Minneapolis is quickly solidifying itself as one of the Midwest’s most important startup ecosystem. TechCrunch Live is thrilled to host a special (virtual) event in the Twin Cities. Next week, on Wednesday, September 7, our crew is set to interview some of the best startups and investors, and speak on the area’s recent fundings, best practices, and strategies. Just like every TechCrunch Live event, this one is free to attend and participate.

To help highlight what the city has to offer, we’re enlisting the help of local startups! Like past City Spotlights, this one will feature a pitch-off with local Minneapolis startups pitching to VCs. The winner gets fast-tracked into Startup Battlefield 200, which includes free exhibition space at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022. Applications are closed, but everyone can register for the event here.

Check out this agenda:

TechCrunch Live in Minneapolis, Minnesota

1:00pm CT: Raising capital outside of the coasts with Anna Mason (Rise of the Rest Seed Fund) + Andrew Leone (Dispatch)

Andrew Leone’s Dispatch provides businesses with an on-demand courier delivery service. Headquartered in the greater Minneapolis, Minnesota area, the startup is quickly becoming a shining star in the area’s exploding startup ecosystem. It’s the type of startup that captures the attention of local investors, but outsiders as well including Anna Mason, managing partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest fund.

1:30pm CT: Who’s writing checks in MSP with Mary Grove (Bread & Butter Fund) and Justin Kaufenberg (Rally Ventures)

A panel on the growth opportunities for Minnesota from the perspective of VC funds – what’s needed in the market, what are they funding right, where startups should look for funding.

2:00pm CT: Building a fintech company with Atif Siddiqi (Branch) and Ryan Broshar (Matchstick Ventures)

Minneapolis has a growing number of fintech companies, and Branch is among the best positioned. Hear from its CEO and founder Atif Siddiqi and one of the company’s early investors, Ryan Broshar, managing director and partner at Matchstick Ventures.

2:20pm CT: Pitch-off

Judges: Mahati Sridhar and Sarah Hinkfuss

Planted, a Swiss startup that’s cooking up alternative proteins using biostructuring and fermentation to serve “clean” cuts of vegan meat — such as the plant-based chicken breast plated up above — has raised again, nabbing CHF 70 million (~$72M) in Series B funding after a $21M pre-B round a year ago.

The Series B was led by consumer-focused private equity firm, L Catterton, the private equity arm of LVMH — the Paris, France based multinational corp and conglomerate with a focus on luxury consumer goods. So it’s presumably bought into a vision of the well-heeled being persuaded to abandon bloody filets mignons to bite down on guilt-free vegan cutlets.

The 2019-founded Zurich-based foodtech startup says the new funding will be used to launch its new whole-cut line of products, such as the above chicken breast (or ‘chicken’t’ as one colleague wittily dubbed it) — expanding out from its current range of smaller faux chicken pieces, mock pulled pork and kebab meat, and breaded schnitzel, which can so far be found in some 4,200 retailers and 3,000+ restaurants across three regional markets.

Further international expansion (within Europe) is on the cards now. Planted tells TechCrunch it has the Benelux markets (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) in its sights, using the Series B funds to build on its early focus on German-speaking markets (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

Funding will also go on boosting its production capacity as it works to optimize its processes to shrink the price gap between actual animal flesh and its pea-protein-based vegan chicken alternative. (It also uses oat and sunflower protein in other mock meats in its range.)

For its vegan chicken, its website lists just four ingredients: Pea protein, pea fiber, canola oil and water (it also adds vitamin B12) — hence the “clean” claim, with its marketing further emphasizing: “We do not use any flavouring or preservatives, chemical additives, soy, gluten, lactose or GMO ingredients.” (Some may quibble over the healthiness of canola oil, which has faced some popular controversy in recent years — although it’s less clear whether the concern is merited.)

Alternative proteins face several barriers to mass adoption — a major one being price, as they do not enjoy the same kind of subsidies typically ploughed into traditional food production, meaning it’s not a level playing field when it comes to competing with meat. Often buying actual meat is cheaper than a plant-based alternative, despite the vastly higher environmental costs attached to traditional meat production (not to mention the animal welfare harms). So the economics are a challenge.

Planted says its current product price vs actual chicken varies depending on the market — sitting between the price of free range and organic chicken as it stands. Though, as it scales production, it envisages being able to shrink this gap, pointing to a doubling of production volume it achieved in May which enabled it to reduce prices. (A set of three of its current faux meat products, each weighing 400g, can cost around €25 for the bundle.)

“One of the main challenges to be solved is the cutting of unsustainable subsidies to the animal industry that currently are the main reason for the low prices of animal protein (also depending on the market) that we have on the market today,” Planted argues. “Price matters when it comes to food — as with everything else. Subsidies into various sectors along the animal protein value chain are maintaining this unequal equilibrium — at our own cost. We must change that to get closer to the true cost of our protein consumption.”

There can also be concern among consumers about how much processing (and potentially preservatives) go into making mock meat. Hence Planted’s focus on minimizing the ingredients used to produce its products — and on transparency around its production methods. No ‘secret blend of herbs & spices’ here.

“What we do is structuring of plant-based protein but then we have a fermentation process run over it so essentially we’re combining the two approaches… What this allows us is to have a very clean formulation,” says co-founder, Christoph Jenny, in a phone call with TechCrunch. “So we don’t have any additives whatsoever — and that seems to be the key message that resonates with consumers. We only have proteins, fibers, water and vegetable oil.”

