds of products our customers will love and can spot market opportunities for products that don’t exist yet.”

Bespoke Post says it will also create brands in categories like homeware, apparel and shoe care.

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The HRP-5P is a humanoid robot from Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology institute that can perform common construction tasks including – as we see above – install drywall.

While HRP-5P – maybe we can call it Herb? – uses environmental measurement, object detection, and motion planning to perform various tasks. In this video we see it use small hooks to grab the wallboard and slide it off onto the floor. Then, with a bit of maneuvering, it’s able to place the board against the joists and drill them in place.

“By utilizing HRP-5P as a development platform of industry-academia collaboration, it is expected that research and development for practical use of humanoid robots in building construction sites and assembly of large structures such as aircraft and ships will be accelerated,” write the creators.

The researchers see the robot as a replacement for an aging population and a declining birthdate. “It is expected that many industries such as the construction industry will fall into serious manual shortages in the future, and it is urgent to solve this problem by robot technology,” the write. “Also, at work sites assembling very large structures such as building sites and assembling of aircraft / ships, workers are carrying out dangerous heavy work work, and it is desired to replace these tasks with robot technology. However, at the assembly site of these large structures, it is difficult to develop a work environment tailored to the robot, and the introduction of robots has not progressed.”

Considering there are 6 million contractors in the US alone, robots like this one could be a boon or a curse. What happens when we can easily replace humans in shipping, logistics, and construction? Let’s just hope Herb here needs a supervisor.

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Ettitude, recently graduated from the ERA accelerator, is looking to ride the growing wave of e-commerce by offering eco-friendly sheets.

The company offers bamboo lyocell sheets and pajamas, which feel like a hybrid between silk and cotton, and stay cool longer than cotton or other fabrics.

Bamboo lyocell fabric is essentially organic fabric made from weaving together tiny fibers of organic bamboo material or pulp. Ettitude says that the fiber yield per acre from bamboo is about 10 times higher than cotton and requires less than 10 percent of the water to grow.

I tried out the Ettitude sheets and found that they were indeed soft and kept me cool in the hot NYC summer, but they also require slightly more attentive laundering. Ettitude sheets should be washed in cold water and separately (or in a laundry bag), which is a slight departure from throwing your sheets in with the regular wash.

Still, the company is growing. Ettitude, a predominantly bootstrapped company, first launched in Australia and gained traction via ecommerce channels. Late this summer, the company launched in the U.S. and has sold “tens of thousands” of units, with a 20 percent month over month growth rate.

Ettitude has taken some investment from friends and family, and also received $100,000 in investment from Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator .

While the consumer side of the business seems to be growing, Ettitude is also receiving inbound requests from enterprise brands such as airlines to get involved with the brand. Qantas, the largest airline in Australia, has started selling Ettitude in its online portal to frequent fliers.

Ettitude Queen set sheets cost $178.

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I’d like to meet some high-tech folks in Vancouver this week and I need your help. I’d like to hold a micro meet up at about 7pm on October 4 and I need a recommended place. If we can manage it we might be able to have a pitch off as well so let me know if you Vancouverians (Vancouverites?) know of any place with a bar and maybe a little stage and a microphone.

Please let me know if you can think of any good spots and I’ll finalize the meetup tomorrow. Email me at john@techcrunch.com or Tweet me @johnbiggs with ideas/help.

See you soon, eh!

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The slow and steady rise of Babbel has been impressive on many fronts. The company is now managing the top-grossing language learning app in the world. That’s why I’m excited to announce that we’ll have founder and CEO Markus Witte as well as CEO U.S. Julie Hansen at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Babbel has been around for over a decade. The company started with a web-based language learning service. It was based on Adobe Flash and HTML. Now, most Babbel users interact with the service using the company’s mobile app.

And Babbel also represents a European success story. Thanks to the European Union, many people live, work and travel all around Europe. It creates a unique market opportunity as the continent is a highly fragmented market when it comes to languages — there are dozens of different languages. That’s why building a language learning startup in Berlin is the perfect fit.

Babbel operates with a freemium, subscription-based model. Downloading the app is free, but you need to pay a subscription to unlock all the features.

More recently, Babbel has been betting on the U.S. as its next market opportunity. Many Europeans want to learn English, and it’s also true in the U.S. Immigrants want to improve their knowledge of English.

It’s a different market that causes a different set of challenges. That’s why the company has named Julie Hansen as CEO of the U.S. division of Babbel.

