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French startup Doctolib will take advantage of recent legal changes that will make telemedicine legal in France. Starting on January 1st, you’ll be able to book face-to-face appointments on Doctolib as well as remote appointments.

Doctolib is a marketplace with 60,000 practitioners using the platform to manage their calendars and let people book appointments through Doctolib’s website. Millions of people then browse Doctolib’s website and app to find practitioners and book appointments. Doctors pay a monthly fee to access Doctolib’s service.

While it’s still unclear how it’s going to work, Doctolib plans to tap its existing community of doctors to let them accept remote appointments too.

Doctolib is already testing the service with 500 practitioners. According to the legal framework, you won’t be able to hop on Doctolib, find an available doctor and start a video call with them.

The idea is that you don’t have to show up in person every time you need to see your doctor. Once in a while, a remote appointment is enough. That’s why you’ll only be able to book remote appointments with practitioners who know you already.

But the good news is that remote appointments will be reimbursed by the national healthcare system, just like any appointment. Details are still thin when it comes to the payment system and the communication platform.

In order to work on that new service, Doctolib plans to hire 150 engineers and open up a big office — the Health Tech Center. It’s not going to be limited to the Doctolib team as the company plans to invite officials, practitioners and more.

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Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services.

Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He then worked with the Consensys team on other cryptocurrency projects.

But he’s now 100 percent focused on his own project — Mattereum. As the name suggests, it’s all about bringing physical objects to the blockchain.

For instance, if you buy an expensive painting, you want to make sure that you sign a contract with the previous owner that says that you now own this painting.

Mattereum helps you set up self-executing smart contracts to transfer digital assets (including tokens that could prove the ownership of a painting).

But if you want to combine smart contracts with good old legal contracts, Mattereum has also worked on Ricardian contracts so that those contracts have a legal value. Finally, Mattereum also worked on a decentralized dispute resolution platform that can be enforced in a national court.

If you want to listen to Gupta talk about Mattereum himself, then 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.

Vinay Gupta

Founder, Mattereum Ltd.

Vinay Gupta is a technologist and policy analyst with a particular interest in how specific technologies can close or create new avenues for decision makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defence, security, resilience and disaster management arenas.

He is the founder of Hexayurt.Capital, a fund which invests in creating the Internet of Agreements. Mattereum is the first Internet of Agreements infrastructure project, bringing legally-enforceable smart contracts, and enabling the sale, lease, and transfer of physical property and legal rights.

He is known for his work on the hexayurt, a public domain disaster relief shelter designed to be build from commonly-available materials, and with Ethereum, a distributed network designed to handle smart contracts.

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Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services.

Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He then worked with the Consensys team on other cryptocurrency projects.

But he’s now 100 percent focused on his own project — Mattereum. As the name suggests, it’s all about bringing physical objects to the blockchain.

For instance, if you buy an expensive painting, you want to make sure that you sign a contract with the previous owner that says that you now own this painting.

Mattereum helps you set up self-executing smart contracts to transfer digital assets (including tokens that could prove the ownership of a painting).

But if you want to combine smart contracts with good old legal contracts, Mattereum has also worked on Ricardian contracts so that those contracts have a legal value. Finally, Mattereum also worked on a decentralized dispute resolution platform that can be enforced in a national court.

If you want to listen to Gupta talk about Mattereum himself, then 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.

Vinay Gupta

Founder, Mattereum Ltd.

Vinay Gupta is a technologist and policy analyst with a particular interest in how specific technologies can close or create new avenues for decision makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defence, security, resilience and disaster management arenas.

He is the founder of Hexayurt.Capital, a fund which invests in creating the Internet of Agreements. Mattereum is the first Internet of Agreements infrastructure project, bringing legally-enforceable smart contracts, and enabling the sale, lease, and transfer of physical property and legal rights.

He is known for his work on the hexayurt, a public domain disaster relief shelter designed to be build from commonly-available materials, and with Ethereum, a distributed network designed to handle smart contracts.