If you’re wondering what biostructuring is, Planted’s website details the “wet extrusion” production process it uses to convert extracted plant proteins, which are spherical in shape, into “the fibrous, elongated shape of animal muscle fibre proteins” — aka, to mimic meat.

“The ingredients in the extruder are heated and put under pressure by means of two rotating screws, while simultaneously under high shear similar to a pasta maker. This creates a dough that is pressed through a nozzle and cooled,” it explains. “In this way, we can convert plant material to the fibrous structure of meat by applying nothing more than heat, pressure and shear. The best raw materials and the right parameters are chosen for our unique setup in this innovative process without requiring chemical additives.”

“Currently pretty much everything you see in the market has additives in one way or the other. And we feel that is one of the key things — besides the price equation — that holds consumers back. And I do understand it,” Jenny adds. “That’s why we founded the company as we wanted to be able to eat something clean, that’s good for you health. That becomes more and more important — and that’s the angle or the differentiation we focus on.”

Planted also produces all its products under a glass-house production facility in Kemptthal, Switzerland — which it bills as “the first transparent meat production open to the public”. (And you certainly won’t find open-door slaughter houses — but, hey, maybe that should be a policy mandate as a ‘hard truths’ tool to educate consumers on what actual meat is made of to help speed up the transition to less harmful protein production methods…)

A Planted production facility (Image credits: Planted)

It’s also worth noting that (actual) meat can be adulterated with plenty of substances the average person may not want near their food, from the antibiotics fed to animals to increase yields, to the (‘antimicrobial’) chlorine routinely used to wash chicken carcasses in US meat production facilities (although that particular process is banned in the EU) — so there can be a double (i.e. higher) standard applied to meat alternatives, even as long accepted (i.e. tolerated) factory farming methods leave plenty to be desired.

But the vested interests in sustaining traditional animal husbandry and the jobs it creates are undeniable.

The upshot is that alternative protein makers have to work doubly hard to get their products to market and into people’s stomachs. So the growth challenge is real — even as the potential for scaling looks massive as policymakers everywhere look for ways to shrink carbon emissions. (A 2021 study reported by the Guardian found that meat production accounted for nearly 60% of the greenhouse gases associated with global food production — which itself is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases generated by human activity — which means that greening how we eat generally, and meat specifically, is essential if we’re to avoid climate catastrophe; no ifs, no buts.)

Investors backing alternative proteins are calculating that humanity will, over the long haul, make the switch to alternative protein sources, whether gradually then suddenly or slowly and steadily — as food production systems and policy incentives are reconfigured and reformed.

“It is an honor to partner with Planted in its mission to revolutionise the way meat and protein-rich foods are consumed globally,” said Liz Gordon of L Catterton in a statement supporting Planted’s Series B. “Not only are their products inspired by nature but they are also free of unnatural ingredients, scalable, and able to be easily incorporated into consumers’ daily lives as well as traditional meat supply chains. With food as a strong lever to promote human health and environmental stability, Planted directly contributes to creating a healthier and more sustainable food system. We have strong conviction in the company’s continued growth, as more people across the globe continue to adopt alternative proteins into their lives.”

The European Commission has a flagship ‘green deal’ policy with the goal of shrinking the bloc’s carbon emissions to net neutral by 2050 — which includes attention to agricultural reform, under a so-called “farm to fork strategy” (to transition to “a fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food system”, as the EU’s PR puts it). Although oxymoronical talk of “sustainable livestock” at the EU level suggests the thinking may not be nearly bold nor ambitious enough to deliver the slated eco transformation.

In the meanwhile, the reality is current EU agricultural subsidies are among those skewing the global food production playing field by propping up an environmentally unsound status quo. (A reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, adopted at the end of last year for the 2023-2027 period, was billed by lawmakers as combining “higher environmental, climate and animal welfare ambitions with a fairer distribution of payments, especially to small and medium-sized family farms as well as young farmers” — with no high level message about the need for farmers to transition beyond animal protein production as yet, as commissioners shy away from a message that many traditional farmers may find hard to swallow.)

A Commission proposal for a “legislative framework for sustainable food systems” (aka, FSFS) — slated to be a flagship component of the F2F strategy — is due to be adopted by the EU’s executive body by the end of 2023 so, it remains to be seen what else is coming down the pipe, in terms of harder food system reforms, but the pace of the EU’s creeping policy change is already lagging the protein disruptors.

“There are subsidies and also the way the regulations work — which work against us,” agrees Jenny, when asked about the policy picture. “We welcome that alternative proteins are mentioned as part of the green deal — but ‘sustainable livestock’ is also a cornerstone so… ”

Despite a patchy policy picture on home turf, he still sounds confident that traditional meat’s baked in competitive advantage is shrinking — and will shrink further in the coming years — as alt protein players scale up production, optimize their processes and tap into better economies of scale. And, also, as harsher economic conditions bite.

“As we scale up — and [remember] animal farming has been around for centuries and has been totally optimized — so as we’re scaling I think we’re also A) finding better technology, more efficient technology to produce but B) also have large scale obviously — so we can optimize costs quite a bit,” he predicts.

He also points to “adverse inflation” working against animal protein production as it gets more expensive to produce meat — given animals must be fed protein to produce the meat humans eat and that’s a far less efficient means of producing edible protein for humans than getting it direct from plants. “Overall we see meat prices rising as they’re way more prone to inflation given their lower conversion ratio of protein than alternative proteins — and I think that is one of the key measures [we’re] improving.”

