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ClassPass works up $85 million Series D funding Jul 26, 2018

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ClassPass today announced the close of an $85 million Series D financing round led by Temasek, the same firm that led the startup’s Series C financing. L Catterton, a private equity firm that has also invested in the likes of Peloton, Equinox, and Pure Barre, also participated in the round. As part of the deal, L Catterton’s Michael Farello will join the ClassPass board.

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HoneyLove looks to reinvent shapewear Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

Betsie Larkin spent the first ten years of her professional career as an EDM artist. She released two solo albums, toured five continents and worked with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten. But after being constantly frustrated by shapewear she wore under her stage outfits, she felt compelled to try her hand at a new industry. That’s how HoneyLove was born.

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YC-backed Send Reality makes 3D virtual walkthroughs for residential listings Jul 25, 2018

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The fields of computer vision and VR are difficult. But a new company, Send Reality, is entering the race. The Y Combinator-backed company is looking to offer full 3D-modeling for virtual walkthroughs of real estate listings. Founder and CEO Andrew Chen said he was the kid back in middle school and high school that spent hours walking around the streets of Paris, NYC and SF on Google Streetview.

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Doughbies’ cookie crumbles in a cautionary tale of venture scale Jul 24, 2018

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Doughbies should have been a bakery, not a venture-backed startup. Founded in the frothy days of 2013 and funded with $670,000 by investors including 500 Startups, Doughbies built a same-day cookie delivery service. But it was never destined to be capable of delivering the returns required by the VC model that depends on massive successes to cover the majority of bets that fail. The startup became the butt of jokes about how anything could get funding.

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While tech waffles on going public, biotech IPOs boom Jul 24, 2018

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For people who make investment decisions based on revenues and projected earnings, biotech IPOs are kind of a non-starter. Not only are new market entrants universally unprofitable, most have zero revenue. Going public is mostly a means to raise money for clinical trials, with red ink expected for years to come. That pattern may be one reason the venture capital press,Crunchbase Newsincluded, tends to devote a disproportionately small portion of coverage to biotech IPOs.

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What should competitive Fortnite look like? Jul 23, 2018

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Last weekend, Epic Games put forth its first true effort at official competitive Fortnite Battle Royale. It was a disaster. The private hosts used for the tournament were about as laggy as could be, with pro players getting eliminated simply because they couldn’t move. This tournament was for a total prize of $250K. That’s big money, and big frustration for pro players who were essentially eliminated by the whims of the server gods.

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Even raises $40m to transform the working class to the savings class Jul 23, 2018

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The working class of the United States doesn’t get many breaks these days. It’s not just a function of low pay and long hours, but also the incredible uncertainty of income and expenses that makes surviving week-to-week so challenging. One in five Americans have a negative net wealth, even in an economy where the unemployment rate is the lowest in almost two decades.

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Sinemia drops prices for its movie ticket subscriptions, which now start a $3.99 per month Jul 20, 2018

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Sinemia drops prices for its movie ticket subscriptions, which now start a $3.99 per month MoviePass competitor Sinemia is lowering prices on the already low-cost movie ticket subscription plans that it introduced earlier this year. Its monthly prices are being cut by $1 across-the-board. The cheapest plan now costs $3.99 per month, which gets you one standard movie ticket for that month. The priciest one, which covers three tickets (and includes 3D, 4D and IMAX screens), now costs $13.99 per month.

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PureSec exits stealth to secure serverless code Jul 20, 2018

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PureSec, a startup out of Israel emerged from stealth today to provide a way to make serverless computing more secure. Serverless computing reduces programming to writing functions, so that when a certain event happens, it triggers an automated action. The cloud vendor takes care of the underlying infrastructure and developers just write the code. It may sound like Shangri La for tech, but in reality there are still security concerns.

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Y Combinator to give $10K to 100 grads of its online Startup School Jul 19, 2018

Show notes

Y Combinator wants to lure more companies into the funnel for its accelerator whiledemocratizing free access to startup knowledge. It’s simultaneously moving up and down market to conquer the acceleration space, with both its recent Series A program for more mature startups, and $1 million in grants for high potential founders extra-early stage online course.

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