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Six months after completing Y Combinator’s 12-week accelerator program, The Lobby has closed a $1.2 million investment.

The startup connects job seekers to Wall Street bankers, venture capitalists and other finance “insiders” for advice and personalized career coaching. Founder and former investment banker Deepak Chhugani wants to help people who don’t come from elite backgrounds or have the network of an Ivy League graduate land high-profile finance roles.

“There’s a huge chunk of people that never get noticed,” Chhugani told TechCrunch. “The best opportunities are usually only privy to people that are from those wealthy networks.”

Chhugani, a Bentley University graduate who began his career at Merrill Lynch, believes he was only able to break into Wall Street because the firm had a hole in its Latin America M&A group and he’d grown up in Equador.

He and his other non-Ivy League friends who are or have been employed on Wall Street, in venture capital or private equity, are lucky, he says. Despite being perfectly able to succeed, many people of similar backgrounds have had no such luck navigating the finance job market.

“The Lobby is creating the real meritocracy that we tell ourselves the job market is –– or at least should be,” said Matt Mireles in a statement. Mireles, a scout investor at Social Capital, invested personally in the seed round alongside Y Combinator, Ataria Ventures, 37 Angels, former Travelocity CEO Carl Sparks and Columbia Business School’s chief innovation officer Angela Lee.

Using The Lobby, job seekers can connect with professionals over anonymous 30-minute phone calls, where they can conduct mock interviews or fix-up their resumes. Insiders, who are paid by The Lobby’s customers, can give the honest truth about what it’s like to work in finance, a sort-of real-life Glassdoor .

As for the name, Chhugani says he can’t promise any of the startup’s customers a job, but he can promise to get them in the lobby.

“The ones who work really hard and deserve it will get up the stairs.”

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Payments startup Stripe has changed the landscape for how businesses can collect funds online by using a few lines of code, and today the company is announcing that it’s picked up more funding of its own. Stripe has raised $245 million, valuing the company at $20 billion.

This is a big jump on its previous round, two years ago, that valued it at $9 billion.

Led by Tiger Global Management, other new backers included DST Global and Sequoia, along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital.

The company says it plans to use the funding to hire more people for what it describes as its “distributed global engineering team.” It now has hubs in San Francisco, Seattle and Dublin (its co-founders, John and Patrick Collison, hail from Ireland), and it’s also going to launch a new hub in Singapore.

Engineering has been at the heart of the company’s growth from the start, up to now. Recall the famous essay by Paul Graham about Stripe that served as a mantra of sorts for how startups should grow. Fast forward to today, and Stripe boasts that “all told, the company deployed more than 3,200 new versions of its core API over the past year.”

The funding underscores the continuing strong climate for raising money from private backers at increasingly staggering valuations. VCs and private equity firms have raised billions, and they are looking for fast-growing, promising startups where they can invest that money. A number of startups are foregoing, or delaying, going public in favor of staying private for longer, financed by them.

“We have no plans to go public,” said John Collison in an interview. “We’re fortunate to be in the position that the Stripe business is performing very well and the long-term opportunity is that we’re very optimistic to providing the richer stack to businesses. Strong businesses do not always tend to be dependent on outside funding.”

(Not all are following this route: a key competitor of Stripe’s, Adyen, had a very strong IPO debut earlier this year.)

Stripe itself is a prime target for VCs looking to park their money in fast-growing, outsized startups. The company says it now has “millions” of customers, including Google, Didi, Mindbody, Spotify and Uber. It is live in 130 markets for acceptance and 25 countries for originating the charges.

Carving a place out for itself as a faster, easier way to integrate payments infrastructure into websites and apps, by way of a few lines of code, Stripe’s pitch is that it replaces the more laborious, and often more expensive route, of working with banks and other payment providers in a complicated chain of players that includes gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, specialized payment methods, wallets and more.

And although Amazon is one of the world’s biggest companies, and most retailers have a digital presence, e-commerce is still a relatively nascent area, with only about three percent of all transactions occurring online at a global average. That means a big opportunity for companies like Stripe, but also competitors like Adyen, PayPal and others.