“Last but not least, one of the tricky [issues] to overcome is that animal meat is typically used by retailers as a way to get customers in the door so typically they put lower margins on animal meat vs alternative proteins which typically are used as higher margin products by retailers,” he adds — hence that’s why Planted does direct distribution, b2c, to customers (and presumably also explains its early focus on building relationships with restaurants so they’re supporting the product in how they’re putting it on their menus).

Planted executive board, from right to left: Pascal Bieri, Judith Wemmer, Christoph Jenny and Lukas Böni (Image credits: Planted)

“Working on these three things we see the gap shrink quite quick over the next couple of years,” he continues, emphasizing that the team is certainly not hanging around waiting for policymakers to roll out a red carpet for green foodtech but is strategizing hard to make growth happen despite all the ingrained challenges. “What we focus on is what we can impact day by day. We really focus on optimizing our production processes, and simplifying things and making sure that we don’t rely on any policymakers to make the changes — but rather we put ourselves in a position to get to prosperity.”

More problematic than policymakers being slow in serving up their fulsome support, Jenny suggests, is the role of meat industry lobbyists working actively against reform of the food system by trying to undermine adoption of alternative proteins. “The bigger issue is that lobbyists, very strong nationalist lobbyists — on the animal farming side — try to counteract us on a day to day basis, doing that on the European level or in local government,” he tells us. “A good example is the amendment 171 they wanted to pass to forbid plant-based milk.

“France for example is super aggressive that you cannot relate to any animal what we’re doing. So I think that’s the fundamental issue. Then the subsidies that come out of these policy struggles. So I think we find ourselves, on a day-to-day basis on the legislation side, rather in a back-and-forth — rather than moving forward and fixing the broken food system together. And we’re losing time day by day to really reduce our food’s carbon footprint on that side.

“That’s the daily struggle and the reality. So while the green new deal sounds promising the daily struggle with lobbyists and the economical power of the animal farming system is the reality.”

As well as competing with unreasonably cheap animal-derived meat — and fending off vicious attacks from the meat lobby — Planted is also of course competing with a growing number of alternative protein startups.

Plant-based rivals include the likes of Beyond Meat (mock chicken, burgers etc), Heura (mock chicken), Future Farm (fake mince, sausages, burgers), Impossible Burger (faux bloody burgers), and Juicy Marbles (vegan steaks), to name just a few meat-challenger startups in an increasingly-packed-like-sardines but branded-like-fancy-chocolate playing field (yes, plant-based fish is also a thing).

As if that wasn’t enough, there are also lab-grown meat plays trying to disrupt traditional animal farming by growing meat from cells to sell cruelty-free meat. (Aka, lab-grown meat or cultured meat). As well as liquid meal replacement purveyors, like Soylent, pushing the notion that there’s no need to even chew dinner… So the competition for disrupting traditional protein sources is colorful, plentiful and growing.

That makes differentiation between disruptors another potential challenge. How to make your fake chicken or faux pork stand out from other vegan alternatives?

Albeit, the size of the global meat market is more than massive enough to accommodate many different brands and approaches, given every human has to eat (and people’s food tastes will differ). So this should be a case of a rising appetite for alt proteins growing the size of the pie rather than a winner takes all scenario. Just so long as consumers can be convinced, en masse, to chow down on proteins that haven’t demanded animals are reared for slaughter as the price of eating dinner.

“We focus on the message,” says Jenny, when asked how Planted is approaching differentiation amid the growing gaggle of alternative producers. “We just founded the company in 2019 and the reception we get market per market is very positive — because I think people do start to twist the pack around and look on the ingredients. So I think one of the most important communicators for us is the back of the pack and making sure that it’s clean.

“The second thing that comes out — if you do it clean and you do it proper — is that the taste profile is very, very good. So I think our repurchase rates are much higher than the industry standard. And that is very important when you get to sell the product because otherwise you’re just spending marketing money and you don’t get repeat purchases. So that’s a metric we focus on very strongly. And where I think we’re second to none.”

Just how lucrative is the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market? New data from Klarna and recent earnings results from Affirm make it clear that building a global business in the fintech space is far from inexpensive.

The two companies, Affirm American and Klarna Swedish, are among the most valuable players in the BNPL market today. Both recently reported financial results.

Today we’re looking at Affirm’s earnings for the second calendar quarter of 2022 and Klarna’s for the first half of the same year and asking ourselves what we can glean from each dataset. (And, listen, this is a bit of a slog. If you want to trust our math and skip the currency conversions, just scroll on down to the “Why does BNPL lose so much money?” section.)

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Keep in mind that Klarna was recently repriced all the way down to $6.7 billion in its latest funding round. Today before the opening bell, per Yahoo Finance, Affirm was worth $6.74 billion. The two companies temporarily sporting the same valuation means that we have a firmer foundation to compare them than we usually might. We’ll first talk about their results individually and then in contrast to one another and their shared value.

Editor’s note: Jenny Lefcourt is a TechCrunch Live guest on August 31, 2022 where, along with Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and co-founder of WELL Health, she’s scheduled to speak on the specific steps founders should follow when raising a Series A. The event records live and is available to watch at 12:00pm PDT. It’s free to attend. Register here. Replays will be available and posted here following the event.

Beginning with the first company I co-founded 25 years ago and continuing through the second company I co-founded 15 years ago, I raised over $100M from top-tier VCs. During that time, less capital was floating around, and those numbers were considered enormous. The bad news is that I over-capitalized my companies, but the good news is that the process taught me how VCs think and the best way to pitch them. Since 2014, I’ve been a seed-stage investor at Freestyle and had the opportunity to fine-tune this skill by working closely with founders in our portfolio on raising Series A rounds. The market is demanding right now – founders, I hope the following guide helps many of you fundraise in this challenging environment.

