14 Unique Ways to Encourage Innovation in Your Company

As a business owner, you know your company can’t remain stagnant and stuck in its ways if it hopes to grow.

That growth requires innovation and creativity, both of which are best sourced from everyone on your team.

Advice to Encourage Innovation

To help you put your staff in an innovative mindset, we asked 14 members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

“What’s one unique way to encourage innovation in your company that others may not have considered?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. Explore a New Technology Platform

“Select a new technology platform or service and challenge your team(s) to think about what they could do with it for the company or a client. Start with exploring the new tech and answering questions that might come up about it. Then, let the team(s) go away and come up with concepts, then return and share. For those with the capabilities, encourage a prototype or proof of concept.” ~ Andrew Howlett, Struck

2. Start a Company Book Club

“Do a book club together. I have my employees listen to audiobooks that tickle my fancy (or theirs), and then we discuss each week how we could apply those ideas to our business. Why recreate the wheel when you can just re-read it?” ~ Codie Sanchez, Contrarian Thinking & Entourage Effect Capital

3. Be Transparent About Your Challenges

“If your team doesn’t know what the biggest challenges are for the company, then the ideas they have for innovating may be focused on the wrong things. By being transparent about where you as a company need to improve, you can help people focus their thinking on solving the right problems.” ~ Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.

4. Admit (and Learn From) Your Past Failures

“Tell your new hires how you failed in the past. All newbies expect to hear about the company’s greatest successes when they first start out, but if you get into some of the more significant fails, that just might give them the ideas, motivations or thought processes to truly introduce innovation in your company.” ~ Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

5. Encourage People to Use Their PTO

“Encouraging staff to take their allotment of vacation may not be an obvious way to encourage innovation, but it is. When employees are tired and burned out, they’re not as productive or creative. Reminding them to take their vacations will help them destress and decompress, so they come back to work with a clear mind that’s able to think more creatively.” ~ Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

6. Reward Experimental Behavior

“If you want innovative employees, then it helps to encourage and reward experimental behavior. If they try something new that ends up benefiting the company, then you can make an announcement and offer them a gift card or some other form of compensation. Showing your appreciation will motivate your whole team to do the same so you get the results you’re looking for.” ~ Jared Atchison, WPForms

7. Hold Regular ‘Innovation’ Meetings

“Regular meetings where team members can snowball ideas and talk about different concepts are great for sparking innovation. These free-thinking sessions encourage your staff to think outside the box, which can lead to jaw-dropping breakthroughs.” ~ John Turner, SeedProd LLC

8. Have Employees Listen to Customers

“The best source of innovation comes from our customers and their experiences working with our products. I encourage my team to listen to what people are saying and to understand their pain points. When we identify a problem, that’s when an ‘aha!’ moment appears and we’re able to come up with something new and seemingly innovative, when it’s really just that we listened to customers and did something with it.” ~ Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

9. Allow for Questions

“The best way to encourage innovation at work is to promote discussions and allow people to ask questions. It’s essential to create a ‘no stupid questions’ rule so that people don’t hold back from asking questions. When you encourage open discussions, you’ll create an environment that supports innovation.” ~ Blair Williams, MemberPress

10. Give People a Say in Company Decisions

“Allow your employees to have a say in decisions and give them the option of sharing their opinions and ideas. The members of your staff are the backbone of your company, so listening to what they have to say is important and will pave the way toward innovation.” ~ Patrick Barnhill, Specialist ID, Inc.

11. Establish Peer Recognition

“Reward innovation. Establish a formal innovation award where peers nominate one another. This creates a culture where innovation isn’t merely encouraged, it is rewarded. By having peers choose one another, the playing field opens up to anyone in any corner of the organization, frequently inviting more people to step forward with ideas.” ~ Matthew Podolsky, Florida Law Advisers, P.A.

12. Let Your Team Work During Their Peak Productivity Times

“We encourage innovation in our company by allowing our team to work when they are at peak productivity. We don’t have a strict start and end time for the day since our team is global. As a result, we see consistently positive results in terms of productivity and innovation. When people can work when their brain is ‘on,’ they can come up with some really good ideas.” ~ Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights

13. Take Advantage of ‘Small Talk’ Moments

“Our Friday 3:05 p.m. Cafecitos are our time to discuss new trends, news and tech updates companywide. What starts as Cuban coffee talk often results in action plans for adopting new strategies. Do not discount the moments of small talk, whether at the watercooler or while having a coffee break — all moments when you are together and active listening are fertile grounds for innovation.” ~ Matthew Capala, Alphametic

14. Create the Right Restrictions

“Create restrictions. Often we fail to innovate because we have too many options. This is why they say that necessity is the mother of invention — when you have just the right amount of restriction, you are able to get more creative with your solutions and create genius results.” ~ Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.

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• Small Business Management Advice

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This article, "14 Unique Ways to Encourage Innovation in Your Company" was first published on Small Business Trends

Coralogix lands $25M Series B to rethink log analysis and monitoring

Logging and monitoring tends to be an expensive endeavor because of the sheer amount of data involved. Companies are therefore forced to pick and choose what they monitor, limiting what they can see. Coralogix wants to change that by offering a more flexible pricing model, and today the company announced a $25 million Series B and a new real time analytics solution called Streama.

First the funding. The round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners and O.G. Tech Ventures with help from existing investors Aleph VC, StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners and 2B Angels. Today’s round, which comes after the startup’s $10 million Series A last November, brings the total to $41.2 million raised, according to the company.

When we spoke to Coralogix CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf last year regarding the A round, he described his company as more of an intelligent applications performance monitoring with some security logging analytics.

Today, the company announced Streama, which has been in Alpha since July. Assaraf says companies can pick and choose how they monitor and pay only for the features they use. That means if a particular log is only tangentially important, a customer can set it to low priority and save money, and direct the budget toward more important targets.

