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News is exhausting. Mexican murders are sky-high. Ebola is ravaging the eastern Congo. China is erasing an entire culture of Islam from its Western hinterlands. That news — negative and intense though it is — can easily occlude the many positive, longer term stories that are fundamental drivers of the world. Africa is reaching new levels of prosperity. Violence around the world is in retreat. Famine is down, a lot.

These trends are present, but getting high-quality data around them and correctly interpreting them can be challenging. How do you piece all these disparate threads together and start to make sense of the whole?

Enter Our World in Data. The non-profit startup, which started as a research project at Oxford University, builds datasets on human progress around the world and then uses visualizations and deep, clear explanations to allow people to grok exactly what’s happening as well as how to think about it.

Our World in Data is backed by YC in its current batch, and is one of three non-profits this cycle (we profiled another one of them, Upsolve, which is helping consumers file for bankruptcy). The portal has been receiving about a million users per month and two citations a day in major newspapers, and the team is hoping to scale those metrics up as part of the YC program.

Max Roser, the founder and program director, officially organized the firm as a non-profit a few weeks ago, but has been working on it with a team of researchers over many years. “It began kind of slowly as a research project in around 2012,” he said. It was “a fairly small-scale project in the evenings and weekends in the beginning and got bigger and bigger over time.”

He points out that the progress we have seen in human society has happened at a blistering fast rate. “Even in today’s richest and happiest places, the changes have happened very recently. […] Just two hundred years ago, a huge majority of the population lived in extreme poverty.”

Roser sees an opportunity to revolutionize how academic research is disseminated with Our World in Data. “Our mission is to get research out of institutions,” he explained. “We come from this millennium-old institution with University of Oxford … and they have published research in exactly the same way since the invention of the printing press. […] In the communication of research, we haven’t adopted the technologies available with the internet at all … and we are trying to bring these two worlds together.”

Hannah Ritchie, a researcher with the project who holds a PhD in GeoSciences from the University of Edinburgh, said that “our top priority is reaching as many people as we can” and she sees the project becoming the “really credible go-to reference.”

Our World in Data may not be a conventional startup, but it is hitting a thesis close to home here. Arman and I have been doing a dive into the world of societal resilience startups – companies that are trying to protect humanity from itself by building self-healing systems, improving the climate, making our traffic more on time, improving the speed of construction and much, much more. But before we can do all that, we first need to understand what’s even going on with our world in the first place, and that is where Roser, Ritchie and the rest of their research team here can be hugely helpful.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

We want to help startup founders work with attorneys who are right for them. My colleague Eric Eldon wrote a piece today describing our methodology and a little bit more of why we are doing this project.

We have had hundreds of founders give us their recommendations. If you have worked with a great early-stage startup attorney that you recommend, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Startup socialism with capitalist characteristics

Robert P. Baird does a great job describing the rise of Jacobin, the socialist magazine startup that has become a linchpin in leftist politics. It’s a story of a college founder who hustled his way to financial independence and growth. From the article:

Sunkara, for his part, told me that there’s no contradiction between his entrepreneurial enthusiasm and his socialist ideals. “The market logic of creating a publication,” he says—attracting readers, getting them to subscribe, finding competitive advantages that will keep them on the rolls—“is politically pure.”

Is Surveillance Capitalism a thing?

Nicholas Carr wrote a deep dive review for the LA Review of Books of Shoshana Zuboff’s hot new book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” There has been a ton of discussion triggered here, particularly in light of France’s record $57 million fine against Google over GDPR violations earlier this week, and Carr wrote what is probably the best review and context piece available. Still, the question to me remains the same: does anyone actually care that their devices monitor them? Judging by device and services sales, I think much less than privacy advocates appreciate.

Why are investors still investing in Apple’s supply chain?

Bloomberg has an interesting conundrum to discuss: why are investors still standing behind companies like Han’s Laser Technology Industry Group Co., which have seen huge valuation losses over the slowdown in iPhone sales? It’s a bit of a complicated story, but basically investors still believe that high-end manufacturing will drive excess profits even in a chaotic, slower growing, and competitive world. An interesting discussion worth reading.

What’s next & obsessions

• I have a lot of short books on my desk to read.
• Arman is reading Never Lost Again by Bill Kilday, a history of mapping at Google and beyond.
• Arman and I are interested in societal resilience startups that are targeting areas like water security, housing, infrastructure, climate change, disaster response, etc. Reach out if you have ideas or companies here <danny@techcrunch.com>

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TaOXV0

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Despite its “unsexy” reputation, the logistics industry is attracting massive investment from venture capitalists.

