Seychelles-based crypto exchange Huobi has integrated fiat-to-crypto payment service Banxa to its trading platform with zero fees, the firm announced Wednesday.
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Read more A pitch to offer artists a way to give geo-fenced, live events to fans around the world has brought the new Los Angeles startup Moment House $1.5 million in seed funding.
The money came from heavy hitters in the Los Angeles entertainment and investment scene including Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew and Jared Leto. Patreon chief executive Jack Conte and Sequoia Capital partner Jess Lee also participated in the round.
Forerunner Ventures led the deal and the investment was made by Kirsten Green, the firm’s famous founder and managing partner. Kevin Mayer, the former chief executive of TikTok; GV chief David Krane; Aaron Levie from Box; the tech media and entertainment guru, Matthew Ball; and product maestro Eugene Wei all participated in the round as well.
Founded by Arjun Mehta, Shray Bansal, and Nigel Egrari, the company grew out of work the three men did while attending USC and the USC Jimmy Iovine & Dr. Dre Academy for the Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation.
The company touts itself as the simplest way for artists to create online events for their fans.
For its first foray into live entertainment, Moment House is going to host a geo-fenced, location-specific tour for the musician Yungblud. Other ticketed events from Kygo, blackbear, Kaytranada, Denzel Curry and Ruel will follow, the company said.
For musicians, the company’s pitch of ticketing security, merchandise integrations global payments support, must have been music to their ears — because all of those features add up to one thing… cash.
And performers on the platform take all of the ticket revenues, with Moment House earning money by charging fans a small fee.
In a statement, company co-founder Arjun Mehta said that the company’s technology and service wasn’t a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but rather a way to amplify the concert going experience with an online approximation.
“Moment House is empowering artists to deliver digital experiences that feel authentic and compelling,” said Leto, in a statement. “I was drawn to the unique design-driven approach because that’s what is needed to create a new category here.”
Khosla Ventures, the eponymous venture firm helmed by longtime Silicon Valley rainmaker, Vinod Khosla, is raising $1.1 billion for its latest venture fund, according to documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The filing was first spotted by Ari Levy over at CNBC.
Khosla, whose investing career began at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (back when it was still called Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) is rightly famous for a number of bets on enterprise software companies and was a richly rewarded co-founder of Sun Microsystems before venturing into the world of venture capital.
Like his former partner, John Doerr, Khosla also went all-in on renewable energy and sustainability both at Kleiner Perkins and then later at his own fund, which he reportedly launched with several hundreds of millions of dollars from his personal fortune.
Over the years Khosla Ventures has placed bets and scored big wins across a wide range of industries including cybersecurity (with the over $1 billion acquisition of portfolio company Cylance), sustainability (with the Climate Corp. acquisition), and healthcare (through the public offering of Editas).
And the current portfolio should also have some big exits with a roster that includes: the unicorn lending company, Affirm; the nuclear fusion technology developer, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (maybe not a winner, but so so so cool); delivery company, DoorDash; the meat replacement maker, Impossible Foods; grocery delivery service, Instacart; security technology developer, Okta; the health insurance provider, Oscar; and the payment companies Square and Stripe .
That’s quite a string of unicorn (and would-be unicorn) investments. And it speaks to the breadth of the firm’s interests that run the gamut from healthcare to fintech to sustainability and the future of food.
Khosla will likely benefit from the surge of interest in investments that adhere to new environmental, social responsibility and corporate governance standards.
There are billions of dollars that are looking for a home that can invest along those criteria, and for the last 16 years or so, that’s exactly what Khosla Ventures has been doing.
Brighteye Ventures, the European edtech VC firm, is announcing the $54 million first close of its second fund, bringing total assets under management to over $112 million.
Backing comes from a mixture of existing and new investors, made up primarily of unnamed international family offices. The fund’s second close is expected to take place next year and will include additional institutional investors.
