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Imagine coating an expensive part with a layer of diamond dust the width of a human hair, capturing its light pattern as a unique identifier, then storing that identifier in a traditional database or on the blockchain. That’s precisely what Dust Identity, a Boston-based startup is trying to do, and today it got $2.3 million in seed money led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from New Science Ventures, Angular Ventures, and Castle Island Ventures.

The science behind Dust Identity was nurtured inside MIT, but the company has been at work for two years trying to build a solution based on that idea after receiving early support from DARPA. What these folks do is manufacture extremely tiny diamonds. They dust an object such as a circuit board with a coating of this and capture the diamonds in a polymer, company CEO and co-founder Ophir Gaathon explained.

“Once the diamonds fall on the surface of a polymer epoxy, and that polymer cures, the diamonds are fixed in their position, fixed in their orientation, and it’s actually the orientation of those diamonds that we developed a technology that allows us to read those angles very quickly,” Gaathon told TechCrunch.

For all the advanced technology at play here, Dust Identity is truly an identity company, but instead of identifying an individual, its purpose is to provide a trusted identity for an object using a physical anchor — in this case, diamond dust. You may be thinking that diamonds are kind of an expensive way to achieve this, but as it turns out, the company is actually creating the coating materials from low-cost diamond industrial waste.

“We start with diamond waste (for example, [from] the abrasive industry), but we developed a proprietary process (that’s of course highly scalable and economical) to purify and engineer the diamond waste into dust,” a company spokesperson explained.

The idea behind all of this is to prove that an object is valid and hasn’t been tampered with. The dust is applied at some point during the manufacturing process. The unique identifier is captured with some kind of commercial scanner and stored in the database. It provides a physical anchor for blockchain supply chain solutions that’s currently lacking. When the part makes its way to the buyer, they can run the part under a scanner and make sure it matches. If the dust pattern has been disturbed, there’s a good chance the piece was tampered with.

Finding a way to create uncopyable tags for physical objects is a kind of supply chain holy grail. Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins says his firm recognized the potential of this solution. “We have a pretty strong hard tech practice. We understand the value of supply chain and supply chain integrity,” he said.

The company is not alone in trying to find a way to attach a physical anchor to items in the supply chain. In fact, you can go back to RFID tags and QR codes, but Gaathon says the security of these approaches has degraded over time as hackers figure out how to copy them. IBM and others are working on tiny chips to attach to objects, but the diamond dust approach could be the most secure if it can scale because it works with an entirely random light pattern that can never be reproduced.

The startup intends to take the money and try to prove this idea can be commercialized for government and manufacturing use cases. It certainly gets points for creativity here and it could be onto something that could transform how we track the integrity of items as they move through a supply chain.

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Mobile gaming company Jam City is announcing a multi-year deal to create mobile games based on Pixar and Walt Disney Animation characters and films.

As part of the agreement, Jam City is taking over development of the match-three puzzle game Disney Emoji Blitz, which launched in 2016. Jam City says that everyone at Disney’s Glendale game studio who’s affected by this will be offered new jobs at the company to continue working on the title.

The first new game, meanwhile, will be based on the upcoming sequel to “Frozen” (that’s right, there’s going to be a “Frozen 2”), though the companies aren’t revealing any details, like the type of gameplay or the release date.

“While our licensing business for Disney Animation and Pixar games has grown over the last year and we have several top developers creating Disney games, this deal with Jam City represents a significant long-term opportunity for our games business and for the future slate of Disney and Pixar games,” said Kyle Laughlin, Disney’s senior vice president of games and interactive experiences, in a statement.

Jam City was founded in 2009 by Chris DeWolfe (who previously cofounded and served as CEO of MySpace) and former Fox executive Josh Ygaudo. It was initially focused on social games and was known as MindJolt before becoming the Social Gaming Network (named after a company it acquired) and then rebranding again two years ago as Jam City.

While Jam City has created its own games like Cookie Jam and Panda Pop, it’s also been releasing titles based on well-known franchises and intellectual property, such as “Snoopy Pop” and “Marvel Avengers Academy.” Earlier this year, it launched “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery,” a game that allows players to enroll in J.K. Rowling’s famous school for wizards and features the voices of several actors from the films.

