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Shape Security, a fraud-fighting cybersecurity company, has closed a $26 million round of Series E funding.

This will be the fifth round of funding — more than $130 million — since the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was founded in 2011. This latest round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Allegis Capital and others — including JetBlue Ventures and Singtel.

Shape Security said the addition of JetBlue’s investment was because it has benefited first-hand from its fraud-fighting technology.

The company’s primary focus is on preventing imitation attacks — such as when hackers use stolen logins or malware to walk in through the front door. Shape’s enterprise defense technology protects web and mobile apps against automated attacks by utilizing artificial intelligence to differentiate ordinary customers from hackers. Using its massive trove of data, including geolocation and even mouse movements, combined with Shape’s machine learning technology, the company says it can shut down suspicious activity and attacks in real time. The company’s flagship service Blackfish also protects against credential stuffing — where attackers use your stolen credentials to break into other sites.

In total, Shape says it protects 150 million logins each day, and covers one-fifth of the consumer brands in the Fortune 500.

With its $26 million cash injection, Shape said it plans a greater international expansion across the U.K., Europe and the Middle East and Asia to support its growing user base — about half of its customers are located outside of the U.S. And, the company will be bolstering its product development work with new products set to be announced down the pike.

Shape declined to say what it was valued at, but PitchBook puts the company’s valuation now at $495 million.

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Rockset, a startup that came out of stealth today, announced $21.5M in previous funding and the launch of its new data platform that is designed to simplify much of the processing to get to querying and application building faster.

As for the funding, it includes $3 million in seed money they got when they started the company, and a more recent $18.5 million Series A, which was led by Sequoia with participation from Greylock.

Jerry Chen, who is a partner at Greylock sees a team that understands the needs of modern developers and data scientists, one that was born in the cloud and can handle a lot of the activities that data scientists have traditionally had to handle manually. “Rockset can ingest any data from anywhere and let developers and data scientists query it using standard SQL. No pipelines. No glue. Just real time operational apps,” he said.

Company co-founder and CEO Venkat Venkataramani is a former Facebook engineer where he learned a bit about processing data at scale. He wanted to start a company that would help data scientists get to insights more quickly.

Data typically requires a lot of massaging before data scientists and developers can make use of it and Rockset has been designed to bypass much of that hard work that can take days, weeks or even months to complete.

“We’re building out our service with innovative architecture and unique capabilities that allows full-featured fast SQL directly on raw data. And we’re offering this as a service. So developers and data scientists can go from useful data in any shape, any form to useful applications in a matter of minutes. And it would take months today,” Venkataramani explained.

To do this you simply connect your data set wherever it lives to your AWS account and Rockset deals with the data ingestion, building the schema, cleaning the data, everything. It also makes sure you have the right amount of infrastructure to manage the level of data you are working with. In other words, it can potentially simplify highly complex data processing tasks to start working with the raw data almost immediately using SQL queries.

To achieve the speed, Venkataramani says they use a number of indexing techniques. “Our indexing technology essentially tries to bring the best of search engines and columnar databases into one. When we index the data, we build more than one type of index behind the scenes so that a wide spectrum of pre-processing can be automatically fast out of the box,” he said. That takes the burden of processing and building data pipelines off of the user.

The company was founded in 2016. Chen and Sequoia partners Mike Vernal joined the Rockset board under the terms of the Series A funding, which closed last August.

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Spoke, a startup that wants to simplify the way companies add and process help desk tickets using artificial intelligence underpinnings, announced it has enhanced its AI engine to allow for more complex queries.

The company founders were working at Google after a previous startup had been sold to the search giant when they encountered a problem with help desk ticket processing. It was spread across different tools and generally more complicated than they thought it needed to be.

Like all good entrepreneurs, when they left Google in 2016, they were looking for their next challenge, and they decided to attack this pain point which they felt acutely in their time at Google. Like many startups, that pain point gave rise to a new company and they started Spoke .

The product launched last March and the company already 150 customers. The idea with the service is to provide an intelligent internal ticketing system, whether that’s for HR, IT or other internal help desk.

