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Last year, Charlie Bergevin and Brian Cristol, co-founders of Uber’s trucking logistics business Uber Freight, heard Reid Hoffman say Turvo had some of the best technology he had ever seen. Frustrated with the direction Uber Freight had taken, they called up Turvo’s founder and chief executive officer Eric Gilmore.

It wasn’t long before offers were on the table and now, they’ve joined Turvo full-time. Cristol as head of enterprise partnerships and Bergevin as an enterprise partnerships executive. Bin Chang, a founding engineer at Uber Freight, is joining Turvo, too, a move I’m told Cristol and Bergevin were unaware of until they’d already accepted roles at the venture-funded startup. Chang begins Feb. 11.

“Brian and Charlie … have contributed so much to incubate this business and scale it to where we are today,” Uber Freight chief Lior Ron wrote in an internal email to employees shared with TechCrunch. “They were always on the forefront of exploration and innovation and were able to constantly push themselves, and all of us, to the next frontier.”

Cristol and Bergevin were Uber’s first B2B sales hires when they joined the ride-hailing firm in 2016. Tasked with finding product market fit for Uber’s final-mile businesses under the ‘Uber Everything’ initiative, they began learning about the truckload transportation and logistics industry. That’s when they linked up with Curtis Chambers, Uber’s long-time director of engineering. Together, the trio pitched their idea for a logistics business unit within Uber to then CEO Travis Kalanick.

Turvo’s real-time logistics platform.

Today, Uber Freight has roughly 750 employees and $1 billion in revenue. While the loss of two of its key dealmakers, who established relationships with Uber Freight’s Fortune 1000 customers, is cause for concern, Cristol and Bergevin suggested the unit is a rocket ship waiting to take off. 

“Uber Freight has by far the biggest market size and is by far the newest and it was made from scratch,” Bergevin told TechCrunch in reference to other Uber-branded businesses. “Sure we had the brand but with Uber Eats we had drivers, too, this was starting from scratch.”

So why are they leaving? The pair told TechCrunch they simply don’t feel like they are solving enough of the key issues plaguing the industry, particularly legacy systems. Uber Freight, for its part, focuses on freight brokerage, optimizing for top-line revenue. The business automates the backend operations that exist in transportation and truckload brokerage today, aggregating trucking fleets via the Uber Freight app and connecting drivers with shippers.

Turvo, on the other hand, works across the supply chain. The company, which has raised a total of $88.6 million at a $435 million valuation, according to PitchBook, helps shippers, brokers and carriers work together in real time using a software interface on their desktops and mobile phones. Turvo emerged from stealth two years ago with a $25 million Series A led by Activant Capital, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Upside Partnership, Slow Ventures and more. In November, the startup closed a Series B funding of $60 million led by Mubadala Ventures.

“Turvo’s platform is providing this solution to legacy logistics platforms and really maximizing all parts of the supply chain, not just pieces of it, which we were accustomed to at Uber,” Cristol told TechCrunch. “We were excited about how Turvo was innovating around the nucleus of logistics.”

Cristol and Bergevin officially began work at Turvo last week.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HTYXB6

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The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and CIV:LAB – a nonprofit dedicated to connecting urban tech leaders – have announced the launch of The Grid, a member-based partnership network for New York’s urban tech community. The goal of the network is to link organizations, academia and local tech leaders, in order to promote collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and resources.

In addition to connecting member companies and talent, The Grid will host various events, educational programs, and co-innovation projects, while hopefully improving access to investors as well as pilot program opportunities. The Grid is launching with over 70 member organizations – approved through an application and screening process – across various stages and sectors.

In recent years, the tech and startup scene in New York has notably ballooned – evolving from the Valley’s obscure younger sibling to one of the top cities for talent, entrepreneurship, and venture capital investment. And while the city has seen countless startups, VCs, accelerators, and other entrepreneurial resources set up shop within its borders, getting the right tools in place is only part of the battle.