Coralogix announces $10M Series A to bring more intelligence to logging

As the pandemic has taken hold, he says that companies are appreciating the ability to save money on their monitoring costs, and directing those resources elsewhere in the company. “We’re basically building out this full platform that is going to be inside centric and value centric instead of volume or machine count centric in its pricing model,” Assaraf said.

Assaraf differentiates his company from others out there like Splunk, Datadog and Sumo Logic saying his is a more modern approach to the problem that simplifies the operations. “All these complicated engineering things are being abstracted away in a simple way, so that any user can very quickly create savings and demonstrate that it’s [no longer] an engineering problem, it’s more of a business value question,” he explained.

Since the A round, the company has grown from 25 to 60 people spread out between Israel and the U.S. It plans to grow to 120 people in the next year with the new funding. When it comes to diversity in hiring, he says Israel is fairly homogeneous, so it involves gender parity there, something that he says he is working to achieve. The U.S. is still relatively small with just 12 employees now, but it will be expanding in the next year and it’s something he says that he will need to be thinking about that as he hires.

As part of that hiring spree, he wants to kick his sales and marketing operations into higher gear and start spending more on those areas as the company grows.

New Relic is changing its pricing model to encourage broader monitoring

VTEX raises $225M at a $1.7B valuation for e-commerce solutions aimed at retailers and brands

Retailers and consumer brands are focused more than ever in their histories on using e-commerce channels to connect with customers: the global health pandemic has disrupted much of their traditional business in places like physical stores, event venues and restaurants, and vending machines, and accelerated the hunt for newer ways to sell goods and services. Today, a startup that’s been helping them build those bridges, specifically to expand into newer markets, is announcing a huge round of funding, underscoring the demand.

VTEX, which builds e-commerce solutions and strategies for retailers like Walmart and huge consumer names like AB InBev, Motorola, Stanley Black & Decker, Sony, Walmart, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, has raised $225 million in new funding, valuing the company at $1.7 billion post-money.

The funding is being co-led by two investors, Tiger Global and Lone Pine Capital, with Constellation, Endeavour Catalyst and SoftBank also participating. It’s a mix of investors, with two leads, that offers a “signal” of what might come next for the startup, sad Amit Shah, the company’s chief strategy officer and general manager for North America.

“We’ve seen them invest in big rounds right before companies go public,” he said. “Now, that’s not necessarily happening here right now, but it’s a signal.” The company has been profitable and plans to continue to be, Shah said (making it one example of a SoftBank investment that hasn’t gone sour). Revenues this year are up 114% with $8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) processed over platforms it’s built.

Given that VTEX last raised money less than a year ago — a $140 million round led by SoftBank’s Latin American Innovation Fund — the valuation jump for the startup is huge. Shah confirmed to us that it represents a 4x increase on its previous valuation (which would have been $425 million).

The interest back in November from SoftBank’s Latin American fund stemmed from VTEX’s beginnings. The company got its start building e-commerce storefronts and strategies for businesses that were hoping to break into Brazil — the B of the world’s biggest emerging “BRIC” markets — and the rest of Latin America. It made its name building Walmart in the region, and has continued to help run and develop that operation even after Walmart divested the asset, and it’s working with Walmart now in other regions outside the US, too, he added.

But since then, while the Latin American arm of the business has continued to thrive, the company has capitalized both on the funding it had picked up, and the current global climate for e-commerce solutions, to expand its business into more markets, specifically North America, EMEA and most recently Asia.

Revenues were growing at a rate of 50% a year before the pandemic ahead of it’s more recent growth this year of 114%, Shah said. “Of course, we would prefer Covid-19 not to be here, but it has had a good effect on our business. The arc of e-commerce has grown has impacted revenues and created that additional level of investor interest.”

VTEX’s success has hinged not just on catering to companies that have up to now not prioritized their online channels, but in doing so in a way that is more unified.

Consumer packaged goods have been in a multi-faceted bind because of the fragmented way in which they have grown. A drinks brand will not only manufacture on a local level (and sometimes, as in the case of, say, Coca-Cola, use different ingredient formulations), but they will often have products that are only sold in select markets, and because the audiences are different, they’ve devise marketing and distribution strategies on a local level, too. On top of all that, products like these have long relied on channels like retailers, restaurants, vending machines and more to get their products into the hands of consumers.

These days, of course, all of that has been disrupted: all the traditional channels they would have used to sell things are now either closed or seeing greatly reduced custom. And as for marketing: the rise of social networks has led to a globalization in messaging, where something can go viral all over the world and marketing therefore knows no regional boundaries.

So, all of this means that brands have to rethink everything around how they sell their products, and that’s where a company like VTEX steps in, building strategies and solutions that can be used in multiple regions. Among typical deals, it’s been working with AB InBev to develop a global commerce platform covering 50 countries (replacing multiple products from other vendors, typically competitors to VTEX include SAP, Shopify and Magento).

“CPG companies are seeking to standardize and make their businesses and lives a little easier,” Shah said. Typical work that it does includes building marketplaces for retailers, or new e-commerce interfaces so that brands can better supply online and offline retailers, or sell directly to customers — for example, with new ways of ordering products to get delivered by others. Shah said that some 200 marketplaces have now been built by VTEX for its customers.

(Shah himself, it’s worth pointing out, has a pedigree in startups and in e-commerce. He founded an e-commerce analytics company called Jirafe, which was acquired by SAP, where he then became the chief revenue officer of SAP Hybris.)

“We are excited to grow quickly in new and existing markets, and offer even more brands a platform that embraces the future of commerce, which is about being collaborative, leveraging marketplaces, and delivering customer experiences that are second-to-none,” said Mariano Gomide de Faria, VTEX co-founder and co-CEO, in a statement. “This injection of funding will undoubtedly support us in achieving our mission to accelerate digital commerce transformation around the world.”

Spotlight: Just Artisan Offers an Alternative for Handmade Sellers

There are plenty of options for independent artisans to sell their wares. But the current online marketplaces don’t always keep the needs of sellers in mind. That’s where Just Artisan stands out.