If you want to hear both Hansen and Witte talk about Babbel’s past ten years and the company’s next ten years, you should come to Disrupt Berlin.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on November 29-30.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

Markus Witte

Babbel Founder and CEO

Markus Witte is CEO and founder of Babbel , the world’s top-grossing language learning app. He describes Babbel as a learning company inside and out: “Heading a team in which each and every person, as well as the organization itself, is constantly learning new things is incredibly fulfilling.”

Markus began his career at NYU, and later lectured at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he discovered his passion for teaching. Following his time as an academic, he led the development of online marketing and web infrastructure and managed the online and systems teams at music software company Native Instruments. Coming back to learning and teaching, he founded Babbel with three others in 2007.

Julie Hansen

Babbel CEO U.S.

Julie Hansen is CEO U.S. at Babbel. Based in the company’s New York office she is leading the US expansion of the world’s top-grossing language learning app.

Before joining Babbel, Julie was the COO and President of Business Insider. Under her leadership the news site became the most visited business outlet on the internet. Prior to Business Insider, Hansen held top management roles at sports site NCAA.com, Condé Nast Publications, and Time Inc. Julie has over two decades of experience growing digital media companies, launching interactive web sites, deploying mobile apps, and leading online and offline marketing campaigns. She began her career at Penguin Books, publishing learning software for literature among other products.

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French startup Klaxit connects drivers with riders so that you don’t have to take your car to work every day. And the company recently announced a new feature with the help of Uber. If your driver cancels your ride home, Klaxit will book an Uber for you.

Klaxit is a ride-sharing startup that focuses on one thing — commuting to work. And this problem is more complicated than you might think. You can’t just go to work with the same person every day because you don’t always go to work at the same time. Similarly, sometimes your driver has to leave work early, leaving you at the office with no alternative.

As a driver, you want to take the quickest route to work. So you want to be matched with riders who are exactly on the way to work.

Klaxit currently handles 300,000 rides per day. In particular, the company has partnered with 150 companies, including big French companies such as BNP Paribas, Veolia, Vinci and Sodexo.

Klaxit can be particularly useful for companies with large office buildings outside of big cities. Promoting Klaxit instantly fosters supply and demand from and to this office. But you don’t have to work for one of those companies to use Klaxit.

Local governments can also financially support Klaxit to improve traffic conditions and mobility for users who don’t have a car or a driver’s license. “Subsidizing rides on Klaxit is 8 to 10 times cheaper than building a bus line,” co-founder and CEO Julien Honnart told me.

One of the biggest concerns as a rider is that you’re going to be stuck at work in the evening. Klaxit is now asking its users to request a ride with two other drivers. If they both decline your request, Klaxit will book you an Uber ride to go back home.

You don’t have to pay the Uber ride and then get reimbursed, Klaxit pays Uber directly. You don’t need an Uber account either as Klaxit is using Uber for Business. MAIF is the insurance company behind this insurance feature, and also one of Klaxit’s investors. This is a neat feature to convince new users that they can trust Klaxit.

Klaxit competes with other French startups on this market, such as Karos and BlaBlaCar’s BlaBlaLines.

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French startup Ownpage has recently released a new product called Relike. Relike is one of the easiest ways to get started with email newsletters. You enter the web address of your Facebook page and that’s about it.

The company automatically pulls your most recent posts from your Facebook page and lets you set up an emailing campaign in a few clicks. You can either automatically pick your most popular Facebook posts or manually select a few posts.

Just like any emailing service, you can choose between multiple templates, decide the day of the week and time of the day, import a database of email addresses and more. If you’ve used Mailchimp in the past, you’ll feel right at home.

But the idea isn’t to compete directly with newsletter services. Many social media managers, media organizations, small companies, nonprofits and sports teams already have a Facebook page but aren’t doing anything on the email front.

Relike is free if you send less than 2,000 emails per month and don’t need advanced features. If you want to get open rates, click-through rates and other features, you’ll need to pay €5 per month and €0.50 every time you send 1,000 emails.

The company’s other product Ownpage is a bit different. Ownpage has been working with media organizations to optimize their email newsletters. The company is tracking reading habits on a news site and sending personalized email newsletters.

This way, readers will get tailored news and will more likely come back to your site. Many big French news sites use Ownpage for their newsletters, such as Les Echos, L’Express, 20 Minutes, BFM TV, Le Parisien, etc.

Ownpage founder and CEO Stéphane Cambon told me that Relike was the obvious second act. Using browsing data for customized newsletters is one thing, but many talented social media managers know how to contextualize stories and maximize clicks (even if it means clickbait, sure).

The startup was looking at a way to get this data, and ended up creating Relike, which could appeal to customers beyond news organizations. For now, both products will stick around. In the future, the company plans to add Twitter and Instagram integrations as well as better signup flows for newsletter subscribers.