They wanted to make the tool as conversational as possible, so you simply enter a question or statement such as ‘the WiFi is down in my conference room’ or ‘how much vacation do I have left.’ The system generally recognizes the type of request — WiFi would go to IT and vacation to HR — and it moves the ticket through the system accordingly. If there is a relevant knowledge base article available, it might pull that as suggested reading. They say they have gotten to the point that 50 percent of requests can be resolved automatically without routing to a human.

Along the way, it keeps asking for feedback so that that the artificial intelligence engine underlying the tool can learn what it got right and wrong and adjust accordingly in the future.

While the tool has its own complete interface, the founders recognized that people work in different ways, so they have also built integrations with Zapier (the workflow tool) and Slack, allowing customers to take that Spoke functionality and use it inside the tools they commonly use at work without explicitly having to open the Spoke tool.

The company has 20 full time employees at the moment. Customers include DoorDash, Evernote and Charitywater. They have raised $28 million.

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Well, you have to admire a staggered PR plan. Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that just announced £85 million in Series E funding and its entrance into the fintech unicorn club, is rolling out a new feature today. The banking upstart is adding interest-earning savings accounts as an upgrade to its existing “Pots” functionality that launched last November.

The new “Savings Pots” feature is being offered in partnership with third party bank Investec Corporate & Investment Banking and lets you earn 1 percent interest on the money you specifically allocate to a Savings Pot. It is the first time Monzo customers have been able to earn interest on their savings through the Monzo app, and is part of wider “marketplace banking” strategy that will see Monzo increasingly offer various financial products via third party fintech startups or incumbent providers.

The idea behind Pots is to let you set money aside for specific things, such as a planned holiday, preparing for Christmas, or simply saving for a rainy day. You can create up to 10 Pots, each with their own name, and then add money to them manually, schedule payments in and out, or round up your day-to-day transactions to the nearest pound and add the additional change to a Pot, piggybank style.

To that end, you’ll need a minimum of £1,000 to open a Savings Pot, and above this can put as much money as you want in a Savings Pot. The savings accounts are flexible, so you can take money out of your Savings Pots at any time, where it will arrive back in your main Monzo account the next working day. Investec will hold the money in your Savings Pots and pay the 1 percent interest.

Savings Pots are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), meaning up to £85,000 of customers’ savings are protected (ie £85,000 across all of your Savings Pots as well as any other money you’ve deposited with Investec. Money you have banked with Monzo outside of Savings Pots is protected by the FSCS separately, again up to £85,000.

Monzo says it will be gradually rolling the feature out to its more than one million customers, and that the bank will email customers once they’re able to start using Savings Pots. I had the feature from yesterday and it is pretty self-explanatory to use.

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Exactly one year to the day since it launched its line of men’s health products, HIMS is announcing its foray into women’s wellness.

The company is using its mountain of venture capital to support the new brand, called HERS. In September, HIMS raised another $50 million in a round led by IVP.  The financing valued the startup, which has brought in $97 million to date, at $500 million, according to PitchBook.

“Our goal is to help women make the most informed choices about their health at every stage of their healthcare journey,” HERS brand lead Hilary Coles told TechCrunch.

Upon launch, HERS is offering three categories of products: sexual wellness, skin care and hair loss treatments. Its line of sexual health products includes a prescription-based birth control pill and Addyi, the only FDA-approved medication for women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

“We thought it was offensive really that there have been 26 options out there for men to get hard and this is the first thing offered for women,” Coles said, referring to Addyi — the ‘female viagra.’ “It’s another area that has been super stigmatized.”

HERS will also sell a hair, skin and nails vitamin supplement and shampoo & conditioner that protects against damaged hair that sheds. For the skin, HERS will offer a prescription topical cream to treat acne, an anti-aging cream and a melasma corrector for hyperpigmentation.

The company will also begin selling women Minoxidil, a treatment for hair thinning usually prescribed to men, in January. With the exception of birth control and Addyi, the products range from $15 to $75 per month.

HIMS is known for selling erectile dysfunction medication, oral hygiene and skin care products to men. Founded in 2017, the San Francisco-based company is backed by Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, SV Angel, 8VC and more.

2018 is a record year for funding in the femtech space, which has included fundings for fertility and birth control startups like Nurx, Future Family and Maven. North of $400 million is expected to be funneled into the sector this year — a more than 10 percent increase than the $354 million raised by femtech startups in 2017.