The new marketplace started out of a desire to help those selling on other platforms.

Small Business Spotlight: Just Artisan

Read about the company and its journey in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What the Business Does

Provides an online marketplace for handmade businesses.

Founder Marcello De Lio told Small Business Trends, “We are dedicated to providing our vendors with the tools they need to succeed selling online, including low fees, analytics tools, friendly support, and full control over their storefront.”

Business Niche

Low fees and support for vendors.

De Lio explains, “Many large marketplaces charge high fees to sell on their platform and provide little support for sellers after they have signed up. We have taken a different approach, and strive to put our vendors first.”

Origin Story

After noticing issues with existing options.

De Lio says, “I first came up with the idea for Just Artisan in 2018, when I met my girlfriend. She and some of her friends were selling their handmade goods on a large marketplace. But continually felt that the marketplace did not have their interest at heart. It bothered me to see such a large corporation take advantage of their sellers. With a background in business and web development, I knew that I could make a platform for artists that could be fair and transparent. By the end of 2019, I decided it was time to create a marketplace built for artists, and began working on Just Artisan. We currently have over 400 artists who call our platform home.”

 

Biggest Win

Helping artists.

De Lio explains, “With new vendors joining every day, it is clear that artists are in need of a marketplace like Just Artisan. We are encouraged by the support and feedback we are receiving and excited about the prospect of helping artists and small businesses.”

Biggest Risk

Competing with larger marketplaces.

De Lio adds, “It is too soon to tell the outcome of our decision to challenge the dominance of larger platforms. But we are confident that a marketplace built on trust and fairness can succeed.”

Lesson Learned

Start strong with marketing.

De Lio says, “If I could do it all over again I would ramp up marketing before rolling out the beta. When our site was ready for beta testing we had no email list, or interested artists, meaning we had to start from scratch. The initial few weeks were slow going. But we were able to make the best of it and add multiple vendors every day.”

How They’d Spend an Extra $100,000

Online ads and influencer marketing.

De Lio says, “At this time we are happy with our platform. And although we are always tweaking and making adjustments, the money would be best spent raising awareness and bringing more buyers to the site.”

Company Mascot

A cockapoo named Dexter.

De Lio explains, “He is also our employee of the month, 5 months running, by unanimous vote.”

* * * * *

Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program

Image: Just Artisan, Marcello De Lio

This article, "Spotlight: Just Artisan Offers an Alternative for Handmade Sellers" was first published on Small Business Trends

Memo Bank details its offering for its business bank accounts

French startup Memo Bank has unveiled three different plans for its new customers. The company is building a business bank for small and medium companies that generate between €2 million and €50 million in annual turnover.

Earlier this year, Memo Bank obtained licenses from the French regulator (ACPR) and the European Central Bank to become a credit institution. It can provide all the services you’d expect from a business bank, from current accounts to credit lines.

On paper, Memo Bank’s current accounts look a lot like a software-as-a-service product. There are three different plans. For €49 per month, you get one user account and each additional account costs €10 per month. You get 20 transactions in and out per month, each additional transaction costs €0.40 per transaction.

For €149 per month, you can create as many user accounts as you want and you get 200 transactions per month. Once again, additional transactions cost €0.40 per transaction.

And if you handle a lot of transactions, you get unlimited transactions for €399 per month. The mid-tier plan also lets you access an authorized overdraft.

Interestingly, companies on the top two tiers will earn interests on their deposits — 0.15% up to €100,000 and 0.30% up to €200,000 for the top two plans respectively. Memo Bank isn’t mentioning checks or payment cards for now.

Image Credits: Memo Bank

The startup is also saying that its web platform should work better than your average banking site. The search feature works as expected, you can issue grouped transfers to pay your employees and you can set up an approval workflow for big transactions.

More importantly, Memo Bank is open for business to issue loans. Companies can apply to get a €20,000 to €200,000 loan and pay back over 1 to 7 years. With this product, the startup is competing with online lending platforms, such as October.

Memo Bank unveils its business bank, credit license and $22.5 million in new funding

Hailo challenges Intel and Google with its new AI modules for edge devices

Hailo, a Tel Aviv-based startup best known for its high-performance AI chips, today announced the launch of its M.2 and Mini PCIe high-AI acceleration modules. Based around its Hailo-8 chip, these new models are meant to be used in edge devices for anything from smart city and smart home solutions to industrial applications.

Today’s announcement comes about half a year after the company announced a $60 million Series B funding round. At the time, Hailo said it was raising those new funds to roll out its new AI chips, and with today’s announcement, it’s making good on this promise. In total, the company has now raised $88 million.

“Manufacturers across industries understand how crucial it is to integrate AI capabilities into their edge devices. Simply put, solutions without AI can no longer compete,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo, in today’s announcement. “Our new Hailo-8 M.2 and Mini PCIe modules will empower companies worldwide to create new powerful, cost-efficient, innovative AI-based products with a short time-to-market – while staying within the systems’ thermal constraints. The high efficiency and top performance of Hailo’s modules are a true gamechanger for the edge market.”

Image Credits: Hailo

Developers can still use frameworks like TensorFlow and ONNX to build their models, and Hailo’s Dataflow compiler will handle the rest. One thing that makes Hailo’s chips different is its architecture, which allows it to automatically adapt to the needs of the neural network running on it.

Hailo is not shy about comparing its solution to that of heavyweights like Intel, Google and Nvidia. With 26 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and power efficiency of 3 TOPS/W, the company claims its edge modules can analyze significantly more frames per second than Intel’s Myriad-X and Google’s Edge TPU modules — all while also being far more energy efficient.

Image Credits: Hailo

The company is already working with Foxconn to integrate the M.2 module into its “BOXiedge” edge computing platform. Because it’s just a standard M.2 module, Foxconn was able to integrate it without any rework. Using the Hailo-8 M.2 solution, this edge computing server can process 20 camera streams at the same time.

