Save with group discounts and bring your team to TechCrunch’s first ever Enterprise event Sept. 5 in SF

Get ready to dive into the fiercely competitive waters of enterprise software. Join more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 to navigate this rapidly evolving category with the industry’s brightest minds, biggest names and exciting startups.

Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play, which saves you $100. But one is the loneliest number, so why not take advantage of our group discount, buy in bulk and bring your whole team? Save an extra 20% when you buy four or more tickets at once.

We’ve packed this day-long conference with an outstanding lineup of presentations, interviews, panel discussions, demos, breakout sessions and, of course, networking. Check out the agenda, which includes both industry titans and boundary-pushing startups eager to disrupt the status quo.

We’ll add more surprises along the way, but these sessions provide a taste of what to expect — and why you’ll need your posse to absorb as much intel as possible.

Talking Developer Tools
Scott Farquhar (Atlassian)

With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like.

Keeping the Enterprise Secure
Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Wendy Nather (Duo Security), Emily Heath (United Airlines)

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast — without breaking things.

Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course
Bill McDermott (SAP)

With over $166 billion in market cap, Germany-based SAP is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general.

The Quantum Enterprise
Jim Clarke (Intel), Jay Gambetta (IBM) and Krysta Svore (Microsoft)
4:20 PM – 4:45 PM

While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum computing today to prepare for tomorrow.

TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 takes place on September 5. You can’t be everywhere at once, so bring your team, cover more ground and increase your ROI. Get your group discount tickets and save.

What happened to the sharing economy?

A few years ago, Silicon Valley couldn’t stop using a trendy buzzword — the sharing economy. The good old top-down economic model with a clear separation between service providers and clients was falling apart. And huge tech companies disrupted entire industries, from Airbnb to Taskrabbit, Uber, Etsy and Getaround.

When you retrospectively look at the sharing economy boom of the early 2010s, many of the principles that defined that generation of startups have slowly disappeared. Instead of a huge societal shift, the sharing economy is slowly fading away.

What is the sharing economy?

In the past, if you wanted to buy a good or a service, you would ask a company or a professional to provide it.

You’d buy something from a company in particular because you knew it would be the exact thing you need. That’s why plenty of companies spent huge amounts of money to build a brand and a reputation. If you just bought a car, chances are you’ll see thousands of ads for cars before you buy your next car.

And that’s also why distribution channels have been key, especially in commoditized markets with low brand differentiation. For instance, when you buy a new printer, chances are you just head to an electronics store or type “printer” on your favorite e-commerce website. If HP doesn’t have a distribution deal with those stores, you’ll just buy an Epson printer.

If your neighbor wants a new printer in a couple of years, you might recommend the same printer, but you may have forgotten where you bought it. There’s little differentiation between distribution channels in that case.

The marketplace model

The sharing economy happened because a group of entrepreneurs wanted to invent new distribution channels. Sure, some traditional distribution channels secured exclusive rights to sell specific products.

But those startups made a radical change. They wanted to work on a completely new inventory of goods or services.

Impossible Foods goes to the grocery store

After receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration, Impossible Foods has cleared the last regulatory hurdle it faced to rolling out in grocery stores.

The company is targeting a September release of Impossible products to join its competitor Beyond Meat on grocery store shelves.

The news comes as the company said it inked a major supply agreement with the OSI Group, a food processing company, to increase the availability of its Impossible Burger.

Impossible Foods has been facing shortages of its product, which it can’t make fast enough to meet growing customer demand.

The supply constraints have been especially acute as the company inks more deals with fast food vendors like Burger King, White Castle and Qdoba to supply its Impossible protein patty and ground meal to a growing number of outlets.

Impossible Foods products are now served in more than 10,000 locations around the world.

Earlier this year, the company hired Dennis Woodside and Sheetal Shah to scale up its manufacturing operations and help manage its growth into international markets. The company began selling its product in Singapore earlier this summer.

May not only saw new executives joining the Impossible team, but a new capital infusion as well. Impossible Foods picked up $300 million in financing from investors, including Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Temasek, Sailing Capital and Open Philanthropy Project.

With the new FDA approval, Impossible Foods will now be able to go head to head with its chief rival, Beyond Meat. The regulatory approval will also help to dispel questions that have swirled around the safety of its innovative soy leghemoglobin that have persisted since the company began its expansion across the U.S.

Last July, the company received a no-questions letter from the FDA, which confirmed that the company’s heme was safe to eat, according to a panel of food-safety experts.

The remaining obstacle for the company was whether or not the company’s “heme” could be considered a color additive. That approval — the use of heme as a color additive — is what the FDA announced today.

“We’ve been engaging with the FDA for half a decade to ensure that we are completely compliant with all food-safety regulations — for the Impossible Burger and for future products and sales channels,” said Impossible Foods Chief Legal Officer Dana Wagner. “We have deep respect for the FDA as champion of U.S. food safety, and we’ve always gone above and beyond to comply with every food-safety regulation and to provide maximum transparency about our ingredients so that our customers can have 100% confidence in our product.”

Aspire raises $32.5M to help SMEs secure fast finance in Southeast Asia

Aspire, a Singapore-based startup that helps SMEs secure working capital, has raised $32.5 million in a new financing round to expand its presence in several Southeast Asian markets.

The Series A round for the one-and-a-half-year old startup was funded by MassMutual Ventures South Asia. Arc Labs and existing investors Y Combinator — Aspire graduated from YC last year — Hummingbird, and Picus Capital also participated in the round. Aspire has raised about $41.5 million to date.

Aspire operates a neo-banking-like platform to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) quickly and easily secure working capital of up to about $70,000.