New York wants to prove its initiatives are more than just “show-and-tell” projects and city officials believe that building a truly sustainable innovation economy is dependent on all its local resources working in conjunction, allowing entrepreneurship to permeate every arm of commerce. With an institutionalized network like The Grid, New York hopes it can further fuse its pockets of innovation into to one well-oiled machine, consistently producing transformative ideas.

“The Grid represents a promising new way for NYCEDC to work across sectors to strengthen collaboration and innovation, first in New York City and hopefully soon in many more cities across the country and around the world,” said NYCEDC President and CEO James Patchett in a statement. “It signals that New York City is leading with  a new approach to technology and startup culture, with a real focus on diversity, inclusion, equity, and community.”

As one of the largest and most industrially diverse cities in the world, New York has naturally placed a heightened focus on the growing sector of “urban tech” – which has been broadly categorized as innovation focused on improving city functionality, equality or ease of living. According to NYCEDC, the urban tech space has seen nearly $80 billion in VC investment since 2016, with nearly 10% going to New York-based beneficiaries.

The launch of The Grid is part of an expansion of NYCEDC’s larger UrbanTech NYC program, which has already helped establish the New York innovation hubs New Lab, Urban Future Lab, and Company. Alongside the membership network and a new site for UrbanTech NYC, NYCEDC is also launching The Grid Academy, an adjacent academic group with the mission of creating applied R&D partnerships between local academic institutions and corporate sponsors. The expansion of UrbanTech NYC represents the latest of several initiatives NYCEDC is pursuing to develop the broader ecosystem, coming just months after the EDC announced the launch of Cyber NYC, a $30 million investment initiative focused on growing New York’s cybersecurity presence and infrastructure.

The group will be led by a steering committee that will guide decisions related to strategic priorities, funding, events, and communications. Members of the committee include some of The Grid’s largest government and corporate members including the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Civic Hall, Company, New Lab, Urban Future Lab, Dreamit UrbanTech, URBAN-X, Urban.Us, Accenture, Samsung NEXT, Rentlogic, Smarter Grid Solutions, Civic Consulting USA, and the World Economic Forum.

“Since its early days, innovation has been part of the DNA that is New York City,” said Jeff Merritt, Head of IoT + Smart Cities at World Economic Forum. “Nowhere else in the world can you find an ecosystem that combines as many industries and nationalities. New York’s thriving urban technology community is a natural byproduct of what happens when you allow diversity, entrepreneurship and ambition to collide in one of the greatest cities in the world.” 

The Grid’s first meeting will be held on February 19th at Samsung NEXT’s New York HQ. Membership applications for The Grid are accepted on a rolling basis and can be found here on the UrbanTech NYC website.

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Calm, the meditation and wellness app that launched back in 2012, has today announced the close of an $88 million Series B financing with a valuation of $1 billion. (We have not been able to clarify whether the valuation was post- or pre-money.)

The funding was led by TPG Growth, with participation from CAA and existing investors Insight Venture Partners and Sound Ventures.

As meditation grows in popularity across the U.S. — the CDC says it tripled from 4.1 percent in 2012 to 14.2 percent in 2017 — Calm has capitalized on the craze by offering a suite of mindfulness and wellness tools, from guided meditation sessions to a product called “Sleep Stories,” via a subscription.

But Calm is also meeting stress where it lives. For example, the company invested $3 million in XPresSpa late in 2018. XPresSpa is a chain of quick spa stores found in airports. Meanwhile, Calm partnered with American Airlines to offer Calm content within AA’s in-flight entertainment system.

The growth of Calm is hard to deny. The company says that it has topped 40 million downloads worldwide, with more than one million paying subscribers. Calm also says that it quadrupled its revenue in 2018 — the company is now profitable — and is on track to do $150 million in annual revenue.

With the new financing, Calm’s total amount raised comes to $116 million.

Moreover, Calm’s valuation has soared from $250 million at the beginning of 2018, on the heels of a $27 million Series A, to now hit $1 billion.

Here’s what cofounder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith had to say in a prepared statement:

We started as a meditation app, but have grown far beyond that. Our vision is to build one of the most valuable and meaningful brands of the 21st century. Health and wellness is a $4 trillion industry and we believe there is a big opportunity to build the leading company in this fast growing and important space.