The key when raising is to understand what VCs are looking for in a founder and a business at each stage, and then you can make the call on the best way to pitch them in a way that feels right to you.

There’s a notable difference between raising Seed and Series A rounds: A Seed is often raised solely on a founder’s big vision, whereas a Series A typically needs a big vision and business traction, especially in the current market. Below are general best practices for pitching, followed by specific advice on structuring a Series A story arc.

Fundraising wisdom for any stage

• Mindset matters! Enter a meeting with the spirit of having an intellectual conversation about your business v being in hard-core “sell” mode. VCs prefer to work with founders who can discuss their business thoughtfully. Be curious, confident, and ready to debate–and, at all costs, resist being defensive. I discuss mindset more here, Learn to Love Fundraising.
• Trust is table stakes. If you don’t know the answer to a question, saying so gains respect and trust, while avoiding the question destroys it. One of the easiest ways to lose an investor’s interest in a first meeting is for the VC to feel like you aren’t being direct. There’s no expectation of you knowing all the answers–there is an expectation of telling it straight.
• VCs have short attention spans! You need to get them interested in the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting to earn their attention for the rest. See more below on “Section 1.”
• Goal of meeting #1 is to get meeting #2. Your goal is not to tell them everything or pre-emptively answer any question they may ask. So keep your story high level and interesting – do not data dump or mire them in the details too early.
• Tell a good story vs. “present slides”. This is why I recommend that founders spend time crafting their story arc, followed by creating the slides to support that story.
  Make your main points very clear and support those points with the data or color that helps them believe. Don’t make VCs listen to a lot of talk and inundate them with a lot of data in hopes that they connect the dots. Subtle does not win here.
• Prepare for questions. Have a hearty appendix that covers any question you may get or does a deeper dive into the business. VCs love it when they ask a question and the founder pulls up a slide that directly addresses it. The VCs get the information they are looking for, and you show them that you are just the kind of thoughtful founder with whom they like to work!
  Manage time. Know how much time you have and make sure to make your main key points. Don’t let it get to minute 30, and you’re still down a rabbit hole on a non-critical part of the business.

Series A Fundraising wisdom

When your first Series A pitch is over, ideally, the VC is excited about the opportunity, impressed with you, knows enough to believe you are on a promising path, and is still thinking about you and your business well after the meeting. Typically founders have 30 minutes (often over Zoom) to make this happen.

I recommend thinking about your pitch in three “Sections.”

SECTION 1: The goal is to earn the right to their attention for the rest of the meeting! It may include some/all of the following:

• Team
• Vision. The big vision of the company–NOT simply what you do today.
• Market. Educate VCs about your market, which includes market size and macro trends. VCs should understand that it is a big market and understand a reason for the “why now?” question.
• Problem/Opportunity. Make it clear who your customer is and what their problem is that you are solving. Sometimes it is less of a “problem” you are solving and more of a new opportunity that now exists, given the changes in the market.
• Solution for stated problem/opportunity (precisely what your company does!)
• Early sign of success. Have a visual here where you can imagine the title of this slide being “And it is Working!” This may be a graph of a key metric like revenue or users that goes up and to the right, lots of logos of companies that have already signed up, or other goodness. The goal here is to get them leaning in and excited to learn more.

After pitching this section, take a breath and check in with the investors. Ask: “Any questions? Does this sense?”

SECTION 2: The goal here is to educate them on how you have de-risked the business thus far and presented traction on product and growth. This section typically contains some or all of the following:

• Where you have started. Note: all startups have to start somewhere. You told them earlier what the big vision is. Now you want to tell them where you started (and maybe why) and how it is going. Just be careful not to get bogged down in too much detail.
• Your customers. Who they are and what your value proposition is for them.
• Go to Market. Explain how you target/acquire customers.
• Traction thus far. You want to be clear about the main levers/metrics that drive your business and share information on how those have evolved. You do not need to cover all metrics and details–you can cover that in the Appendix. Here is a laundry list of potential traction metrics: new customers/total customers, retention/churn, engagement, sales funnel conversion, sales pipeline, average sales price, revenue, gross margins, CAC payback, LTV:CAC ratio,…
• Unit Economics
• Product Love. Ideally, you share engagement stats or something that shows that people are not just buying/using your product but are loving it and finding it indispensable. Possibilities here include engagement stats, virality, spending more time or money with your business over time, putting more of their business on your platform, etc. A few testimonials alongside the data can also help.
• Any other slide that is CRITICAL to your company’s success.
• Competitive landscape. This is NOT a feature comparison but rather a market mapping to educate them on the players. Many use a 2×2 map to show who is in the market based on two attributes where your company sits alone in the top right quadrant. This may feel counter-intuitive, but you want big, important players on this map as you want your prize to be worth winning. Example from Scenery:

A screenshot from Scenery’s pitch deck

SECTION 3: The goal here is to tell a straightforward story of where you are headed from here and how the business becomes massive. This section typically contains some or all of the following:

• Product and/or strategic/geo rollout roadmap. Cover your plans and explain why you believe this is the best path forward
• 3-year financial projections (maybe here, maybe Appendix)
• Milestones you will hit with this round. Note: most VCs care less about how you will “spend” the capital than what you will achieve with the capital (note: use of proceeds can be a good Appendix slide.). VCs want your business to be more valuable by the time you raise your next round. Potential milestones could include revenue, number of users, product/technology developed, number of markets you will be in, and key partnerships,…