With a fresh $97 million in Series C funding, NEXT joins a fleet of heavily funded logistics platforms, including Flexport, Huochebang and Convoy. The company, which connects shippers and carriers through an online marketplace, raised the capital from Brookfield Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and logistics solutions provider GLP. NEXT declined to disclose the valuation or whether its latest financing included debt.

In 2018, global logistics startups collected more than $6 billion in VC funding, nearly double the $3.2 billion invested in the space the year prior, according to PitchBook. A significant portion of the 2018 capital went to Chinese ventures at about 40 percent. U.S. logistics businesses raised 19 percent, or about $1.2 billion, across 114 deals.

“The logistics space is under more pressure than ever before — with more shipments coming into our ports than drivers and warehouses have the capacity to manage,” NEXT co-founder and chief executive officer Lidia Yan said in a statement.

NEXT was founded in 2015 by Yan and her husband Elton Chung. The round brings the business’s total raised to $125 million, including a $21 million round in January 2018.

Headquartered in Lynwood, California, NEXT plans to use the investment to fill 150 positions in 2019, as well as complete the launch of Relay, a new service targeting the “systemic congestion” at shipping ports.

“NEXT continues to address the critical issues that face logistics management in the U.S. — from the nationwide driver shortage to congestion and operations at our busiest ports,” Sequoia partner Omar Hamoui said in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with NEXT’s ability to execute, and the introduction of Relay proves they have the team and expertise to continue innovating in ways that will ease the pain points of carriers and shippers.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2T8AF7x

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Despite its “unsexy” reputation, the logistics industry is attracting massive investment from venture capitalists.

With a fresh $97 million in Series C funding, NEXT joins a fleet of heavily funded logistics platforms, including Flexport, Huochebang and Convoy. The company, which connects shippers and carriers through an online marketplace, raised the capital from Brookfield Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and logistics solutions provider GLP. NEXT declined to disclose the valuation or whether its latest financing included debt.

In 2018, global logistics startups collected more than $6 billion in VC funding, nearly double the $3.2 billion invested in the space the year prior, according to PitchBook. A significant portion of the 2018 capital went to Chinese ventures at about 40 percent. U.S. logistics businesses raised 19 percent, or about $1.2 billion, across 114 deals.

“The logistics space is under more pressure than ever before — with more shipments coming into our ports than drivers and warehouses have the capacity to manage,” NEXT co-founder and chief executive officer Lidia Yan said in a statement.

NEXT was founded in 2015 by Yan and her husband Elton Chung. The round brings the business’s total raised to $125 million, including a $21 million round in January 2018.

Headquartered in Lynwood, California, NEXT plans to use the investment to fill 150 positions in 2019, as well as complete the launch of Relay, a new service targeting the “systemic congestion” at shipping ports.

“NEXT continues to address the critical issues that face logistics management in the U.S. — from the nationwide driver shortage to congestion and operations at our busiest ports,” Sequoia partner Omar Hamoui said in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with NEXT’s ability to execute, and the introduction of Relay proves they have the team and expertise to continue innovating in ways that will ease the pain points of carriers and shippers.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2T8AF7x

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Andela, the company that connects Africa’s top software developers with technology companies from the U.S. and around the world, has raised $100 million in a new round of funding.

The new financing from Generation Investment Management (the investment fund co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore) puts the valuation of the company at somewhere between $600 million and $700 million, based on data available from PitchBook on the company’s valuation following its previous $40 million funding.

Previous investors from that financing, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital and CRE Venture Capital, also participated.

“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela. “Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”

The company now has more than 200 customers paying for access to the roughly 1,100 developers Andela has trained and manages.

Since its founding in 2014, Andela has seen more than 130,000 applicants for those 1,100 slots. After a promising developer is onboarded and goes through a six-month training bootcamp at one of the company’s coding campuses in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda or Uganda, they’re placed with an Andela customer to work as a remote, full-time employee.

Andela receives anywhere from $50,000 to $120,000 per developer from a company and passes one-third of that directly on to the developer, with the remainder going to support the company’s operations and cover the cost of training and maintaining its facilities in Africa. Coders working with Andela sign a four-year commitment (with a two-year requirement to work at the company), after which they’re able to do whatever they want.

Even after the two-year period is up, Andela boasts a 98 percent retention rate for developers, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s operations.

