Berbix raises $9M for its identity verification platform

Berbix, an ID verification startup that was founded by former members of the Airbnb Trust and Safety team, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Mayfield. Existing investors, including Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Fika Ventures, also participated in this round.

Founded in 2018, Berbix helps companies verify the identity of its users, with an emphasis on the cannabis industry, but it’s clearly not limited to this use case. Integrating the service to help online services scan and validate IDs only takes a few lines of code. In that respect, it’s not that different from payment services like Stripe, for example. Pricing starts at $99 per month with 100 included ID checks. Developers can choose a standard ID check (for $0.99 per check after the basic allotment runs out), as well as additional selfie and optional liveness checks, which ask users to show an emotion or move their head to ensure somebody isn’t simply trying to trick the system with a photo.

While ID verification may not be the first thing you think about in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is actually seeing increasing demand for its solution now that in-person ID verification has become much harder. Berbix CEO and co-founder Steve Kirkham notes that the company now processes the same number of verifications in a day that it used to do monthly only a year ago.

“The inability to conduct traditional identity checks in person has forced organizations to move online for innumerable use cases,” he says in today’s announcement. “One example is the Family Independence Initiative, a nonprofit that trusts and invests in families’ own efforts to escape poverty. Our software has enabled them to eliminate fraudulent applications and focus on the families who have been economically affected by COVID.”

Berbix co-founder Eric Levine tells me the company plans to use the new funding to expand its team, especially the product and sales department. He also noted that the team is investing heavily in localization, as well as the technical foundation of the service. In addition, it’s obviously also investing in new technologies to detect new types of fraud. Scammers never sleep, after all.

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Fondeadora is a Mexican challenger bank that just raised $14 million

Meet Fondeadora, a fintech startup based in Mexico City that wants to build a full-stack neobank. The company just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Founded in 2018, the company already manages 150,000 accounts and is adding $20 million in deposits every month.

Mexico represents a massive opportunity for a challenger bank as many people still rely on cash for most of their transactions. Given that all countries are progressively switching to card and digital payments, it seems like the right time to launch Fondeadora.

Y Combinator, Scott Belsky, Sound Ventures, Fintech Collective and Ignia are also participating in the funding round.

“We launched the first crowdfunding platform in Mexico about 10 years ago,” co-founder and co-CEO Norman Müller told me. “About 50% of card transactions failed in the system.”

That platform was also called Fondeadora. After a deal with Kickstarter, Müller and Fondeadora co-founder René Serrano went back to the drawing board and thought about the problems they had while operating the crowdfunding platform. It became Fondeadora as we know it today, a challenger bank that wants to improve the banking experience in Mexico.

The team traveled across Mexico to find a bank charter that they could use. “We acquired the charter, it was owned by a group of tomato farmers in Mexico. Twenty years ago, the government gave about 10 charters to create financial inclusion,” Müller told me.

The company launched its banking service after that. You can open an account without visiting a branch. You then receive a Mastercard debit card. You can choose to receive notifications after each purchase, lock and unlock your card, send instant transfers to other users and more. There are no monthly subscription fee and no foreign transaction fee.

Up next, Fondeadora wants to democratize savings accounts. “Cash has a great UX and UI. You can touch it, you can store it in your drawer. But as a medium to generate income, it’s terrible,” Müller told me.

In the coming months, you’ll earn interest on your deposits in your Fondeadora account. “We’re investing in government bonds, it’s a very secure type of instruments. In Mexico, you can get 5% or 6% interest rate,” Müller said. The startup could allocate a small portion of deposits to medium-risk investments as well.

Image credits: Fondeadora

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After early-COVID layoffs, Hipcamp is buying competition, hiring

When shelter-in-place was first announced in the United States, most companies in the travel space saw bookings drop. Some shuttered. Hipcamp, a San Francisco-based startup that provides private land for people who want to go glamping or camping, found itself in a similar spot (even though its entire sell is about getting you away from crowds).