“Hailo’s M.2 and Mini PCIe modules, together with the high-performance Hailo-8 AI chip, will allow many rapidly evolving industries to adopt advanced technologies in a very short time, ushering in a new generation of high performance, low power, and smarter AI-based solutions,” said Dr. Gene Liu, VP of Semiconductor Subgroup at Foxconn Technology Group.

Hailo raises $60M Series B for its AI chips

Dwolla Releases Push-to-Debit Feature to Quickly Issue Reimbursement

Do you want to pay gig workers or vendors in a quick, hasslefree manner? Do you want to delight your customers by issuing prompt refunds? If yes, then Dwolla has good news for you.

The company has recently launched a push-to-debit facility to help businesses quickly send money to any debit card holder’s account. What’s more, the facility enables the receiver to instantly access the money.

How Dwolla Push-to-Debit Works

You need to have only the debit card details of the receiver to send him/her money. So there is no need to enter tedious bank account details.

With the Dwolla’s push-to-debit feature, you can push funds to a receiver’s debit card in near-realtime. So the receiver can access money even on weekends, holidays, and outside regular business hours.

PC: Dwolla

What’s more, it is quite simple to start using Dwolla’s push-to-debit feature.

You can initiate sending a payment in three steps: create a customer, add a funding source, and initiate the payment.

Dwolla’s push-to-debit feature offers the following advantages to businesses:

• Simplified pricing (one flat fee)
• Transaction activity monitoring
• Easy integration
• Card Tokenization

How Your Small Business Can Benefit From Push-to-Debit

Needless to say, adding account details can be a tedious task, and paying through checks delay the receiver’s access to the money.

As a small business owner, you must be making payments to vendors, issuing refunds, and reimbursing freelance workers.

The push-to-debit feature enables businesses to send money in near-realtime, thus delighting the vendors, customers, and gig workers. As a result, your business can have a competitive advantage.

Dwolla CEO Brady Harris said in a prepared statement, “Business payments need to be versatile and easily accessible, which is why Dwolla’s goal is to provide customers with as many options as possible to get funds to their end-users,”

“Because handling debit card transactions is an incredibly intricate process, our Push-to-Debit offering is one-of-a-kind. We took on the challenge of abstracting the card gateways so businesses don’t have to,” he added.

About Dwolla

Dwolla, Inc. is a leading FinTech company, offering payment solutions to innovative businesses. Click here to know more about Dwolla’s push-to-debit solution.

Image: dwolla.com

This article, "Dwolla Releases Push-to-Debit Feature to Quickly Issue Reimbursement" was first published on Small Business Trends

October closes $300 million in new funds for its SME lending marketplace

French fintech startup October has raised some fresh capital to invest in small and medium companies on its lending platform. Overall, the company has gathered $300 million (€258 million) from various partners that will be deployed over the next few years.

This is not a traditional startup funding round as today’s new investment is specifically designed to finance new loans on its platform. October isn’t selling equity in exchange for capital.

October works with small companies in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany that need a credit line. For small and medium companies, you can apply for a loan and get an answer just a few days later. October evaluates risk before handing out loans thanks to industry-specific data analysis and human analysts.

Loans range from €30,000 to €5 million. There’s no personal guarantee and interest rate varies depending on the risk associated with your application.

On the other side of the marketplace, individuals can contribute to SME financing. But the startup has been relying more and more on institutional investors looking for different types of assets to diversify their investment portfolios.

Hence today’s new influx of cash. Here’s the full breakdown:

• $23 million (€20 million) will be used for traditional SME loans with monthly repayments.
• $44 million (€38 million) will be deployed in the tourism industry specifically — hotels, restaurants and more. Six insurance companies and French public sector financial institution CDC are contributing to this fund. Companies applying for loans in this category can delay repayment.
• $232 million (€200 million) will be injected in Italian SMEs in particular. Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo Group is investing exclusively in this fund. Those government-backed loans will go live quite rapidly as everything will be deployed by the end of 2020.

As you can see, October is becoming an important technological partner for European support plans during the economic crisis. The startup can issue government-backed loans and some public institutions are choosing October to finance SMEs.

Over the past five years, October has handed out around 1,000 loans. It represents $521 million (€448 million) in capital. That number will go up rapidly following today’s announcement.

Crowd-lending platform October hits pause on loan repayments

Papaya Global raises $40M for a payroll and HR platform aimed at global workforces

Workforces are getting more global, and people who work day in, day out for organizations don’t always sit day in, day out in a single office, in a single country, to get a job done. Today, one of the startups building HR to help companies provision services for and manage those global workers better is announcing a funding round to capitalise on a surge in business that it has seen in the last year — spurred in no small part by the global health pandemic, the impact it’s had on travel and the way it has focused the minds of companies to get their cloud services and workforce management in order.

Papaya Global, an Israeli startup that provides cloud-based payroll, as well as hiring, onboarding and compliance services for organizations that employ full-time, part-time, or contractors outside of their home country, has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Workday Ventures — the corporate investment arm of the HR company — Access Industries (via its Israeli vehicle Claltech), and previous investors Insight Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, New Era Ventures, Group 11, and Dynamic Loop also participated

The money comes less than a year after its Series A of $45 million, following the company growing 300% year-over-year annually since 2016. It’s now raised $95 million and is not disclosing valuation. But Eynat Guez, the CEO who co-founded the company in that year with Ruben Drong and Ofer Herman, said in an interview that it’s 5x the valuation it had in its round last year.

Its customers include fast-growing startups (precisely the kind of customer that not only has global workforces, but is expanding its employee base quickly) like OneTrust, nCino and Hopin, as well as major corporates like Toyota, Microsoft, Wix, and General Dynamics.