With the new cash in hand, Andela says it will double in size, hiring another thousand developers, and invest in new product development and its own engineering and data resources. Part of that product development will focus on refining its performance monitoring and management toolkit for overseeing remote workforces. 

“We believe Andela is a transformational model to develop software engineers and deploy them at scale into the future enterprise,” says Lilly Wollman, co-head of Growth Equity at Generation Investment Management, in a statement. “The global demand for software engineers far exceeds supply, and that gap is projected to widen. Andela’s leading technology enables firms to effectively build and manage distributed engineering teams.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2MpazKK

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Electric.ai, the New York-based startup that offers chat-based IT support, has announced the close of a $25 million Series B round led by GGV. As part of the deal, partner Jeff Richards will be joining the board.

Founder Ryan Denehy launched Electric in 2016. Previously, he’d run two startups that were sold to USA Today Sports and Groupon, respectively, where he realized that all of the simplicity that came with using a service like Zenefits simply didn’t exist in the IT world.

“It was all local service providers, and they all charge way too much money,” said Denehy. “I thought ‘this is so nuts!’ Companies are using more and more technology every day.”

With his second startup, Swarm, he saw even more clearly how big of a problem this was as the company sold a product that required hardware installation at retailers.

“We were building a company on top of local IT providers, and I saw up close and personal how difficult it was and how fragmented the industry was.”

And so, Electric was born.

The premise is relatively simple. Most of IT’s tasks focus on administration, distribution and maintenance of software programs, meaning that the individual IT specialist doesn’t necessarily need to be desk-side troubleshooting a hardware issue.

Companies using Electric simply install its software on every corporate laptop, giving the top IT employee or the org’s decision-maker a bird’s-eye view of the lay of the land. They can grant and revoke permissions, assign roles and make sure everyone’s software is up to date. By integrating with the APIs of the top office software programs, like Dropbox and G Suite, most of the day-to-day tasks of IT can be handled through Electric’s dashboard.

This leaves IT professionals time to focus on actual troubleshooting, hardware installation, etc.

For startups that haven’t yet hired an IT person, Electric connects startups that need help with installation or in-person troubleshooting with local vendors.

Electric says it has automated around 40 percent of IT tasks, with plans to automate 80 percent of IT tasks over 2019.

The company currently has around 300 customers, which rounds out to about 10,000 total users, and serves 10 U.S. markets, including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Austin, among others.

The new funding brings Electric’s total funding amount to $37.3 million.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2sIb4qw

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Desktop Metal announced this morning that it has raised $160 million. That Series E brings the Burlington, Mass.-based metal 3D printing company up to a whopping $438 million. The startup’s tagline says the company “is reinventing the way design and manufacturing teams print with metal” — and now it undoubtedly has the money to do so.

Koch Disruptive Technologies (yes, that Koch) led the round, joined by GV, Panasonic and Techtronic Industries. The latest round follows $65 million last March, which found Ford investing in the technology,  which has applications for both prototyping and manufacturing. Big names like BMW and Lowe’s have also pumped money into Desktop’s impressive additive manufacturing technology.

The company will be investing the massive funding back into its technology. “This new funding will fuel the continued development of our metal 3D printing technology and rich product roadmap, the scaling of operations to meet a growing demand of orders, and the financing of major new research and development initiatives,” co-founder and CEO Ric Fulop said in a press release tied to the news.

Desktop Metal’s technology clearly represents a bright spot in the world of 3D printing/additive manufacturing — at least so far as investors are concerned. Much of that is due to the speed and durability of the printing process, which is helping it move from simple prototyping to real-world product manufacturing.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2DrKTKA

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Travis CI, the popular Berlin-based open source continuous integration service, has been acquired by Idera, a company that offers a number of SQL database management and administration tools for both on-premises and cloud applications. The move comes at a time where other continuous integration services, including the likes of Circle CI, seem to be taking market share away from Travis CI.

Idera, which itself is owned by private equity firm TA Associates, says that Travis is complementary to its current testing tools business and that the acquisition will benefit its current customers. Idera’s other tools in its Testing Tools division are TestRail, Ranorex and Kiuwan. “We admire the business value driven by Travis CI and look forward to helping more customers achieve better and faster results,” said Suhail Malhotra, Idera’s General Manager for Travis CI .

Idera clearly wants to move into the DevOps business and continuous integration is obviously a major building block. This still feels like a bit of an odd acquisition, given that Idera isn’t exactly known for being on the leading edge of today’s technology (if it’s known at all). But Travis CI also brings 700,000 users to Idera and customers like IBM and Zendesk, so while we don’t know the cost of the acquisition, this is a big deal in the CI ecosystem.