AspireAccount, the startup’s flagship product, provides merchants and startups with instant credit limit for daily business expenses, as well as a business-to-business acceptance and other tools to help them manage their cash flow.

“I saw the problem while trying to rally small businesses trying to grow in the digital economy,” Andrea Baronchelli, founder and CEO of Aspire told TechCrunch last year. “The problem is really about providing working capital to small business owners,” said Baronchelli, who served as a CMO for Alibaba’s Lazada platform for four years.

Aspire currently operates in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam. The startup said it will use the fresh capital to scale its footprints in those markets. Additionally, Aspire is building a scalable marketplace banking infrastructure that will use third-party financial service providers to “create a unique digital banking experience for its SME customers.”

The startup is also working on a business credit card that will be linked to each business account by as early as this year, it said.

Baronchelli did not reveal how many business customers Aspire has, but said the startup has seen “30% month-on-month growth” since beginning operations in January 2018. Additionally, Aspire expects to amass more than 100,000 business accounts by next year.

Southeast Asia’s digital economy is slated to grow more than six-fold to reach more than $200 billion per year, according to a report co-authored by Google. But for many emerging startups and businesses, getting financial services from a bank and securing working capital have become major pain points.

A growing number of startups are beginning to address these SMEs’ needs. In India, for instance, NiYo Bank and Open have amassed millions of businesses through their neo-banking platforms. Both of these startups have raised tens of millions of dollars in recent months. Drip Capital, which helps businesses in developing markets secure working capital, raised $25 million last week.

How the Capital One Data Breach Could Affect Your Small Business

The news of the Capital One data breach comes just as Equifax paid a $700 million fine for its 2017 incident. And this undoubtedly will have consumers and businesses more on edge about the security of their financial data.

Capital One Data Breach

Even though the perpetrator of this crime was arrested, it wasn’t due to Capital One or the authorities. The theft of the data took place on March 22 and 23, 2019. However, no one knew about it until a tipster warned Capital One its data may have been leaked. This was on July 17, almost four months after the fact.

This further highlights the need for everyone to keep an eye on their financial records on a regular basis.

You can set five minutes a week to go through your records to make sure your data hasn’t been compromised. Those five minutes will save a lot of headaches. Headaches that can last for months or even years if someone steals your information and destroys your credit.

As this case clearly points out, you can’t depend on these companies to monitor your data at all times. After all, they have hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers around the world. You are the only one that can give your data the attention it deserves.

The best you can hope for is for a quick reaction once an organization finds out. And in the case of Capital One that is exactly what it did.

So, What Happened?

As the Justice Department says in the release, these are just allegations and a person is innocent until proven guilty.

According to the Justice Department, a Seattle tech worker named Paige A. Thompson (aka erratic) posted the theft of information from Capital One on GitHub. On July 17, 2019, a user saw the post and alerted Capital One on its Responsible Disclosure Program.

Capital One verified the information on July 19, 2019, and it alerted the FBI. The FBI was then able to identify Thompson as the person who posted the content. Agents then executed a warrant at her residence and they seized devices which contained copy of the data.

Thompson was able to exploit a misconfigured web application firewall that enabled access to the data.

For its part, Capital One says, “We immediately addressed the configuration vulnerability and verified there are no other instances in our environment. Among other things, we also augmented our routine automated scanning to look for this issue on a continuous basis.”

If guilty, Thompson can face up to five years in prison along with a $250,000 fine.

You can take a look at the complaint below.

Thompson Complaint by jonathan_skillings on Scribd

The Stolen Data

Capital One says the victims in this crime total 100 million individuals in the U.S. and another 6 million in Canada

The majority of the information comes from consumers and small businesses who applied for credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. The information includes names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Thompson also allegedly obtained portions of credit card customer data; customer status data such as credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information; and fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018.

The company goes on to say this didn’t affect bank account or Social Security numbers. However, it did affect around 140,000 Social Security numbers of its credit card customers and roughly 80,000 linked bank account numbers of its secured credit card customers.

In Cananda, 1 million social insurance numbers were stolen.

Capital One will notify all affected individuals and make free credit monitoring and identity protection available to them.

In the end, Capital One says this incident will end up costing the company anywhere from $100 to $150 million in 2019.

You Have to be Proactive

The threat to all financial institutions is a relentless attack which takes place 24/7/365. And eventually, people will break through.

Before this happens, you have to take matters into your own hands. This means being proactive in the protection of your digital data. Monitor your credit report with all three agencies, update the software on your computing device with the latest version, and change your passwords on a regular basis.

These are just a few of the things you can do, but if you want to take additional measures the Federal Trade Commission has a guide you can follow here.

Image: Capital One

This article, "How the Capital One Data Breach Could Affect Your Small Business" was first published on Small Business Trends

Prodly announces $3.5M seed to automate low code cloud deployments

Low code programming is supposed to make things easier on companies, right? Low code means you can count on trained administrators instead of more expensive software engineers to handle most tasks, but like any issue solved by technology, there are always unintended consequences. While running his former company, Steelbrick, which he sold to Salesforce in 2015 for $360 million, Max Rudman identified a persistent problem with low-code deployments. He decided to fix it with automation and testing, and the idea for his latest venture, Prodly, was born.

The company announced a $3.5 million seed round today, but more important than the money is the customer momentum. In spite of being a very early-stage startup, the company already has 100 customers using the product, a testament to the fact that other people were probably experiencing that same pain point Rudman was feeling, and there is a clear market for his idea.

As Rudman learned with his former company, going live with the data on a platform like Salesforce is just part of the journey. If you are updating configuration and pricing information on a regular basis, that means updating all the tables associated with that information. Sure, it’s been designed to be point and click, but if you have changes across 48 tables, it becomes a very tedious task, indeed.

