Category: startups

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Challenger business bank Qonto raises $115 million round led by Tencent and DST Global

French startup Qonto has raised a $115 million Series C funding round led by Tencent and DST Global. Today’s news comes a few days after another French fintech startup Lydia raised some money from Tencent.

Existing investors Valar and Alven are also participating in today’s funding round. TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and Adyen CFO Ingo Uytdehaage are also joining the round. Qonto says that it represents the largest funding round for a French fintech company.

Qonto is a challenger bank, or a neobank, but for B2B use cases. Instead of attracting millions of customers like N26 or Monzo, Qonto is serving small and medium companies as well as freelancers in Europe.

According to the startup, business banking in Europe is broken. The company thinks it can provide a much better user experience with an online- and mobile-first product.

The company has managed to attract 65,000 companies over the past two years and a half. The product is currently live in France, Italy, Spain and Germany. In 2019 alone, Qonto has managed €10 billion in transaction volume.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to double down on its existing markets, develop new features that make the platform works better in each country based on local needs and hire more people. The team should grow from 200 to 300 employees within a year.

Qonto obtained a payment institution license in June 2018 and has developed its own core banking infrastructure. Around 50% of the company’s user base is currently using Qonto’s own core banking system. Others are still relying on a third-party partner.

Moving from one back end to another requires some input from customers, which explains why there are still some customers using the legacy infrastructure. Over the coming months, Qonto plans to launch new payment features that should convince more users to switch to Qonto’s back end.

Even more important, Qonto plans to obtain a credit institution license, which could open up a ton of possibilities when it comes to features and revenue streams. The company says that it should have its new license by the end of the year.

For instance, you could imagine being able to get a credit card, apply for an overdraft and get a small loan with Qonto.

Compared to traditional banks, Qonto lets you open a bank account more easily. After signing up, Qonto offers a modern interface with your activity. You can export your transactions in no time, manage your expenses and get real-time notifications. Qonto also integrates with popular accounting tools.

When it comes to payment methods, Qonto gives you a French IBAN as well as debit cards. You can order physical or virtual cards whenever you want, customize limits and freeze a card. Qonto also supports direct debit and checks. Like many software-as-a-service products, you can also manage multiple user accounts and customize permission levels.

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Personio, the German HR platform for SMEs, raises $75M Series C at a $500M valuation

Personio, the Germany-founded HR platform for SMEs, has raised $75 million in Series C funding in a round led by Accel. I understand the investment values the company at around $500 million.

Also joining is Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside Lars Dalgaard (the founder and former CEO of SuccessFactors). Existing investors Index Ventures, Northzone, Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, and Picus Capital followed on.

The Series C brings Personio’s total funding to $130 million since launching in 2015. The additional capital will help support the company’s expansion into the U.K. and Ireland, which is also being announced today. This will see Personio establish a new office in London to better serve clients in the U.K. and Ireland.

Combining human resources, recruiting and payroll into a single platform, Personio bills itself as a “HR operating system” for small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) ranging from 10 to 2,000 employees.

The cloud-based software is designed to power all of a company’s people processes via the product’s own growing functionality or through its ability to integrate with third-party software.

To that end, Personio says its customer base has tripled in the past twelve months, and says it now serves almost 2,000 customers in more than 40 countries. In the same period, the number of employees at Personio has more than doubled to over 350. That figure is set to reach 700 employees by the end of 2020.

Along with traditional SMEs, Personio has naturally found a home amongst startups. “The strong growth of the last four years in German-speaking countries has shown that there is a great demand for HR software in SMEs,” Personio co-founder and CEO Hanno Renner tells me.

“42% of their time is currently spent on administrative tasks, according to a recent, as yet unpublished study from Germany. Personio automates repetitive tasks and thus gives HR staff time for value-adding tasks. This is an invaluable advantage that has already convinced several U.K. customers such as Raisin and millimetric.”