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Truecaller may already be a familiar name, but many of you probably don’t know that it’s slowly becoming a significant messaging app. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Truecaller co-founder and CEO Alan Mamedi will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Truecaller first started as a call screening app. Some countries are more affected than others. But it’s clear that text and call spam is the most intrusive form of spam.

The Swedish company then leveraged this user base to quietly turn the app into a full-fledged messaging app with one focus in particular — India.

With the acquisition of Chillr, the company shows that it wants to recreate a sort of WeChat for India. The company launched payment features — Truecaller Pay lets you pay other Truecaller users as well as pay your bills.

Eventually, Truecaller wants to open up its platform to third-party services. Back in April, the company reported that it had 100 million daily active users.

If you’re impressed by Truecaller’s growth strategy, you should 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.

Alan Mamedi

CEO & Co-founder, Truecaller

Alan Mamedi is the CEO and Co-founder of Truecaller. Truecaller is one of the leading communication apps in the world with services in messaging, payment, caller ID, spam detection, dialer functionalities, and has more than 300 million users globally. In this position, Alan focuses on product development and innovation, and charting the strategic roadmap for the company’s success. To date, Truecaller has raised 80 million USD from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank, is gearing up to launch a new “Auto Savings” feature — a clever way to lower the barriers for Tandem app users who want to save for a rainy day — and to power the feature the company is partnering with Stripe.

The latter in itself isn’t necessarily huge news when you consider that Stripe is morphing into a payments company in the broadest sense. However, it does come at a time when other U.K. bank upstarts are attempting to wean users off making Stripe-powered card payments to top up their accounts since fees can soon add up.

The new Auto Savings offering will mean that every Tandem app will effectively have a flexible savings bank account with Tandem, which they can pay money into based on various savings rules. These rules will be applied based on transaction data gleaned through third-party bank accounts you’ve linked to in the Tandem app (and possibly your Tandem credit card, if you have one) and include rounding up payments to the nearest pound.

At the end of each week Tandem will move the money it’s allocated to Auto Savings out of your linked account via your debit card. This, of course, is also where Stripe comes into play by handling all the needed rerouting, and processing the card payment. It is also evidence of how the U.S. payments company plans to take advantage of Open Banking as a major part of its growth strategy.

Cue statement from Iain McDougall, U.K. and Ireland Country Manager, at Stripe says: “Building on infrastructure that powers the programmatic movement of money will be increasingly seen as a differentiator for technology companies, emerging fintechs and even established financial services providers. By providing this infrastructure, Stripe is helping Tandem to extend their product in new directions at a faster pace, which is a significant competitive advantage”.

Meanwhile, I’m told the feature will work alongside existing tools Tandem has built around aggregating your financial data and helping you budget. This means that Auto Savings will only withdraw money based on what Tandem deems you can actually afford. Oh, and in case you are wondering: yes, an Auto Savings account will pay interest.

The bigger picture is that Tandem wants to find ways to encourage people who don’t currently save to start doing so. To achieve this, saving needs to be “frictionless” and done in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t set someone up to fail. The challenger bank believes that roundups, which essentially ties saving to spending, and other forms of “auto saving”, that happens retrospectively once per week, is one way of doing this. Powering it by debit card is also lowering the barrier somewhat, too.

Adds Ricky Knox, Tandem CEO: “With this latest savings solution we wanted our customers to be able to pay money into their Tandem account without any hassle. A lot of other banks require you to make manual transfers or standing orders, which can make the whole process of saving a chore. With the help of Stripe, we want to make it as quick and easy as possible to save small and often straight from your debit card”.

Tandem’s Ricky Knox will be on-stage at TechCrunch Berlin later this month.

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Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank, is gearing up to launch a new “Auto Savings” feature — a clever way to lower the barriers for Tandem app users who want to save for a rainy day — and to power the feature the company is partnering with Stripe.

The latter in itself isn’t necessarily huge news when you consider that Stripe is morphing into a payments company in the broadest sense. However, it does come at a time when other U.K. bank upstarts are attempting to wean users off making Stripe-powered card payments to top up their accounts since fees can soon add up.