APPENDIX: The goal here is to address any question you may get asked or dive deeper into an aspect of your business. As you get more questions, add more appendix slides! I recommend pulling a specific slide up when asked for more information on a subject. Some potential appendix slides include:

• Sales productivity
• Sales pipeline
• Deeper dive into current customers
• Acquisition and payback period by channel
• Deeper breakdown of market
• Cohort analysis
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Sean Ellis test
• Product Roadmap
• Geography rollout plans
• Organization structure and team + key hires

Unquestionably, fundraising can be daunting and exhausting. However, I would encourage you to recognize some positive aspects of fundraising…the clarity you gain about your business as you prepare to pitch, the wisdom you will get from many of your meetings and something not discussed as much, the customers you can acquire when interested VCs introduce you to their portfolio companies. Lastly, remember, you only need one VC to say yes!

A couple of additional resources:

If you’ve yet to raise your Seed round, you may find this interesting to watch (especially for women founders). Jess Lee @ Sequoia and I dissected a VC pitch for Seed for All Raise’s first Female Founder Office Hours.

Top-tier pitch agency, 4th & King, and I did a session on Series A Fundraising with Freestyle portfolio founders, which you can watch here.

Today’s TechCrunch Live is all about raising a Series A. Jenny Lefcourt from Freestyle Partners and Guillaume de Zwirek CEO and co-founder of WELL Health are scheduled to speak on the specific steps founders should follow. I hope you can join us. Like every week, the event is free to attend.

We’re going to start the event talking about fundraising Well Health’s seed round, and hear the lessons Guillaume de Zwirek learned along the way. As you’ll hear from Lefourt and de Zwirek, there are notable differences between raising a Seed round and a Series A round. Investors look at different aspects of the company, and the founder must prepare for the fundraising differently. Rather than selling a story, they’re selling a company.

This is a serious topic for Jenny Lefcourt. To help even more founders, she’s prepared an extensive blog post to go along with her TechCrunch Live appearance that goes even deeper into raising a Series A. This post will be published alongside today’s event.

This TechCrunch Live event opens on August 31 at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT with networking. The interview begins at 12:00 p.m. PDT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PDT.

Apply for TCL Pitch Practice by completing this application.

If you haven’t joined us before on Grip — our TCL online platform — click here to register for free and gain access to all TechCrunch Live events, including TechCrunch Live, City Spotlight, Startup Pitch Practice, Networking and other TechCrunch community events, with just one registration.

Already part of the TechCrunch Live on Grip community? Click this link to add this session to your agenda!

TechCrunch Live records weekly on Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT. Join us!

Identity is a big part of any security strategy, helping control access to applications and services across a company. Sometimes that involves a person, and sometimes a machine, adding to the complexity and requiring a more automated approach to identity management. Zilla Security, a Boston-based startup, believes it has come up with a solution to meet these more modern identity requirements.

Today the company announced a $13.5 million Series A investment.

Company CEO and co-founder Deepak Taneja says his company believes that identity has become the foundational piece in any security stack, and he says that requires a new approach to protecting it.

“There’s been a bunch of companies over the last decade that are focused on authenticating identities and making sure that you’re establishing trust in the right identities,” Taneja told TechCrunch. “The next frontier is all about exactly what those trusted identities have access to. And that’s what Zillow focuses on. Whether those trusted identities are people, machines or API’s, we are ensuring that the right identities have the right access, which has become absolutely critical,” he said.

As he sees it, if you want to have a more granular approach to permissions, it requires moving beyond the directory approach, the traditional approach to managing identity. “We provide a comprehensive solution. So while on the one hand, the people in the business can look at their own applications, their own solutions, from an organizational security standpoint, folks can get a completely unified view of who has access to what across SaaS, across infrastructure, across on prem solutions, at a level of detail that is very granular.”

Image Credits: Zilla Security

He points out that this requires a level of automation and intelligence to pull off because there are so many configuration options, often based on the level of access. By automating all of that, the startup helps ensure that customers are safe before there is an issue, at least to the extent possible.

Taneja, who has been in the security business for over 30 years, launched the startup in 2019. The company took some time building the application and landed its first customer last April. Today, it has 60 customers using the solution.

He says that the product should play well, no matter what happens in the economy in the short term. “I think what plays in our favor is the fact that while we provide a security value, a governance value add, we also provide a compliance and operational efficiency value and so we’re saving companies money,” he said.

The company has 35 employees, and is currently hiring. He expects to double in size in the next year. Taneja says his experience as a leader helps when it comes to building a diverse workforce. “I’ve found in my career that the more diversity you can bring into the company the more ideas you get, the richer your journey is, and the better your solution is. So we have a very inclusive culture.” He said that part of that is driven by the fact the many employees are remote and he can hire from anywhere.

Today’s $13.5 million investment was led by Tola Capital and FirstMark Capital with help from Pillar VC.

The process of finding job candidates often entails a lot of tedious manual work for recruiters, like sending versions of the same email over and over again. That’s Kula was created. The platform not only automates tasks like sending introductory messages, but also surfaces promising leads from the first-degree connections of an organization’s existing employee base.

Kula announced today it has raised a $12 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital, with participation from returning investors Venture Highway and Together Fund.

The new funding comes less than six months after Kula’s pre-seed and brings its total raised to $15 million before its public launch. It will be used to expand its research and development, product and go-to-market teams in the United States, Singapore and India.