“We are excited about our next chapter of growth with the Idera team,” said Konstantin Haase, a founder of Travis CI, in today’s announcement. “Our customers and partners will benefit from Idera’s highly complementary portfolio and ability to scale software businesses to the next level. Our goal is to attract as many users to Travis CI as possible, while staying true to our open source roots and community.”

That’s pretty much what all founders write (or what the acquiring company’s PR team writes for them), so we’ll have to see how Idera will steer Travis CI going forward.

In his blog post, Haase says that nothing will change for Travis CI users. “With the support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and improving our core product, to have Travis CI be the best Continuous Integration and Development solution for software projects out there,” he writes and also notes that the Travis CI will stay open source. “This is who we are, this is what made us successful.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2AZ5sfI

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We’re nearing 1,000 submissions from startup founders and leaders in Silicon Valley and across the world about the best early-stage tech lawyers to work with. As we’ve sorted through survey responses and begun scheduling interviews with the first qualified nominees, we’ve gotten a bunch of questions. We love questions.

First of all, why are we creating a living list of great tech startup lawyers? Lawyers don’t create startups, but they can help great startups succeed. They can also kill promising ventures before they have time to get off the ground. Who you use as your lawyer matters, and yet, there are no great resources to help early-stage founders navigate this decision.

Need more detail before you take the survey? Read on.

A living list

We are not making a listicle or an occasional ranking like what you might see on other news sites or legal review services. Instead, we are making a living body of knowledge about service providers by and for people who are building companies. This survey will be staying open indefinitely and we’ll be updating our findings whenever we have enough feedback from our community about an individual lawyer. Ultimately, we will add as many lawyers as there are lawyers in the world who qualify.

We are just beginning what will be a continuous process. Each additional recommendation will help you know more about who to hire to help you with your work.

Early-stage focus

We are interested in featuring lawyers who are today heavily focused on early-stage technology startups. We realize that “early-stage” can mean multiple funding rounds and many, many millions of dollars, so we are not drawing hard boundaries. As a rule of thumb, think of startups in the process of finding product-market fit and/or a scalable business model, and are maybe even in the early stages of growth.

We realize that attorneys who have succeeded with early-stage companies over the years will themselves often move into later-stage legal work. We’re happy to hear about these folks — particularly what they have done for a company in key early moments — but we know they’re often busy and will take on few if any young companies today.

We’re happy to feature them when relevant, but we’ll also note that if you’re looking for the overall top technology lawyers in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, you should really be checking out Chambers and Partners, Martindale-Hubbell, Super Lawyers, The American Lawyer, National Law Journal and the numerous other established sources for lawyer rankings.

Tech focus

“Tech” has been heavily abused by marketers in recent years. If you’re leaving a review as a founder, but you’re not clearly building some sort of meaningful technology yourself, we will likely discard your recommendation. There are plenty of great lawyers out there who can assist with starting a business, who are not going to be familiar with the myriad challenges that a startup faces when it attempts meaningful technology innovation.

Global breadth

We’re open to submissions about lawyers working anywhere in the world. As the tech industry has gone global, locally focused attorneys have helped nurture their startup hubs and develop new crops of successful companies. Based on our survey results so far, we’re going to be featuring a geographically broad range of people to help the next generation of entrepreneurs get the best support from people who understand their surroundings.

Online legal services

While traditional law firms continue to be the preferred route for many founders, especially when they scale into the later stages of company-building, we’ve gotten a number of strong recommendations about attorneys working through software-enabled services. We see this as an important part of the future of the industry — if you’ve had a great experience, let us know about both the lawyer and the product they’re working within.

Attorneys who haven’t made partner (yet)

While submissions to date tend to focus on lawyers who have already made partner at larger firms, or have founded their own established operations, we have also gotten glowing recommendations about folks who are earlier in their careers. Like companies themselves, the top lawyers of tomorrow are working hard to get there today — so we very much want to hear about them now. Maybe we can even help them get to the top faster?

Remember, we invite any lawyer who is actively working with early-stage technology companies anywhere in the world to share this survey with their clients.

Now go take the survey if you haven’t already.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2R9E3Nw

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Travel financing startup Uplift is announcing that it has raised $123 million in Series C funding.