The idea behind Prodly is to automate much of the configuration, provide a testing environment to be sure all of the information is correct, and finally automate deployment. For now, the company is just concentrating on configuration, but with the funding it plans to expand the product to solve the other problems as well.

Rudman is careful to point out that his company’s solution is not built strictly for the Salesforce platform. The startup is taking aim at Salesforce admins for its first go-round, but he sees the same problem with other cloud services that make heavy use of trained administrators to make changes.

“The plan is to start with Salesforce, but this problem actually exists on most cloud platforms — ServiceNow, Workday — none of them have the tools we have focused on for admins, and making the admins more productive and building the tooling that they need to efficiently manage a complex application,” Rudman told TechCrunch.

Customers include Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Tableau and Verizon (which owns this publication). The $3.5 million round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Norwest Venture Partners.

Salesforce Grabs Quote To Cash Vendor SteelBrick for $360 Million

Hello Heart raises $12 million for at-home monitoring and behavioral treatment for hypertension

Leveraging new remote sensing and monitoring technologies and the willingness of corporate insurance programs to provide more preventative treatment to reduce long-term costs, Hello Heart has raised $12 million in new financing to further develop its business.

The money came from Khosla Ventures and previous backer Blue Run Ventures. The company said it will use the financing to expand its business.

Hello Heart tackles high blood pressure and heart disease with early monitoring coming from an at-home sensing system to track blood pressure and an integrated smart phone application providing prompts on behaviors to reduce high blood pressure.

According to a retrospective study paid for by Hello Heart and conducted by researchers at UCLA and Harvard Medical School, 70% of Hello Heart users managed to reduce their blood pressure an average of 22mmHg.

“Delivering clinical outcomes at the scale of population health requires strong patient engagement across a variety of patient types. Hello Heart’s ability to drive engagement is what led to these unprecedented results,” said Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, a Harvard medical school faculty researcher and the chief medical and innovation officer of Sheba Medical Center.

The company collects all the data on its patients in a randomized and anonymized fashion in order to provide information on population health, according to a statement. In an interview, Maayan Cohen, the chief executive officer of the company, said that Hello Heart did not sell any data to third parties.

“Our mission is to empower patients to understand and improve their health, and we’re very proud to be able to help them do it so effectively in heart health — [the number one] cause of death in the world.”

Direct-to-consumer lingerie brand Lively acquired for $85M

Lively, a lingerie business founded and led by former Victoria’s Secret executive Michelle Cordeiro Grant, has sold to intimate apparel brand Wacoal for $85 million.

The deal includes up to an additional $55 million in performance-based payouts.

Lively, headquartered in New York, had raised $15 million in venture capital funding, including a $6.5 million Series A investment from GGV Capital, NF Ventures and former Nautica CEO Harvey Sanders announced late last year. The Series valued the startup at $101 million, according to PitchBook.

The deal brings Wacoal’s parent company, Wacoal International Corporation, a team of highly-skilled e-commerce marketers, who’ve successfully managed to tap into the millennial customer sect.

Lively, founded in 2016, sells bras and intimates online and in two brick-and-mortar locations in Chicago and New York. It competes with a number of other direct-to-consumer lingerie and activewear upstarts, including ThirdLove, AdoreMe, TomboyX and Outdoor Voices.

“We built Lively to inspire women to live life passionately, purposefully, and confidently,” Grant wrote in a statement. “We invest in our community and customers to empower them to celebrate their individuality and enable them with products to look and feel their best. Wacoal’s core values have a beautiful synergy with Lively’s, enabling us to come together, not just to take market share, but to also create market share.”

Lively raises $6.5M to bring its comfortable and inclusive lingerie to brick-and-mortar stores

Trueface raises $3.7M to recognise that gun, as it’s being pulled, in real time

Globally, millions of cameras are deployed by companies and organizations every year. All you have to do is look up. Yes, there they are! But the petabytes of data collected by these cameras really only become useful after something untoward has occurred. They can very rarely influence an action in “real time.”

Trueface is a U.S.-based computer vision company that turns camera data into so-called “actionable data” using machine learning and AI by employing partners who can perform facial recognition, threat detection, age and ethnicity detection, license plate recognition, emotion analysis and object detection. That means, for instance, recognising a gun, as it’s pulled in a dime store. Yes folks, welcome to your brave new world.

The company has now raised $3.7 million from Lavrock Ventures, Scout Ventures and Advantage Ventures to scale the team growing partnerships and market share.

Trueface claims it can identify enterprises’ employees for access to a building, detect a weapon as it’s being wielded or stop fraudulent spoofing attempts. Quite some claims.

However, it’s good enough for the U.S. Air Force, as it recently partnered with them to enhance base security.

Originally embedded in a hardware access control device, Trueface’s computer vision software inside one of the first “intelligent doorbell” Chui was covered by TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha in 2014.

Trueface has multiple solutions to run on an array of clients’ infrastructures, including a dockerized container, SDKs that partners can use to build their own solutions and a plug and play solution that requires no code to get up and running.

The solution can be deployed in various scenarios, such as fintech, healthcare, retail, humanitarian aid, age verification, digital identity verification and threat detection. Shaun Moore and Nezare Chafni are the co-founders and CEO and CTO, respectively.

The computer vision market was valued at $9.28 billion in 2017 and is now set to reach a valuation of $48.32 billion by the end of 2023.

Facial recognition was banned by agency use in the city of San Francisco recently. There are daily news stories about privacy concerns of facial recognition, especially in regards to how China is using computer vision technology.