Guez said Papaya Global was partly born out of the frustrations she herself had with HR solutions — she’s worked in the field for years. Different countries have different employment regulations, varied banking rules, completely different norms in terms of how people get paid, and so on. While there have been some really modern tools built for local workforces — Rippling, Gusto, Zenefits now going head to head with incumbents like ADP — they weren’t built to address these issues.

Other HR people who have dealt with international workers would understand her pain, those who control the purse strings might have been less aware of the fragmentation. All that changed in the last eight months (and for the foreseeable future), a period when companies have had to reassess everything about how they work to make sure that they can get through the current period without collapsing.

“The major impact of Covid-19 for us has been changing attitudes,” said Guez. “People usually think that payroll works by itself, but it’s one of the more complex parts of the organization, covering major areas like labor, accounting, tax. Eight months ago, a lot of clients thought, it just happens. But now they realize they didn’t have control of the data, some don’t even have a handle on who is being paid.”

As people moved into and out of jobs, and out of offices into working from home, as the pandemic kicked off, some operations fell apart as a result, she said. “Payroll continuity is like IT continuity, and so all of a sudden when Covid started its march, we had prospects calling us saying they didn’t have data on, for example, their Italian employees, and the office they were using wasn’t answering the phone.”

Guez herself is walking the walk on the remote working front. Papaya Global itself has offices around the world, and Guez herself is normally based in Tel Aviv. But our interview was conducted with her in the Maldives. She said she and her family decided to decamp elsewhere before Israel went into a second lockdown, which was very tough to handle in a small flat with small children. Working anywhere, as we have found out, can work.

The company is not the only one that has identified and is building to help organizations handle global workforces. In fact, just when you think the unemployment, furlough and layoff crunch is affecting an inordinate number of people and the job market is in a slump, a rush of them, along with other HR companies, have all been announcing significant funding rounds this year on the back of surges in business.

Others that have raised money during the pandemic include Deel, which like Papaya Global is also addressing the complexities of running global workforces; Turing, which helps with sourcing and then managing international teams; Factorial with its platform targeting specifically SMBs; Lattice focused on the bigger challenges of people management; and Rippling, the second act from Zenefits’ Parker Conrad.

“Papaya Global’s accelerating growth is a testament to their top-notch executive leadership as well as their ability to streamline international payroll management, a first for many enterprises that have learned to live with highly manual payroll processes,” said Rory O’Driscoll, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, in a statement. “The complexity and cost of managing multi-region workforces cannot be understated. Eynat and her team are uniquely serving their customers’ needs, bringing an advanced SaaS platform into a market long-starved for more effective software solutions.”

The joke is on consumers as Liquid Death raises $23 million more

In what began as a kind of funny, savvy marketing stunt that has since gained traction, a nearly three-year-old, Santa Monica-based startup that sells water from the Austrian Alps under the brand Liquid Death, has raised $23 million in Series B funding. Backers in the round include an unnamed family office; Convivialité Ventures, which is Pernod Ricard Group’s venture arm; the musician known as Fat Mike; and earlier backer Velvet Sea Ventures.

The company, originally incubated with the help of the L.A.-based startup studio Science, has now raised a little more than $34 million altogether.

We talked with Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario, who was formerly a West Coast agency exec, not long after he launched the company to the public, and he argued at the time that canned water could give sugary energy drinks like Rockstar, Monster and Red Bull a run for their money if it was also named like a heavy metal act.

Indeed, our favorite part of the product has long been its promise to “murder your thirst.” (It’s water in an aluminum can, after all, so other differentiators are hard to come by.)

Clearly, plenty of other people are amused enough by the company’s inventive marketing that its products are selling, including at Whole Foods. It put the cans on its shelves back in February, around the same time that Velvet Sea led the company’s $9 million Series A round.

Liquid Death also sells at more than 1,000 7-Eleven stores in California, and it sells, as it always has, directly to customers, who can select either mountain water or sparkling water, and buy a T-shirt or hoodie from a growing merchandise store on their way out of its online store.

A 12-pack of tallboys costs $16. A “Hydrate or Die” T-shirt can be had for $26.

E-scooter startup Neuron Mobility adds $12M to its Series A for expansion in Australia and New Zealand

Neuron Mobility, a Singapore-based e-scooter rental startup, announced today that it has added $12 million to its Series A. Led by Square Peg, an Australian venture capital firm and GSR Ventures, this increases the round’s new total to $30.5 million. The company, which operates in Australia and New Zealand in addition to Southeast Asian markets, first announced its Series A in December 2019.

Singapore’s Neuron Mobility raises $18.5M to bring its electric scooters to more international markets

Part of Neuron Mobility’s growth plans hinges on the increased adoption of electric scooters and bikes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people are using their cars less frequently because they are working remotely or there are movement restrictions where they live. When they do go out, electric bikes and scooters offer an alternative to public transportation and ride-hailing services for short trips.

Neuron Mobility’s chief executive Zachary Wang said the company raised a Series A+ instead of moving onto a Series B because more cities are “opening up to the possibility of micromobility, particularly rental e-scooters as they present an individual transport option that takes pressure off public transport and allows people to continue social distancing.”

“We’ve been experiencing tremendous growth in ANZ and the pandemic has made us fast track our plans,” he added.

Though Neuron Mobility currently does not operate in other Southeast Asian countries besides Singapore, Wang said it is “constantly evaluating opportunities across APAC.”

The new funding will be used to speed up Neuron Mobility’s expansion plans in Australia and New Zealand, where it claims to be the leading electric scooter rental operator. The company is currently present in nine locations, including Auckland, New Zealand, and Australian cities Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin, Canberra and Townsville. Neuron Mobility plans to expand into five new cities over the next two months and part of that involves hiring 400 more people in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. In addition to the Asia-Pacific, Neuron Mobility will also launch in Slough, it’s first location in the United Kingdom, by the end of this year.