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Dressed in a Naruto t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the phrase “lone wolf,” Ne-Yo slouches over in a chair inside a Holberton School classroom. The Grammy-winning recording artist is struggling to remember the name of “that actor,” the one who’s had a successful career in both the entertainment industry and tech investing.

“I learned about all the things he was doing and I thought it was great for him,” Ne-Yo told TechCrunch. “But I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”

It turns out “that actor” is Ashton Kutcher, widely known in Hollywood and beyond for his role in several blockbusters and the TV sitcom That ’70s Show, and respected in Silicon Valley for his investments via Sound Ventures and A-Grade in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Bird and several others.

Ne-Yo, for his part, is known for a string of R&B hits including So Sick, One in a Million and Because of You. His latest album, Good Man, came out in June.

Ne-Yo, like Kutcher, is interested in pursuing a side gig in investing but he doesn’t want to waste time chasing down the next big thing. His goal, he explained, is to use his wealth to encourage people like him to view software engineering and other technical careers as viable options.

“Little black kids growing up don’t say things like ‘I want to be a coder when I grow up,’ because it’s not real to them, they don’t see people that look like me doing it,” Ne-Yo said. “But tech is changing the world, like literally by the day, by the second, so I feel like it just makes the most sense to have it accessible to everyone.”

Last year, Ne-Yo finally made the leap into venture capital investing: his first deal, an investment in Holberton School, a two-year coding academy founded by Julien Barbier and Sylvain Kalache that trains full-stack engineers. The singer returned to San Francisco earlier this month for the grand opening of Holberton’s remodeled headquarters on Mission Street in the city’s SoMa neighborhood.

Holberton, a proposed alternative to a computer science degree, is free to students until they graduate and land a job, at which point they are asked to pay 17 percent of their salaries during their first three years in the workforce.

It has a different teaching philosophy than your average coding academy or four-year university. It relies on project-based and peer learning, i.e. students helping and teaching each other; there are no formal teachers or lecturers. The concept appears to be working. Holberton says their former students are now employed at Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox and Tesla.

Ne-Yo participated in Holberton’s $2.3 million round in February 2017 alongside Reach Capital and Insight Venture Partners, as well as Trinity Ventures, the VC firm that introduced Ne-Yo to the edtech startup. Holberton has since raised an additional $8 million from existing and new investors like daphni, Omidyar Network, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle.

Holberton has used that capital to expand beyond the Bay Area. A school in New Haven, Conn., where the company hopes to reach students who can’t afford to live in tech’s hubs, is in development.

The startup’s emphasis on diversity is what attracted Ne-Yo to the project and why he signed on as a member of the board of trustees. More than half of Holberton’s students are people of color and 35 percent are women. Since Ne-Yo got involved, the number of African American applicants has doubled from roughly 5 percent to 11.5 percent.

“I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”

Before Ne-Yo’s preliminary meetings with Holberton’s founders, he says he wasn’t aware of the racial and gender diversity problem in tech.

“When it was brought to my attention, I was like ‘ok, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed,’” he said. “It makes no sense that this thing that affects us all isn’t available to us all. If you don’t have the money or you don’t have the schooling, it’s not available to you, however, it’s affecting their lives the same way it’s affecting the rich guys’ lives.”

Holberton’s founders joked with TechCrunch that Ne-Yo has actually been more supportive and helpful in the last year than many of the venture capitalists who back Holberton. He’s very “hands-on,” they said. Despite the fact that he’s balancing a successful music career and doesn’t exactly have a lot of free time, he’s made sure to attend events at Holberton, like the recent grand opening, and will Skype with students occasionally.

“I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic.”

Ne-Yo was very careful to explain that he didn’t put money in Holberton for the good optics.

“This isn’t something I just wanted to put my name on,” he said. “I wanted to make sure [the founders] knew this was something I was going to be serious about and not just do the celebrity thing. I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic so we dropped whatever we were doing and came down, met these guys, hung out with the students and hung out at the school to see what it’s really about.”

What’s next for Ne-Yo? A career in venture capital, perhaps? He’s definitely interested and will be making more investments soon, but a full pivot into VC is unlikely.

At the end of the day, Silicon Valley doesn’t need more people with fat wallets and a hankering for the billionaire lifestyle. What it needs are people who have the money and resources necessary to bolster the right businesses and who care enough to prioritize diversity and inclusivity over yet another payday.

“Not to toot the horn or brag, but I’m not missing any meals,” Ne-Yo said. “So, if I’m going to do it, let it mean something.”