However, Truface is only deployed “on-premise” and includes features like “fleeting data” and blurring for people who have not opted-in. It’s good to see a company building in such controls from the word go.

However, it’s then up to the company you work for not to require you to sign a statement saying you are happy to have your face recognized. Interesting times, huh?

And if you want that job, well, that’s a whole other story, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Visa pitches a program offering fintechs faster market access through an ecosystem of partners

Visa is pitching a new way for startups in the fintech space to get to market faster by using its rails and a group of pre-approved partners.

The Fast Track program, a variant of an investment commitment and ecosystem of services the company has already launched in other geographies around the world, comes to the U.S. without an investment commitment, but with a pre-defined list of partners that will help new financial services startups launch more quickly, the company said.

Chiefly, the process makes it easier to integrate with Visa. It’s an attempt to put the payment processor’s network, VisaNet, at the center of a vast array of services ranging from payroll to business to business payments and online banking, online lending and even digital wallets.

“There’s about $17 trillion in cash and checks today that hasn’t gone digital and $20 trillion in business to business that’s happening over wires and check… those are all opportunities for Visa,” says Terry Angelos, a former fintech entrepreneur who now serves as a senior vice president at Visa and the company’s global head of fintech. 

“To some degree Visa has been the original fintech,” says Angelos. “Today, you would  pitch it as a SaaS platform for payment and commerce.”

For its new service, Visa has come up with a list of partners to provide the array of compliance services and infrastructure that a startup in the financial services space would need to get up and running quickly.

“These are vetted partners that are providing a fast track process and a concierge service so we can track the companies in the program,” says Angelos. 

What the program won’t include, Angelos said, is a commitment to invest in startups in the U.S. that would be equivalent to the $100 million investment fund the company has carved out for European investments as part of the fast track program there.

“We have investments that are happening that are in parallel,” Angelos says. “We don’t have a separate fund.”

Companies that are partnering with Visa on this program represent a different service offering for the ecosystem, including: Alloy, BBVA Open Platform, Cross River Bank, Galileo, Green Dot, Marqeta, Netspend (TSYS’ Consumer Segment), Stripe, TabaPay, TSYS, Q2 and Very Good Security. The company said its debit processing service will support some of the partners’ participation in the program.   

Last year, fintech companies raised $39.5 billion from investors globally, up 120% from the previous year, according to data provided by Visa. And as part of their outreach to this startup community, Visa is pre-qualifying for its program portfolio companies from investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Ribbit Capital and Trinity Ventures. 

“We see many entrepreneurs with big ideas that can add real value and solve problems in the global payments system; the problem can be the difficulty of distribution and connectivity to the essential infrastructure,” said Hans Morris, managing partner, Nyca Ventures, in a statement. “Fast Track solves for this, enabling some of our best companies to start working with Visa right away.”

Many of the firms’ portfolio companies are already partnering with Visa in some capacity. The company has already announced agreements (of an undefined and undisclosed nature) with startups like Currencycloud, Flutterwave, Ininal, N26, PayActiv, Rappi, Razer and Remitly. 

Visa has also invested in startups. In 2019 alone, the company added Anchorage, Bankable, Branch, Finix, Minna Technologies and Paymate to its stable of startups. 

The main thing that startups would get from the Visa Fast Track program is mentorship and access to the company’s experts in payments and fintech. And its effort to tie itself more closely to a financial services ecosystem comes as Visa finds itself under threat from some of the very startup technologies that the company may look to co-opt.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies offer the possibility of alternative payment mechanisms that don’t rely on the traditional money transfer systems developed decades ago by companies like Visa and Mastercard, and can offer potentially faster transaction times and charge lower fees.

To combat that threat, Visa has been aligning with some of the largest technology companies to head off challengers at the pass. The company (along with its largest rival, Mastercard) is collaborating with Facebook on its controversial proposed cryptocurrency, Libra, in an effort to head off any challengers with a new transaction system of its own.

Angelos insists that there’s nothing nefarious in Visa’s efforts to engage with startups, and says that the company is merely another actor supporting the movement of trillions of dollars into a digital economy.

“If you look at what’s happening in the fintech ecosystem… Fintechs are reducing friction and adding consumers that are underbanked,” Angelos says. “They can work on any payment rails they choose. [But] all those fintechs… are choosing to build at least part of their products on top of the rails that we built… if you look around the world, fintechs are probably leveraging the existing payment  rails to provide a lot of innovation and remove friction.”

Clearbanc co-founder and president Michele Romanow is coming to Disrupt SF

Raising venture capital isn’t easy; for some, it’s impossible.

Clearbanc offers startups a fundraising alternative and in just a few short years, it’s become a household name in Silicon Valley circles. The company disrupts the startup funding process by providing companies cash to buy ads in exchange for a revenue share so those companies aren’t forced to give up equity to venture capitalists. 

2019 has been Clearbanc’s year. It was only natural to invite Romanow to join us on stage at Disrupt SF. Romanow will discuss the funding landscape for startups, Clearbanc’s plans to deploy billions of dollars, as well as a breakdown of when to raise equity cash vs. non-dilutive capital. Alongside Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras, Romanow will also talk through serving startups as customers.

This year alone, the company, under Romanow’s lead, launched a campaign to back 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019, raised $120 million across three different equity rounds and just this week, announced a $250 million fund to continue backing startups through its rev-share model.

Romanow’s career took off as an angel investor on the Canadian version of Shark Tank, Dragons’ Den. Together with co-founder Andrew D’Souza, she started Clearbanc in 2015 with a goal of helping more founders maintain control of their company through larger equity stakes. In conversation with TechCrunch earlier this year, she and D’Souza explained that some 40% of VC dollars end up going to Facebook and Google for digital ad campaigns. That capital, they said, should be put into hiring and other scaling efforts. 