Cofounder and co-CEO Alex Tew said that the funding will predominantly go towards international growth and increased investment in content.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UMkZY1

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Raisin, the pan-European fintech marketplace for savings and investment products, is disclosing that it has raised $114 million in Series D funding. Existing investors Index Ventures, PayPal, Ribbit Capital and Thrive Ventures all participated in the round, which brings the total raised to date to $200 million.

Tellingly, the fast-growing Berlin fintech says it plans to use the new capital for “strategic acquisitions” and further internationalisation. Although available to customers across the EU from the get-go, Raisin had dedicated market launches in the Netherlands and the U.K. last year, seeing the company expand beyond Germany. It plans to add at least two additional international markets this year.

Originally founded in 2013, Raisin set out to open up the savings deposit market in Europe by taking advantage of EU-wide banking regulation, which goes someway to creating a financial services single market. Specifically, the problem the startup solves is that saving deposit rates differ not only from one local bank offer to another but more noticeably across Europe as a whole.

The Raisin marketplace lets you shop around and compare different rates European-wide. However, the key difference to a comparison site is that, via its own bank partner, the company offers consumers a single interface that includes account opening and anti-money laundering checks, making it easy to switch and continually ensure you get a competitive interest rate.

For the banks that integrate with the Raisin marketplace, especially smaller and midsize banks, they get exposure to customers across Europe that might otherwise never be reached. It also gives them potential access to many more deposits, which helps with their own balance sheet lending and scale.

To that end, Raisin says that it has brokered more than $11 billion in deposits for its 62 partner banks. It claims more than 160,000 customers from 31 different European countries, and says that to date Raisin has helped savers earn $90 million in interest.

Meanwhile, Raisin says the new “infusion” of capital will enable the fintech to strengthen its position as the preeminent online platform that gives Europeans access to the “single financial market” for savings.

Comments Raisin CEO and co-founder Dr. Tamaz Georgadze: “We want to break through unnecessary barriers to profitable saving and share the benefits of open markets – with both consumers and banks. Our central aim is to give savers and financial institutions the ‘Schengen experience’ for banking. Our first five years demonstrate that, indeed, Raisin stands for the saving and investing of the future”.

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

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The P&G acquisition of This is L., a startup retailer of period products and prophylactics, shows just how profitable investing in women’s healthcare brands and products can be.

A person with knowledge of the investment put the price tag at roughly $100 million — a healthy outcome for investors and company founder Talia Frenkel. But just as important as the financial outcome is the deal’s implications for other mission-driven companies.

This is L. launched from Y Combinator in August 2015 with a service distributing condoms in New York and San Francisco and steadily expanded into feminine hygiene products.

Frenkel, a former photojournalist who worked for the United Nations and Red Cross, started the company in 2013 — roughly three years after an assignment in Africa revealed the toll that HIV/AIDs was taking on women and girls on the continent.

“I didn’t realize the No. 1 killer of women was completely preventable and I think that really inspired me to action,” Frenkel told TechCrunch at the time of the company’s launch.

Now the company has distributed roughly 250 million products to customers around the world.

“Our strong growth has enabled us to stand in solidarity with women in more than 20 countries,” said Frenkel in a statement following the acquisition. “Our support has ranged from partnering with organizations to send period products to Native communities in South Dakota, to supplying pad-making machines to a women-led business in Tamil Nadu. Pairing our purpose with P&G’s expertise, scale and resources provides an extraordinary opportunity to contribute to a more equitable world.”

The company is available in more than 5,000 stores across the U.S. and is working with women entrepreneurs in countries from Uganda to India and beyond.

“This acquisition is a perfect complement to our Always and Tampax portfolio, with its commitment to a shared mission to advocate for girls’ confidence and serve more women,” said Jennifer Davis, president, P&G Global Feminine Care. “We feel this is a strong union and together we can be a greater force for good.”