“Bookings took a precipitous drop as people sheltered-in-place, and we actually encouraged people to cancel,” founder Alyssa Ravasio said in an interview. The startup conducted a round of layoffs back in April, citing “economic uncertainties.” One employee tells TechCrunch that 60% of the company was laid off in two weeks. Hipcamp did not comment directly on the number of layoffs, other than to say the percentage of laid off employees is significantly lower than the 60% report.

Months later, Hipcamp is in a far better spot. When stay-at-home orders lifted, bookings spiked with people eager to get outside, which the CDC says is a safer activity than being inside a place with less ventilation. Ravasio says that Hipcamp has even brought back some employees it originally laid off. The startup is currently hiring.

Off this new momentum, Hipcamp today announced that it has acquired Australia-based landsharing startup Youcamp, marking its first expansion into an international market. With the new business, Hipcamp will acquire Youcamp’s existing 50,000 listings, bringing its total to 420,000 listings.

Hipcamp declined to disclose the financials of the deal at this time.

Youcamp, founded by James Woodford, was born in New South Wales in 2013. Similar to Hipcamp, Youcamp worked to draw urban-based adults to the great outdoors. For its seven years as an independent company, Youcamp racked up listings by working directly with private landowners.

Ravasio says she made her first big international bet in Australia partly because of revenue predictability.

“Expanding to the Southern Hemisphere also helps us account for natural seasonality with outdoor recreation. Between the U.S. and Australia, it’s an endless summer,” the founder said.

The entire team at Youcamp will join Hipcamp, adding five to Hipcamp’s staff, bringing its employee base to a total of 35.

Along with the acquisition announcement, Hipcamp shared that it is officially launching in Canada. The startup already had a number of Canadian hosts, but it will now increase the total by partnering directly with private landowners.

The company declined to share profitability or growth statistics, instead pointing to aggregate usage numbers as some sort of cumulative revenue parallel. To date, Hipcamp has helped people spend 2.5 million nights outside across 6,000 hosts in the United States, Australia and Canada.

In July 2019, Hipcamp got a tranche of new capital from investors, including but not limited to Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Slow Ventures, Marcy Ventures (co-founded by Shawn Carter, or Jay-Z) and Dreamers Fund (co-founded by Will Smith). The round valued the startup at $127 million.

Hipcamp, which has been dubbed by The New Yorker the “Airbnb of the outdoors,” is more optimistic than it was in March, as shown by this appetite for acquisition. The progress mirrors what we’re seeing out of the actual Airbnb, which has found bookings increasing year over year as people look to stay at properties for local holidays.

Oyo layoffs, Airbnb’s delayed IPO and the long-term quandary of investing in travel startups

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Register for our last pitch-off next week on September 2

It’s time again to start warming up your pitching arm. Our next Pitchers & Pitches session takes place next week on September 2. Register today!

Pitchers & Pitches sessions combine critique and competition with a focus on helping early-stage startup founders create an iron-clad, 60-second pitch. Here’s how it works. Everyone is welcome to attend, but only founders exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020 will be invited to pitch.

We’ll feature five startups from Digital Startup Alley to present their best, rapid-fire pitch to a panel of experts. Previous P&P judges have featured leading VCs including Monique Idlett, Jess Morris Jr., Sydney Thomas and Curtis Rodgers. Who better than top VCs to provide constructive feedback on your pitch? They’ll help you cut to the chase and present the essential information in the best possible light.

The viewing audience will choose which of the five startups presented the best pitch, and that lucky team will win a consulting session with cela, a company that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help scale their businesses.

Listen to what the winner of our first Pitchers and Pitches session, Hannah Webb, CEO of Findster Technologies, says about her experience.

“Disrupt and Digital Start Up Alley haven’t even officially started yet, and we’ve already seen great benefits. Cela introduced us to multiple accelerators in the NYC area and one is a perfect fit for our company’s situation.”