“We are essentially a non-dilutive co-investor,” Romanow said. “VC takes time; it’s a lot of nos and you’re really giving up equity that you can never get back.”

“A lot of founders in the early days don’t calculate what their equity could be worth,” she added. “Like the first $250,000 in Uber is worth $1 billion now.”

Clearbanc, founded less than four years ago, has already put hundreds of millions of dollars in its pockets and like Brex, it has ambitions to support each and every startup out there. Brex and Clearbanc’s leaders will undoubtedly provide a conversation on the state of startups & fintech that can’t be missed.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

Investors bet another $50M on Clearbanc’s revenue share model

That company disrupting venture capital just raised more venture capital.

Clearbanc has attracted $300 million, including a $50 million equity investment led by Highland Capital with participation from Arcadia, iNovia and Emergence Capital, and another $250 million from limited partners for its third fund. Clearbanc declined to disclose its valuation, but noted the company was not “forced to raise” and therefore “raised on terms that [they] liked.”

The Canadian business, headquartered in Toronto, offers startups an alternative to VC in the form of non-dilutive revenue-share agreements. Coupling data and machine learning technology, Clearbanc is quick to make decisions about potential investments, driven by a lofty goal of backing 2,000 companies by 2020.

Through its latest campaign, the “20-Min Term Sheet,” Clearbanc invests between $10,000 to $10 million in e-commerce upstarts with positive ad spend and positive unit economics. Charging 6% on its capital, Clearbanc collects a portion of a company’s revenue until they’ve paid back 106% of the original investment.

Clearbanc has invested in 791 online brands so far this year, including Le Tote, UNTUCKit, Leesa Sleep and Public Goods. The company says its investments have generated an average of $121 million in monthly revenue.

“The 20-minute term sheet was our take on showing the market how fast we could get startups access to capital,” Clearbanc co-founder and president Michele Romanow tells TechCrunch. Their method, she explained, saves both VCs and founders a lot of time.

“[Founders] don’t need to go and pitch their life story,” Clearbanc co-founder and chief executive officer Andrew D’Souza tells TechCrunch. “They don’t need to spend hours and hours on due diligence and they don’t need to get on a flight and meet VCs in person, we’ve automated all of that.”

The $50 million investment will be used to expand into new verticals beyond e-commerce and to launch a venture partner program, which will give its portfolio of founders access to experienced investors and operators, a resource a traditional venture capital fund typically provides its entrepreneurs.

Clearbanc has signed up Jack Abraham, the founder and managing partner of Atomic, Hubble co-founder Jesse Horwitz, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover and more to support the new venture partner network.

D’Souza and Romanow say Clearbanc’s revenue-share model could become a larger asset class than equity in the long term. Bullish about their prospects, D’Souza compares Clearbanc to SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant behind The Vision Fund.

“I have no doubt we will raise billions and billions for funds in the coming years and I think we can be bigger than SoftBank,” he said. “If we aren’t aiming to do that, then we aren’t aiming to solve the problems that exist for entrepreneurs globally.”

Clearbanc’s third fund, a $250 million effort, is five times larger than its second fund. The company wouldn’t disclose the size of its debut fund.

Clearbanc has raised $120 million in equity funding to date.

Clearbanc plans to disrupt venture capital with ‘The 20-Min Term Sheet’

Luna Labs creates playable ads, directly from Unity

It seems obvious that the best way to advertise a game is to let people play the game itself — and we’ve covered other startups tackling this problem, such as AppOnboard and mNectar.

But Luna Labs co-founder and CEO Steven Chard said that for most developers, the creation of these ads involves outsourcing: “It might take weeks to make an ad, and the quality of the content at the end could be limited.”

The problem, Chard said, is that most games are built on the Unity engine, while the ads need to be in HTML5, which means that developers often have to build playable ads from scratch — hence the outsourcing.

“There’s this huge demand for playables, but the tech hasn’t caught up with it,” he said. “Our view — and I think why it’s really resonating with developers — we’re saying to developers: Use that same [Unity] editor to create a playable ad. You’re going to give the user a playable ad which genuinely feels like the game.”

In fact, while Luna is officially launching its service to developers this week, it’s already been working with a few partners like Kwalee and Voodoo. Luna says that in Kwalee’s case, the results were good enough that the company spent 60% more than they did on other playable ads, and the Luna playables drove more than 250,000 installs per day.

“Luna is solving a real pain point for our studio, and the initial results have been tremendous,” said Kwalee CRO Jason Falcus in a statement. “Integrating the Luna service has allowed us to significantly scale our campaigns by a comfortable margin, to the best results so far.”

Luna’s investors include Ben Holmes (formerly of Index Ventures, backer of King and Playfish) and Chris Lee (who also invested in Space Ape and Hello Games).

Chard said the startup is currently focused on providing tools to developers, rather than getting involved in the ad-buying process. More generally, he said the company has been focused on the technology rather than the business model.

“We’re an early company with a very, very complex piece of technology — it’s taken a lot of time to get where we are,” he said. “We’re not doing it for free, but the focus isn’t on short-term profitability. It is, in the longer term, on creating a scalable product which can be used by developers.”

Chard added that eventually, he’s hoping Luna can become more involved in “at the content creation level.” For example, he suggested that developers could use the technology to test out playable concepts and see what resonates, before building a full game.

You can test it out for yourself on the Luna Labs website.

Google is launching playable in-game ads

Non-Disclosure Agreements: When Does Your Business Need Them?

In the past, a small business owner might not consider using a Non-Disclosure Agreement (also called a confidentiality agreement or an NDA). But times have changed, and today having an NDA in your toolbox is a must.