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Israel’s cybersecurity startup scene spawned new entrants in 2019

Yoav Leitersdorf Contributor
Yoav Leitersdorf is the Silicon Valley-based Managing Partner at YL Ventures, where he accelerates cybersecurity startups in the U.S. market.
More posts by this contributor
Ofer Schreiber Contributor
Ofer Schreiber is partner and head of Israel Office at YL Ventures, where he seeds and accelerates cybersecurity startups.
More posts by this contributor

As the global cybersecurity market becomes increasingly crowded, the Start Up Nation remains a bulwark of innovation and opportunity generation for investors and global cyber companies alike. It achieved this chiefly in 2019 by adapting to the industry’s competitive developments and pushing forward its most accomplished entrepreneurs in larger numbers to meet them.

New data illustrates how Israeli entrepreneurs have seized on the country’s reputation for building radically cutting-edge technologies as the number of new Israeli cybersecurity startups addressing nascent sectors eclipses its more traditional counterparts. Moreover, related findings highlight how cybersecurity companies looking to expand beyond their traditional offerings are entering Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem in larger numbers through highly strategic acquisitions.

Broadly, new findings also reveal the Israeli cybersecurity market’s overall coming of age, seasoned entrepreneurial dominance and greater appetite for longer-term visions and strategies — the latter of which received record-breaking investor backing in 2019.

Breaking records

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Soft Robotics raises $23 million from investors including industrial robot giant FANUC

Robotics startup company Soft Robotics has closed its Series B round of funding, raising $23 million led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact, and including participation from exiting investors including Honeywell, Yahama, Hyperplane and more. This round also brings in FANUC, the world’s largest maker of industrial robots and a recently announced strategic partner for Soft Robotics .

The company said in a press release announcing this latest round of funding that the round was oversubscribed, which suggests it isn’t looking to glut itself on capital investors, given that this $23 million follows a similarly sized $20 million round that closed in 2018 which it also referred to as “oversubscribed.” Prior to that, Soft Robotics had raised $5 million in a Series A round closed in 2015. It has plenty of large, global clients already, so it’s probably not hurting for revenue.

Soft Robotics is focused on developing robotic grippers that, as you might’ve guessed from the name, make use of soft material endpoints that can more easily grip a range of different objects without the kind of extremely specific and tolerance-allergic complex programming that’s required for most traditional industrial robotic claws.

With its 2018 funding raise, Soft Robotics said that it was expanding further into food and beverage, as well as doubling down on its presence in the retail and logistics industries. This round and its new partnership with FANUC (which involves a new integrated system that pairs its mGrip robotic gripper with a new Mini-P controller, all with simple integration to FANUC’s existing lineup of industrial robots) will give it strategic and functional access to what is the most influenentioal industrial robotics company in the world.

This round will specifically help Soft Robotics spend on growth, looking to increase its variability even further and work on expanding its food packaging and consumer goods applications, as well as diving into e-commerce and logistics – specifically to help automate and improve the returns process, a costly and ever-growing challenge as more retail moves online.

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Maze raises $2 million and adds Figma support to enable user testing at scale

Maze wants to reinvent usability tests by letting you turn design prototypes into tests in just a few clicks. It could become the equivalent of a developing test suite for developers, but this time for designers — it could be something that you run before shipping an update to make sure everything works fine. The startup just raised a $2 million funding round and launched a couple of new features.

Since I first covered the company, Maze founders Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary still have the same vision. The company wants to empower designers and turn them into user testing experts. With Maze, you can turn your InVision, Marvel or Sketch projects into a browser-based user test.

You can then share a link with a group of users to get actionable insights on your upcoming design changes. Everything works in a web browser on both desktop and mobile.

After running a testing campaign, you get a detailed report with a success rate (how many people tapped on all the right buttons to achieve something in your app), where your users drop off, polling results and more.

That product has been working well, attracting 20,000 users working for IBM, Greenpeace, Accenture, BMW and more.