The new Auto Savings offering will mean that every Tandem app will effectively have a flexible savings bank account with Tandem, which they can pay money into based on various savings rules. These rules will be applied based on transaction data gleaned through third-party bank accounts you’ve linked to in the Tandem app (and possibly your Tandem credit card, if you have one) and include rounding up payments to the nearest pound.

At the end of each week Tandem will move the money it’s allocated to Auto Savings out of your linked account via your debit card. This, of course, is also where Stripe comes into play by handling all the needed rerouting, and processing the card payment. It is also evidence of how the U.S. payments company plans to take advantage of Open Banking as a major part of its growth strategy.

Cue statement from Iain McDougall, U.K. and Ireland Country Manager, at Stripe says: “Building on infrastructure that powers the programmatic movement of money will be increasingly seen as a differentiator for technology companies, emerging fintechs and even established financial services providers. By providing this infrastructure, Stripe is helping Tandem to extend their product in new directions at a faster pace, which is a significant competitive advantage”.

Meanwhile, I’m told the feature will work alongside existing tools Tandem has built around aggregating your financial data and helping you budget. This means that Auto Savings will only withdraw money based on what Tandem deems you can actually afford. Oh, and in case you are wondering: yes, an Auto Savings account will pay interest.

The bigger picture is that Tandem wants to find ways to encourage people who don’t currently save to start doing so. To achieve this, saving needs to be “frictionless” and done in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t set someone up to fail. The challenger bank believes that roundups, which essentially ties saving to spending, and other forms of “auto saving”, that happens retrospectively once per week, is one way of doing this. Powering it by debit card is also lowering the barrier somewhat, too.

Adds Ricky Knox, Tandem CEO: “With this latest savings solution we wanted our customers to be able to pay money into their Tandem account without any hassle. A lot of other banks require you to make manual transfers or standing orders, which can make the whole process of saving a chore. With the help of Stripe, we want to make it as quick and easy as possible to save small and often straight from your debit card”.

Tandem’s Ricky Knox will be on-stage at TechCrunch Berlin later this month.

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Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank, is gearing up to launch a new “Auto Savings” feature — a clever way to lower the barriers for Tandem app users who want to save for a rainy day — and to power the feature the company is partnering with Stripe.

The latter in itself isn’t necessarily huge news when you consider that Stripe is morphing into a payments company in the broadest sense. However, it does come at a time when other U.K. bank upstarts are attempting to wean users off making Stripe-powered card payments to top up their accounts since fees can soon add up.

The new Auto Savings offering will mean that every Tandem app will effectively have a flexible savings bank account with Tandem, which they can pay money into based on various savings rules. These rules will be applied based on transaction data gleaned through third-party bank accounts you’ve linked to in the Tandem app (and possibly your Tandem credit card, if you have one) and include rounding up payments to the nearest pound.

At the end of each week Tandem will move the money it’s allocated to Auto Savings out of your linked account via your debit card. This, of course, is also where Stripe comes into play by handling all the needed rerouting, and processing the card payment. It is also evidence of how the U.S. payments company plans to take advantage of Open Banking as a major part of its growth strategy.

Cue statement from Iain McDougall, U.K. and Ireland Country Manager, at Stripe says: “Building on infrastructure that powers the programmatic movement of money will be increasingly seen as a differentiator for technology companies, emerging fintechs and even established financial services providers. By providing this infrastructure, Stripe is helping Tandem to extend their product in new directions at a faster pace, which is a significant competitive advantage”.

Meanwhile, I’m told the feature will work alongside existing tools Tandem has built around aggregating your financial data and helping you budget. This means that Auto Savings will only withdraw money based on what Tandem deems you can actually afford. Oh, and in case you are wondering: yes, an Auto Savings account will pay interest.

The bigger picture is that Tandem wants to find ways to encourage people who don’t currently save to start doing so. To achieve this, saving needs to be “frictionless” and done in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t set someone up to fail. The challenger bank believes that roundups, which essentially ties saving to spending, and other forms of “auto saving”, that happens retrospectively once per week, is one way of doing this. Powering it by debit card is also lowering the barrier somewhat, too.