For investors with knowledge of the company, the P&G acquisition is a harbinger of things to come. The combination of a non-technical, female founder operating in the consumer packaged goods market with a mission-driven company was an anomaly in the Silicon Valley of four years ago, but Frenkel’s success shows what kind of opportunities exist in the market.

“With this acquisition investors need to update their patterns,” said one investor with knowledge of the company.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Bm7DdH

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Nayeem Islam spent nearly 11 years with chipmaker Qualcomm, where he founded its Silicon Valley-based R&D facility, recruited its entire team and oversaw research on all aspects of security, including applying machine learning on mobile devices and in the network to detect threats early.

Islam was nothing if not prolific, developing a system for on-device machine learning for malware detection, libraries for optimizing deep learning algorithms on mobile devices and systems for parallel compute on mobile devices, among other things.

In fact, because of his work, he also saw a big opportunity in better protecting enterprises from cyberthreats through deep neural networks that are capable of processing every raw byte within a file and that can uncover complex relations within data sets. So two years ago, Islam and Saumitra Das, a former Qualcomm engineer with 330 patents to his name and another 450 pending, struck out on their own to create Blue Hexagon, a now 30-person Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that is today disclosing it has raised $31 million in funding from Benchmark and Altimeter.

The funding comes roughly one year after Benchmark quietly led a $6 million Series A round for the firm.

So what has investors so bullish on the company’s prospects, aside from its credentialed founders? In a word, speed, seemingly. According to Islam, Blue Hexagon has created a real-time, cybersecurity platform that he says can detect known and unknown threats at first encounter, then block them in “sub seconds” so the malware doesn’t have time to spread.

The industry has to move to real-time detection, he says, explaining that four new and unique malware samples are released every second, and arguing that traditional security methods can’t keep pace. He says that sandboxes, for example, meaning restricted environments that quarantine cyberthreats and keep them from breaching sensitive files, are no longer state of the art. The same is true of signatures, which are mathematical techniques used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software or digital document but are being bypassed by rapidly evolving new malware.

Only time will tell if Blue Hexagon is far more capable of identifying and stopping attackers, as Islam insists is the case. It is not the only startup to apply deep learning to cybersecurity, though it’s certainly one of the first. Critics, some who are protecting their own corporate interests, also worry that hackers can foil security algorithms by targeting the warning flags they look for.

Still, with its technology, its team and its pitch, Blue Hexagon is starting to persuade not only top investors of its merits, but a growing — and broad — base of customers, says Islam. “Everyone has this issue, from large banks, insurance companies, state and local governments. Nowhere do you find someone who doesn’t need to be protected.”

Blue Hexagon can even help customers that are already under attack, Islam says, even if it isn’t ideal. “Our goal is to catch an attack as early in the kill chain as possible. But if someone is already being attacked, we’ll see that activity and pinpoint it and be able to turn it off.”

Some damage may already be done, of course. It’s another reason to plan ahead, he says. “With automated attacks, you need automated techniques.” Deep learning, he insists, “is one way of leveling the playing field against attackers.”

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

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Ike, the autonomous trucking startup founded by veterans of Apple, Google and Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s self-driving truck program, has raised $52 million in a Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Redpoint Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Basis Set Ventures and Neo also participated in the round. Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal has joined Ike’s board. 

Ike’s funding round will help the company expand beyond its 30-person team as it drives forward with its mission to build a commercial product at scale. It’s a mission — expand and deploy — that sounds a lot like other autonomous vehicle startups. But that’s where the parallels end.

Ike’s three founders — Jur van den Berg, Nancy Sun and Alden Woodrow — aren’t pushing to have the first self-driving trucks on the road. It’s a declaration, and one the company outlined Tuesday in a blog post on Medium, that lies in contrast with a budding and cutthroat industry often described as being in a frantic race.

But then again, these founders were in the thick of those buzzy, heady days of 2016 and 2017, when startups were being snapped up by automakers and big tech companies and term sheets were raining down.

Van den Berg and Sun were both working at Apple’s special projects group when they left to join Otto, an autonomous trucking startup that was acquired by Uber in 2016. Woodrow, who was product lead of Google X’s Makani project, would also end up at Uber ATG by February 2017 as group product manager of its self-driving truck program.