Even if you don’t get to pitch, you still get to benefit. Take that top VC advice and apply it to your own business to make your pitch a more effective tool. You need a pitch that impresses, that opens doors and starts conversations. This is a rare opportunity to get advice from the very people you want to attract.

Here are even more reasons to attend Pitchers & Pitches.

• Get familiar with the new virtual Disrupt platform before it goes live in September
• Watch and interact with the pitch-off event on the virtual main stage
• Meet and video network with other attendees
• Connect with the five pitchers in their virtual booth in the startup expo

The next Pitchers & Pitches takes place next week on September 2 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET – Register to see all of the action today. And while you’re at it get your Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package.so you can start to reap all of the benefits of Disrupt 2020 right away! Get warmed up and ready to throw the first pitch!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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What can growth marketers learn from lean product development?

Andrea Fryrear Contributor

Andrea Fryrear is co-founder of AgileSherpas, a leading authority on optimizing customer acquisition and retention processes, the author of two books on organizational agility and an international speaker and trainer.

Old-school approaches to marketing were often described as “spray and pray.” Marketers would launch a massive campaign in as many places as possible and hope that something worked.

More customers would show up, so it would appear that something had in fact worked.

But nobody could be sure exactly what that something was.

When we can’t predict what will have an impact, we need campaigns that cover all the bases, and those campaigns are consequently huge. They take a long time to create, are expensive to launch and come chock full of risk.

If a spray-and-pray campaign is a total failure (and we don’t have to go far to find examples of those), it’s quite possible an entire year’s worth of marketing budget has just been wasted.

Instead, marketers need to take a page from lean product development and begin creating Minimum Viable Campaigns (MVCs). Rather than wait until a massive multichannel launch is perfect, we can incrementally release a series of smaller, targeted, data-driven campaigns.

Over time these MVCs coalesce to look and act much like a Big Bang-style campaign from the spray-and-pray days, but they’ve done so in a much more data-driven and less risky way.

What exactly is an MVC?

Just as with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it can be easy to misunderstand the real definition of an MVC. It’s not something thrown together with no regard for brand standards or strategic goals, and it’s not a blind guess.

Instead, a good MVC represents the smallest amount of well-designed work that could still achieve some of the campaign’s goals. Before we have any chance of figuring out what that looks like, we need to know the ultimate goal of the bigger campaign or initiative. If we don’t know this, we can’t possibly measure the effectiveness of the MVC.

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Walmart expresses interest in TikTok, teaming up with Microsoft

{rss:content:encoded} Walmart expresses interest in TikTok, teaming up with Microsoft https://ift.tt/32AuNts https://ift.tt/2YBjQGY August 27, 2020 at 06:48PM

There’s been a flurry of TikTok news today, and the flood doesn’t seem to be letting up.

First was the announcement that Kevin Mayer, who joined the company just a bit more than three months ago, has stepped down overnight.

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer resigns after 100 days

Now, we are receiving a bunch of deal-related news as well. Walmart has confirmed to multiple news outlets that it has expressed interest in teaming up with Microsoft in a bid for the fast-growing social app. Meanwhile, entertainment news site The Wrap reported that Oracle has placed a bid for the company, targeting a price around $20 billion.

This is a fast-developing story, and we will have more updates to come as we receive them.

TikTok has been heavily in the news since the Trump Administration threatened to ban TikTok from the U.S. market unless it sold its U.S. operations to an American company. On August 6, President Trump signed an executive order that gave TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance 45 days to make a deal to divest the U.S. operations of its popular video-sharing app. The deadline was later extended until mid-November.

The order arrived at a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China, which are battling across a number of fronts outside of tech. Relations have deteriorated over issues like China’s move to assert more authority over Hong Kong with its new national security law, the detention of one million or more ethnic Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, trade tariffs, Beijing’s military buildup in the disputed South China Sea, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tech companies were pulled into this conflict between the two superpowers. Ahead of the proposed TikTok ban, the U.S. government also had tightened its restrictions on China’s Huawei Technologies in recent weeks.