With freelancers now regularly taking part in projects with small businesses, you have to use an NDA. And if you don’t make your freelancer sign one, it could have negative repercussions down the road. But NDAs can also protect you with inventions, purchase or sale, development of a project, and even a private party.

A new infographic from LegalTemplates has some valuable information about NDAs. Additionally, LegalTemplates provides some free NDA templates and everything you need to know about NDAs.

So, What is an NDA?

An NDA is a contract between a disclosing and receiving party, and It recognizes a legally binding relationship between them.

Anyone can be the disclosing party, such as an individual, company or an entity. The receiving party is the one getting confidential information, such as an employee.

When you sign an NDA, you agree not to disclose information which is in the agreement.

According to LegalTemplates, an NDA is also known as Confidentiality Agreement (CA); Confidential Disclosure Agreement (CDA); Proprietary Information Agreement (PIA); Secrecy Agreement (SA). This will depend on the region or industry.

Cases Where You Need an NDA

There are many cases which require an NDA. If you are not sure, you can err on the side of caution and have one drawn up. But it is best to consult a legal expert to make sure you are doing the right thing and you have the necessary elements in the contract to protect yourself.

NDA may be required for:

Employees – Notifies employees not to discuss business information.

Interviews – Because sensitive company information can be revealed during an interview, an NDA ensures it is protected.

Inventors – Inventors use NDAs with investors or other parties when they discuss details of their creation before they get a patent.

Real Estate – This type of NDA protects the buyer, seller, broker or anyone else involved in a property transaction.

Trade Secrets – Companies use this NDA to protect their trade secrets when talking to third parties.

Anyone can draw up an NDA contract to ensure your information and privacy is protected. As long as both parties agree to the contract and sign it, it is valid.

What Happens if You Don’t Use an NDA?

Whether you have invented the next big thing in tech, or you are protecting the recipe for your fried chicken, an NDA safeguards your information. But if you don’t use an NDA, someone can potentially use the information as their own.

As a legally enforceable agreement, an NDA will ensure the parties involved can’t use your information for their own advantage.

Some of the information an NDA can include are business practices and/or strategies; customer lists; drawings, designs, documents; financial information; marketing materials; proprietary information; prototypes or samples and much more.

Types of NDAs

There are two types of NDAs, a unilateral (one-way) and mutual (bi-lateral) non-disclosure agreement. Although both NDAs protect confidential information, they are not the same.

In a unilateral NDA, only one party is disclosing valuable information, only one party promises to protect the information, and it is used by an inventor and potential investor.

On the other hand, in a bilateral NDA, both parties are disclosing valuable information, both parties promise to protect the information, and it is used in a joint venture or merger.

Take a look at the LegalTemplate’s infographic below for more on NDAs, and make sure to visit their site to get the free templates here.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "Non-Disclosure Agreements: When Does Your Business Need Them?" was first published on Small Business Trends

Building for Small Business: New Features That Help You Meet Your Customers Where They Are

Sponsored Post

Although my desk at the Salesforce Tower might seem far removed from the kitchen table where I worked as an entrepreneur, small businesses continue to be the heart and soul of everything I do. Prior to working at Salesforce, I co-founded a small children’s lunchbox company with my wife — and we were fortunate enough to be featured on “Shark Tank.” During that time, I learned a lot about what’s important when running your own business. You need to be passionate and believe in yourself to see it through. You need to be resilient because there will be hard times and long nights. And you need to pick tools that are easy to use and can grow with your business. That last reason is why I came to Salesforce. I couldn’t pass up the chance to work on a product like Essentials, an all-in-one sales and service CRM app designed specifically for small businesses. I feel like there’s no better place to build a CRM product for small business than at Salesforce.

To build the best products, you need a real understanding of what challenges customers face. That’s why our team can often be found on the road, meeting with small businesses and listening to their needs. One thing that stands out in all these conversations is that building relationships with customers is critical to their success. But it’s hard for many small businesses to stay on top of customer conversations and even more difficult to maintain an individualized level of service as they grow. That’s where Salesforce comes in.

Adding new conversation channels in Salesforce Essentials

A personalized customer service experience can mean the difference between a bad review and a happy, repeat customer. That’s why I’m so excited about the new conversation channels in our latest release. Many small businesses have grown-up on social media platforms and need to be able to communicate and engage with customers on their preferred channels — from Facebook Messenger, Instagram, YouTube, web chat or on the phone. Our new features are easy to set up with a few clicks and are included with Salesforce Essentials at no additional cost — in fact, our small business customers can turn them on today.

Easy channel setup with walkthroughs and live help

While my wife and I ran our lunchbox company we didn’t have a lot of spare time. Between product design, manufacturing, marketing, and a dozen other things, we didn’t have time to struggle with difficult systems or learn complicated processes. That’s why my team and I want to make Essentials simple and easy. We have in-product walkthroughs for each step in adding new channels, and if you need more support, we have a team ready to help you get up and running. We even offer free hands-on workshops to get you on the road to success.

Seamless conversations across social channels

Today’s customers increasingly reach out to businesses on Facebook and Instagram. But it’s challenging for them to track all of these conversations and make sure they answer every customer’s question. To address this, we’ve enabled real-time conversations via Facebook Messenger from within Salesforce. When a customer sends a company a question via Messenger, the message is routed to an employee who can have a live conversation without ever leaving Salesforce. We also provide notifications when customers comment on your Instagram and YouTube posts, so you can respond to all customers from one place. These new channels expand our existing support of Facebook pages and Twitter.