Now, Maze also supports Figma projects. Given the hype behind Figma, adding this feature is important to stay relevant. It also opens up a new market for Maze — companies using Figma as their main design tool.

Maze has also added a feature that should be particularly useful for companies that are just starting with user testing. The startup can put together a testers panel for you.

This is completely optional and you can just stick with your monthly software-as-a-service plan and work with your own panel. But it provides a good end-to-end experience if you want to centralize all your user testing needs under one roof.

Maze has also raised a $2 million funding round. Amplify Partners is leading the round with existing investors Seedcamp and Partech also participating. Business angels in this round also include Eric Wittman, the former Director of Operations at Adobe and COO at Figma, Peter Skomoroch, the former Head of AI Automation & Data Products at Workday, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.

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France improves stock options policies for startup employees

A couple of weeks ago, France’s digital minister Cédric O announced some changes when it comes to stock options in France. President Emmanuel Macron is going to talk about the new policy today ahead of the World Economic Forum.

While I don’t want to be too technical, here’s a quick overview of the changes.

First, the price of stock options (also known as BSPCE in France) won’t be based on the same VC-determined valuation. Let’s take an example — a VC fund invests in a Series A round, valuing the company at €12 million.

If you join the company after, you can get stock options based on a lower valuation, which increases the chances of higher returns. Going forward, there will be a different valuation for employees getting stock options.

Second, if you work for a foreign startup but you’re based in France, you couldn’t receive stock options. For instance, if you’re a Citymapper employee — a startup that is headquartered in London — based out of the Paris office, you could forget about stock options. Employees based in France can now receive stock options even if the company isn’t incorporated in France.

Third, the French Tech Visa now also works for foreign companies with an office in Paris. If you work for Berlin-based N26 and you want to hire a great Brazilian data scientist in your Paris office, you can now go through the fast-track visa process for startup employees.

30 European startup CEOs call for better stock option policies

Last year, VC firm Index Ventures coordinated an effort to overhaul stock option policies across Europe by lobbying policymakers. Hundreds of tech CEOs have signed the ‘Not Optional’ letter since then.

According to Index Ventures, Germany, Spain and Belgium are the lowest-ranked European countries when it comes to the regulatory framework around stock options.

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Open banking platform Tink raises €90M at a post-money valuation of €415M

Tink, the European open banking platform, is disclosing €90 million in new funding, just 11 months after the Sweden-headquartered company announced a €56 million round of funding.

Co-leading this new round is Dawn Capital, HMI Capital and Insight Partners. The round also includes the incumbent postal operator and Italy’s largest financial services network Poste Italiane as a new investor, along with existing investors Heartcore Capital, ABN AMRO Ventures and BNP Paribas’ venture arm, Opera Tech Ventures.

The injection of capital will enable Tink to accelerate its European expansion plans and further develop its product accordingly.

“During 2020, we are committed to building out our platform with more bank connections and, on top of that, expand our product offering,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén tells me. “Our aim is to become the preferred pan-European provider of digital banking services and increase our local presence across the region”.

Originally launched in Sweden in 2013 as a consumer-facing finance app with bank account aggregation at its heart, Tink has long since repositioned its offering to become a fully-fledged open banking platform, requisite with developer APIs, to enable banks and other financial service providers to ride the open banking/PSD2 train.

Through its various APIs, Tink provides four pillars of technology: “Account Aggregation,” “Payment Initiation,” “Personal Finance Management” and “Data Enrichment.” These can be used by third parties to roll their own standalone apps or integrated into existing banking applications.

“We have grown significantly, both in terms of our platform’s connectivity and as an organisation,” says Kjellén, when asked what has changed in the last 11 months. “We have during the year launched our platform in Belgium, Austria, the U.K., Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. In total, our open banking platform is right now live in twelve European markets and connects to more than 2,500 banks that reach more than 250 million bank customers across Europe”.