Founded in 2017, Brighteye describes itself as a thesis-driven fund investing in startups that enhance learning. Unsurprisingly, the VC says it sees an unprecedented opportunity within the $7 trillion global education sector “as educators and students are adapting to distance learning en masse and millions of displaced workers are seeking to upskill’.
Out of this new fund, Brighteye will invest in 15-20 companies over the next three years at the seed and Series A stage and write cheques of up to $5 million.
“We invest in startups that use technology to directly enable learning, skills acquisition or research as well as companies whose products address structural needs in the education sector,” Alex Spiro Latsis, managing partner at Brighteye Ventures, tells me.
“For example, Zen Educate addresses the systemic issue of teacher supply shortages in the U.K., via an on-demand platform that saves schools money whilst allowing educators to earn more. Litigate is an AI-driven coach and workflow tool improving results for legal associates, while Ironhack, the largest tech bootcamp in Europe and Latin America, gives young professionals the skills needed to enter the innovation economy and connects them to employers with a 90% job placement rate”.
The VC’s investments also includes Ornikar, the online driving school in France and Spain serving more than 1.6 million students; Tandem, the Berlin-based peer-to-peer language learning platform with over 10 million members; and Epic!, a reading platform said to be used in more than 90% of U.S. schools.
“Sector specialisation means that our entire team is devoted to mapping, evaluating and building networks in the learning industry,” adds Spiro Latsis, when asked how Brighteye will compete for edtech deals when many generalist VCs are eyeing up the sector. “We understand what a differentiated approach looks like, can develop conviction quickly and make an offer based on that conviction. Once we invest, portfolio companies benefit from a network that includes not just potential clients and investors but also some of the best performing edtech companies in Europe”.
Meanwhile, Brighteye says it will be expanding its advisory team to support the new fund and expects to grow from three members to 10 within the next 12 months. In addition, David Guerin has been promoted to principal to manage deal making and portfolio support in Paris, and the firm expects to open a DACH region presence by summer 2022.
Zoom has a new marketplace and new integrations, Spotify gets a new format and we review Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go. This is your Daily Crunch for October 14, 2020.
The big story: Zoom launches its events marketplace
Zoom’s new OnZoom marketplace allows anyone to host and sell tickets for virtual events. It’s also integrating the ability for nonprofits to accept donations.
The company made a couple other announcements at its Zoomtopia user conference. For one thing, it’s also integrating with a starting lineup of 35 third-party “Zapps,” allowing products like Asana and Dropbox to integrate directly into the Zoom experience.
In addition, Zoom said it will begin rolling out end-to-end encryption (a feature it’s been promising since acquiring Keybase in May) to users next week.
The tech giants
Spotify introduces a new music-and-spoken word format, open to all creators — The new format is designed to reproduce the radio-like experience of listening to a DJ talk about the music, and it also enables the creation of music-filled podcasts.
Microsoft reverse engineers a budget computer with the Surface Laptop Go — Brian Heater writes that the Laptop Go is a strange and sometimes successful mix of Surface design and budget decisions.
Google launches a suite of tech-powered tools for reporters, Journalist Studio — The suite includes a host of existing tools as well as two new products aimed at helping reporters search across large documents and visualizing data.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Getaround raises a $140M Series E amid rebound in short-distance travel — The rebound is real: I took my first Getaround this weekend.
Augury taps $55M for tech that predicts machine faults from vibration, sound and temperature — The startup works with large enterprises like Colgate and Heineken to maintain machines in their production and distribution lines.
Plenty has raised over $500M to grow fruits and veggies indoors — The funding was led by existing investor SoftBank Vision Fund and included the berry farming giant Driscoll’s.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
What the iPhone 12 tells us about the state of the smartphone industry in 2020 — While the iPhone 12 was no doubt in development long before the current pandemic, the pandemic’s global shutdown has only exacerbated many existing problems for smartphone makers.
Databricks crossed $350M run rate in Q3, up from $200M one year ago — The data analytics company scaled rapidly to put itself on an obvious IPO path.