By 2018, the last of Otto’s founders had left Uber and the self-driving trucks program was in free fall. Sun, Woodrow and van den Berg left Uber by spring 2018 to launch Ike. A few months later, Uber announced it would shutter its self-driving trucks unit to focus on autonomous cars.

In short, Ike’s founders have seen a thing or two, including missteps and exciting breakthroughs, splashy reveals and a heaping spoonful of hubris.

“The temptation when you’re working on this technology — because there’s so much potential and because there’s so much excitement for it — especially for small companies in the early stages, is to try and hack something together and try to get up and running really quickly,” Alden Woodrow, co-founder and CEO of Ike told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

That’s not what Ike is doing, Sun noted. Instead, the company is taking a systems engineering approach and sprinkling in a little Silicon Valley agility, Sun said.

What this means is Ike engineers aren’t focused just on quickly building out integrating self-driving software and sensors to get on the road. Instead, the company says it’s laser-focused on a systems-based philosophy. Ike is working on determining the design and architecture first before laying the foundation — to use a comparison to building a home.

It’s focused on an entire system that accounts for everything in the self-driving truck, from its wire harnesses, alternator and steering column to durable sensors designed for the highway, computer vision and deep learning that allows it to see and understand its environment and make the proper decisions based on that information. That systems approach also includes proper validation before testing on public roads.

This will likely mean Ike’s self-driving trucks will launch after others. But its founders believe that when they do hit the road at scale, it will be a validated and valuable product that won’t need constant tweaks or even a pivot.

There are trade-offs between all of these functional areas, Sun noted. “That’s why we need to get it right from a systems perspective and not over-rely on any one view.”

The heads down, systems approach is a reflection of broader changes within the industry, which has since sobered up. Many companies, even those “ahead” in the race to deploy autonomous vehicles, have discovered the problem is harder than expected. The days of time-lapsed self-driving videos, demos and bold claims have largely been replaced with a quieter let’s-get-to-work-now approach.

Ike’s plan for trucks

Ike, which is named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U.S. interstate system he helped create when he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, is trying to build a system that allows trucks to drive safely and reliably on the highway without a human driver.

However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for human drivers under Ike’s model. The company intends for its trucks to only drive autonomously on highways. From there, human truck drivers would move the loads between the highways.

Ike stands apart from other self-driving truck startups in other ways too, namely its decision to license autonomous delivery company Nuro’s vehicle software stack. The copy of Nuro’s autonomous vehicle stack was a “hard fork,” Woodrow explained, meaning Ike doesn’t have an ongoing technical connection with the company. Nuro does have a minority stake in Ike.

Instead, Ike gained a copy of relevant items (and the IP rights to it) that Nuro built, including some hardware designs, the autonomous software stack and the core infrastructure, which includes data logging, maps and simulation.

“We’re making a lot of progress today on hardware, software, systems engineering without driving trucks on the road,” Woodrow said. “That’s partly because of the team we’ve assembled, but it’s also due to the licensing agreement with Nuro that has given us a set of really robust tools.”

Ike won’t be staying off the roads for long. The company is planning to begin testing its self-driving trucks (with human safety drivers behind the wheel) on public roads this year.

Still, Ike’s founders aren’t set, or even focused yet, on where it will first deploy commercially.

“Because our road map is measured in years, we’ve got some time to get that right,” Woodrow said.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2tf3y6N

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Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. Depending on how much follow-on cash Reddit drums up from Silicon Valley investors and beyond, its post-money valuation could reach an epic $3 billion.

As more people seek esoteric community and off-kilter entertainment online, Reddit continues to grow its link sharing forums. 330 million monthly active users now frequent its 150,000 Subreddits. That warrants the boost to its valuation, which previously reached $1.8 billion when raised $200 million in July 2017. As of then, Reddit’s majority stake was still held by publisher Conde Nast that bought in back in 2006 just a year after the site launched. Reddit had raised $250 million previously, so the new round will push it to $400 million to $550 million in total funding.