Neuron Mobility’s research found that before the COVID-19 lockdowns in Australia, one in five of its users had never used an e-scooter before. But now Australian and New Zealand users have increased their average e-scooter trip distances by 23% to 2.6 kilometers, with the average duration of rides rising by 10% to more than 14 minutes. Neuron Mobility’s pricing is meant to be affordable depending on different markets. For example, in Brisbane, users pay one Australian dollar (about 68 U.S. cents) to begin a trip and then 38 Australian cents for each minute of the ride. Its e-scooters can go up to speeds of about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) per hour.

Other “micromobility” companies, including Ofo, Reddy Go, Obike and Lime, have also offered rental services in Australia and New Zealand, but ran into trouble. Bike-sharing startups Ofo, Reddy Go and Obike withdrew from Australia in part because city councils were frustrated by bikes were being abandoned on sidewalks and in parks. Lime still operates in Australian cities, but in June, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that the company failed to disclose safety issues with its Generation 2 scooters (in response, Lime said it would implement new compliance procedures and upgrade to its new Generation 3 scooter).

Wang said Neuron Mobility avoids those issues by strategically planning which cities it will launch in, instead of focusing on rapid expansion, partnering with city councils and “continually shifting and adapting to meet their needs.” Several of Neuron Mobility’s features, including geofencing to control where and how fast e-scooters can be ridden, and a “Helmet Lock” to make helmets available for all scooters, were developed after discussions with city councils. Neuron Mobility’s scooters, designed by the company specifically for renting, also use swappable batteries to decrease pollution.

After launching in Singapore, Neuron Mobility decided to focus on Australia and New Zealand because “both countries have cities that are highly suitable for micromobility in terms of infrastructure and regulations,” Wang said. City councils have also “been keen to push the boundaries of what can be done with technology to make programs better and safer and that really suits our way of thinking.”

The scooters arrive in Australia

 

Collective, a back office platform that caters to ‘businesses of one,’ just landed a hefty seed round

Americans and other global citizens are increasingly self-employed, thanks to great software, the need for flexibility, and because skilled services especially can pay fairly well, among other reasons.

In fact, exactly one year ago, the Freelancers Union and Upwork, a digital platform for freelancers, released a report estimating that 35% of the U.S. workforce had begun freelancing. With COVID-19 still making its way around the country and globe, prompting massive and continued job dislocation for many tens of millions  of people, that percentage is likely to rise quickly.

Unsurprisingly, savvy startups see the economic power of these individuals — many of whom aren’t interested in managing anyone or anything other than the steady growth of their own businesses. A case in point is Collective, a 2.5-year-old, 20-person San Francisco-based startup that’s been quietly building back office services like tax preparation and bookkeeping for what it dubs “business of one” owners, and which just closed on $8.65 million in seed funding.

General Catalyst and QED Investors co-led the round, along with a string or renowned angel investors, including Uber cofounder Garrett Camp, Figma founder Dylan Field, and Doordash executive Gokul Rajaram.

We talked yesterday with cofounder and CEO Hooman Radfar about Collective’s mission to “empower, support and connect the self-employed community” — and what, exactly, it’s proposing.

TC: You previously founded a company and, even before it sold to Oracle in 2016, you had jumped over to VC, working with Garrett Camp at his startup studio Expa. Why shift back into founder mode?

HR: What I saw throughout across AddThis and Expa and my angel investing is that managing finances is hard. Accounting, taxes, compliance — all that set-up as a small business is annoying.

Two years ago, [Collective cofounder] Uger [Kaner] came into Expa and he basically pitched me on a startup-in-a-box-type program that we were talking about building from an incubation perspective, but [with more of a pointed focus on back office issues]. He’s an immigrant like me, and because he didn’t quite understand the system, he wound up having tax penalties — penalties that are even worse when you’re a freelancer. Some startups have come up with a  bespoke version of what we offer, but we were like, ‘Why do they have to do it?’ These are commodities, but if you put them together in a platform, they can can be powerful.

TC: So is what you’ve created proprietary or are you working with third parties?

HR: Both. We’re an online concierge that’s focused on the back office as the core, meaning accounting and tax services. We also form an S Corp for you because you can save a lot of money [compared with forming a business as an LLC, which features different tax requirements]. So there’s an integration layer plus a dashboard on top of that. If you’re an S Corp, you need to have payroll, so we have partnership with Gusto that comes with your subscription. We have a partnership with Quickbooks. We work with a third party on compliance. Our vision is to make this easy for you and to set this on autopilot because we understand that time is literally money.

TC: How much are you charging?

For taxes, accounting, business banking, and payroll, for the core package, it’s $200 a month. We are piloting bookkeeping and a fuller service package that’s probably [representative of] the direction we’ll head over time, and that will be an additional fee.

TC: How can you persuade these businesses of one that it’s worth that cost?

HR: There are almost three million people in the U.S. who [employ only themselves and] are making more than $100,000 a year and if you think about how many of these [different products] they are already using, it’s a great deal. Quickbooks and Gusto is cheaper with us. You see savings through expensing. The magic is really running your S Corp the right way. Part of that is normal income tax, but you also have a distribution and it’s taxed differently than an income — it’s taxed less. So we pull in salary data and look at expenses and across states, and say, ‘This is what we’d recommend to you based on how your cash flow is coming in, so you recognize this distribution in a compliant way.’

TC: Interesting about this useful data that you’ll be amassing from your customers. How might you use it? 

HR: Our first concern is making sure the right people are seeing it [meaning we’re focused on privacy]. But there’s a lot we can do with the aggregation of that data once we’ve earned the right to use it. Among the things we could do, theoretically, including creating a new level of scoring. If you’re a business of one, for example, it’s very difficult to get mortgages and loans, because credit agencies don’t have the tools to assess you. But if we have your financial history for years, can we represent that you’re a great person, you have a great business.

Another interesting direction as we reach more members — we’ll get to 2,000 soon — would be to use our power as a collective to get our members less expensive insurance, [help facilitate] credit, [help them with a] 401(k).