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To keep up with the growing sizes of early-stage funding rounds, Y Combinator announced this morning that it will increase the size of its investments to $150,000 for 7 percent equity starting with its winter 2019 batch.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., YC funds and mentors hundreds of startups per year through its 12-week program that culminates in a demo day, where founders pitch their companies to an audience of Silicon Valley’s top investors. Airbnb, Dropbox and Instacart are among its greatest successes.

Since 2014, YC has invested $120,000 for 7 percent equity in its companies. It has increased the size of its investment before — in 2007, a YC “standard deal” was just $20,000 — but the amount of equity the accelerator takes in exchange for the capital has been consistent.

“We thought a $30K increase was necessary to help companies stay focused on building their product without worrying about fundraising too soon,” Y Combinator chief executive officer Michael Seibel wrote in a blog post this morning. “Capital for startups has never been more abundant, and we’ll continue to focus on the things that remain hard to come by — community, simplicity, advice that’s systematic and personal, and above all, a great founder experience.”

Seibel was named CEO in 2016. Co-founder Sam Altman serves as YC’s president.

YC is also changing the way it crafts its investments. It will now invest in startups on a post-money safe basis rather than on a pre-money safe. YC invented the fundraising mechanism, safe, in 2013. A safe, or a simple agreement for future equity, means an investor makes an investment in a company and receives the company stock at a later date — an alternative to a convertible note. A safe is a quicker and simpler way to get early money into a company and the idea was, according to YC, that holders of those safes would be early investors in the startup’s Series A or later priced equity rounds.

In recent years, YC noticed that startups were raising much larger seed rounds than before and those safes were “really better considered as wholly separate financings, rather than ‘bridges’ into later priced rounds.” Founders, in the meantime, were struggling to determine how much they were being diluted.

YC’s latest change, in short, will make it easier for founders to know exactly how much of their company they are selling off and will make capitalization table math, which can be extremely grueling for founders, a whole lot easier.

The pre-money safe has been criticized by founders and investors alike.

Last year, a pair of venture capitalists who’d worked with YC companies, Dolby Family Partners’ Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne, wrote that the safe method was screwing over founders.

“Entrepreneurs who don’t do the capitalization table math end up owning less of their company’s equity than they thought they did. And when an equity round is inevitably priced, entrepreneurs don’t like the founder dilution numbers at all. But they can’t blame the VC, they can’t blame the angels, so that means they can only blame… oops!”

A transition to a post-money safe will eliminate that cap table math headache while still being simple and efficient. The trade-off, YC says, “is that each incremental dollar raised on post-money safes dilutes just the current stockholders, which is often the founders and early employees.” So it’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement.

Recent YC grad Deepak Chhugani, the founder of The Lobby, which announced a $1.2 million investment this week, had a positive response to the changes and said either way, most of the resources provided by YC are priceless to a first-time founder, like himself.

YC is also tweaking its policy around pro-rata follow-ons. You can read about that here.

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Blok.Party, the company the upcoming PlayTable game console, announced today raised $10 million in new funding. It’s also unveiling a big content partnership, where Blok.Party will create its own version of the popular board game Settlers of Catan.

I first wrote about Blok.Party and PlayTable earlier this year, when co-founder and CEO Jimmy Chen first laid out his vision to use blockchain technology to build a console that can recognize real-world objects (like figurines and cards), creating a hybrid between tabletop and video gaming.

The idea may have sounded a little abstract at the time, but it got a lot clearer when Chen dropped by the TechCrunch New York office to play a couple rounds of Catan with me.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t played in a while, but it was clear from the start that PlayTable saved us some setup time — instead of putting all the pieces of the physical board together, you play on a digital representation of the board. Most of the pieces are digitized too, and we used and traded our cards using smartphones. But there is a physical “robber” pieces, because Chen said this allows the robber’s movement to remain “a very visceral experience … that a digital version can’t ever capture.”

It may not be too long before you get to try this out for yourself, at least if you’re among the 100,000 pre-orders Blok.Party has received so far. Chen said the company will start shipping its first devices this fall.

He added that Catan, like many of the other games built for PlayTable, will be priced at around $20.

“For us, it’s not about trying to compete based on price,” Chen said. “We’re trying to compete based on experience.”

The new funding comes from crypto fund JRR Capital and other investors. Chen said the company will use the money to continue scaling the product, including further software development and building out the library of games.

At the same time, he emphasized that although Blok.Party is manufacturing the initial devices, his vision is to achieve real scale through partnerships with hardware manufacturers, who will build their own PlayTable consoles. Apparently, some of those discussions are already underway.

“Our strategy is to always have [our own] hardware program running to continually do research,” Chen said. “What I’ve discovered is that keeping a hardware program running is not that expensive. The expensive part is when you try to scale the program.”

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