It should have been clear that Reddit was on the prowl after a month of pitching its growth to the press and beating its own drum. In December Reddit announced it had reached 1.4 billion video views per month, up a staggering 40 percent from just two months earlier after first launching a native video player in August 2017. And it made a big deal out of starting to sell cost per click ads in addition to promoted posts, cost per impression, and video ads. A 22 percent increase in engagement and 30 percent rise in total view in 2018 pushed it past $100 million in revenue for the year, CNBC reported.

But supporting and moderating all that content isn’t cheap. The company had 350 employees just under a year ago, and is headquartered in pricey San Francisco — though in one if it’s cheaper but troubled neighborhood. Though the exact details of the Series D could fluctuate before it’s formally announced, until Reddit’s newer ad products rev up, it’s still relying on venture capital.

Tencent’s money will give Reddit time to hit its stride. It’s said to be kicking in the first $150 million of the round. The Chinese conglomerate owns all-in-on messaging app WeChat and is the biggest gaming company in the world thanks to ownership of League Of Legends and stakes in Clash Of Clans-maker Supercell and Fortnite developer Epic. But China’s crackdown on gaming addiction has been rough for Tencent’s valuation and Chinese competitor Bytedance’s news reader app Toutiao has grown enormous. Both of those facts make investing in American news board Reddit a savvy diversification, even if Reddit isn’t accessible in China.

Reddit could seek to fill out its round with up to $150 million in additional cash from previous investors like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, or YC’s president Sam Altman. They could see potential in one of the web’s most unique and internet-native content communities. Reddit is where the real world is hashed out and laughed about by a tech savvy audience that often produces memes that cross over into mainstream culture. And with all those amateur curators toiling away for Internet points, casual users are flocking in for an edgier look at what will be the center of attention tomorrow.

Reddit has recently avoid much of the backlash hitting fellow social site Facebook, despite having to remove 1000 Russian trolls pushing political propaganda. But in the past, the anonymous site has had plenty of problems with racist, mysoginistic, and homophobic content. In 2015 it finally implemented quarantines and shut down some of the most offensive Subreddits. But harassment by users contributed to the departure of CEO Ellen Pao, who was replaced by Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder. Huffman went on to abuse that power, secretly editing some user comments on Reddit to frame them for insulting the heads of their own Subreddits. He escaped the debacle with a slap on the wrist and an apology, claiming “I spent my formative years as a young troll on the Internet.”

Investors will have to hope Huffman has the composure to lead Reddit as it inevitably encounters more scrutiny as its valuation scales up. Its policy choice about what constitutes hate speech and harassment, its own company culture, and its influence on public opinion will all come under the microscope. Reddit has the potential to give a voice to great ideas at a time when flashy visuals rule the web. And as local journalism wanes, the site’s breed of vigilante web sleuths could be more in demand, for better or worse. But that all hinges on Reddit defining clear, consistent, empathetic policy that will help it surf atop the sewage swirling around the internet.

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

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Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. Depending on how much follow-on cash Reddit drums up from Silicon Valley investors and beyond, its post-money valuation could reach an epic $3 billion.

As more people seek esoteric community and off-kilter entertainment online, Reddit continues to grow its link sharing forums. 330 million monthly active users now frequent its 150,000 Subreddits. That warrants the boost to its valuation, which previously reached $1.8 billion when raised $200 million in July 2017. As of then, Reddit’s majority stake was still held by publisher Conde Nast that bought in back in 2006 just a year after the site launched. Reddit had raised $250 million previously, so the new round will push it to $400 million to $550 million in total funding.

It should have been clear that Reddit was on the prowl after a month of pitching its growth to the press and beating its own drum. In December Reddit announced it had reached 1.4 billion video views per month, up a staggering 40 percent from just two months earlier after first launching a native video player in August 2017. And it made a big deal out of starting to sell cost per click ads in addition to promoted posts, cost per impression, and video ads. A 22 percent increase in engagement and 30 percent rise in total view in 2018 pushed it past $100 million in revenue for the year, CNBC reported.