TC: There are a lot of other things you can get into presumably, too, from project management to graphic design . . .

HR: Right now, we’re want to make sure our core service is nailed.

Think about the transparency and peace of mind that Uber brought to ride-sharing, or that Uber Eats brings to food delivery. You know when something is cooking, when it’s on its way, when it’s arriving. We’ve gotten used to that level of transparency and accountability with so many things, but when it comes to accounting, it’s not there and that’s crazy. We want to change that.

TC: Going after “businesses of one” means you’re addressing a highly fragmented market. What kinds of partnerships are you striking to reach potential customers?

HR: We’re having those conversations now, but you can imagine neo banks make sense, along with vertical marketplaces for nurses and doctors and realtors and writers. There are a lot of possibilities.

Pictured, left to right, Collective’s cofounders: CTO Bugra Akcay, CEO Hooman Radfar, and CPO Ugur Kaner.

Shipt shoppers are organizing a walkout in protest of new pay model

Shipt shoppers are organizing a handful of actions in protest of Shipt’s new pay structure that began rolling out this month.  The first action is happening from Saturday, Oct. 17 through Oct. 19, when workers are calling on their fellow Shipt shoppers to walk out and boycott the company. Organizers are asking for shoppers not to schedule any hours or accept any orders during that time.

“Our goal is to draw attention to the fact that this pay scale really does affect shoppers and regardless of Shipt’s position of it taking into account effort and benefitting shoppers, we are finding it is the opposite on both fronts,” Willy Solis, a Shipt shopper in Dallas and lead organizer at Gig Workers Collective, told TechCrunch. “It’s not holding up to the true reality. We are getting paid less for more effort.”

Shipt shoppers also plan to stage a direct action at Target’s corporate headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Monday, October 19. During the action, shoppers plan to read letters written to Shipt CEO Kelly Caruso that describe how the pay changes have impacted them.

“We have communicated to shoppers that we have learned a lot in the six years we have been in business,” Shipt spokesperson Molly Snyder told TechCrunch in a statement. “Our previous pay model was a commission model that paid based on the cost of the basket or the order. We know how much effort goes into shopping and delivering and believe that we should compensate for that effort. The new model accounts for that effort by factoring in things like the order complexity, what market it is in and the day and time of week. Shoppers will always see the pay range for the shop, the address where they would need to deliver it, a list of all of the items in the shop and the delivery window timeframe. Shoppers can choose whether or not they want to accept an order.”

Shipt shoppers have been speaking out against this new pay model since earlier this year, after Shipt started testing this new pay structure. In February, a Shipt shopper from Kalamazoo told me they were losing about 30% or more of their regular pay as a result of the change.

According to Target-owned Shipt, it’s doing this to “better account for the actual effort it takes to complete and deliver orders,” Shipt wrote in the Shipt Shopper Hub. That means the new pay model takes into account estimated drive time from the store to the customer’s door, how many items are in the order, location, peak shopping windows and more. But Shipt isn’t sharing an exact formula for calculating pay because “each metro has unique characteristics that can affect the shopping experience.”

On the blog, Shipt also points to how similarly priced orders might pay differently as a result of the effort it takes. For example, if the order total is $100 but is only one item versus 30 items, the latter order scenario would take more effort. That means the shopper would get paid more for that order with more items. But Solis said that’s an anomaly and that the majority of shoppers don’t receive orders like that.

“To base an entire pay structure off of an anomaly like that is really concerning,” he said.

Meanwhile, Solis said he’s found discrepancies between the way Shipt talks about its formula for calculating pay. In July, Shipt published a blog post about shop time. In it, the company laid out how it thinks about things like the location of the item, size of store and more. In the original post, which has since been updated, Shipt said it did not take into account checkout time, nor was it trying to gain insight about it.

Image Credits: Willy Solis/Screenshot

After shoppers expressed frustration about it in a Facebook group, Solis noticed that Shipt deleted that part from its blog post.

Image Credits: Willy Solis/Screenshot

“They literally said they are not interested in taking into account checkout times, which is a considerable amount of time shoppers spend in stores,” Solis said.

Shipt shoppers have staged actions before, but Solis said this one is receiving the most support to date. As part of the call-to-action, Gig Workers Collective is also asking Shipt shoppers to spread the word to at least five other workers they know.

“We are continuing to listen to shopper feedback, but can tell you that we are consistently seeing increasing numbers of shoppers putting themselves on the schedule to shop, accepting, shopping and delivering orders,” Snyder said.

Shipt shoppers are the latest gig workers to organize

Cube Dev raises $6.2M for its open-source data platform

Cube Dev, the open-source company behind Cube.js that is building a data platform to help developers write analytics applications for both internal and external users, today announced that it has raised a $6.2 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Previous investors Eniac Ventures, Betaworks, Innovation Endeavors and Slack Fund also participated, in addition to new investors Uncorrelated Ventures and Overtime.vc.

The two co-founders, Artyom Keydunov and Pavel Tiunov, actually built the core of what is now the successful Cube.js project for another company they founded in 2016: Statsbot. Statsbot is a business intelligence platform that helps enterprises create reports and dashboards — and there’s a Slack bot, too.

“While working on Statsbot we build what is Cube.js right now to power the Statsbot application,” Keydunov said. “But over time, as users were using Statsbot, we started to see that they were asking us about how they could use this technology to power internal application or customer-facing applications for analytics. […] We worked with several companies to have some proof of concept of using Cube.js as a standalone technology and we got really positive feedback about that.”

Statsbot helps businesses pull their data into Slack

The general idea behind Cube.js is to replace a lot of the busywork of building the backend infrastructure for connecting data sources and building visualizations. The open-source tool is essentially a middleware layer that sites between the databases and the frontend and that handles the SQL generation, caching, security and orchestration so that developers can focus on writing their applications. Thanks to its caching technology, it also solves a lot of performance issues for developers.