Dear Sophie: I came on a B-1 visa, then COVID-19 happened. How can I stay? — The latest advice from immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. And we’re having a fall sale!)
Everything else
NASA loads 14 companies with $370M for ‘tipping point’ technologies — NASA has announced more than a third of a billion dollars’ worth of “Tipping Point” contracts awarded to over a dozen companies pursuing potentially transformative space technologies.
Harley-Davidson should keep making e-motorcycles — That’s Jake Bright’s takeaway after three weeks with the LiveWire e-motorcycle.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Audrey Gelman, the former CEO of The Wing who resigned in June, today posted a letter she sent to former employees of The Wing last week. In it, Gelman apologized for not taking action to combat mistreatment of women of color at The Wing. She also acknowledged that her drive for success and scaling quickly “came at the expense of a healthy and sustainable culture that matched our projected values, and workplace practices that made our team feel valued and respected.”
That meant, Gelman said, The Wing “had not subverted the historical oppression and racist roots of the hospitality industry; we had dressed it up as a kindler [sic], gentler version.”
Here are some other highlights from her letter:
- “Members’ needs came first, and those members were often white, and affluent enough to afford The Wing’s membership dues.”
- “White privilege and power trips were rewarded with acquiescence, as opposed to us doubling down on our projected values.”
- “When the realization set in that The Wing wasn’t institutionally different in the ways it had proclaimed, it hurt more because the space we claimed was different reinforced the age-old patterns of women of color and especially Black women being disappointed by white women and our limited feminist values.”
A public apology from Gelman and The Wing COO Lauren Kassan is just one of the demands from members of Flew the Coup, a group of former staffers at The Wing. Another demand is for The Wing to drop the non-disclosure agreements in their contracts.
“Collectively, we have faced racism and anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric from management, HQ staff, and members,” the group wrote on Instagram back in June. “We have faced physical and psychological violence within the various Wing locations, and discrimination when attempting to move up within the company.”
The group went on to say that while The Wing was built on the idea of being a safe and inclusive place for women and non-binary folks, “we have continuously seen the exact opposite of this mission.”
The Wing has raised $117.5 million from a number of investors, including New Enterprise Associates, AlleyCorp, Sequoia Capital, Serena Williams and Kerry Washington. At TechCrunch Disrupt, Washington told me a bit about how she felt about the drama at The Wing.
“Well, you know, I’m not new to scandal, so there’s that,” Washington said. “I was and I am really deeply still inspired by the original vision of the company. And, I think like a lot of companies in this time, because of the several pandemics that we’re facing, whether it’s our awareness around racial injustice, or COVID, lots of people are in a moment of recalibration and self-reflection. So I think that there is incredible space to improve the dynamics. And as somebody who’s an investor, as a woman of color, it’s important to me that there is increased transparency and also accountability.”
Over the past few months, Washington said her role as an investor has been “really just supporting leadership in this transition,” as well as expressing to those leaders a “deep desire” for transparency and accountability.
The Wing, like many other tech companies, struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April, The Wing laid off or furloughed “the majority” of its workers, the company said. Then, in July, The Wing laid off another 56 people.
As part of Flew the Coup’s organizing, it’s also raising money to help support people who were laid off from The Wing. As of today, the group has raised more than $15,000 for its grant program. Its goal is to raise $100,000.
We’ve reached out to The Wing and will update this story if we hear back.
AI can read your emotional response to advertising and your facial expressions in a job interview. But if it can already do all this, what happens next? In part two of a series on emotion AI, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review explore the implications of how it’s used and where it’s heading in the future.
We meet:
- Shruti Sharma, VSCO
- Gabi Zijderveld, Affectiva
- Tim VanGoethem, Harman
- Rohit Prasad, Amazon
- Meredith Whittaker, NYU’s AI Now Institute
Credits: This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Karen Hao, Tate Ryan-Mosley, and Emma Cillekens. We had help from Benji Rosen. We’re edited by Michael Reilly and Gideon Lichfield.