“We believe in the contingency of progress,” said Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison, in a statement. “Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship and help upstarts compete with incumbents. By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world.” Stripe estimates there will be $4 trillion in online sales by 2020 globally.

While payments is Stripe’s bread and butter, the company has also been diversifying and now also includes Stripe Issuing, Stripe Terminal, fraud detection and potentially cash advances, among its various offerings. These help the company develop stronger ties with its customers, and also potentially increase its margins.

“No one else is going as deep as us on software and the technology stack as we are,” said co-founder and president John Collison.

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Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality.

Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy foods — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go, for anywhere from $5 to about $8. In order to ensure restaurant-quality food, Farmer’s Fridge has a chef on board who receives feedback from customers to constantly tweak the menu and the food. There’s also a large workforce in place to restock the food, which is prepared daily in Farmer’s Fridge’s kitchen, every morning. I tried the food while I was in Chicago, and I must admit that it was good. And this is coming from someone who generally dislikes salad.

While the amount of waste is low (about 5 percent left over) — thanks to its allocation algorithm that determines how much of each type of food to stock in each vending machine location — Farmer’s Fridge has a system in place to deliver leftover food to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a food bank that works in partnership with 700 agencies, including soup kitchens, shelters and pantries.

“The hypothesis for the business is that it’s been done for ATMs, it’s been done for movies, and those things have nothing to do with each other. So the only connection would be that consumers generally want things that are faster and cheaper and more convenient, as long as they don’t have to sacrifice any quality from the experience,” Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders told me at the startup’s headquarters in Chicago.

Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders at the startup’s Chicago-based HQ.

“So, renting a movie from a kiosk — there’s no difference,” he added. “It’s the same movie when you get home. With food, though, it was interesting because there’s a lot of businesses where the experience is supposedly the most important part, so ‘if you have really good service at a restaurant, could technology actually replace that experience’ was the core question of the business. Or is that an important sustained advantage for a restaurant versus our business model?”

So far, it’s been working. Since launching in 2013, Farmer’s Fridge has deployed 200 vending machines throughout Chicago and Milwaukee. Farmer’s Fridge vending machines can be found in airports, hospitals and in traditional retailers, like pharmacies, convenience stores and even the AmazonGo store in Chicago. Each location gets stocked at least five days a week, while the airport gets stocked seven days a week. Depending on the business partner, Farmer’s Fridge has a revenue model that ranges from subsidized accounts to revenue shares.

“Each vertical behaves really differently,” Saunders said. “In a hospital, they care more about having an amenity overnight for employees who don’t have access to a cafeteria than they do about profitability. At O’Hare International Airport, it’s a revenue share because of the traffic generated. For some retailers, it’s about the traffic Farmer’s Fridge brings to those places.”

The app is probably the least technologically interesting part about Farmer’s Fridge, but what it offers is an easy way to see where you can find a fridge, the inventory of said fridge and the ability to reserve food from that fridge ahead of time. The fridge itself is the real technological achievement. It’s an internet-connected device that runs firmware, features a graphical user interface and cloud infrastructure.

Next year, the plan is to expand regionally and launch in an additional region. In the nearer term, Farmer’s Fridge is expecting to grow from 130 employees today to about 200 by the end of next year.

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Today, a new crop of startups is launching out of the Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator. This marks the 15th ERA class, the past 14 classes comprising 165 startups with a combined market capitalization of $2B+.

Thirteen companies in total are participating in demo day today, spanning a wide variety of industries including e-commerce, real estate, and voice collaboration.

Here are the new startups:

Agilis is a B2B commerce platform for chemical distributors. The supply chain for chemical distribution is often complex, but Agilis aggregates supply and demand and facilitates transactions on behalf of all parties involved, from producers to distributors to buyers.

As voice interfaces continue to grow in prominence, Airbud is looking to offer developers and companies a way to add voice capabilities to their websites and apps. Airbud’s technology quickly ingests the information on a website or app to allow users to interact with that information with their voice.