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VICIS has closed its Series B on $28.5 million, with participation from NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers via Rx3 Ventures. Rodgers joins a list of other pro footballers to back the helmet startup, including Roger Staubach, Jerry Rice, Russell Wilson and Doug Baldwin.

VICIS is known for its $950 Zero1 football helmet designed for adult players. The company spent $20 million over the course of three years collaborating with athletes, engineers and neuroscientists to design and finetune the high-tech head shield, which protects against impact forces and mitigates the effects of collisions through a soft outer shell and several underlying protective layers.

With the fresh funding, which brings total investment in the company to $84 million, VICIS is bringing its youth helmet to market. Founded in 2013, the Seattle-based company says its mission from the get-go was to protect kids and teens playing football.

“There are 2 million kids in the U.S. playing youth football and they deserve the best possible protection,” VICIS co-founder and chief executive officer Dave Marver told TechCrunch. “To be able to offer this technology to kids; it’s our mission fully realized.”

The youth helmet, which retails at $495, is the first-ever to be designed for kids. Most youth helmets are miniaturized versions of adult helmets and fail to take into account the specific needs of a youth player.

VICIS’ youth helmet is tuned for the impact velocities expected in youth play; its the lightest helmet available for kids at uner 4 pounds; and it has the widest field of view of any kids’ helmet currently available.

“We feel like we have the opportunity to catalyze innovation in the youth space,” Marver said.

According to the National SAFE KIDS Campaign and the American Academy of Pediatrics, sports are the cause of 21 percent of traumatic brain injuries per year. Football, in particular, is responsible for the majority of the between 1.6 million and 3.8 million sports-related concussions found annually.

Research linking football to CTE, a degenerative brain disease, has proven that the sport can, in fact, be deadly, yet millions flock to the field every year. VICIS’ smart, tech-enabled helmets could help usher in a new era for safety in the popular sport.

VICIS plans to bring its technology to other sports in the future. It’s also recently inked a contract with the U.S. Army, with plans to provide the Army and Marine Corps a version of its helmet, tailored specifically for combat.

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ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski is obsessed with SAR satellites. He’s so obsessed that his company plans to launch dozens of satellites into space. According to him, ICEYE satellites should be much better than existing SAR satellites — call it the Tesla or satellites if you want. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Modrzewski is coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to speak.

SAR stands for synthetic-aperture radar. There are already many SAR satellites around the earth, observing the surface of the planet. But they weigh hundreds of kilograms and cost a small fortune to put into space.

While consumer electronics have greatly benefited from miniaturization, the same can’t be said about space. But ICEYE thinks it’s time to make satellites smaller.

The company’s SAR satellites only weigh around 70 to 80 kilograms. It’s a cost-effective solution, which means it’s much cheaper to build a complete constellation. The company is aiming for 18 fully operational satellites around the planet.

In many ways, ICEYE is a tech achievement. And the fact that the company operates like a startup makes the venture even more interesting.

If you want to hear Modrzewski tell you more about what they’ve been working on, you should come to Disrupt Berlin. The conference will take place on November 29-30 and you can buy your ticket right now.

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.

Rafal Modrzewski

Co-founder & CEO, ICEYE

Rafal Modrzewski is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of ICEYE. ICEYE aims to launch and operate a constellation of micro-SAR satellites providing access to timely and reliable Earth observation data. ICEYE is the first company that has successfully miniaturized a SAR satellite, creating a unit that is 100x more cost-effective than traditional counterparts. With its 18 satellite constellation, ICEYE offers its partners a set of unprecedented satellite imaging capabilities, accessing any area of interest faster, more frequently and at lower cost.

Since co-founding the project in 2012, which became the company in 2014, with Pekka Laurila, Modrzewski is responsible for overseeing the organization’s growth and implementing ICEYE’s overall vision. Modrzewski brings with him deep domain expertise in SAR engineering, and he has received the 2018 Forbes 30 under 30 Technology award based on the world-first achievements of ICEYE.

Prior to co-founding ICEYE, Modrzewski researched innovative products at VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) in the RFID and wireless sensing group. He attended Warsaw University of Technology in Poland, where he studied Electrical Engineering and co-founded the Multimedia Technologies Science Group. Modrzewski continued his studies in Radio Science and Engineering at Aalto University where he led the on-board data handling team working on Aalto-1, Finland’s flagship satellite project.