Uplift has been relatively quiet about its business until now. Its founder and CEO is Brian Barth, who previously sold his travel startup SideStep to Kayak for $200 million

“We’ve been exceedingly low-profil,e because it’s a really good idea and we wanted to keep it a secret,” said President Robert Soderberry. “But now we’re at a size and scale where we’re ready to raise our visibility.”

Besides, he acknowledge that it would be hard to “keep a $123 million Series C financing round a secret.”

The idea is pretty straightforward: Uplift works with partners like the vacation package sites of United Airlines, Southwest and American Airlines, as well as Allegiant Travel Company and Kayak, to offer financing to travelers, allowing them to pay for their trips in monthly installments. (It has a bank partner for the loans.)

For example, Soderberry said that if a family is considering a trip to Disneyland for a price of $2,000, Uplift might be able to offer a one-year financing plan with monthly payments of $189 a month.

“We make it really easy for consumers to understand,” he said. “It’s a convenient way to book travel, it reduces the upfront cost and encourages them to book more often, which in turn drives conversion for our travel partners. It’s really a win-win.”

It’s an idea that’s spreading in other industries through companies like Affirm — and in fact, Affirm has been moving into travel. But Soderberry said Uplift is is the only company focused entirely on the travel industry.

“Planning and purchasing travel is really different buying a mattress or a gym membership,” he said. “It’s a different kind of product and different technology.”

And although Uplift launched less than two years ago, Soderberry said the company is on-track to drive nearly $1 billion in loans in 2019. He said that for some partners, Uplift represents 20 percent of their business.

The new funding should allow Uplift to bring on new partners, offer new services and otherwise grow the business. At the same time, Soderberry said the company will remain focused on travel, and on reaching consumers through its partners rather than launching a marketplace of its own

“Travel companies want to protect their customers and they don’t want us to be sourcing or acquiring their consumers,” he said. “We stand behind our partners … We don’t bring [customers] to our site to try to create a marketplace, we’re not trying to build a consumer platform, we’re building a platform for travel partners.”

Uplift previously raised $23 million in funding. The Series C was led by Madrone Capital Partners, with participation from Draper Nexus, Ridge Ventures, Highgate Ventures, Barton Asset Management and PAR Capital.

“Uplift’s focused business model of bringing flexible payments to travel is a winner,” said Madrone’s Jamie McJunkin in a statement. “Our confidence to invest was driven by an experienced management team, a very large market opportunity and the competitive advantages driven by the innovations Uplift has brought to the travel market.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2U5Ffn4

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One in every three dogs gets cancer, according to the National Canine Cancer Foundation. One Health, a startup that just raised a $5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Bio fund with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Y Combinator, aims to make it easier for humans to treat canine cancer, which is the number one disease killer of pups.

“Prevalence and incidence for cancer is much higher with dogs,” One Health founder and CEO Christina Lopes told TechCrunch over the phone.

One Health’s FidoCure product is designed to make treating your dog’s cancer more accessible and affordable. It specifically utilizes next-generation gene sequencing to better understand the genetic mutation that is causing an individual dog’s cancer. From there, FidoCure offers recommendations and an action plan to the human, outlining the best therapeutic implications and targeted treatment.

“The purpose of the company is actionability,” Lopes said. “The test is the first step. From there, if there’s a certain mutation present, we’ll say what the FDA-approve drugs with data in dogs available are. We’ve been able to then work with pharmaceutical partners and other compounding pharmacies.”

If your dog gets diagnosed with cancer, your veterinarian may recommend One Health’s product. Still, you’ll continue to take your pup to the veterinarian, as One Health says it is “100 percent partnered with veterinarians,” who must be able to see the furry friend in real life.

The drugs recommended are FDA approved for humans, but do have data relevant to dogs. That’s where One Health says it has invested time and money in understanding those targeted drugs and their impact on dogs.

“While we didn’t develop the drugs, we’ve had to be the ones to do a lot more to close the information gap,” Lopes said.

One Health charges veterinarians directly. From there, the vet may or may not charge the patient. Average cancer care for dogs cost $6,700, Lopes said. With markup, One Health is designed to cost less than the average cost of care, she said.

“Advances in our understanding of cancer biology have revolutionized how we diagnose and treat human cancers,” a16z GP Jorge Conde said in a statement. “As research continues to uncover similarities between certain dog and human cancers, One Health not only will harness these advances to transform how we care for our pets, but also has a unique opportunity to impact human health as it discovers better ways to manage this devastating disease in dogs.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2WaS0P4