Bikky looks to give restaurant owners more insight into their customers, aggregating data across online ordering channels and using SMS to get real-time feedback on orders. The customer analytics platform for restaurants hopes to help businesses increase their customer retention and better understand what is and isn’t working with their business.

Daivergent was founded by Byran Dai. Inspired by his brother, who has autisim, he created Daivergent to allow businesses to hire individuals with autism who are particularly well-suited to perform complex data tasks. The platform provides training, management and workflow functions alongside making the initial connection between these highly skilled workers and companies.

Ettitude is a D2C bedding and homewares brand looking to compete with the likes of Broolinen. Unlike most competitors, however, Ettitude uses a proprietary supply of organic bamboo lyocell fabric to make soft, cooling, hypoallergenic sheets, pillowcases, etc.

LVRG is a vendor relationship management platform for the enterprise, allowing decision-makers within organizations to make collaborative, informed purchasing decisions with the help of an AI algorithm.

Maivino reinvents the idea of boxed wine by letting users subscribe to receive premium wine in a pouch. Unlike a box or a bottle, Maivino’s pouch keeps wine fresh for 32 days after opening, letting users have control of their own pace.

ProdPerfect wants to make quality assurance regression tests for web applications easier and more effective. By analyzing live user traffic to build test cases from behavior patterns, the company gives engineering teams QA testing coverage that continuously and automatically updates as they add new features.

Rocket Cloud is looking to be the Angie’s List for industrial suppliers. The company has created a marketplace that connects electrical, plumbing and HVAC equipment manufacturers and suppliers to online customers.

Rubik is a data platform for real estate investors, providing up-to-date financial data on 70 million single family homes in the U.S., letting investors search based on their own investment criteria.

Threshing Floor Security collects, aggregates and analyzes internet background noise, network scans, web scrapers, and authentication attempts to let security teams find alerts that matter to them. The company integrates its technology with the most popular enterprise security products out there.

Triyo is a secure project collaboration platform for highly regulated industries, particularly financial services. As teams work together on a project, they can use Triyo to collaborate on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets efficiently without duplicating work, all within the bounds of internal compliance and regulatory rules.

Woveon is a CRM tool that aggregates data from all channels, including phone calls, email, social media and CRM, so that companies can get a bird’s eye view of their customer relations. The platform is powered by AI, allowing Woveon to point out the most relevant information for resolving customer inquiries.

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When Circle raised its $110 million funding round, the company used this opportunity to talk about its stablecoin — USD Coin, or USDC for short. And you can now buy, sell and send USD Coins on Circle Trade and Circle’s exchange Poloniex.

But what is a stablecoin? As the name suggests, 1 USDC is worth 1 USD. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, you can be sure that the value of USDC isn’t going to fluctuate like crazy.

There are multiple reasons why you’d want to use stablecoins. First, if you want to short cryptocurrencies without cashing out, you can convert your bitcoins or ethers to USDC. This way, it’ll be easier to buy cryptocurrencies again in the future.

Second, if you want to avoid traditional financial institutions, you can send USDC to other people without going through a bank. Sending USDC is like sending any other token — you just need to tell your recipient to get a wallet and ask for their wallet address.

Third, I’m sure many people are going to use stablecoins to avoid taxation issues. It’s easier to hide a bunch of tokens than a big wire transfers hitting your bank statement.

Many people living in countries suffering from hyperinflation or chronic inflation, such as Venezuela or Turkey, could also rely on USDC to convert some of their savings. This way, you don’t have to open a bank account in another country.

USDC is an ERC-20 token, which means that it’s easy to add support for USDC if you’re running an exchange or a wallet. But Circle wants to make sure that issuers are not just printing money without any actual USD in their bank accounts.

Multiple companies partnered to create CENTRE, a consortium that is going to define policies around stablecoins and governance. If you want to issue USDC, you have to comply with a bunch of rules. In particular, you have to send monthly audited reports proving that you have as many USD on deposit as issued tokens.