Image Credits: Cube.js

As Keydunov argued, if you are a data analyst or data engineer, there are already plenty of tools on the market today that will provide you most of what you need. Developers, though, who typically need to build custom applications, have to rely on a variety of disconnected libraries. “They don’t have any solutions they can use specifically for building analytics applications,” he noted.

“We invest very often in open source companies. And one of the areas of pain points that we’re very well aware of this challenge of building applications that connect to lots of different data sources,” Bain Capital Ventures partner Stefan Cohen told me. “The advent of the public cloud and the heterogeneity of the data sources that are out there and being consumed at such a rapid pace by developers and engineers just makes it really hard to pull all this stuff together in a way that can present visually appealing and useful applications for the enterprise.”

Yet enterprises want these applications because they can help them unlock new revenue and streamline their workflows. That puts Cube Dev right in the middle of this trend.

Like most open-source companies, the Cube Dev team is looking at offering a commercial cloud and SaaS service for enterprises, with all of the usual enterprise accouterments like additional security and sign-in features.

As Keydunov told me, the team expected to spend 2020 on building out the open-source community around Cube Dev through events and meetups. And while that has obviously gotten a bit harder, the team still focused on talking to potential customers and community members as much as possible.

“I think the big challenge — and the opportunity for us — is to make this leap from open source to a commercial product,” Cohen noted. “And it’s great to see so many developers and organizations using the Cube.js open source. But what we really need to do is get that fully featured cloud product available and then start to drive use of it. And not even necessarily monetizing it but just making sure that our enterprise features are the right ones for the market and that we’re solving a meaningful pain point. And I think if we could get that right, the world’s our oyster — but we have to get that product out and then start driving some initial usage.”

Unsurprisingly, that’s also what the team plans to focus on with this new round of funding it now has in the bank.

 

Trym raises $3.1M seed to grow its cannabis cultivation platform

Commercial cannabis operations often rely on software platforms to track and forecast crops from seed to sale. Trym today is announcing a $3.1 million seed round that will help the company expand its software offering.

Trym’s solution offers commercial growers a robust set of features, including integration with the regulatory platform Metrc and environmental sensors. Using the system, growers gain a powerful tool to grow their plants and business thanks to comprehensive analytics capabilities and operations management.

Trym’s seed round came from friends and family, along with notable investors. Out of the $3.1 million round, $1 million came from friends and family. At the same time, 7thirty Capital and Delta Emerald Ventures co-led the preferred round of $2.1 million with participation from Welcan Capital, Arcview Collective Fund and others. Trym says the round was oversubscribed.

“Our investors are a perfect match with Trym’s DNA,” said Matt Mayberry, CEO and co-founder of Trym in a released statement. “They understand that connectivity is the future of cannabis agriculture and that to stay in the game, commercial cultivators have to closely track and manage all aspects of their business. A disruption is happening in the market, and we are helping to drive it.”

Where these 6 top VCs are investing in cannabis

The cannabis software market is quickly gaining new entrants as more developers discover the exploding market. Gone are the days of growers scribbling notes on pads of paper. The legal cannabis industry in the United States is quickly adapting to the latest platforms to increase yield and decrease the amount of bookkeeping needed to stay up with ever-changing regulations.

“The growth opportunity in the cannabis cultivation software market is very exciting for us,” Micah Tapman, managing partner at 7thirty Capital, said in a released statement. “Trym is disrupting cannabis cultivation with a comprehensive software platform that streamlines business and connects the whole team for more efficient farm management. We have watched Trym grow since 2019, and their progress has been exceptional. We are delighted to participate in this round.”

Two weeks ago, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, a similar company called Canix won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition. Like Trym, Canix gives growers a platform to track growth and stay current on regulations.

And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2020 is… Canix

Final week to score $50 student passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Class is about to be in session, students. If you’re passionate about mobility and transportation tech and hungry to learn from the visionaries, makers and investors who are building the future today, don’t miss out on TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on October 6-7.

We support you, the next generation of mobility tech leaders, so take advantage of our $50 student pass — a $145 savings. But don’t delay. The price increases on October 5.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 offers two days packed with 1:1 interviews and panel discussions with the people at the top of game — the leaders, movers and shakers who continue to push beyond what seems possible. You won’t just hear from them, you’ll engage with them during a series of Q&A breakout sessions.

Whether you’re focused on micromobility, connected data, EVs or regulatory trends, you’ll find it — and much more — across the main stage, breakout sessions and sponsored sessions. Here’s a taste of what to expect. Be sure to study the event agenda and start strategizing your schedule now.

Driving the Mobility Revolution with Connected Car Data: Bret Scott, Wejo VP, discusses the future of mobility and how connected car data impacts the world of autonomous, electric and shared cars.

Software is Revolutionizing the Driver Experience and Driving Mass Electrification: Software in EVs enables a shift from buying a car to investing in an experience. ChargePoint CEO, Pasquale Romano discusses how it’s driving adoption, revolutionizing behavior and keeping up with demand.

Uber’s City Footprint: Uber touches many aspects of the transportation ecosystem — autonomous vehicles, food delivery, trucking and traditional ride-hailing. Director of Policy, Cities & Transportation, Shin-pei Tsay discusses Uber’s place in cities and how she navigates various regulatory frameworks.

This virtual conference draws a global audience and thousands of attendees. Talk about the perfect place to build your network — an essential part of any successful career. Find that dream internship or exciting employment opportunities and explore more than 40 early-stage mobility startups in the expo area.

Take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free AI-enhanced networking platform. It’s an easy-to-use tool to find and connect with the people who can help you advance your startup aspirations. Stay focused and organized as you schedule 1:1 meetings, meet founders, pitch investors, discuss your resume and otherwise impress the pants off influential people.

Class is in session on October 6-7. Join your community, dazzle the experts and build a firm foundation for your future at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. Purchase your student pass before the price increases on October 5 and save a chunk of cash.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.