Real-time chat conversations from website or help center

One of the things I discovered as a small business is that nothing beats a real-time conversation. Most customers want help immediately, not hours later. That’s why we enable small businesses to add a Salesforce chat widget to their website or help center, with capabilities that include having each new chat routed immediately to an employee. At the start of a chat, complete customer information is automatically presented — previous interactions, case history, open sales opportunities, and more, all without searching through different systems.

Native phone support built into the #1 CRM

We also help small businesses save time with Lightning Dialer for Essentials, an easy-to-use call center solution built right into the CRM. When someone on your team makes or receives a call, the customer’s profile and account information pops up within Salesforce, giving them a detailed customer history for fast and personalized service. Calls are automatically logged, reducing manual data entry and making sure that information doesn’t get lost.

Continuing innovation for small business success

Since launching Essentials in 2017, we’ve doubled-down on helping small businesses succeed with innovations ranging from online buying and check-out, guided set-up, and Essentials for Service, to in-app help and a team of dedicated coaches. So far the response has been great. Businesses of all sizes — from sole proprietors to companies with ten or more employees — have embraced Essentials. G Photography, which creates stunning portraits, PepTalkHer, which works to close the gender pay gap, and Mission.org a leading podcast provider are just a few of our customers. We continue to invest in new features that will help small businesses thrive and grow — while remaining at a price point they can afford.

If you’re a small business owner interested in innovation, I’d love to hear what’s important to you @ppedrazzi. And if you haven’t already, you can check out Essentials for free for 14 days. So, go ahead, take it for a spin!

Republished by permission. Original here.

Photo via Salesforce

This article, "Building for Small Business: New Features That Help You Meet Your Customers Where They Are" was first published on Small Business Trends

Porsche Digital expands U.S. presence beyond Silicon Valley with new Atlanta office

Porsche Digital, the subsidiary of carmaker Porsche, is opening its second U.S. location, after launching its first in 2017 in Silicon Valley. The second North American office for this software and digital product-focused wing of Porsche will open in Atlanta, which is also the seat of Porsche’s North American cars business. Porsche Digital cited proximity to their auto business headquarters as one reason why they picked Atlanta, but also pointed to Atlanta’s “local tech talent” and “robust and constantly growing startup and tech sector” as key factors in its selection.

The need for a second office is specifically about serving the U.S. market, Porsche Digital notes and the company expects to have 45 employees total in the U.S. across both offices within the next year. The subsidiary overall has 120 employees worldwide, with offices in Berlin, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv as well as the U.S.

Porsche Digital does focus on creating software and digital products for the automaker’s customers, but it’s actually probably more valuable to its parent company as a sort of distributed tech talent scouting and business development arm of the company. Its offices definitely occupy global hotspots when it comes to startup tech companies, and having a permanent presence in this locations has got to come in handy when looking to attract engineering talent and potential acquisitions of complimentary early-stage companies.

Jamf acquires Digita Security to gain native Mac security

Jamf has been widely known as an enterprise Mac deployment and management tool company, but it has been looking for ways to expand beyond those core capabilities. One thing it heard from customers was that there was a dearth of native Mac security tools. It checked that box today, announcing it has acquired Digita Security, a startup with a native Mac security suite. The two companies did not reveal the purchase price.

Digita, a two-year old startup, was founded by a team of security experts led by Patrick Wardle, whose background includes a decade as a Mac security researcher, seeking out vulnerabilities on the Mac, and time at the NSA where he honed his security research skills.

Wardle says that because of the relatively low Mac marketshare, many traditional security vendors haven’t paid close attention, which can lead to trouble. “Mac marketshare is somewhat limited, maybe around 10%. So the average company is not going to spend a lot of time and resources developing Mac-specific capabilities,” he said.

“From the hacker’s point of view, this is great news, because their backdoor implants are generally not going to be detected by traditional tools. What I’ve been working on the last few years, and then most recently at Digita Security, is creating a system that is Mac specific, that leverages Mac-specific and Apple-specific frameworks and technologies,” he added.

The Digita Suite consists of three main tools. It takes advantage of and enhances XProtect, the Mac’s built-in malware detection system with a tool called UXProtect, that provides a valuable missing front end to the tool. It also offers a Mac laptop security tool called Do Not Disturb that sends you message if someone tries to access your laptop without permission, and finally it offers a tool called Gameplan, a heuristic-based malware detection system.

Jamf plans to continue to market the Digita toolset as a set of stand-alone package for the time being, while taking advantage of the Jamf policy engine when it makes sense, according to company CEO Dean Hagar. “With Digita, we’re going to be able to bring a whole solution to our customers, In addition to leaving Digita as a solution that can be offered on its own, we will be able to complete that journey for our customers by being able to monitor and hunt for threats and apply security policy,” Hagar told TechCrunch.

The deal has closed and the five Digita Security employees are now part of the Jamf security team. Having a security tool like this in the fold could help make companies more comfortable deploying Macs by giving security teams the tools they need to monitor and defend them, which could in turn expand Mac usage in the enterprise.

In the Spotlight: Woofie’s Makes Animal Care its Pet Project

The pet industry is surging. But there are still some markets where it’s hard to find quality dog walking, pet sitting and grooming services.

The founders of Woofie’s experienced that gap in the marketplace with their own pets. So they decided to do something about it. Read all about their story in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What the Business Does

Offers pet sitting, dog walking and mobile pet spa services.

Co-Founder and Co-CEO Amy Reed told Small Business Trends, “Each client’s pet is matched with the best pet sitter, dog walker or groomer in order to offer a truly exceptional experience. Woofie’s holds multiple fundraisers on an annual basis to raise money for local animal shelters.”

Business Niche: Personalized Pet Care

A focus on customer service.