Multiple companies have already announced that they will begin trading USDC soon, such as DigiFinex, CoinEx, KuCoin, OKCoin, Coinplug and XDAEX. On the wallet front, BitGo, Cobo, Coinbase Wallet, CoolWallet S, Elph, imToken, Ledger, Status and Trust will add native USDC support soon.

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Instana, an application performance monitoring (APM) service with a focus on modern containerized services, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel. This brings Instana’s total funding to $57 million.

The company, which counts the likes of Audi, Edmunds.com, Yahoo Japan and Franklin American Mortgage as its customers, considers itself an APM 3.0 player. It argues that its solution is far lighter than those of older players like New Relic and AppDynamics (which sold to Cisco hours before it was supposed to go public). Those solutions, the company says, weren’t built for modern software organizations (though I’m sure they would dispute that).

What really makes Instana stand out is its ability to automatically discover and monitor the ever-changing infrastructure that makes up a modern application, especially when it comes to running containerized microservices. The service automatically catalogs all of the endpoints that make up a service’s infrastructure, and then monitors them. It’s also worth noting that the company says that it can offer far more granular metrics that its competitors.

Instana says that its annual sales grew 600 percent over the course of the last year, something that surely attracted this new investment.

“Monitoring containerized microservice applications has become a critical requirement for today’s digital enterprises,” said Meritech Capital’s Alex Kurland. “Instana is packed with industry veterans who understand the APM industry, as well as the paradigm shifts now occurring in agile software development. Meritech is excited to partner with Instana as they continue to disrupt one of the largest and most important markets with their automated APM experience.”

The company plans to use the new funding to fulfill the demand for its service and expand its product line.

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Despite the increase in women in the U.S. workforce and public pledges from several high-profile CEOs to close the gender pay gap, women, especially working mothers, often find themselves without the resources necessary to succeed at work.

Maven, a digital health startup and benefits platform focused on improving access to healthcare for women, has emerged specifically to help businesses help their female employees.

Maven has garnered the support of Sequoia Capital, a household name in Silicon Valley and a venture capital firm that has seldom backed female-focused businesses. Today, the company is announcing a $27 million Series B co-led by Sequoia and Oak HC/FT. Existing investors Spring Mountain Group, 14W and Female Founders Fund have also participated in the round.

As part of the deal, Sequoia’s Jess Lee and Oak’s Nancy Brown will join Maven’s all-female board of directors.

The company was founded by Kate Ryder, a journalist-turned-venture capitalist-turned-founder. Before joining Index Ventures as an early-stage investor in 2012, Ryder was a reporter at The New Yorker and The Economist.

During her time as a VC, digital health and telemedicine were the nascent sectors to watch. Professionally, Ryder realized the huge market opportunity, meanwhile, personally, she was reminded of the major lack of resources for women at work.

“A lot of my friends started having kids while I was working in venture capital, so I started hearing about the difficulties of having kids or postpartum depression,” Ryder told TechCrunch. “It’s not like you as a woman get educated on what all this is while you’re in school.”

In 2014, Ryder left her VC job to create Maven . Her goal: become a one-stop shop for working women starting families. Since launching the company, Ryder herself has become a mother of two.

“You go through this enormous life experience; it’s hugely transformative to have a child,” she said. “You do it when your careers is moving up — they call it the rush hour of life — and with no one supporting you on the other end, it’s easy to say ‘screw it, I’m going home to my family’ … If someone leaves the workforce, that’s fine, it’s their choice but they shouldn’t feel forced to because they don’t have support.”

Maven partners with companies, including Snap and Bumble, to provide employees access to its women’s and family health provider network. The platform connects users to OB-GYNs, pediatricians, therapists, career coaches and other services including resources for families interested in adoption, IVF or maternity care.

Users can also video chat or direct message healthcare practitioners using the Maven app.

Along with the Series B financing, Maven is announcing the launch of a breastmilk service, Maven Milk, which it says is its next step toward closing the resource and care gap for working mothers.

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