But supporting and moderating all that content isn’t cheap. The company had 350 employees just under a year ago, and is headquartered in pricey San Francisco — though in one if it’s cheaper but troubled neighborhood. Though the exact details of the Series D could fluctuate before it’s formally announced, until Reddit’s newer ad products rev up, it’s still relying on venture capital.

Tencent’s money will give Reddit time to hit its stride. It’s said to be kicking in the first $150 million of the round. The Chinese conglomerate owns all-in-on messaging app WeChat and is the biggest gaming company in the world thanks to ownership of League Of Legends and stakes in Clash Of Clans-maker Supercell and Fortnite developer Epic. But China’s crackdown on gaming addiction has been rough for Tencent’s valuation and Chinese competitor Bytedance’s news reader app Toutiao has grown enormous. Both of those facts make investing in American news board Reddit a savvy diversification, even if Reddit isn’t accessible in China.

Reddit could seek to fill out its round with up to $150 million in additional cash from previous investors like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, or YC’s president Sam Altman. They could see potential in one of the web’s most unique and internet-native content communities. Reddit is where the real world is hashed out and laughed about by a tech savvy audience that often produces memes that cross over into mainstream culture. And with all those amateur curators toiling away for Internet points, casual users are flocking in for an edgier look at what will be the center of attention tomorrow.

Reddit has recently avoid much of the backlash hitting fellow social site Facebook, despite having to remove 1000 Russian trolls pushing political propaganda. But in the past, the anonymous site has had plenty of problems with racist, mysoginistic, and homophobic content. In 2015 it finally implemented quarantines and shut down some of the most offensive Subreddits. But harassment by users contributed to the departure of CEO Ellen Pao, who was replaced by Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder. Huffman went on to abuse that power, secretly editing some user comments on Reddit to frame them for insulting the heads of their own Subreddits. He escaped the debacle with a slap on the wrist and an apology, claiming “I spent my formative years as a young troll on the Internet.”

Investors will have to hope Huffman has the composure to lead Reddit as it inevitably encounters more scrutiny as its valuation scales up. Its policy choice about what constitutes hate speech and harassment, its own company culture, and its influence on public opinion will all come under the microscope. Reddit has the potential to give a voice to great ideas at a time when flashy visuals rule the web. And as local journalism wanes, the site’s breed of vigilante web sleuths could be more in demand, for better or worse. But that all hinges on Reddit defining clear, consistent, empathetic policy that will help it surf atop the sewage swirling around the internet.

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

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French startup Workwell has released a major update to its platform. The company now provides an app to manage as many things related to your office building as possible from your phone.

The company started with a sort of intranet replacement. You could book meeting rooms, get a map of the office, contact your coworkers from the app. Workwell now wants to create a more flexible platform that expands beyond your company and beyond a single office building.

“The goal is to become the digital layer of every building,” co-founder and CEO Marie Schneegans told me. “We consider Workwell as an infrastructure product for buildings, just like water, electricity and internet. Workwell provides an interface to interact with the building, its services and people.”

Instead of a traditional service-based interface, Workwell is now organized by actions. If you want to book something, you tap on the booking button to book a meeting room, a parking spot or a gym class for instance. Similarly, the inbox has been unified to interact with both people and services in a single messaging interface.

Each person belongs to multiple circles. For instance, you can be part of a company with multiple offices around the world, part of a building and part of a co-working space. Each entity can have its own sets of services and features. It creates a more cohesive experience for the end user. It’s like being able to sign in to multiple Slack workspaces.

This way, you can use the app to badge in when you’re traveling to another city for some meetings with colleagues working in another city.

Eventually, Workwell wants to collaborate with real estate developers to integrate its app from day one. Imagine there’s a new office tower in town. Workwell could integrate with the AC system, elevators and parking sensors to improve the experience for all the companies working in that new building.

Real estate developers can integrate Workwell for free and hand it out to companies working in the building. Companies can then choose to add their own services by becoming a paid Workwell customer. Workwell is already partnering with Hines, Mirvac and Grand Paris Aménagement for new buildings.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2RFT0HB