After Trump’s signing of the executive order, TikTok immediately fought back, most recently in the form of a lawsuit against the U.S. government that challenged the legality of the TikTok ban. In the interim, several U.S. tech companies’ names emerged as having had discussions with TikTok about a deal, including Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Oracle, and even Walmart. Oracle on Thursday morning was said to be nearing a deal with the White House that would comprise $10 billion of cash, $10 billion in Oracle stock, and 50% of annual TikTok profit to flow back to ByteDance.

The actual risk presented by the TikTok app has remained in dispute. Trump’s executive order declared the social app, and other apps owned by Chinese companies that have entered the U.S., a threat to “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” The concern is that the app could collect data on U.S. citizens, including location, browsing and search histories. Critics believe TikTok could serve as a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda and censorship arm, as well.

The TikTok app itself has become hugely popular in the U.S in recent years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even declared TikTok’s existence one of the reasons why Facebook shouldn’t be considered a monopoly, in his testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in July.

According to data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, TikTok has been download nearly 194 million times in the U.S., which is 8.2% of TikTok’s total downloads, including its Chinese version, Douyin. The U.S. also accounted for nearly $111 million, or 13% of TikTok’s total ~$840 million in revenue.

Mobile data and analytics firm App Annie said TikTok had 52 million weekly active users in the U.S. during the week of August 9-15, 2020, and this number continues to climb. Its weekly active user count in July (July 15-25) was up 75% from just the beginning of 2020, in fact. It also became the top grossing app on the iOS App Store globally in the second quarter, due to increased consumer usage of mobile apps during the pandemic. It consistently ranks in the top five for downloads across both the U.S. iOS App Store and Google Play.

Time spent in the app has grown as well, from 5 hours, 4 minutes per month as of August 2018 to 16 hours, 20 minutes per month as of December 2019.

Despite all that success though, TikTok’s next steps remain hazy. It needs to fight its lawsuit, net approval from U.S. regulatory agencies, and also continue to build trust with users in the throes of an acrimonious election season. We’ll have more developments as this story unfolds.

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Beat the clock: Get your group discount passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

The expression “it takes a village” easily applies to building a successful mobility startup, especially in uncertain and tumultuous times. It also takes opportunities, and you’ll find plenty of those at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 (Oct. 6-7). Even better — you can bring your entire village, increase your opportunity potential and save money with our group discount. Win-win-ka-ching!

When you book four or more tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility, you’ll trim $25 off the price of each pass — but only if you buy them before the deadline: Sept. 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Prices go up September 5.

The two-day conference focuses on every aspect of mobility and transportation — autonomy, micro-mobility, AI-based mobility applications, investment, regulatory issues, battery technology and more. Learn from the leading experts about the current state of the industry and what trends — and which players — will shape its future.

You and your village can divide and conquer — gather the latest intel, network to build essential connections and engage in the kinds of conversations that lead to lasting partnerships. What you learn can shift the way you think about your goals. Here’s what two team members from FlashParking had to say about their experience.

“We left TC Sessions: Mobility with a good vision of how the space will evolve over the next three to five years. It will help us position our company and understand how to think about strategy and partnerships going forward.” — Jeff Johnson, vice president of enterprise sales and solutions at FlashParking.

“TC Sessions: Mobility isn’t just an educational opportunity, it’s a real networking opportunity. Everyone was passionate and open to creating pilot programs or other partnerships. That was the most exciting part. And now — thanks to a conference connection — we’re talking with Goodyear’s Innovation Lab.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

CrunchMatch — our free business matchmaking platform — makes networking in a virtual venue easier. Answer a few quick questions, and the AI-powered tool helps you find, connect and schedule 1:1 video calls with the kinds of people you need to grow your business. Looking for investors? Check. Need a developer? Can do. Want to add new startups to you portfolio? CrunchMatch covers all the bases.