Adds Ricky Knox, Tandem CEO: “With this latest savings solution we wanted our customers to be able to pay money into their Tandem account without any hassle. A lot of other banks require you to make manual transfers or standing orders, which can make the whole process of saving a chore. With the help of Stripe, we want to make it as quick and easy as possible to save small and often straight from your debit card”.

Tandem’s Ricky Knox will be on-stage at TechCrunch Berlin later this month.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2z82G74

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Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank, is gearing up to launch a new “Auto Savings” feature — a clever way to lower the barriers for Tandem app users who want to save for a rainy day — and to power the feature the company is partnering with Stripe.

The latter in itself isn’t necessarily huge news when you consider that Stripe is morphing into a payments company in the broadest sense. However, it does come at a time when other U.K. bank upstarts are attempting to wean users off making Stripe-powered card payments to top up their accounts since fees can soon add up.

The new Auto Savings offering will mean that every Tandem app will effectively have a flexible savings bank account with Tandem, which they can pay money into based on various savings rules. These rules will be applied based on transaction data gleaned through third-party bank accounts you’ve linked to in the Tandem app (and possibly your Tandem credit card, if you have one) and include rounding up payments to the nearest pound.

At the end of each week Tandem will move the money it’s allocated to Auto Savings out of your linked account via your debit card. This, of course, is also where Stripe comes into play by handling all the needed rerouting, and processing the card payment. It is also evidence of how the U.S. payments company plans to take advantage of Open Banking as a major part of its growth strategy.

Cue statement from Iain McDougall, U.K. and Ireland Country Manager, at Stripe says: “Building on infrastructure that powers the programmatic movement of money will be increasingly seen as a differentiator for technology companies, emerging fintechs and even established financial services providers. By providing this infrastructure, Stripe is helping Tandem to extend their product in new directions at a faster pace, which is a significant competitive advantage”.

Meanwhile, I’m told the feature will work alongside existing tools Tandem has built around aggregating your financial data and helping you budget. This means that Auto Savings will only withdraw money based on what Tandem deems you can actually afford. Oh, and in case you are wondering: yes, an Auto Savings account will pay interest.

The bigger picture is that Tandem wants to find ways to encourage people who don’t currently save to start doing so. To achieve this, saving needs to be “frictionless” and done in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t set someone up to fail. The challenger bank believes that roundups, which essentially ties saving to spending, and other forms of “auto saving”, that happens retrospectively once per week, is one way of doing this. Powering it by debit card is also lowering the barrier somewhat, too.

Adds Ricky Knox, Tandem CEO: “With this latest savings solution we wanted our customers to be able to pay money into their Tandem account without any hassle. A lot of other banks require you to make manual transfers or standing orders, which can make the whole process of saving a chore. With the help of Stripe, we want to make it as quick and easy as possible to save small and often straight from your debit card”.

Tandem’s Ricky Knox will be on-stage at TechCrunch Berlin later this month.

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Mintos, the Latvian fintech that operates a global loans marketplace to let you invest in loans from various loan originators, has raised €5 million in Series A funding. Backing the startup once again is the Riga-based venture capital firm Grumpy Investments (previously known as Skillion Ventures). More noteworthy, the new capital will be used to launch a Mintos banking account and debit card, significantly expanding the company’s offering.

“Both banking account and the card in our opinion is a natural step in our journey of revolutionising financial services through technology and serving our investors and will nicely complement our current offering of investments in loans, and low-fee mid-market rate currency exchange,” Mintos co-founder and CEO Martins Sulte tells me. “This development also means that, theoretically, our investors won’t need their banks anymore”.

The Mintos banking account will act like any other IBAN account. You’ll be able to receive a salary into your Mintos account, use it to get paid by companies, or receive money from friends. And of course you’ll be able to transfer money out of your Mintos account, just like a regular bank account.

Sulte says the idea behind plans to launch a Mintos banking account, and the reason why the company is applying for a European e-money license, is to improve the overall Mintos experience. This includes making it quicker to access money generated by the loans you have invested in (which is held by Mintos on your behalf) and easier to invest on a regular basis.