Kula co-founders Suman Kumar Dey, Achuthanand Ravi and Sathappan M

Before co-founding Kula, CEO Achuthanand Ravi worked as a recruiter at tech companies including Stripe, Uber and Freshworks. During that time, he saw marketing and sales teams get increasingly sophisticated tech tools, but the recruitment process still remained more or less the same.

Kula helps fix that by integrating with tools commonly used by recruiters, including LinkedIn, Github, Gmail and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and automating workflows. For example, it can send introductory messages to promising leads through emails, LinkedIn nudges and InMails. A feature called Kula’s Circle consolidates all employee networks into one dashboard, helping recruiters figure out potential candidate from the first-degree connections of all their employees. Kula also includes analytics that helps recruiters forecast and measure their talent pipeline more accurately.

Kula is currently pre-revenue with alpha customers, and monetizes by selling to businesses through it’s go-to-market strategy, which is mostly focused on the United States. In particular, it targets SMBs and mid-market organizations with less than 1,000 employees, which Ravi says are underserved.

Ravi identified Gem.com, HireEz and Beamery as Kula’s closest competitors. But Gem.com only offers automated reach-outs as a product, and has no feature for the referral workflow like Kula’s Circle. HireEZ’s only channel to reach out to a candidate is email, but Kula’s platform also automates InMails on LinkedIns, an important source of potential candidates. Beamery, meanwhile, only counts the outbound recruitment workflow as a small part of is platform, Ravi said.

In a statement, Square Peg Capital partner Piruze Sabuncu said, Recruitment is an absolute priority for companies across the spectrum of size, industry, and geography, and is still an underserved business function. Kula’s founding team brings an unmatched combination of substantial recruiting experience and distinguishing engineering talent – giving them the ability to understand the problem deeply and build a solution that scales with the organizations they serve.”

As the mechanical keyboard hobby exploded during the early days of the pandemic, a lot of companies raced to launch new products. Drop, however, which maybe did more than anybody to popularize custom mechanical keyboards by making them and lots of accessories available to a larger audience, mostly added third-party keyboards to its lineup during this time. Now, however, it is launching the Sense75, its first brand-new in-house keyboard in two years.

As the name implies, this is a 75% keyboard, meaning you get the full set of function and arrow keys, as well as three buttons on the right side (by default, these are delete, page up and page down) and, as has become standard these days, a knob. They’re are RGB LEDs, of course, including underside diffusers that will create what Drop calls a “visually appealing halo’ and, of course, hot-swap sockets so you can easily change out your switches. The keyboard will support customization through QMK and VIA to adapt it to your typing needs.

Image Credits: Drop

For the first time, Drop is also using the increasingly popular gasket-mount system for one of its in-house keyboards, which should result in enhanced sound and a bit more bounce in the typing experience.

“When we pursued developing a 75% mechanical keyboard, we were committed to designing a product with great attention to detail and premium materials that not only outperformed others in the market but also offers a typing and customization experience that our community would love,”said Drop CEO Jef Holove. “After an intensive design and development process, we are proud to introduce the Drop SENSE75 and we cannot wait for our community to try it out, as we could not have created it without them.”

You’ll be able to choose between a pre-built version with the company’s Holy Panda X switches, its new DCX keycaps and factory-tuned Phantom Stabilizers, or a barebones version that only includes the keyboard frame and PCB board. I would have loved to see more color options, but for now your choices are black (or, Nightfall, as Drop calls it) and e-white (Polar), with the white version commanding a $50 premium.

The pre-built version will set you back $349 for the black edition and $399 for the white one, while the barebones version will cost $249 in black and $299 in white. For now, though, you can only pre-order the pre-built version, with shipments arriving in November (a reasonable lead time in the mechanical keyboard world). The barebones version won’t be available until “a later date,” which will likely be a bit of a disappointment for many Drop fans who already have a set of favorite switches and keycaps.

It’s hard to judge a keyboard by looks alone (though I do like the minimalist style of these based on the image Drop has shared so far). We’ll have to see what they sound and feel like when they arrive in a few months. Drop did a nice job with its new keycaps, so I have high hopes for this new board, too. But the market at this price point is very competitive and the likes of Keychron, NovelKeys, KBDfans and plenty of others offer very competitive custom keyboards in this same price range. Keyboards fans are nothing if not persnickety, so there’s little room for error.

Hello friends, Alex here from the TechCrunch+ team. We’re having a sale, meaning that you can get access to TechCrunch+ for a tidy discount. If you are a regular TechCrunch reader, this is for you.

Snag our Labor Day discount for TechCrunch+ here!

What is TechCrunch+?

TechCrunch+ is the work on TechCrunch.com that sits behind the paywall. It’s a bit more analytical than our news-focused work that you have known for more than a decade now. TechCrunch+ is very much like TechCrunch, if longer-form and a bit more data-focused.

We do the odd sale at TechCrunch+, usually around a holiday. They are a good excuse to make a little fuss about the hard work of our reporters and edit staff, which means that today I get a chance to brag about the folks I am lucky enough to work with. Indulge me:

Dominic-Madori Davis wrote what I think is our best work on the Adam Neumann-Flow matter, and has led our coverage of Black founders in recent months as the venture capital market has evolved. And she’s looking around the United States’ less well-known venture capital markets, getting to the brass tacks with data and what’s changing this year.

Rebecca Szkutak has been more than busy since joining earlier this year. She’s digging into all things startups, from what’s going on with the Midwest and the fate of HR-focused startups to how first-time funding managers are faring in 2022 and why government funding may be an undertapped resource. (Oh, and she wrote about Israeli startups, as well as those in the U.S. Southeast.)