We haven’t touched on the great speakers we have on tap or explored the TC Sessions Mobility 2020 agenda. Peruse it at your leisure, but don’t dawdle. Buy your group discount passes by September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT) and save. Opportunity calls, and it’ll take a village to take advantage of all of them.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Alexa von Tobel: Eliminating risk is the key to building a startup during an economic downturn

Launching a company, even in the best of times, is one of the most challenging exercises a person can go through. In an economic recession, it can seem downright impossible. But founders across the country, and indeed across the globe, are in the midst of that process as I write.

They aren’t the first. Alexa von Tobel, founder of LearnVest and founding partner at Inspired Capital, publicly launched her fintech startup in 2009, and founded it in May of 2007. In that span of time, Lehman Brothers went under — in December of 2008.

The company was launched in the midst of the worst economic downturn in at least three generations (current circumstances notwithstanding). We briefly chatted with von Tobel about this in a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, but the topic deserved much more exploration. Von Tobel was gracious enough to talk to us again, and gave us her advice and insights on what it means, and what it takes, to launch a business in the midst of economic uncertainty.

Write it down

Von Tobel says that one of the most important exercises in forming LearnVest — a company that was acquired for $375 million by Northwestern Mutual — was writing out a business plan. It was 75 pages, and by no means a formal document. Rather, the LearnVest business plan was a brain dump of everything von Tobel could possibly think of as it relates to her idea.

“It was nothing beautiful and by no means a work of art,” said von Tobel. “But it was valuable to put it together and walk through this blueprint of all the big questions, all the concerns. How would the customer feel? How big was the market? What was the competition? I even drew up a product plan of how I would roll it out. It was a budget, looking at how much money we think we need to get up and running.”

This business plan also included the areas in which von Tobel felt she was not an expert. She wanted a clear expression of her own strengths and weaknesses built into the business from its very inception.

von Tobel had never written a formal business plan before. She had taken a few business classes at Harvard Business School, but didn’t see the exercise as preparation for publication, but rather her own personal space to develop a product and business.

“It was a macro, more thoughtful plan that allowed me to understand where things were positioned,” said von Tobel. “Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You don’t have to be perfect, but you have to do enough that you have a really clear sense of the picture and a really clear sense of the cracks.”

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Passion Capital has backed Fronted, the startup that wants to offer loans to cover rent deposits

Fronted, the new London-based startup aiming to make life easier for renters, including lending the cash needed for a deposit, has picked up seed investment from Passion Capital. The investment showed up in a recent regulatory filing for the company.

The exact cheque size isn’t yet disclosed, but what we do know is that Passion Capital partner Eileen Burbidge has joined Fronted’s board. That’s unsurprising, given that Fronted co-founder Simon Vans-Colina was an early and important employee of Monzo, the challenger bank that counts Passion Capital and Burbidge as original backers.

Confirming Passion Capital’s investment, Fronted co-founder and CEO Jamie Campbell gave TechCrunch the following statement:

“Like a lot of businesses we have been finding our feet in post-pandemic world, we are grateful to have supporting investors like Passion Capital who have supported us from the very beginning and who believe in our vision to help renters move.”

The company, founded late last year by Campbell, Vans-Colina and Anthony Mann — former employees at Bud, Monzo and Apple, respectively — is planning to launch later this year with a fintech product to help renters finance their rental deposits.

The nascent company is currently in the FCA “sandbox” program (run by the U.K. financial services regulator) to begin lending cash that can only be used for a rental deposit.

By using open banking and other financial technology, and offering a credit product designed to finance deposits directly, Fronted believes it can lend more cheaply than existing options — such as credit cards, pay-day lenders and overdrafts, or insurance-backed membership schemes — and at lower risk.

Late last year, Campbell and Vans-Colina explained that renters that apply to use the Fronted service will be asked to link their bank using open banking, therefore sharing their recent transaction data, and provide details of the property they wish to rent. Then, once Fronted has run the required checks and agreed to provide credit, the startup will send the money directly to the estate agent to be placed in the U.K.’s Deposit Protection Scheme, meaning that the loan never touches the renter’s hands (or wallet).