“The card will allow investors to access the money they hold on the Mintos account instantly by paying at their local grocery shop or online or withdrawing money at ATMs; basically use the card like any other bank card,” he says. “They will no longer need to request a withdrawal from the platform to their bank account and wait up to two days for their money to arrive”.

The fintech startup claims a customer base of 87,000 investors from 71 different countries. In addition to launching the Mintos banking account, the company will use the additional funding for further geographical expansion, including Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia). It will also invest in acquiring more customers, and significantly expanding the size of its 60 person team. Notably, Mintos has been profitable since January 2017.

To that end, the fintech company says it has already facilitated more than €1 billion in investments in loans through its marketplace since launching in 2015. It says Investors in total have earned €26.7 million in interest through loans to individuals and businesses and have attained an average net return of nearly 12 percent.

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Heyday, a startup aiming to make facials more affordable and personalized, announced today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

I first wrote about the company a year ago, when it raised its $3 million seed round. At the time, co-founder and CEO Adam Ross said his goal was to offer something that sits between expensive, high-end facials and “random little places that are generally cheap in a bad way.” (Heyday pricing starts at $65 for a 30-minute session.)

The company currently operates six brick-and-mortar locations — it started in New York City but recently opened its first Los Angeles store. At the same time, Ross said the website was recently redesigned to offer a more “frictionless” booking experience, and the company also says it can use its “Facial Record” of customers to personalize the treatment and products.

Moving forward, the goal is to both open new physical locations (particularly in LA), but also to continue investing in the technology.

“It’s not an either/or — we see mutual growth and expansion across both channels,” Ross said. “The physical footprint is always going to be a key pillar of our brand strategy, but to win and service customers’ needs in this space, you need to be online.”

Ross also suggested that Heyday is changing the way customers look at facials. For one thing, 30 percent of its customers say they’ve never had a facial before. In addition, Ross said they’re starting to see facials not as an occasional luxury, but as a regular part of their wellness routine: “Most of our clients think about us like an Equinox membership.” And they should, he argued, especially since “your skin is your largest organ.”

The new funding was led by Fifth Wall Ventures, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Brainchild Funding, M3 Ventures and CircleUp. Fifth Wall partner Kevin Campos is joining Heyday’s board of directors.

“We are in the midst of a significant shift in the retail industry, where marquee brands are moving from digitally native to an omnichannel model,” Campos said in the funding announcement. “We believe the team at Heyday is offering the best experience across both digital and physical touchpoints, and we are thrilled to partner with them to help navigate this complex process and position them for success.”

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Heyday, a startup aiming to make facials more affordable and personalized, announced today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

I first wrote about the company a year ago, when it raised its $3 million seed round. At the time, co-founder and CEO Adam Ross said his goal was to offer something that sits between expensive, high-end facials and “random little places that are generally cheap in a bad way.” (Heyday pricing starts at $65 for a 30-minute session.)

The company current operates six brick-and-mortar locations — it started in New York City but recently opened its first Los Angeles store. At the same time, Ross said the website was recently redesigned to offer a more “frictionless” booking experience, and the company also says it can use its “Facial Record” of customers to personalize the treatment and products.

Moving forward, the goal is to both open new physical locations (particularly in LA), but also to continue to investing in the technology.

“It’s not an either/or — we see mutual growth and expansion across both channel,” Ross said. “The physical footprint is always going to be a key pillar of our brand strategy, but to win and service customers’ needs in this space, you need to be online.”

Ross also suggested that Heyday is changing the way customers look at facials. For one thing, 30 percent of its customers say they’ve never had a facial before. In addition, Ross said they’re starting to see facials not as an occasional luxury, but as a regular part of their wellness routine: “Most of our clients think about us like an Equinox membership.” And they should, he argued, especially since “your skin is your largest organ.”

The new funding was led by Fifth Wall Ventures, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Brainchild Funding, M3 Ventures and CircleUp. Fifth Wall partner Kevin Campos is joining Heyday’s board of directors.

“We are in the midst of a significant shift in the retail industry, where marquee brands are moving from digitally native to an omnichannel model,” Campos said in the funding announcement. “We believe the team at Heyday is offering the best experience across both digital and physical touchpoints, and we are thrilled to partner with them to help navigate this complex process and position them for success.”

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