Tim De Chant brought an entirely new domain of expertise to TechCrunch+. As our leading climate writer, he is taking us through how the United States could become a battery powerhouse, why we need a climate change emoji, and where venture dollars are flowing when it comes to neo-energy sources. Tim is brilliant at explaining complex scientific concepts, which rules.

Jacqueline Melinek, who heads up our crypto-focused coverage on TechCrunch+, has been writing up a storm since coming aboard, including lots of work on the web3 regulatory environment, where all that blockchain fundraising went, and why folks from the Solana team to Anthony Hopkins are still into NFTs. (She’s also on the TechCrunch crypto podcast, Chain Reaction.)

Walter Thompson leads our external contributions work, bringing in voices from the technology community to discuss founder- and investor-related matters. The how-to stuff you see on TechCrunch+ comes from his hands, for which we are more than grateful. The goal of TechCrunch+ is to provide founders with the information they need to understand their market, and then act. Walter’s work forms the crux of the latter effort.

Anna Heim has been rocking lately as well, helping regularly write TechCrunch+’s daily markets-focused column and taking on its weekly newsletter. And, as the former owner of that particular bit of digital property, let me add “and improving it in the process” to that sentence. Anna also writes focused investor surveys, interviews VCs, and more.

TechCrunch+ is one part of the larger TechCrunch family, which means that our colleagues from the main site also contribute. We’re lucky to have words often from Ron Miller (enterprise, big data, M&A), Natasha Mascarenhas (fintech, edtech, early-stage startups), Mary Ann Azevedo (fintech, Texas, proptech), Anita Ramaswamy (the wild world of crypto), Kyle Wiggers (enterprise software and so much more), Haje Jan Kamps (pitch decks, venture capital how-tos) — the list goes on and on.

This is all to say that after years of work, TechCrunch+ is bigger, better, and I hope more informative and fun than ever before. We’re still expanding our output and our geographic footprint. More markets are coming, we promise.

That’s enough from me, I reckon. What are you waiting for: Snag the discount code! We’re cooking up a huge new batch of words for you as you read this, and you don’t wanna miss them!

Alex
TechCrunch+ Editor in Chief

P.S. Really, all the cool kids are\ TC+ members, so save a few bucks and join the fun here. 

The company behind last summer’s hot social app, Poparazzi, appears to be readying a round two following its $15 million Series A announced in June. A new listing in the App Store under the developer’s account, TTYL, is teasing a pre-release app called Made with Friends. The app offers a twist on Poparazzi’s original concept of social networking profiles crafted by a user’s friends, instead of by the users themselves, but adds support for other types of content.

Poparazzi had encouraged friends to post photos to each others’ social networking profiles as if they were their friends’ “paparazzi” — hence the name. Made with Friends, meanwhile, expands on that concept by asking users to post all sorts of things to their friends’ profiles — including text-based content like answers to questions or prompts, as well as photos and videos.

This Poparazzi spin-off seems partly inspired by today’s popular Q&A apps, like Sendit or NGL, which tie into other social networks, like Snapchat and Instagram. On those apps, users receive questions in an inbox that they can answer and share to their social profiles or Stories elsewhere. But in the case of Made with Friends, users aren’t posting questions anonymously, nor is the app itself delivering fake questions to create engagement as the anonymous Q&A apps had been doing (at least, until Apple’s App Review team caught on and requested changes to be made.)

However, based on some earlier screenshots of the new app, it does appear the Q&A responses in Made with Friends could be designed for social sharing to other platforms, like Instagram.

Image Credits: Made with Friends

TechCrunch reached out to the team behind Poparazzi to ask about its plans for the new app and whether or not this was an attempt to pivot into a new area. Our emails were not returned.

But according to data from Apptopia, the Made with Friends app was originally titled “Pop – Made with Friends,” and had described itself as a way you could “pop” someone by answering questions about them, tagging them on a prompt with a photo, video, GIF, quote or description. The updated version on the App Store today does away with the “pop” lingo and branding, but introduces the same concept of social profiles that are essentially made by friends.

It makes sense that Poparazzi’s team is beginning to test new options.

Despite Poparazzi’s early success, which led the app to top 5 million installs a year after its launch, it’s since lost ground to a new wave of social networking apps that are attracting a younger, Gen Z audience. Currently, this group is dominated by BeReal, which has been steadily holding onto its position as the No. 1 app on the U.S. iPhone App Store. In addition, younger audiences have also downloaded a range of other social apps in larger numbers than Poparazzi — like video networking app Yubo, which counted some 60 million sign-ups as of May, and homescreen social app Locket with around 20 million installs as of its $12.5 million seed funding announcement announced this month.

These trends could be driving TTYL to look for new twists on its friends-focused social networking concept.

This would not be the first time the team at TTYL experimented with a new social networking concept. Before delivering a hit with Poparazzi, the company had developed nearly a dozen other apps, including OMG, CampusFM, TYPO, Lynx, Yearbook 2020 as well as TTYL, the audio social network and Clubhouse rival the company’s name references.

As TTYL co-founder Alex Ma explained earlier this summer, most social networking apps fail and the best thing to do is to keep building and experimenting until one works. This multi-app business model has also been adopted by another consumer social app maker, 9count, which recently raised new funding as both Wink and its Gen Z dating app Summer took off.