Renters will then pay back the loan over a set schedule, or they can pay it off entirely when they have the money to do so. There is also a planned “holiday mode” that will allow borrowers to temporarily reduce their monthly payments in order to help avoid falling into financial difficulty.

Fronted paused operations as the coronavirus pandemic took hold and at the height of uncertainty, but with the initial product built and money in the bank, a launch doesn’t look too far off.

“We are in the final stage [of regulatory approval] and once we are authorised we can launch,” adds Campbell.

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Delivery Hero picks up InstaShop in $360M deal to expand in groceries in the Middle East

Grocery delivery has emerged as one of the hottest categories in e-commerce in the last six months, partly due to the coronavirus pandemic, where stay-at-home orders plus a general reluctance to avoid crowded places have led many more consumers to shopping online. Today, one of the big players in on-demand restaurant delivery is picking up a grocery delivery business both to meet that demand and continue diversifying its business.

Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based restaurant delivery company that operates mainly in emerging markets, has acquired InstaShop, a Dubai-based grocery delivery platform with around 500,000 users in five markets, where people can order food and other home supplies, pharmacy items, flowers and other items.

Delivery Hero said the acquisition values the company at $360 million, $270 million upfront plus an additional $90 million based on InstaShop meeting certain growth targets. It currently operates in five markets: United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain and Greece, the home country of the founders, Ioanna Angelidaki and John Tsioris. It’s a great return for investors: the five year-old startup had raised just $7 million before being acquired.

Both Delivery Hero and InstaShop are already profitable. The bigger of the two today posted half-year results that noted revenues were up 93.7% on a year-on-year basis to €1,126.8 million ($1.3 billion) in the period, although gross profit declined slightly given the impact of lockdowns and curfews, it said, posting gross profit of €167.2 million versus €168.3 million a year ago.

The plan is for InstaShop to stay as an independent brand under its current leadership team, both to expand in MENA, but also to look at how to apply its model to other markets.

This puts it (and now Delivery Hero) a significant step ahead of U.S. companies like Instacart, which was one of the pioneers and most popular purveyors of the grocery-on-demand model in the U.S. but hasn’t really exported its service outside of North America.

InstaShop’s basic business model is very similar to Instacart’s: its focus is on providing a two-sided marketplace not just to consumers but to retailers, which might not have their own delivery services, or want to use InstaShop to expand the number of deliveries they can make, or to reach a different audience.

DeliveryHero — which is now traded publicly in Germany with a market cap of nearly €19 billion ($22 billion) — is already running grocery delivery services across most of its operations in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Middle East/Africa, its founder and CEO Niklas Ostberg told TechCrunch.

“The largest part is Latin America and MENA but Asia catching up quickly. Today we cover 22,000 vendors in our quick commerce area,” he said. “InstaShop is unique in their customer experience. We looked into 100+ grocery players last year and InstaShop is a magnitude better than anything we have seen. This is one reason why they can grow incredibly fast while still being profitable. Together with Delivery Hero they can further improve their customer experience by offering faster delivery and more shops.”

If you count that they are from Greece, this is one of the largest exits for a Greek-founded company.

“The partnership with Delivery Hero is a great opportunity for us to continue to grow our business and put the group’s expertise to use,” said Tsioris, the CEO. “I really enjoyed working with Delivery Hero on this deal and am thrilled to continue to further expand the reach and quality of our service at InstaShop. Delivery Hero is a network driven by ambitious founders and entrepreneurs just like ourselves, and we are proud to become part of this family.”

The transaction is said to set a record value for a Greek startup and is one of the largest recent exits in the MENA region more generally. The previous largest Greek deal was Microsoft’s acquisition of Softomotive for around $150 million. Prior to this, other notable Greek exits include Samsung’s purchase of Innoetics and Daimler buying TaxiBeat — both for less than $50 million each.

InstaShop was initially backed in 2015 by VentureFriends, a European early-stage investor from Greece, and Jabbar, an investor in the MENA region. Notably, VentureFriends’ founding partner Apostolos Apostolakis co-founded e-food, a food delivery marketplace also acquired by Delivery Hero, in 2015.