The company’s headcount has also grown a lot, too. In the beginning of 2019 it sat at around 120, but is now at 300 employees. Most but not all are based in its headquarters in Stockholm, alongside local offices including recently opened sites in Paris, Helsinki, Oslo, Madrid, Warsaw, Milan and Copenhagen.

Perhaps better positioned than most, I asked Kjellén what types of use cases are really resonating with open banking, given that many industry commentators don’t think it has quite yet lived up to the hype.

“Many of our customers are seeing the advantage of being able to build smart multi-banking products with the data that they are now able to fetch and use to add value for their end users,” he says. “The use cases that really show the potential of open banking that we see our customers thriving with are those that leverage the full value of the financial data to deliver truly personalised experiences at scale, or remove friction in the user journey to a minimum, such as proactive price comparison, enhanced credit scoring and onboarding. Use cases such as these show that the consumer’s data can really work for them and bring improvements to their everyday interactions”.

One example Kjellén gives me is Klarna, the checkout credit provider, which he says is using open banking to provide a “wonderful” in-app experience. “I love that I as a consumer can now choose to change my mind and slice up the payments for a purchase I have already paid in full with my bank card,” he explains. “This shows how the potential of open banking goes way beyond just accessing a transaction history and allows the most innovative players, such as Klarna, to create a new standard in consumer experience”.

Kjellén says another standout use-case is using PSD2 APIs to verify identity to complete any type of customer registration completely automatically. “[That is] something that I find very innovative. It automates the previously time-consuming administration on the business side and delivers a completely seamless digital service on the end user side,” he says.

Meanwhile, Tink says its customer numbers have “quadrupled” in the past year, and includes PayPal, Klarna, NatWest, ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas Fortis, Nordea and SEB. “More than 4,000 developers are currently using Tink to build and power new innovative financial services and products,” adds Kjellén.

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TechCrunch’s Top 10 investigative reports from 2019

Facebook spying on teens, Twitter accounts hijacked by terrorists, and sexual abuse imagery found on Bing and Giphy were amongst the ugly truths revealed by TechCrunch’s investigating reporting in 2019. The tech industry needs more watchdogs than ever as its size enlargens the impact of safety failures and the abuse of power. Whether through malice, naivety, or greed, there was plenty of wrongdoing to sniff out.

Led by our security expert Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch undertook more long-form investigations this year to tackle these growing issues. Our coverage of fundraises, product launches, and glamorous exits only tell half the story. As perhaps the biggest and longest running news outlet dedicated to startups (and the giants they become), we’re responsible for keeping these companies honest and pushing for a more ethical and transparent approach to technology.

If you have a tip potentially worthy of an investigation, contact TechCrunch at tips@techcrunch.com or by using our anonymous tip line’s form.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Here are our top 10 investigations from 2019, and their impact:

Facebook pays teens to spy on their data

Josh Constine’s landmark investigation discovered that Facebook was paying teens and adults $20 in gift cards per month to install a VPN that sent Facebook all their sensitive mobile data for market research purposes. The laundry list of problems with Facebook Research included not informing 187,000 users the data would go to Facebook until they signed up for “Project Atlas”, not receiving proper parental consent for over 4300 minors, and threatening legal action if a user spoke publicly about the program. The program also abused Apple’s enterprise certificate program designed only for distribution of employee-only apps within companies to avoid the App Store review process.

The fallout was enormous. Lawmakers wrote angry letters to Facebook. TechCrunch soon discovered a similar market research program from Google called Screenwise Meter that the company promptly shut down. Apple punished both Google and Facebook by shutting down all their employee-only apps for a day, causing office disruptions since Facebookers couldn’t access their shuttle schedule or lunch menu. Facebook tried to claim the program was above board, but finally succumbed to the backlash and shut down Facebook Research and all paid data collection programs for users under 18. Most importantly, the investigation led Facebook to shut down its Onavo app, which offered a VPN but in reality sucked in tons of mobile usage data to figure out which competitors to copy. Onavo helped Facebook realize it should acquire messaging rival WhatsApp for $19 billion, and it’s now at the center of anti-trust investigations into the company. TechCrunch’s reporting weakened Facebook’s exploitative market surveillance, pitted tech’s giants against each other, and raised the bar for transparency and ethics in data collection.

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them

Protecting The WannaCry Kill Switch

Zack Whittaker’s profile of the heroes who helped save the internet from the fast-spreading WannaCry ransomware reveals the precarious nature of cybersecurity. The gripping tale documenting Marcus Hutchins’ benevolent work establishing the WannaCry kill switch may have contributed to a judge’s decision to sentence him to just one year of supervised release instead of 10 years in prison for an unrelated charge of creating malware as a teenager.

The sinkhole that saved the internet

The dangers of Elon Musk’s tunnel

TechCrunch contributor Mark Harris’ investigation discovered inadequate emergency exits and more problems with Elon Musk’s plan for his Boring Company to build a Washington D.C.-to-Baltimore tunnel. Consulting fire safety and tunnel engineering experts, Harris build a strong case for why state and local governments should be suspicious of technology disrupters cutting corners in public infrastructure.

Review of Elon Musk’s DC-to-Baltimore ‘Loop’ system reveals safety concerns

Bing image search is full of child abuse

Josh Constine’s investigation exposed how Bing’s image search results both showed child sexual abuse imagery, but also suggested search terms to innocent users that would surface this illegal material. A tip led Constine to commission a report by anti-abuse startup AntiToxin (now L1ght), forcing Microsoft to commit to UK regulators that it would make significant changes to stop this from happening. However, a follow-up investigation by the New York Times citing TechCrunch’s report revealed Bing had made little progress.

Microsoft Bing not only shows child sexual abuse, it suggests it

Expelled despite exculpatory data

Zack Whittaker’s investigation surfaced contradictory evidence in a case of alleged grade tampering by Tufts student Tiffany Filler who was questionably expelled. The article casts significant doubt on the accusations, and that could help the student get a fair shot at future academic or professional endeavors.

Tufts expelled a student for grade hacking. She claims innocence

Burned by an educational laptop

Natasha Lomas’ chronicle of troubles at educational computer hardware startup pi-top, including a device malfunction that injured a U.S. student. An internal email revealed the student had suffered a “a very nasty finger burn” from a pi-top 3 laptop designed to be disassembled. Reliability issues swelled and layoffs ensued. The report highlights how startups operating in the physical world, especially around sensitive populations like students, must make safety a top priority.

Reliability concerns raised over pi-top’s STEM learning laptop

Giphy fails to block child abuse imagery

Sarah Perez and Zack Whittaker teamed up with child protection startup L1ght to expose Giphy’s negligence in blocking sexual abuse imagery. The report revealed how criminals used the site to share illegal imagery, which was then accidentally indexed by search engines. TechCrunch’s investigation demonstrated that it’s not just public tech giants who need to be more vigilant about their content.

Despite bans, Giphy still hosts self-harm, hate speech and child sex abuse content

Airbnb’s weakness on anti-discrimination

Megan Rose Dickey explored a botched case of discrimination policy enforcement by Airbnb when a blind and deaf traveler’s reservation was cancelled because they have a guide dog. Airbnb tried to just “educate” the host who was accused of discrimination instead of levying any real punishment until Dickey’s reporting pushed it to suspend them for a month. The investigation reveals the lengths Airbnb goes to in order to protect its money-generating hosts, and how policy problems could mar its IPO.

How Airbnb handles discrimination claims

Expired emails let terrorists tweet propaganda

Zack Whittaker discovered that Islamic State propaganda was being spread through hijacked Twitter accounts. His investigation revealed that if the email address associated with a Twitter account expired, attackers could re-register it to gain access and then receive password resets sent from Twitter. The article revealed the savvy but not necessarily sophisticated ways terrorist groups are exploiting big tech’s security shortcomings, and identified a dangerous loophole for all sites to close.

Hackers are spreading Islamic State propaganda by hijacking dormant Twitter accounts

Porn & gambling apps slip past Apple

Josh Constine found dozens of pornography and real-money gambling apps had broken Apple’s rules but avoided App Store review by abusing its enterprise certificate program — many based in China. The report revealed the weak and easily defrauded requirements to receive an enterprise certificate. Seven months later, Apple revealed a spike in porn and gambling app takedown requests from China. The investigation could push Apple to tighten its enterprise certificate policies, and proved the company has plenty of its own problems to handle despite CEO Tim Cook’s frequent jabs at the policies of other tech giants.

Apple fails to block porn & gambling ‘Enterprise’ apps

Bonus: HQ Trivia employees fired for trying to remove CEO

This Game Of Thrones-worthy tale was too intriguing to leave out, even if the impact was more of a warning to all startup executives. Josh Constine’s look inside gaming startup HQ Trivia revealed a saga of employee revolt in response to its CEO’s ineptitude and inaction as the company nose-dived. Employees who organized a petition to the board to remove the CEO were fired, leading to further talent departures and stagnation. The investigation served to remind startup executives that they are responsible to their employees, who can exert power through collective action or their exodus.

Mutiny at HQ Trivia fails to oust CEO

If you have a tip for Josh Constine, you can reach him via encrypted Signal or text at (585)750-5674, joshc at TechCrunch dot com, or through Twitter DMs

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Taiwan’s entrepreneurs move forward after tense presidential election

Last Saturday, Taiwanese voters re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen to her second term after an election that split the country among generational and ideological lines. A crucial issue were the differences in how Tsai, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and her main opponent, Han Kuo-yu of the Kuomintang (KMT), approach Taiwan’s fraught relationship with China.

Despite the highly polarizing run-up to the election, however, both the DPP and KMT have taken measures to foster entrepreneurship in Taiwan. Now that Tsai has won, many investors don’t expect a dramatic impact, but instead are keeping an eye on how policies put in motion by both parties will play out. They are also looking for political allies who understand the startup ecosystem in Taiwan, which is often overshadowed by large hardware OEMs and semiconductor companies.

Policy

Joseph Huang, an investment partner at Infinity Ventures, has worked with both the DPP and KMT as limited partners, and says “from our side, they are always asking for how to create more awareness of Taiwan startups, how do we help them with institutions, how do we help them more?”

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Startups Weekly: Plaid’s $5.3B acquisition is a textbook Silicon Valley win

Hi everyone, my name is Eric Eldon and I’m the new writer of the Startups Weekly newsletter. 

I’ll be picking my favorite explicitly startup-focused articles of the week for you from Extra Crunch (where I’m the editor now), as well as TechCrunch (where I was the co-editor years ago… long story). 

Some people tell us that TechCrunch doesn’t cover startups like it used to. I don’t know if that is true, but it is definitely hard to keep track of our startup coverage mixed in with the rest of our news.

This newsletter will highlight the best startup coverage on TechCrunch and Extra Crunch to help fix that.

I probably hate reading bad startup advice and analysis even more than you do, and not only because I’ve had to read a lot of it over the years as an editor. I’ve also started a few companies myself, and I’ve had the chance to experience exits, failures and venture backing.

I’ll be highlighting articles that I think address something significant about building a company, and I’ll tell you why each one is worth a read. 

There will also be some experiments. Thanks for reading!

Everybody loves Plaid

Plaid’s product is beyond boring to most people, but it is already a name brand to its enterprise users and across the greater startup world, as its stats and funding rounds have grown. The $5.3 billion outcome announced this week cements its status as a top SaaS/fintech startup story of this era, in addition to being a popular platform for developers who need to sync user payment data.