We noticed TTYL has already begun to market the new app through TikTok influencers as there are posts that show Made with Friends in action, despite its pre-order status. One such video was also reposted to the new Made with Friends TikTok profile which teases the app as “coming soon.”

It’s not clear what this additional may mean for Poparazzi’s future, but it’s worth noting that TTYL’s flagship app has still not made its way to Android.

The App Store shows an expected release date of October 1, 2022 for Made with Friends, which is now available for pre-order.

More than three years in the making, the UK government today announced a new, sweeping set of rules it will be imposing on broadband and mobile carriers to tighten up their network security against cyber attacks — aimed at being “among the strongest in the world” when they are rolled out, said the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

The new requirements cover areas such as how (and from whom) providers can procure infrastructure and services; how providers police activity and access; the investments they make into their security and data protection and the monitoring of that; how providers inform stakeholders of resulting data breaches or network outages; and more. The rules will start to get introduced in October, with carriers expected to fully implement new procedures by March 2024.

Critically, those who fail to comply with the new regulations will face big fines: non-compliance can result in up to 10% of annual revenues; continuing contraventions will see fines of £100,000 ($117,000) per day. Communications regulator Ofcom, which worked with the National Cyber Security Centre to formulate the new regulations and code of practice, will enforce compliance and fines.

The rules are the first big enforcement directives to come out of the Telecommunications (Security) Act, which was voted into law in November 2021. 

“We know how damaging cyber attacks on critical infrastructure can be, and our broadband and mobile networks are central to our way of life,” Digital Infrastructure Minister Matt Warman said in a statement. “We are ramping up protections for these vital networks by introducing one of the world’s toughest telecoms security regimes which secure our communications against current and future threats.”

The emergence of the new security laws and enforcement process comes at a crossroads.

On one hand, as security breaches continue to grow in scope and frequency, one of the most significant battlegrounds that has emerged in the fight against cybercrime has been  network infrastructure — the mobile and broadband rails that all of our apps and device need to function. For the most part broadband and mobile providers have set their own standards and processes, although the government today pointed out that a Telecoms Supply Chain Review that it carried out “found providers often have little incentive to adopt the best security practices.”

On the other, there have been a number of breaches over the years that point not just to the sitting duck that is network infrastructure, but the failure to protect it. These have included incidents that threaten to reveal carriers’ source code; exposure of lax security policies to gain network access; and creating targets out of their customers by not being stronger on security. The state of play was particularly laid bare a few years ago as 5G networks were starting to take shape, when there were question marks over not just how those networks would be secured, but whether the very equipment that was being procured — Chinese vendors being a key issue at the time that the legislation was first taking shape — was safe.

The aim of the new rules is meant to be all-encompassing, covering not just how networks are being built and run, but the services that run on them.

As the government lays out, they “protect data processed by their networks and services, and secure the critical functions which allow them to be operated and managed; protect software and equipment which monitor and analyze their networks and services; [require providers to] have a deep understanding of their security risks and the ability to identify when anomalous activity is taking place with regular reporting to internal boards; and take account of supply chain risks, and understand and control who has the ability to access and make changes to the operation of their networks and services to enhance security.”

Notably the new laws do not lay out any specific names of companies, nor of countries, which gives the government license to change course, but might be seen as a way to further politicize the process.

“We increasingly rely on our telecoms networks for our daily lives, our economy and the essential services we all use,” said NCSC Technical Director Dr Ian Levy in a statement. “These new regulations will ensure that the security and resilience of those networks, and the equipment that underpins them, is appropriate for the future.”

Pakistani fintech PostEx has acquired logistics service provider Call Courier, creating what it describes as the largest e-commerce service provider in the country. PostEx will now serve 1.3 million users with over 8,000 merchants across 500 cities in Pakistan, and is on track to having a loan book of more than $12 million.

The acquisition means that Call Courier will become a wholly-owned subsidiary under the group name. PostEx provides services like upfront payments in a country where more than 90% of e-commerce payments are still completed in cash, and revenue-based financing for e-commerce sellers and SMEs.

PostEx co-founder and CEO Omer Khan told TechCrunch that according to the World Bank, about 100 million adults in Pakistan don’t have a bank account. As a result, businesses have limited access to working capital and lack adequate cash flow. On the other hand, consumers are wary of digital transactions, and even many who have bank accounts still prefer to pay cash on delivery for items ordered online.

But cash on delivery is problematic for e-commerce businesses because they have a higher rejection rate at the door. Furthermore, funds from cash on delivery purchases often take up to two to three weeks to be deposited into a business’ banking account, compared to a few days for digital payments.

As a result, PostEx’s founding team decided there was potential to build a reliable logistics service provider, plus upfront cash. Upfront payments mean that online vendors no longer have to wait through long payment cycles, and have better cash flow.

“We’re out there making it simpler for businesses to reach out to more customers, take care of their delivery needs and provide them with upfront liquidity,” said Khan. “This is essential for smaller businesses that need every penny to sustain themselves.”

In terms of competition, Khan says PostEx’s novelty factor is its hybrid of fintech and logistics. It has raised $8.6 million to date, and its backers include Zayn Capital, Global Founder Capital, MSA Capital, RTP, FJ Labs and Shorooq.

In a statement, Senator Afnan Ullah Khan, a member of the Prime Minister’s IT Task Force Committee said, “This acquisition shows the importance of close collaboration between fintech and logistics highlighting the importance of access to capital. This acquisition makes PostEx the largest e-commerce service provider in the market, showing the potential of startups for challenging incumbents. It’s refreshing to see new solutions to old problems.”