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Facebook removes ‘Kenosha Guard’ militia account after shooter kills two at protest

Facebook has removed a local self-declared militia’s page and a related event following the events that unfolded last night in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Two people were killed and another was wounded when a man believed to be 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly began firing on a group protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot in the back while walking away from officers and approaching his car. Rittenhouse was arrested Wednesday in Antioch, Illinois and charged with first-degree intentional homicide.

A series of videos from the night depict law enforcement officers at the protest having friendly conversations with a group of men carrying guns, even offering them bottled water and expressing appreciation for their presence. Rittenhouse appears to have been among the armed group at the protest who said they were attending to protect property. How the armed counter-demonstrators organized their presence and what groups they are affiliated with has not yet been reported.

Prior to the night’s events, a Facebook account called Kenosha Guard published an event to gather “armed citizens to protect our lives and property.” According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a post by the now-removed account attempted to rally “patriots willing to take up arms and defend [our] City tonight from the evil thugs.”

Two different Facebook users reported the Kenosha Guard account last night before the shooting took place, but in both cases Facebook determined the event and account were not in violation of its policies, The Verge reported.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Facebook said that it removed the group, the event page and the suspected shooter’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram. The company did not find a connection between Rittenhouse’s own account and the Kenosha Guard page.

“At this time, we have not found evidence on Facebook that suggests the shooter followed the Kenosha Guard Page or that he was invited on the Event Page they organized,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

“However, the Kenosha Guard Page and their Event Page violated our new policy addressing militia organizations and have been removed on that basis.”

Facebook is currently monitoring its platform for content praising the shooting and plans to remove anything that meets its threshold for inciting serious violence.

Facebook bans ‘violent network’ of far-right boogaloo accounts

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook removes ‘Kenosha Guard’ militia account after shooter kills two at protest Taylor Hatmaker https://ift.tt/2ExtUKd
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Here’s how you can get a second shot at Startup Battlefield

We’re big believers in second chances here at TechCrunch, and that’s great news for early-stage founders who didn’t apply to compete in the Startup Battlefield during Disrupt 2020 (September 14-18). Your second chance comes in the form of two Wild Card entries to the world’s most legendary startup competition.

Want a shot to head-to-head with some of the best new startups from around the world? Go buy a Digital Startup Alley Package and exhibit your standout startup to thousands of Disrupt 2020 attendees. TechCrunch editors will designate two outstanding early-stage startups from Digital Startup Alley as Wild Card entries.

You’ll have just a few days to prepare before you join the other Startup Battlefield competitors and deliver a six-minute pitch and demo to a panel of judges — top-name VCs and technologists. You’ll also answer a Q&A after your pitch. If you make it through to round two, you’ll do it all again to a fresh set of experts.

The prize? Massive exposure to media and investors (whether you win or not), glory in the form of the Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in sweet, equity-free cash.

Pro tip: Exhibit in Digital Startup Alley and you’re eligible for a Wild Card slot — even if you applied to Startup Battlefield but didn’t make it into the final cohort. You came so close — don’t pass up your second chance!

Exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley by itself is a win-win proposition. Introduce your tech and talent to thousands of people around the world, expand your network, build partnerships, attract investors, build your customer base and increase your brand recognition.

“I met so many industry experts — manufacturers, marketers, engineers — I even met people interested in investing in my company. Fostering these relationships over the long term will help my company scale and help me grow as an innovator.” — Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap.

Buy a Digital Startup Alley Package, hang your shingle in Startup Alley and get ready to connect with the influential people who can help you build your business. Believe in second chances — you just might earn a Wild Card entry to Startup Battlefield and take a page out of RecordGram’s playbook. They rode the Wild Card to total victory as Battlefield champs. Go for it!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Here’s how you can get a second shot at Startup Battlefield https://ift.tt/2QsV5Iq

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