Alex Wilhelm was all over the news. He dug into Visa’s presentation explaining the purchase on Extra Crunch — it paid more than twice Plaid’s last valuation — and found the classic tale of a large, slow-moving incumbent strategically buying a hot younger company in order to grow into newer markets. Then he got comments for Extra Crunch from a range of analysts… who basically said the same thing. 

You can now tune into the latest TechCrunch Equity episode to hear him talk about it with our resident former VC Danny Crichton.

Atrium gets out of the human law firm business

Closely watched Atrium is shutting down the law firm to focus on the tech company. Founder Justin Kan tells Josh Constine on TechCrunch that this is part of the evolution toward providing a better tech service.

The law firm had been designed to provide the human touch in a way that machines couldn’t, but Kan says that lawyers do that great as third parties.

Many SaaS startups are trying to take on the back office processes of the 20th century. Atrium’s change will be another reason for them to go all-in on software, with humans not included.

brooke hammerling

PR expert says maybe don’t do PR right now

One of the most loved and feared people in tech communications today, Brooke Hammerling has been in the middle of key stories of the decade with founders young and old. And sometimes on the opposite side of me.

 She knows her stuff. Here’s one of my favorite gems from the full interview with Jordan Crook over on Extra Crunch:

If you’re an early-stage company, and you’re an unknown founder, and you’re coming out with your own take on something, you don’t want to spend your money on PR too early.

You want to spend that money on product development and engagement and engineering and so forth.

Big funds do the small funding rounds now

That’s the word on the street from our resident former VC, who was recently out in San Francisco visiting his many friends and professional acquaintances. Danny put his notes together for TechCrunch back in the comfort of his New York apartment, and found that everyone is raising huge rounds [emphasis his] — and it’s all about being there for the future. Plaid’s cap table is a good example.

One of my favorite quotes:

As one VC explained to me last week (paraphrasing), “What’s weird today is that you have firms like Sequoia who show up for seed rounds, but they don’t really care about … anything. Valuation, terms, etc. It’s all a play for those later-stage rounds.” I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration to be clear, but ultimately, those one million-dollar checks are essentially a rounding error for the largest funds. The real return is in the mega rounds down the road. 

He also noticed for TechCrunch that VCs today seem to be especially tired. You can tell him what you think about these observations at danny@techcrunch.com.

(Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

Home robots are making moves at CES

I have never been to CES and don’t plan to go, but Brian Heater always goes and this year he came back thinking that the home robot sector is getting serious.

His takeaway for Extra Crunch: 

There’s a cynical (and probably at least partially correct) view that these sorts of deals are publicity stunts — big companies using CES to demonstrate how forward-thinking they are about new technologies. But there’s something to be said for the show’s position at the forefront of such technologies. The products are real, even if wider use is hypothetical. And in an era when Amazon has deployed more than 100,000 robots across its U.S. fulfillment centers to enable next and same-day delivery, we’re well into the realm of real-world use.

Brian is also hosting a one-day TechCrunch conference focused on robotics startups at UC Berkeley in early March, for those who are focused on this space. The event last year was a huge hit and we’re looking forward to the next one. Follow the link to learn more. 

Will Silicon Valley win at weed?

Eaze has been one of the highest-profile cannabis distributors, but now it might be running out of cash, report Ingrid Owen and Josh Constine. There are many structural reasons why any cannabis business is very hard, legal or otherwise. 

But it’s interesting to take a look at who is succeeding in the consumer cannabis market and why.

One local example is Berner, a high school dropout in San Francisco who became a budtender and partnered with cannabis geneticists to create and promote the Girl Scout Cookies strain, and also became an international rap star (the main topic is his weed) and clothing designer.  

These days, he’s opening more and more Cookies retail cannabis outlets, including in Oakland and L.A., and cutting licensing and certification deals with a broad network of partners, (and claims to be turning down huge acquisition offers). Basically, his cannabis is also his modern multi-platform brand and the cool kids are into it. He does not appear to be running out of cash.