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Mavrck has raised another $5.8 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $13.8 million.

When the company raised its Series A back in 2015, it was focused on helping brands work with “micro-influencers” who were already using their products. Now it describes itself as an “all-in-one” influencer marketing platform, offering a number of tools to automate and measure the process.

Last month, Mavrck announced new features for Pinterest, where it’s now an official marketing partner. It also says it’s been doing more to improve measurement and detect fraud — on the fraud side, it promises to analyze a “statistically significant sample” of an Instagram account’s followers, and of the accounts that engage with their content, to determine if they’re bots.

Customers include P&G, Godiva and PepsiCo, and the company says recurring revenue has grown 400 percent year-over-year.

“Everything that we have done at Mavrck this year has been done with the intention to drive the influencer industry forward,” said co-founder and CEO Lyle Stevens in the funding announcement. “Every new capability that we’ve introduced, every partner that we’ve started working with, every influencer behavior that we’ve tracked was part of our mission to help marketers harness the power of content that people trust to drive tangible business value for their brands.”

The new funding comes from GrandBanks Capital and Kepha Partners. A spokesperson said this isn’t a Series B, but rather additional capital raised to support increased demand and channel partnerships.

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TechCrunch has an exclusive look at the companies participating in 500 Startups‘ 24th startup accelerator batch, which kicked off last week.

Through its four-month seed program, the Silicon Valley seed fund invests $150,000 in exchange for 6 percent equity. The companies below include a mix of industries from cryptocurrency to digital health to e-commerce. 500 Startups says 40 percent of the companies have a female founder, 50 percent have a black, mixed-race or Latinx founder and 31 percent are headquartered outside the U.S.

Here’s a closer look at the 22 companies, which will demo their tech to investors on February 28:

• Alba: A Santiago, Chile-based mobile marketplace for babysitters in emerging markets.
• Assemble: A Los Angeles-based digital platform for automating video content production.
• Back Office: A Palm Beach, Florida-based financial software provider focused on streamlining personal bookkeeping.
• BlockVigil: A San Francisco-based platform for building and scaling blockchain applications.
• Cambridgene: A Cambridge-based developer of clinical-genomic software for personalizing cancer therapy in hospitals.
• Celer Network: A platform for building and scaling decentralized applications.
• Crowdz: Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the blockchain-based B2B marketplace builds digitized supply chains.
• HAMAMA: A San Francisco-based provider of microgreen kits for growing healthy food at home.
• IOTW: A Hong Kong-based IoT-connected cryptocurrency mining platform.
• Kura Tech: A San Francisco-based developer of augmented reality glasses with micro-display and variable focus.
• Memoir Health: A Boston-based behavioral health startup providing physical and virtual mental wellness and substance use services.
• MessageCube: Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the company is building an integration for people to discuss and purchase shared experiences over chat.
• Ovation: A Provo, Utah-based online portal for restaurant reviews meant to help businesses measure customer experience.
• PantyProp: A New York-based seller of underwear and swimwear for women to wear while menstruating.
• Pilleve: A Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based startup using data to help care providers lower the costs associated with opioid addiction.
• Savion: A Livermore-based aviation company bringing green, long-range private jets to the middle class.
• SnapShyft: Headquartered in Indianapolis, the startup provides an on-demand labor marketplace focused on the food and beverage industry.
• Thrive Agric: An Abuja, Nigeria-based crowdfunding platform for farms and farmers in Africa.
• TripAfrique: Headquartered in Paris, the online booking platform helps travelers arrange trips to Africa.
• UTRUST: A Zurich-based cryptocurrency payments platform that offers buyers protection, instant transactions and more.
• Zeuss Tech: Headquartered in Palo Alto, the blockchain-based anti-money-laundering platform targets cash-intensive industries.
• No information is available on the final company, which is in stealth mode.

Here’s a look at 500 Startups batch 23, 22 and 21.

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Bitcoin turned 10 years old, a milestone for a technology that few have used and even fewer understand. Ultimately, the blockchain it wrought could be the biggest change to banking, finance, and politics ever or it could be a dud. The jury is still out, but let’s take a walk down memory lane and see just how the product grew from White Paper to world beater.

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