Reed says, “We built our business on this approach from day one and we have never deviated from it.”

How the Business Got Started

Because of a common interest.

Reed and Leslie Barron were neighbors and friends who shared a love of animals. Over time, they realized the lack of a quality pet care service in their area. So they thought others might appreciate what they had to offer as well.

Biggest Win

Getting their first two franchisees to invest in the brand.

Reed says, “I can’t think of a higher honor and validation of the Woofie’s business model, our team members and the Woofie’s brand.”

Biggest Risk

Narrowing their service area.

Reed explains, “While all of the other pet sitting companies in our area had large service areas, we scaled ours down so that we had a small, highly concentrated service area. We gave away a lot of business to our competitors who were in those other markets (which was especially tough to do in the early days of our business) but we felt it was the right thing to do for our long term strategy.

We made this decision because it allowed us to know our clients on a much more personal level, thus providing them with a better customer experience. It also enabled us to be an integral part of our local community and it gave us the opportunity to support our team members better by keeping them close by. This resulted in our business growing quicker and more efficiently over the years than our competitors who had large service areas. This is also why we ultimately decided to franchise our Woofie’s business. We wanted to give other pet lovers the opportunity to invest in a Woofie’s franchise in other markets.”

Lesson Learned

Automation saves time.

Reed adds, “[If I could do it over again] I would automate more of our business processes from the very beginning and I would document all of those processes in detail.”

How They’d Spend an Extra $100,000

Building tech for clients and franchisees.

Reed says, “We would use it to help build our Woofie’s University grooming school and to make additional enhancements to our customized client software system.”

Hiring Practice

Interacting with dogs.

Reed says, “We always have dogs in our office during employee interviews to see how the applicants interact with the pups. This allows us to see if the applicants are a good fit with our company and how they would treat our client’s pets. All applicants and any vendors who work with Woofie’s must be 100% dog-approved!”

Favorite Quote

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – Mark Twain

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Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program

Images: Woofie’s; Top Image: (rom left to right) Caroline Murphy (VP of Franchise Development & Support), Renee Ventrice (VP of Marketing), Amy Reed (Co-founder & Co-CEO), Jack Ceschin (Golden), Maggie Cruz (VP of Recruitment Operations), Leslie Barron (Co-founder & Co-CEO)

This article, "In the Spotlight: Woofie’s Makes Animal Care its Pet Project" was first published on Small Business Trends

Charging for Bags: Is It Right for Your Business?

New York is set to ban single use plastic bags in March of 2020. It’s a big move designed to cut down on waste. But there’s another way to do your part. A new trend has retail stores charging for single use plastic bags.

Small Business Trends contacted some experts to find the pros and cons of it for your small business.

Here’s an Overview

Joe Gladstone is an Assistant Professor, University College, London. A small surcharge for these bags seems to be working there.

“People are more responsive to losses than they are to gains,” he said recently in a BBC interview. In Britain, a small charge on plastic bags was more effective than just including a small increase in goods.

The Senate Bill 1508 which passed in New York only includes single use plastic bags. The law allows for each county to place a five-cent fee on paper bags.

There are some other American cities like Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle that have a plastic bag ban. Some of the US cities that allow the bags with fees include Boulder, Colo., Portland, Maine and Washington, D.C.

According to the United Nations, as of July 2018, 127 countries have enacted regulations on plastic bags that includes charging fees.

So, what are the pros and cons to these fees for retailers and other small businesses?

You Don’t Lose Out on The Branding

It doesn’t cost a lot to print your logo and catchphrase on the side of the plastic bag. It’s a cheap marketing strategy that goes home with each and every sale. Charging a fee might be a little difficult at first, but you don’t need to scramble to find another marketing option.

You Can Turn People Away

There’s some evidence that charging people for bags can turn them off green behavior. They might even decide to buy somewhere else.

“There’s a lot of evidence that these kinds of charges can actually decrease pro social behavior,” Gladstone says.

You’ll also need to be careful not to position your company on the wrong side of the environmental debate. You don’t want to look like you’re profiteering on the back of  environmentalism.

Fees Work

There is evidence that charging a fee for plastic bag use works. Especially if the community is looking to decrease the number of bags used. As far back as 2012, Montgomery County in Maryland saw the percentage of consumers using the bags drop. The numbers decreased from 82% to 40% after a tax.

At the same time, shoppers in Arlington Virginia used the same number of plastic bags. There was no tax charged there.

What These Fees Mean for Small Business

Legislated plastic bag fees and/or bans have consequences for small businesses. There are 30 companies in New York State that make plastic bags.  A fee or outright ban could be 1500 jobs at risk.

Some small businesses are leaning towards offering paper bags as an alternative. But from an environmental perspective, there is evidence plastic grocery bags take 40% less energy to make. One study says they actually generate 80% less solid waste.

Fee Strategies for Small Businesses

Still there is a growing trend toward charging fees for plastic bags. Charging a bag fee at the check out in retail and grocery stores is a common method. There are some strategies you can use to implement this kind of program.

Make the case the extra plastic bag fee helps the environment. Some of your customers will pay the extra charge when you frame it up that way. Be clear and upfront on your webpages and social media.

Reusable Bags

You can offer reusable bags.

For example, paper bags are biodegradable. Find a supplier and make a bulk deal for a number of these. It can create another revenue stream. And keep you on the right side of the environmental debate.

You can stock cotton and hemp bags too. These come in a variety of colors and sizes. They are another way to market your goods and services in a positive light.

Charging for plastic bags isn’t a bad thing for small businesses. In the end, it gives your enterprise a good reputation where sustainability is concerned.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "Charging for Bags: Is It Right for Your Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends