• The CEO of Vlocity, which Salesforce bought for $1.33 billion, showed that Salesforce was doubling down on the industry specific sales strategy introduced by former co-CEO Keith Block.
• Vlocity's CEO recently said that Salesforce's industry cloud products saw 71% growth in average order value from a year prior and have 4,000 customers and 2.8 million monthly active users.
• The industry specific strategy could lead to "stickier" customers that tend to stick with the products and pay more over time, one analyst said. 
• Click here to read more BI Prime stories. 

Salesforce $1.33 billion acquisition of Vlocity, which closed in June, is already showing signs of success. 

The startup made software for specific industries, like insurance, healthcare, and the public sector, that sat on top of Salesforce's platform, and the acquisition was seen as Salesforce's way of doubling down on the industry-specific sales strategy that former co-CEO Keith Block introduced before he left the company. 

Vlocity's CEO and founder David Schmaier, who was named CEO of Salesforce industries in June, shared at the company's developer conference last week that the average order value of Salesforce's industry cloud products grew 71% from a year prior. Those products now have 4,000 customers and 2.8 million monthly active users, Schmaier added. 

At the time of the acquisition, Salesforce had five industry specific cloud offerings: financial services, health, government, manufacturing, and consumer goods. Vlocity added more capabilities to the first three and added industry-specific tools for communications, media and entertainment, and energy and utilities. 

Industry cloud was "already a big part of Salesforce," Schmaier said, "And it's one of the fastest growing product lines and one of the fastest growing parts of Salesforce today." 

When Salesforce announced the acquisition, several analysts saw it as an effective way for the company to continue building out its industry specific sales strategy as Keith Block left. These new metrics show progress and are a good sign because industry-specific customers tend to stick with the products and pay more over time, according to Baird analyst Rob Oliver.

"We have long been bullish on CRM's vertical industries strategy and believe Vlocity is poised to accelerate those growth efforts by broadening and strengthening CRM's current vertical market offerings," Oliver in a research note to clients after the conference. "Our thesis is that vertical customers are stickier and willing to pay more over time." 

The industry-specific strategy has resulted in more value for both Salesforce and its customers because the tools being offered are truly helping to drive digital transformation for companies, Oliver said. Additionally, the strategy is growing Salesforce's total market opportunity, as the specialized tools are more attractive to organizations that may not have thought they needed customer relationship management software, he said. 

Now that the acquisition has closed, Vlocity added 1,000 employees to the team working on Salesforce's industries products, bringing the total to 3,000, with Schmaier leading the charge. 

As of now, Salesforce's Health Cloud is the fastest growing industry cloud option, especially given the contract tracing and Work.com tools for reopening safely that Salesforce recently introduced.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• Phillips 66 – an energy giant with over $100 billion in annual revenue — began its digital transformation in 2017, just as the oil and gas industry was on the upswing from a rocky few years. 
• Now, the sector is once again in turmoil as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. But the uncertainty is actually helping to push the company's digital overhaul along, according to Chief Digital Officer Zhanna Golodryga.  
• "It's very hard to transform where the company is doing extremely well," she told Business Insider. "It's much easier when everyone is under pressure and you have to take some efforts and measures really fast." 
• Among other changes, Phillips 66 tapped SAP as its enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platform and moved 80% of its workloads to the cloud. 
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When Phillips 66 started its digital journey in 2017, business was booming again. 

The oil and gas industry was beginning to emerge from a downturn over the prior few years. It was the perfect time to make an investment in new enterprise-wide technology as a way to differentiate itself from rivals, according to Chief Digital Officer Zhanna Golodryga.  

Now, the sector is under enormous pressure as the coronavirus pandemic erodes demand and oil prices drop. It's the kind of whiplash to which the industry is well-accustomed after the highs and lows over the past decade. 

But the current upheaval is actually turning out to be a game-changer for Phillips 66's transformation effort. And the eagerness to continue such a significant investment during the ongoing economic turbulence is evidence of just how important these IT modernization initiatives are to the future of the company.  

"It's very hard to transform where the company is doing extremely well," Golodryga told Business Insider. "It's much easier when everyone is under pressure and you have to take some efforts and measures really fast."

"We're not transforming because we have a burning technology platform. We're transforming because we have a burning desire," she added. 

The majority of the initiatives underway are estimated to drive some sort of value for the firm — whether that be improving profit margins, reducing operational costs, or avoiding unnecessary expenditures. And Phillips 66 is already seeing the benefits of some of those investments.  

The company was one of the first in the industry, for example, to announce it would cut $700 million in spending in 2020. Golodryga attributed the speed with which it could make such an important decision to the work done over the past three years. 

"Purely digital transformation by itself does not stand. It just doesn't work. We're a publicly traded company. Our shareholders expect returns and they expect more than just really cool technology," she said. 

Revamping a $100 billion operation 

Oil and gas companies looking to maintain or increase their leadership position during the wreckage caused by the coronavirus pandemic "will need to redouble their efforts in this moment, protecting or even scaling up technology, digital, and artificial-intelligence investments," consulting firm McKinsey & Company wrote in a May report. 

Phillips 66 is already well on its way. In 2017, the company tapped SAP to build a targeted enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platform for the oil and gas industry built around its popular S/4HANA tool. 

The software integrates many aspects of the business — like manufacturing, finance, and human resources — into one system that, among other advantages, makes it easier to analyze data across the enterprise to improve decision-making. It's the latest effort by SAP to target its core applications towards specific industries, such as commercial real estate. 

In particular, Phillips 66 wanted to use SAP's S/4HANA to extract as much value as possible from its hydrocarbon operations — the main component of petroleum and natural gas. The overall chain from procurement to production accounts for the lion's share of its $100 billion-plus in annual revenue.

Phillips 66 already has 80% of its workloads hosted in the cloud

The first step in the IT modernization process was moving away from physical data centers. It currently has over 80% of its workloads hosted in the cloud, which Golodryga estimated is the highest in the oil and gas industry.

And there is no one sole cloud provider. Instead, the company relies on a mixture of services from Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft. Its ERP platform, for example, runs on AWS. 

With SAP's software, Phillips 66 used a multi-phase implementation. So far, the company has completed three of the stages — including deploying across human resources and its West Coast hydrocarbon operations.

Employees, for example, have self-service access to more of the apps they need — eliminating the need to go through the HR department for common problems — and the software will help improve performance reviews, per Golodryga. 

It is also helping to cut down the number of software in use by traders and marketers.

Prior to the overhaul, Phillips 66 used over a dozen different programs. That meant employees had to check numerous spreadsheets and other resources on a regular basis. Now, all of that is housed in SAP's S/4HANA, making it easier for those roles to access data stored across the organization.  

A fourth phase — scheduled to go live next month — will encompass its wealth management and procurement units also located on the West Coast of the US. The final release will cover global asset management operations and is slated for January 2022. 

A fourth phase — scheduled to go live next month — will encompass its asset management and procurement units also located on the West Coast of the US. The final release will cover global hydrocarbon operations, asset management, and procurement. It's slated for January 2022.

Once it's complete, Phillips 66 is hoping the system it built with SAP becomes the standard across the oil and gas sector. And since it's an early adopters, the company is hoping that ultimately gives them a "first mover" advantage. 

"We're going to have a product that is going to be utilized across the industry. This is what sets us apart from the competition," said Golodryga. 

SEE ALSO: Google Cloud and Fox Sports are teaming up to use machine learning to create better content for fans, like by scouring decades of old footage to find the most exciting plays

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• Steve Blank, a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who appeared on the podcast 20VC earlier this week, said that the startup ecosystem is on the verge of turning into a Ponzi scheme that offloads destructive or valueless products on the next generations.
• He said that while some founders are looking to disrupt industries, improve lives, and change the world, investors are "looking for a liquidity event."
• VCs, who are hoping to see sky-high returns, are investing in things like social media, as opposed to technologies that the world actually needs.
• And one of the consequences of this laissez-faire approach to investing could be the destruction of democracy, Blank said. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Before the age of social media, the pioneering venture capitalists invested heavily in hardware, computers, therapeutics, and the life sciences, which ushered in an era of breakthroughs in technology, including the Apple computer and new drugs manufactured through bioengineering.

But Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur who launched his legendary career in Silicon Valley in 1978, said that the current startup ecosystem is on the verge of turning into a Ponzi Scheme. It wasn't a literal comparison, but Blank is suggesting that entrepreneurs often aren't delivering the best value to the next generations to come.

Blank, who appeared on the podcast 20VC,  which is hosted by Harry Stebbings, said that startup founders and venture capitalists do not share the same interests, and this discordance has led to a slew of startups that fail to create the technologies that our society actually needs, including better medical equipment. Blank's words echo those of another notable investor, Marc Andreessen, who has recently called on founders to help the US rebuild its healthcare, housing, and education systems.  

It's not that Blank believes that the entire startup ecosystem is a sham (he said he was being half facetious when he called it a Ponzi scheme). Instead, the Silicon Valley pioneer said that the system could benefit from some oversight, though not necessarily in the form of government regulation. 

As it stands, the system is almost entirely "laissez-faire," a French phrase that describes the type of government that abstains from interfering with the free market. While some founders want to change the world, disrupt stagnation, and improve people's lives, investors want to "make the most money without any rules," Blank said.

"They're looking for a liquidity event," Blank said of venture capitalists' ultimate goal.

And so it seems that venture capitalism, which paved the way for the technological innovations of the late twentieth century, has lost it moral compass, Blank added.

These days, venture capitalists are pouring billions into social media apps and entertainment platforms in hopes of funding the next TikTok or Netflix, and the technologies that we actually need are woefully underfunded or overlooked, in Blank's view. 

This approach, Blank said, has led to the creation of startups with no social consciousness and no national interest.

Throughout the last decade, and especially in recent years, it has become clear that VC-backed social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok could help topple governments as well as lead to the spread of misinformation that bamboozles voters.

Blank doesn't believe that founders set out to become evil, but he said that "out of all the things that are probably going to destroy democracy," it's probably Facebook, which has seen a flurry of companies boycotting the platform following controversies over misleading political advertising. 

As an example of what could go wrong, Blank said that we need to look no further than contemporary China, where tech has turned aspects of Chinese society into "a dystopian nightmare." Some experts say that the coronavirus pandemic could accelerate the development of China's "dystopian surveillance system," Business Insider's Alexandra Ma has previously reported. 

The current startup ecosystem has led to chaos and opened up countries like the US to manipulation from outside players like Russia, Blank said. And social media, which was supposed to bring people closer together, has only torn the US further apart, he said. 

While Blank's outlook is rather gloomy, it doesn't capture the full picture.  

Many VCs have been betting that startups in sectors like healthcare, biotech, and fintech will improve the country's broken systems. And one of those startups might be the one that bails us out of our ongoing shelter-in-place orders by developing a vaccine to the coronavirus.

SEE ALSO: A turf war between 2 types of VC firms could reshape the venture business but turn startups into collateral damage

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• AngelPad was one of the earliest accelerators — companies that help founders get their startups up and running — and is still going strong a decade later.
• Although it's less well known than some of its peers, AngelPad has had repeated successes and just scored a big hit when Postmates, one of its earliest startups, agreed earlier this month to be acquired by Uber for $2.7 billion.
• Unlike other accelerators, AngelPad has largely stayed true to the original vision of its founders, Carine Magescas and Thomas Korte; they still run its programs and mentor its startups.
• Magescas and Korte still enjoy working with founders and helping build solid companies.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When Gautam Narang and his cofounders were launching Gatik three years ago, they knew they wanted to jumpstart their autonomous vehicle startup by going through an accelerator program.

They also knew just which one they wanted to join — AngelPad.

Accelerator programs offer aspiring founders a way to turn their ideas into nascent businesses. Although there are many of them now, AngelPad was among the first. And unlike some of its more well-known peers, such as 500 Startups and Y Combinator, AngelPad has stayed close to its roots and largely under the radar. It's still run by the same two people, and it still only accepts a small group of companies into each of its accelerator groups.

Narang and his team were lucky; they were among the few that got into AngelPad's program. And they got out of it just what they hoped — a boost for their company. Since completing the accelerator program in early 2018, Gatik has raised a seed and a Series A round and last year signed a long-term deal with Walmart to have its self-driving delivery trucks transport grocery products from the retail giant's warehouses to its retail stores.

"A big part of Gatik's success to date is because of AngelPad," said Narang, the startup's CEO. He continued: "AngelPad ... played a huge role in every way."

AngelPad's founders like working with entrepreneurs

Accelerator programs have become increasingly popular over the last 10 to 15 years. They offer aspiring founders coaching and mentorship; guidance on fundraising, marketing, and product development; peer support; and often the first cash investment the founders' see. In exchange, the accelerator firm typically gets a small stake in entrepreneurs' nascent startups.

The programs typically offer sessions several times for groups or cohorts of startups. At the end of each session, the programs usually try to connect founders with early-stage investors.

Some of the most prominent startups of recent years graduated from accelerator programs. Among them: Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, SendGrid, PillPack, and Grab. AngelPad has its own prominent alumni, including Iterable, Buffer, Sensor Tower, and Postmates, the food delivery company that announced earlier this month a deal to be acquired by Uber.

Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas — a husband and wife team — launched AngelPad in 2010. Each had a background in tech. Korte had worked in product development at Google, helping with the launches of its advertising product and Google Maps. Magescas, meanwhile, had worked for a series of startups, managing marketing, project management, and strategic partnership teams.

Both considered themselves entrepreneurs. Magescas had founded an ecommerce startup in the early 2000s, and Korte was part of the founding team at a startup in the late 1990s. They thought about getting into angel investing, but both wanted to be more hands-on.

"We get joy out of working with the founders early on and figuring out what the company is, and kind of get them to the start, rather than just being financial investors," Korte told Business Insider in an interview last week. "That was core idea behind it."

Korte and Magescas still work one-on-one with their founders

While many other accelerators have supersized over the last decade, taking in larger and larger classes and expanding to new locations, Korte and Magescas have largely stayed close to their original vision. They still run AngelPad and its programs themselves. They limit each group — which they convene one to two times a year — to about 20 companies, and work directly with the founders they admit to their program over each 10- to 12-week session.

They offer each of their founders the same basic deal — $120,000 for a 7% stake in their companies. But they pride themselves on tailoring their advice to each founders' needs.

Korte and Magescas don't review their startups' software code. But they can and do help them with just about everything else. They help the entrepreneurs figure out what market they should pursue and how to tailor their product for that market. They help them lay out a strategic vision for where they want to be in the future. They prepare them for meeting with investors. 

Their goal is to get the founders set not just for their first financing round, but for the long term.

"It's a very intense experience, where they spend a lot of time with us trying to figure out the very earliest stages of their companies," Korte said.

He and Magescas have different strengths, said Gatik's Narang. Korte's the visionary, helping founders to think and see how their markets and products will develop years into the future, he said. Magescas, meanwhile, is a master strategist and negotiator, he said. She's excellent understanding the motivations and interests of particular investors and figuring out which would make good board members and which should lead financing rounds, Narang said.

"They have very complementary strengths," he said.

AngelPad favors self-starters

As might be expected, Korte and Magescas are very selective about the companies and founders they admit to their program. They look for smart and driven teams that are focusing on big markets with innovative products or ideas. The teams have to include someone who is doing the coding or building, if not the CEO, then a technical cofounder. They also have to already have built something, typically a prototype they can use to show off their idea.

"Just to see, what can you get done in the first six months? What can you get done while you're maybe still at a job?" Korte said. "It says a lot about you as a founder if you're starting or if you're waiting for investors to give you money to start." 

That said, he and Magescas are open about where the founding teams come from and what industries they're operating in. Many of their startups have been based in the Bay Area, but they've also had ones based in other parts of the country and in Europe. And they've included in their program companies ranging from DroneDeploy, which is developing software for unmanned flying vehicles to Zum, which has built a ride-hailing service for transporting kids. They don't typically fund consumer-focused startups, but they will on occasion.

They do rule out certain kinds of startups, though: those that compete directly against companies they've already backed. That's something other accelerators — which can work with dozens or even hundreds of companies are year — can't promise.

"We feel very strongly about [that]," Magescas said.

Magescas and Korte are betting on the future

By its very nature, running an accelerator, particularly the way Magescas and Korte do it, involves making bets on the future. Companies that they bring into AngelPad may be a year or two from getting seed funding, potentially four years away from getting their A round, and 10 years away from going public or being acquired. That forces Korte and Magescas to constantly be thinking about how business and technology will evolve and about the frustrations faced by businesses that new technology could address. It also means being hyper-attuned to the latest potential trends.

That was easier a decade ago, Korte said. It was pretty easy to tell then that smartphones were going to spark a revolution in the tech industry spurring demand for all sorts of applications that could take advantage of their capabilities and inherent mobility. Forecasting out into the future is harder today, he said.

"It's more art than science, for sure," Korte said. "It's trying to understand," he continued, "what do we do today that we could possibly do differently in the future and are there technologies that are going to make it easier, faster, cheaper, less painful, more joyous and how can we get there."

But, he added, "Sometimes it's just a hunch."

Postmates was a good bet, but not the only one

In a way, Postmates was one of those hunches. Magescas and Korte included Bastian Lehmann, its cofounder, in AngelPad's first session. He wasn't yet working on Postmates, but instead was developing a service called Curated.by that allowed users to compile social media posts. Magescas and Korte liked the service, seeing it as a way for everyday people to navigate the chaos of Twitter.

But they liked Lehmann even more, seeing in him something of themselves. Both Magescas and Korte are, like Lehmann, immigrants to the US who came to the country hoping to break into the tech industry. He, like them, seemed determined to succeed.

So, when Curated.by failed and Lehmann started working on his second startups, which became Postmates, Magescas and Korte backed him as part of AngelPad's second session.

"He was driven," Magescas said. "I knew he would not give up."

Postmates wasn't the only hunch they've had that paid off. In addition to the food delivery company, they've had a series of successful exits. In 2013, just three years after AngelPad's first class, Twitter acquired MoPub, which had been through the accelerator. That deal was nominally for $350 million in stock, but ended up being much more than that after Twitter went public later that year and its share price soared.

More recently, Vungle, another one of its portfolio companies, was acquired by Blackstone in a $750 million deal. Numerous other startups it backed were acquired for $100 million or more, Korte said.

Magescas and Korte ditched their demo day

While AngelPad has largely stayed true to its roots, Korte and Magescas have evolved the program over time. They launched AngelPad in San Francisco. Later they opened up a New York office and hosted sessions there, while still taking field trips with their founders to Silicon Valley. Last year, they closed the New York office and plan to host future sessions again on the West Coast.

Many accelerators finish each program with a demo day, in which graduating companies make presentations to rooms full of potential investors, peers, and members of the press. AngelPad did that too for years. But two years ago, Magescas and Korte decided to do away with their demo day. In its place, they arranged to have their graduating companies meet one-on-one with investors, and tried to ensure that those investors were well-suited for the companies with which they were meeting.

Gatik was in the first batch of AngelPad companies that had an investor day instead of a demo day, and Narang loved it. The one-on-one sessions led to several serious follow-up meetings.

Narang has no regrets about taking part in AngelPad. Not only did Magescas and Korte introduce him and his team to potential backers, but the couple helped coach them before and after each investor meeting. AngelPad was also the first investor to commit to investing in both its seed and A rounds, helping validate the company for other backers, he said. To this day, Narang still talks frequently with Magescas and Korte.

"The advice that we got from Thomas and Carine during our time and after our time at AngelPad, we use it every day — even today," Narang said.

Got a tip about a startup or the venture industry? Contact Troy Wolverton via email at twolverton@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

• Read more about startups and venture capital:
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• LEAKED: A decade before Postmates was acquired by Uber for $2.65 billion, its founder used this 13-slide pitch deck to sell his idea for the new delivery service
• This VC just raised $150 million to invest in ground transportation startups. He says there are better opportunities than trying to find the next Tesla.
• This VC backed self-driving car startup Zoox into a big buyout by Amazon. Here's why he says that deal signals a new wave of automation.

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• The equity management software company Carta promoted gender equity in tech, but behind the scenes the company underpaid and retaliated against its lone female executive, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
• Emily Kramer, former vice president of marketing at Carta, stepped down in November after CEO Henry Ward called her an "asshole" and said she got "passes" because she is a woman, according to the complaint.
• Kramer said she faced discrimination and retaliation at the company after she became more vocal about the lack of women and people of color in leadership positions at the company.
• Carta spokeswoman Lauren O'Mahony declined to comment.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Carta has raised more than $600 million in venture capital on the promise of spreading the wealth in Silicon Valley. But the promise of equal ownership did not extend to the company's lone female executive, according to a new lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco county.

Emily Kramer, former vice president of marketing at the 8-year-old software company, stepped down from her role in November 2019 after what she describes as nearly two years of gender discrimination and retaliatory behavior at the company, stemming from her push for greater diversity on Carta's executive team and on its board. 

She was the only female executive from the start of her tenure until two weeks before she left the company, according to the complaint.

"There are so many mission-driven companies in Silicon Valley, and some are genuine. But a lot of times, they are not practicing what they are preaching," Kramer told Business Insider. "As the only woman exec, I championed these efforts and I was proud to do so. But when this is all happening behind the scenes, the hypocrisy becomes really bothersome."

Carta spokeswoman Lauren O'Mahony declined to comment.

Carta sells software to other startups to manage their equity structure and compensation. It's backed by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tribe Capital, and was last valued at $3.1 billion in a funding round this spring.

In September 2018, under Kramer's leadership, the company published its first gender equity report, which found that while women make up 35% of all equity-holders at tech companies, they only hold 20% of that employee equity, and that for every dollar a male employee holds in equity, female employees own just 47 cents. 

The study closely mirrored Kramer's own experience at Carta. When she joined the company in January 2018, she was offered a $225,000 salary and 150,000 shares of the company's stock, which CEO Henry Ward declined to negotiate higher, according to the complaint.

An internal pay equity study completed later that year revealed a massive discrepancy between Kramer's compensation and that of her male counterparts. Kramer's salary was raised by $50,000 and her equity was nearly tripled, according to the lawsuit, but the company declined to pay Kramer back for the months in which she was underpaid or adjust her equity vesting schedule.

Fired for violating a 'no a--holes' policy

But even after her compensation was raised, Kramer said she was constantly excluded from executive meetings, and turned down for a promotion to the all-male C-suite over what CEO Henry Ward described as a problem with her "style," according to the complaint.

Ward and other executives excluded Kramer from preparing the company's Series E fundraising pitchdeck, which would include a slide featuring an outline of the history of wage labor, with "slavery" cited as the starting point. The slide also included an image of medieval serfs toiling in the fields. Kramer found the slide "highly offensive" and complained about it to Ward and HR. When Kramer attempted to remove the slide from being shown in a presentation at a tech conference, she was reprimanded by Ward, the lawsuit said.

In November 2019, less than two weeks after the company published its second annual pay equity report, Ward told Kramer she was "in violation of a 'no assholes' policy," that she is "like an alcoholic who needed to admit her problem and have a full-scale recovery from being an asshole," and that she had gotten "passes" because she is a woman, the lawsuit alleges.

Kramer stepped down following that conversation, which she believes was calculated to encourage her to resign.

"I think they were worried that if they terminated me that this could be a disaster for them because of the lack of women," she said. 

Below is a copy of Kramer's lawsuit:

SEE ALSO: G2, a software review startup that raised $100 million, spent lavishly on things like a $1 million office staircase. Then it had layoffs and filed for a PPP loan. It shows the challenge of giving startups a coronavirus bailout.

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• Home insurtech startup Hippo said Tuesday it had secured $150 million in Series E funding, bringing the unicorn's valuation up to $1.5 billion.
• Venture capital firms FinTLV, Ribbit Capital, Dragoneer, and Innovius Capital participated in the funding round.
• Trying to raise money while COVID-19 roiled markets was "a b----," CEO Assaf Wand said. 
• Hippo uses technology to build custom profiles of houses, which it draws on to make custom insurance plans. The company says this nuanced approach saves customers money.
• Hippo plans to hire 100 new employees and is building a new office in Austin, Texas as it prepares for an IPO it hopes to complete in 2021.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Home insurance tech startup Hippo announced Tuesday it had pulled in $150 million in a Series E funding round that boosted its valuation to $1.5 billion. But getting there wasn't easy.

"Funding was a b----," CEO and co-founder Assaf Wand told Business Insider.

The unpredictable economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame. The company had to go through a lalorious process of pulling together data on the housing market while the COVID-19 pandemic upended normal patterns.

"When you start the funding, you need to prep the data," Wand said. "You need to do a lot of stuff. Hence, the market was very different three and a half months ago than it was today."

Venture firms FinTLV, Ribbit Capital, Dragoneer, and Innovius Capital participated in the funding round that was based on a $1.5 billion valuation, according to an official release. Hippo had already joined the unicorn club by reaching a valuation of at least $1 billion during a funding round in 2019.

Hippo deploys various kinds of tech to build nuanced profiles of homes. That allows it to create bespoke insurance plans that it says saves money for customers on a case-by-case basis. 

Hippo plans to hire 100 new employees and is building a new office in Austin, Texas ahead of its planned 2021 IPO, according to the release. Sales were up 60% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the same time last year, according to the statement.

Wand said the US home insurance market is too resilient for COVID-19 to dampen Hippo's prospects, although the outbreak had created a change in the company's client base.

There are now a lot more of what Wand calls "switchers.''

"People are staying home and trying to save money and trying to get more modern coverage on their home," Wand said.

Hippo also experienced a bump in May and June as people bought homes and prepared to camp out the pandemic, according to Wand.

"Everybody was cramped into a home for too long, and they said, 'listen: It's not that bad, but what I really need is an extra room in the house, what I really need is a swimming pool, what I really need is an office,'" Wand said.

Hippo's big round follows insurance tech rival Lemonade's announcement in June that it plans to go public. Lemonade is valued at $2 billion.

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• Carta disregarded its vice president of marketing's objections to a slide referencing "slavery" and startup equity ownership, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
• Emily Kramer was subject to gender discrimination and retaliation during her two year stint as the only female executive at Carta, according to the complaint.
• She was excluded from decision-making and reprimanded when she objected to including the slide on the grounds that it was "offensive," the complaint says.
• Carta spokeswoman Lauren O'Mahony declined to comment on the lawsuit.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When Carta was fundraising in 2019 for what would become a $300 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, the company included a depiction of feudal fieldworkers that rubbed some people the wrong way.

That slide, and how the company handled it, is a key detail in a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by Carta's former vice president of marketing, Emily Kramer, who claimed she was excluded from the pitchdeck process and reprimanded when she tried to stop the company from displaying the slide at a big tech conference.

A screenshot of the slide, obtained by Business Insider, shows a short timeline of labor, beginning with "slavery" and ending with "ownership". "Ownership" is a reference to Carta's main product, an equity management software which helps startups track who owns shares in the company.

Kramer said she was concerned that having the word "slavery" in a pitchdeck would be triggering for its viewers, but that she was reprimanded when she suggested it be removed. She told both Ward and human resources that she found the slide "offensive" but it stayed in the pitchdeck, according to the complaint. 

"It's just an insensitive slide and a message that could be told in a much more thoughtful and mindful matter," Kramer told Business Insider.

The pitchdeck is just one example in the lawsuit, which alleges that Kramer was subject to gender discrimination and retaliation during her two year stint as the only female executive at the company.

Kramer stepped down in November 2019, after Carta CEO Henry Ward called her an "asshole" and told her she had been given "passes" because she is a woman, according to the suit.

Carta spokeswoman Lauren O'Mahony declined to comment on the lawsuit.

SEE ALSO: A female exec is suing $3 billion Carta, alleging that the CEO likened her to an alcoholic who needed to recover from her 'a--hole' problem

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• Amazon Assistant is an app and browser extension that lets you compare Amazon prices with listed prices from competing online retailers. 
• Amazon Assistant also lets you access your Amazon Lists from anywhere and track the prices of online items.
• To use the Amazon Assistant software, you must have an Amazon account you can connect the extension to.
• Amazon Assistant isn't compatible with every device or browser, so double check before you try to install. 
• Visit Business Insider's Tech Reference library for more stories.

If you're a fan of online shopping, and you already use browser extensions like Honey to help you save money while making your digital purchases, then you may want to consider downloading Amazon Assistant.

Amazon Assistant is another tool that will let you save money while shopping online, by comparing prices between retailers.

Here's everything you need to know about Amazon Assistant, including how it works, and how to install it.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Apple)

Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $699.99 at Walmart)

Apple Macbook Pro (From $1,299.00 at Apple)

How Amazon Assistant works

The short version is this: If you find an item on an online retailer's website, like Walmart, Amazon Assistant will check to see if that same item is available on Amazon for less money.

But that's not all the Amazon Assistant can do for you.

Any time you search for an item online, you can look for Amazon's 30 Day Price Tracker for that item. It allows you to see how the prices of that item have changed over the past month and puts a sticker on the lowest price it finds. 

Amazon Assistant also gives you access to your Amazon Lists wherever you are on the web, allowing you to search for and add any items that you need with ease. 

The online shopping software is available for download on Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Opera, as well as on Android phones through the Google Play Store.

If you're a frequent Amazon shopper and want to save a few dollars, here's how to install Amazon Assistant and use it to your advantage. 

How to install Amazon Assistant

For Android users, the installation process is as simple as going to the Google Play Store. But depending on which browser you use, the download process will look different.

1. Open your preferred browser on your Mac or PC and open the Amazon Assistant homepage. 

2. Depending on the browser you use, the access link will look different. The Chrome browser features a yellow installation button in the middle of the page. Click the appropriate link in your browser.  

3. You can also access the entire list of extensions through an incompatible browser like Safari. 

4. You will be redirected to the extension store page for your browser. Click "Add to Chrome" or the add button for whatever browser you are using.

5. If you aren't directed there, as is the case with Firefox, you may be asked to grant Amazon permission to install the add-on. Authorize the download to begin the installation process. 

6. Confirm that you want to add the extension. 

7. Your browser will then confirm that the extension has been added and you may be redirected to the Amazon Assistant homepage to get started using the shopping tool. 

8. To use Amazon Assistant, you can click the small blue-green "a" in the top-right corner, where your browser extensions are located. 

9. Depending on the browser you use and its settings, it may not appear there automatically. There should be a way to activate it through your browser settings' extensions menu.

How to use Amazon Assistant

When you shop for any product, on the product's landing page, the assistant will create a pop-up window off to the right side of your screen, showing the price of the item on Amazon, and providing a link to redirect there if you so choose.

If you'd like to add the item to your Amazon list, simply click the Assistant extension button. The item will appear in the Assistant window, and underneath there will be an "Add to Shopping List" button that you can click.

You can also access any of your existing lists by scrolling down to their name in the extension. The hyperlink is a shortcut that will take you directly to the list in a new browser window.

Related coverage from Tech Reference: 

• How to add items to your Amazon Wish List using the Amazon Assistant browser extension

• You can't merge Amazon accounts, but you can share an Amazon Household account with multiple family members — here's how it works

• How to ask a question on Amazon in 5 simple steps to learn more about a product

• 'Does Amazon accept Venmo?': It doesn't directly, but here's how you can use a Venmo Card instead

• 'How much does Amazon Prime cost?': A breakdown of Amazon's membership plans, and whether they're worth it

SEE ALSO: Use one of the best smartphones of 2020 to help you shop with Amazon on the go

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• After launching two NASA astronauts into orbit in May, SpaceX is now set to bring them back from the International Space Station on August 2 in the same spaceship.
• Elon Musk has said this stage of the mission worries him most.
• SpaceX's Crew Dragon ship will need to undock from the space station, survive a fiery fall through Earth's atmosphere, and deploy parachutes to safely land in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Two astronauts aboard the International Space Station are in the middle of a historic mission: the first-ever commercial human spaceflight.

The high-stakes test of SpaceX's human-grade spaceship, the Crew Dragon, sent NASA's Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the station atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket on May 30. The spaceship successfully docked to the space station the next day.

But now comes the hard part: bringing the crew back to Earth.

Behnken and Hurley must board the Crew Dragon again and hurtle back through the atmosphere — a voyage that will require the spacecraft to weather temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said this is the part of the mission that worries him most.

"The return is more dangerous in some ways than the ascent, so we don't want to declare victory yet," Musk told reporters after the launch.

The astronauts' return timeline was initially unclear. The spaceship — currently sitting attached to the ISS — has up to 110 days from arrival until a corrosive form of oxygen high above Earth degrades its solar panels.

But NASA set a date for the return on Friday: Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted that the mission is targeting August 1 to undock Crew Dragon from the space station, and August 2 to land it in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Weather will drive the actual date," Bridenstine said.

If the mission, called Demo-2, finishes according to plan, it will set the stage for SpaceX to regularly ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. Full end-to-end success would restore human spaceflight in the US for the first time since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.

Here's what to expect during the astronauts' return.

The Crew Dragon must survive a fiery fall through Earth's atmosphere

Returning Behnken and Hurley from the space station to a safe landing point in the ocean could take anywhere from six to 30 hours, NASA spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz told Business Insider. The length of the journey depends on when NASA chooses to begin it.

When the time comes, Behnken and Hurley will climb back into the Crew Dragon and the spaceship will retract the hooks that hold it onto the ISS.

Crew Dragon will then gently fire its thrusters to propel itself away from the orbiting laboratory. Once it's far enough from the ISS, the capsule will fire more aggressively to put itself on the right path to its splashdown location off of Florida's Atlantic coast.

From there, the spaceship will shed its tube-like trunk — a lower section outfitted with fuel tanks, solar panels, and other hardware that the astronauts will no longer need. The trunk should fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

This will expose the capsule's heat shield. After another six minutes or so of firing thrusters to push it into Earth's atmosphere, the ship will begin to fall. Its heat shield will deflect and absorb the energy of superheated plasma, protecting the hardware and astronauts as they plow through Earth's atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound.

"The part that I would worry most about would be reentry," Musk told Aviation Week's Irene Klotz in May, a few days before the launch.

Musk added that his "biggest concern" about the new spaceship is the capsule's asymmetric design. The shape was necessary for the emergency escape system, which can jettison the capsule away from the launching rocket if it fails in mid-air. Though Musk said the asymmetry is unlikely to cause a problem, he worries it could complicate the plunge back to Earth.

"If you rotate too much, then you could potentially catch the plasma in the super Draco escape thruster pods," Musk said, adding this could overheat parts of the ship or cause it to lose control due to wobbling. "We've looked at this six ways to Sunday, so it's not that I think this will fail. It's just that I worry a bit that it is asymmetric on the backshell."

Catching the spaceship's fall is its own challenge

Assuming the Crew Dragon survives the fall through Earth's upper atmosphere, the capsule's parachutes must deploy just minutes later to slow the ship as it falls through thicker parts of the atmosphere. The first chute should release at 18,000 feet, as Crew Dragon rockets toward the ground at 350 mph. It should slow the capsule's fall to about 119 mph by the time it reaches 6,000 feet, when more parachutes will deploy.

"The parachutes are new. Will the parachutes deploy correctly? And then will the system guide Dragon 2 to the right location and splash down safely?" Musk said in March 2019, after the company's Demo-1 mission — an uncrewed test flight of its spaceship— lifted off. The parachutes worked well at the end of that mission, but they failed a test just one month later.

During a press briefing before the crewed May launch, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president of mission assurance, was asked what kept him up at night in regard to the mission. He, too, pointed to the parachutes, since their packing can't be tested until they're deployed.

If all goes well, however, the capsule should splash down in the ocean 22 to 175 nautical miles off the Florida coast.

Behnken and Hurley will then wait inside the capsule for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the weather and the state of the spacecraft, as recovery teams in boats approach. The teams will retrieve the astronauts and give them a preliminary medical checkout.

A helicopter will carry Behnken and Hurley to shore. From there they will take a plane to Houston.

At that point, the astronauts will have safely completed a mission with a 1-in-276 chance of killing them.

"I'm breathing a sigh of relief," Bridenstine said after the Crew Dragon reached orbit on May 30. "But I will also tell you I'm not going to celebrate until Bob and Doug are home safely."

Dave Mosher contributed reporting.

SEE ALSO: A new SpaceX filing with the FCC suggests Starship rocket prototypes may fly more than 12 miles above Texas within the next 7 months

DON'T MISS: SpaceX is on the cusp of winning a high-stakes game of capture the flag that Barack Obama started almost 9 years ago

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NOW WATCH: Why NASA waited nearly a decade to send astronauts into space from the US

• Twitter was hacked in mid-July through a social engineering scheme that targeted employees, which resulted in world-famous people's accounts tweeting a bitcoin scam.
• The attack shows key areas of vulnerability for companies with remote workers, cybersecurity experts say. 
• Stopping social engineering scams that come in through email and giving cybersecurity pros better visibility into attacks are critical to stopping scams, experts say.
• Microsoft rolled out new tools Tuesday that address visibility into insider threats and other remote work issues.
• A former White House chief information officer says the Twitter hack should "chill us to the bone" – but worries that companies won't make the needed changes. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

After a scammer tricked a Twitter employee into providing access to high-level controls of the social network, it opened the door to an earth-shaking hack of the accounts of world-famous people in mid-July. 

Few companies' computer systems are as public as Twitter's real-time feed, but many could be hacked in a similar way, experts say, due to a combination of factors intensified by remote work.

While there are still some missing details and Twitter is not commenting beyond its blog post, here's how security experts say companies can protect themselves from a hack like Twitter's  – including new tools released Tuesday.  

Don't click that odd link 

Twitter, like many companies, has a remote workforce this summer, and isolated employees can be especially vulnerable to scams, experts say. Twitter wrote on its blog that "attackers targeted certain Twitter employees through a social engineering scheme." 

That kind of attack often takes the shape of a phishing email that convinces the user to click on something that looks work-related, says Ed Bishop, chief technical officer of Tessian, a cybersecurity company that focuses on how people engage with email. 

"Social engineering in a remote world is all around trying to think through the mindset of the user: What emails would they be expecting? What we're seeing is impersonation of services that are common with work-from-home situations," he said.

For example, a remote worker might be more likely to click a link to a video conference that looks like it comes from a coworker, even if it's unfamiliar.

"In the office you might ask a neighbor, 'Hey, are we using a new video call tool now?' But you can't do that now, so maybe you are more likely to click," he said. 

When in doubt, don't click on a strange email or respond to it, Bishop says. Ask your coworkers or IT team about the email if it looks like it was sent internally. If an email feels suspicious but appears to come from a client, customer, or other contact, look up an email address for the supposed sender and start a new thread or contact them via their website. (Get more guidance from Tessian on helping your employees avoid phishing here.)

"Remote workers are more vulnerable to phishing because we are all a little more unsuspecting and distracted at home," said Oren Falkowitz, cofounder of Area 1 Security. "Phishing comes in many forms, not only email."

Beware the human element — and avoid it through education

Twitter wrote that its hack was kicked off by "the intentional manipulation of people into performing certain actions and divulging confidential information." 

The human element is often the key to major hacks, says Ryan Kalember, executive vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint. "People continue to be the primary focus for threat actors. There are administrative tools on the backend at Twitter, and most organizations, that humans have to have access to and when they get compromised, it can result in fairly massive consequences."

Even if a company has robust cybersecurity tools in place, the human beings that work there could still make the company vulnerable. 

"Even the most sophisticated technologists, like those at Twitter, often overlook the human component of cybersecurity," says Anthony Grenga, vice president of cyber operations at IronNet. "Twitter employees had the ability to 'take over' accounts using an admin panel. Even though an insider may not have malicious intentions, opportunity – bribes, layoffs, conflict of opinions – may tip the scales." 

And the employee may not even be aware they did anything wrong, Tessian's Bishop says. "You can absolutely be socially engineered and not have a clue that you've done anything. 

How should companies avoid this hazard? Empower, educate, and empathize with employees. Companies should regularly train their employees on how to spot phishing emails and on other security hygiene practices — and make sure they're empowered to speak up if they sense anything fishy. A new empathetic approach is needed now, too, when dealing with remote employees, who are working away from the office and under the stress of a pandemic and economic downturn. New email tools and training may be needed that are tailored to this specific moment. 

Attacks can move fast

Another important aspect of the Twitter hack was the inability to spot it early.

"We became aware of the attackers' action on Wednesday, and moved quickly to lock down and regain control of the compromised accounts," Twitter says in its blog. But they didn't move quick enough: 

Hackers were shopping their access to Twitter controls on the darkweb in the days before hacked tweets spilled into the world from Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and many others who were cranking out phony bitcoin tweets. B

ut Twitter isn't alone in being a day late to discover a hack. Only 58% of companies can determine vulnerable assets within 24 hours following news of critical exploits, according to new research from the cybersecurity firm Balbix.

"Cybersecurity teams are struggling with a lack of visibility into major risk areas," Balbix said, noting 89% of cybersecurity professionals identified phishing as one of the biggest security threats, yet, only 48% said they are able to continuously monitor such threats with cybersecurity tools.

Insider threats – an employee who is knowingly or unknowingly assisting in a hack – can move very quickly, says Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at RiskIQ, a company that makes cloud-based cybersecurity software to detect threats. "When access to the account of a Twitter support member was gained, it gave the bad guys instant access to everything," he says. 

IT teams managing remote workers may need new tools to find threats. Microsoft just released new products Tuesday to help achieve this:

New tools and training  

On Tuesday Microsoft rolled out new "insider risk management" tools to its Microsoft 365 users, including data-loss prevention for employees' laptops.

"Remote work, while keeping employees healthy during this time, also increases the distractions end users face, such as shared home workspaces and remote learning for children," the software giant said on its blog. "The current environment has also significantly increased stressors such as potential job loss or safety concerns, creating the potential for increased inadvertent or malicious leaks." 

Twitter vows it is "rolling out additional company-wide training to guard against social engineering tactics to supplement the training employees receive during onboarding and ongoing phishing exercises throughout the year." 

Training may not be enough, says Chloé Messdaghi, vice president of strategy at Point3 Security, which tries to make cybersecurity risk personal to employees through discussions and empathy-based exercises. "This should reinforce for most companies that the phishing situation is really something that people aren't taking seriously enough. No matter how much training you do, the human element is still there and many people are still apathetic when it comes to the cybersecurity of their company because they've never been directly affected by it."

 That apathy is dangerous, says Theresa Payton, former White House chief information officer and CEO of cybersecurity consultancy Fortalice Solutions, who says the Twitter hack "should chill us to the bone."

This is not just a Twitter problem, Payton says. This should be a wakeup call for all companies, she urges: "We're all in this pandemic together. We ignored all the past wake up calls to our detriment. The question is, are we hitting snooze again?"

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why electric planes haven't taken off yet

• Research lab OpenAI released a "natural language generation" tool called GPT-3 that learns from a massive set of data to write impressively human-like text. GPT-3 can account for tone and context to write in conversational or formal English.
• Developers have been using GPT-3 to write creative fiction, design websites, and write business proposals with very little indication a robot created them.
• But even the most advanced AI tool raises concerns around biased language and ways the technology could be used to spread hate and misinformation.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories

OpenAI, a major artificial intelligence research lab, released a new tool to select developers last week that can automatically create written passages that are nearly indistinguishable from those written by humans, and developers are already stunned by how well it can code, mimic famous authors, and write business memos. 

GPT-3, as the tool is called, is the group's third iteration of a "natural language generation" model — an algorithm that can look for patterns in massive datasets of human-created text and spit out entire sentences and paragraph in a writing style that reflects those patterns (in other words, in plain-English).

Language generation models and the applications they power are already used widely. For example, Google's Smart Compose uses these models to help users autocomplete sentences in Gmail and the Associated Press writes quarterly earnings stories and sports reports using them, too. But the results these tools produce are often clunky, awkward, or unnatural due to limitations with the underlying data or the language model itself.

"Historically, natural language generation systems have lacked some nuance," said Carolyn Rose, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. But GPT-3 seems different. Based on early reactions, GPT-3 has blown past existing models thanks to its massive dataset and its use of 175 billion parameters — rules the algorithm relies on to decide which word should come next to mimic conversational English. By comparison, the previous version, GPT-2, utilized 1.5 billion parameters, and the next most powerful model — from Microsoft — has 17 billion parameters.

OpenAI published the technical specifications of GPT-3 in May, but opened it up an application programming interface to select developers last week. Developers on Twitter were amazed by the powerful capabilities of the tool and quickly started experimenting: GPT3 can code a website based on plain English descriptions, write sonnets that mimic Shakespeare's works, and explain OpenAI's research paper on this subject better than this article can (maybe). It was described as a "groundbreaking" new model that could end up making people's jobs easier (or even obsolete). 

"Every bit of the hype is deserved, and it's worth wrestling with each of the big questions raised," investor Chris Sacca tweeted.

German artist Mario Klingemann fed the tool examples of different authors and GPT-3 created paragraphs-long, stylistically-similar, coherent stories.

"People are seeing this perhaps as harbinger of some huge change in natural language processing, coding, what have you," Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit research lab. The tool builds upon all of its predecessors, and 30 years of AI research and experimentation: "Whether it's significant or not is still an open question, but it's certainly impressive," he said. 

Because it's an available as an API, it can democratize experimentation, he added.

"Pople who don't have the resources — both computational and the expertise to build and train these models — could potentially use it," he said. 

While GPT-3 isn't a "new frontier" in AI, it could still lead to huge improvements for automatically generated text, Rose said. For example, it could make text-to-speech tools, like voice instructions from Google or Apple Maps, "less annoying" to listen to.

GPT-3 still isn't perfect, to be sure. When developer Kevin Lacker administered the Turing test — a test meant to see if the AI could trick someone into thinking it was human — he came to the conclusion that "GPT-3 is quite impressive in some areas, and still clearly subhuman in others."

For example, when he asked "How do you sporgle a morgle?" GPT-3 responded, "You sporgle a morgle using a sporgle."

Even Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, was cautious about GPT-3:

GPT-3 also puts a spotlight back on existing ethical concerns surrounding AI-powered tools as well OpenAI itself.

OpenAI was launched in 2015 by tech industry titans including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman, and originally preached a gospel of accountability and transparency around its work. However, Musk criticized OpenAI earlier this year, saying it should be more open about its work, and MIT Technology Review's Karen Hao reported that the company has a culture of secrecy that runs counter to its public image. It originally chose not to make the predecessor to GPT-3 — GPT-2 — available because it could be used to create realistic fake news stories, though it later reversed this decision.

The Allen Institute's Etzioni did say that GPT-3's ability to mimic speech so well may make it harder to spot fake content.

"The question 'Is this text or image or video or email authentic?' is going to become increasingly difficult to answer just based on the content alone," he said. 

GPT-3 has also reignited concerns about the tendency of artificial intelligence to display sexist or racist biases or blind-spots. Because artificial intelligence models learn based on the data provided to them, they can end up exaggerating human biases. For example, the head of Facebook's AI program tweeted about how GPT-3 returned biased results from single-word prompts like "Jew," "women," or "Black" when trained on real tweets. 

"In the end, the process that's happening is totally mechanical." Rose said. "It doesn't have values. It doesn't know what's beautiful."

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• Knotel is trying to raise $100 million this summer, the company told employees on Monday.
• The flexible-office company will bring in $10 million this week.
• Unpaid bills as well as lawsuits over rent are piling up, Business Insider reported last week. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

WeWork rival Knotel is looking to raise fresh capital.

The flexible-office company told employees in an all-hands video call on Monday that it would bring in $10 million this week, part of a targeted $100 million fundraising effort that it plans to wrap up by the end of August, an employee who wasn't authorized to speak to the media told Business Insider. 

Investors in this latest funding round were not named. 

A Knotel spokesperson declined to provide additional comment when reached by Business Insider. 

Forbes earlier on Tuesday reported that Knotel was looking to raise up to $100 million, and that the new round could cut the company's valuation in half. Forbes also reported that fundraising talks have been ongoing for several months, and that it was unclear if Knotel would be able to drum up enough interest from investors to close a deal. 

Last August, the company said it raised $400 million in a Series C round of funding and Knotel CEO Amol Sarva implied a valuation of at least $1.3 billion at the time. But $250 million of that money was set aside for buying buildings on behalf of lead investor Wafra. 

Investors in that 2019 funding round included three Japanese investors — Mori Trust, Itochu Corp, and Mercuria Investment Co, as well as returning investors Newmark Knight Frank, Norwest Venture Partners, and New York City real-estate firm Sapir Organization.

The fundraising push comes as Knotel faces both a turbulent office market and a host of unpaid vendors and landlords. 

Some vendors and landlords say they haven't been paid for months, Business Insider reported last week, and lawsuits for unpaid rent are starting to stack up.

Read more: Office-rental startup Knotel bragged it was a nearly profitable anti-WeWork. Now lawsuits are stacking up. 12 insiders reveal what happened to the $400 million Knotel said it raised last year.

A spokesperson told Business Insider in June that Knotel remained on track to be profitable by the end of 2020. The company's leaked first-quarter financials showed a $49 million net loss and up to $84 million in unpaid bills.

Knotel took on empty offices in older New York buildings and in less desirable locations in an attempt to beat WeWork on its home turf, but much of that has been empty for months, former employees have told Business Insider. The company is now trying to shed 20% of its real-estate portfolio, Sarva has said publicly.

On a video panel earlier this month, Sarva said the company's revenue dropped 20% from the first to the second quarter and that Knotel would disclose more information soon.

Read more:

Knotel is facing claims of $230,000 in unpaid rent and construction bills at one Atlanta location, adding to a growing list of legal woes for the flex-space firm

Women-focused coworking startup The Wing is being sued for almost $270,000 in rent and other charges at its Bryant Park location in New York

Get in touch! Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (646) 768-1627 using a non-work phone, email at mmorris@businessinsider.com, or Twitter DM at @MeghanEMorris. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

READ MORE: Leaked Knotel financials reveal that the WeWork rival had huge pre-pandemic losses and now has more unpaid bills than cash. It's a grim sign for the flex-office space.

SEE ALSO: Office-rental startup Knotel bragged it was a nearly profitable anti-WeWork. Now lawsuits are stacking up. 12 insiders reveal what happened to the $400 million Knotel said it raised last year.

SEE ALSO: Knotel and insurance startup Rhino didn't disclose its CEOs were brothers when it struck a complex financial deal. Now a key partner could be on the hook as Knotel scrambles to pay bills, slashes staff, and plans to shed portions of its portfolio.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why thoroughbred horse semen is the world's most expensive liquid

• This is a preview of The Smart Speaker research report from Business Insider Intelligence.
• Purchase this report.
• Business Insider Intelligence offers even more technology coverage with Connectivity & Tech Pro. Subscribe today to receive industry-changing connectivity news and analysis to your inbox.

The smart speaker has been a runaway success in the handful of years since it hit the market, catapulting from obscurity to the peak of sales lists and cementing itself in the public consciousness.

According to primary survey data from Business Insider Intelligence, as many as half of US respondents reported living in a home with a voice-enabled AI device.

The prevalence of smart speakers is changing how companies in a range of spaces — media, e-commerce, smart home, banking, and more — interact with consumers.

For companies looking to sell these speakers and brands looking to engage with their customers through the now-critical medium, it's important to understand how the voice ecosystem works in practice and how it's being used. 

To learn more about adoption and habits, we surveyed 2,000 US consumers regarding factors like smart speaker ownership, what brands consumers use, and what they use the devices to do. Our survey data offers critical insights for key stakeholders at companies aiming to promote and use the smart speaker to reach customers.

In TheSmart Speaker Report, Business Insider Intelligence examines the fast-evolving smart speaker market. First, we provide a glimpse into smart speaker adoption in the US, both overall and by particular demographics. Then, we look at the characteristics of device owners, including how many speakers they own, which types, how often they use them, and what they use them to do. We also break down the top smart speaker use cases and the reasons why they are or aren't resonating with consumers, and advise brands looking to reach their users via this medium how best to do so.

The companies mentioned in this report are: Amazon, American Express, Apple, Deezer, Google, Nest, Pandora, Samsung, Spotify, and TuneIn.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• 5 years since the first device in its category launched, the smart speaker may be demonstrating one of the fastest rates of consumer adoption of any technology device in history, outpacing even the smartphone, per our data.
• More than half of US respondents who said that they live in households with a smart speaker reported having multiple speakers in their household, and nearly all living in households with speakers use them at least once a week.
• Media playback, general information, and communication are among the most commonly used features of smart speakers for device users.

In full, the report:

• Provides a snapshot of the current state of smart speaker adoption.
• Highlights the most important ways that consumers are using the devices and looks at what will come next in key segments.
• Identifies key trends in smart speaker and voice assistant design and usage and offers guidance for companies and brands looking to use the platform moving forward.

Interested in getting the full report? Here's how to get access:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Join thousands of top companies worldwide who trust Business Insider Intelligence for their competitive research needs. >>Inquire About Our Enterprise Memberships
3. Current subscribers can read the report here.

Join the conversation about this story »

• On a Monday night broadcast, Fox News host Tucker Carlson falsely accused a New York Times reporter of planning to publish his home address in an upcoming story.
• In response, people doxxed the Times reporter, Murray Carpenter, tweeting Carpenter's email, website, and home address, and encouraged others to "start showing up" at his house "during the day and night."
• At the time of the broadcast, The Times had not published the story at the center of Carlson's claims, and the newspaper tweeted a statement in response saying it "does not plan to publish Tucker Carlson's residence, which Carlson was aware of before his broadcast."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A New York Times reporter was doxxed, after Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused the reporter and paper of planning to publish his home address.

Carlson claimed in a Monday night broadcast that The Times was "working on a story about where my family and I live."

"They hate my politics. They want this show off the air," he claimed during his Monday show. "If one of my children gets hurt because of a story they wrote, they won't consider it collateral damage."

At the time of the broadcast, The Times had not published the apparent story at the center of Carlson's claims, and the newspaper tweeted a statement in response saying it "does not plan to publish Tucker Carlson's residence, which Carlson was aware of before his broadcast."

During his segment, he recalled previous harassment he received after his home address made it into the public eye, detailing how his wife and two children were threatened by "screaming Antifa lunatics," which prompted him and his family to move.

"But The New York Times followed us," Carlson said during the show. "Their story about where we live is slated to run in the paper this week. Editors there know exactly what will happen to my family when it does run."

During Monday's show, Carlson listed the individuals involved with the alleged story by name.

"How would Murray Carpenter and his photographer, Tristan Spinski, feel if we told you where they live, if we put pictures of their homes on the air?" Carlson asked during the broadcast. "What if we published the home address of every one of the soulless, robot editors at the New York Times, who assigned and managed this incitement of violence against my family?"

"We could do that," he continued. "We know who they are."

Following the broadcast, Carpenter was doxxed. His email, website, and home address, were published and those on social media encouraged others to "start showing up" at Carpenter's house "during the day and night."

"Give him a taste of his own meds!" one Twitter user wrote.

A representative from Fox News did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Carlson has discussed doxxing on his show before.

Following the whistleblower report that prompted the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, the president and his allies pushed to dox the whistleblower, so much so that Trump accused Fox News hosts of lying when they claimed they didn't know the whistleblower's identity.

Carlson said during a November broadcast that he would name the whistleblower if he were to confirm their identity, dismissing the potential danger of doxxing them.

"His life is in danger? Spare me!" Carlson said during the show. "Try living my life for a week."

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NOW WATCH: Inside London during COVID-19 lockdown

• London-based fintech startup Plum has raised $10 million in fresh VC funding amid a boom in its services during coronavirus. 
• Founded in 2017, the financial management app raised funds from Global Brain and the EBRD to expand its services and products across Europe. 
• "Covid has really accelerated the conversation around money management and fintech," Victor Trokoudes, CEO and cofounder of Plum, told Business Insider.
  
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

Money management startup Plum, founded in 2017 by former TransferWise employee Victor Trokoudes and Alex Michael, raised $10 million in fresh funding. 

The new round is led by Japan's Global Brain and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Existing investors VentureFriends also contributed, and the private funding has also been matched with £2.5 million as part of the UK government's Future Fund scheme.

This raise takes Plum's total funding to $19.3 million. 

"Covid has really accelerated the conversation around money management and fintech," Victor Trokoudes, CEO and founder of Plum, told Business Insider in an interview. "As a result we accelerated our conversations with investors to make our plans into a reality." 

Plum uses AI to automate key parts of personal finance, such as saving, switching bills and investing. The company will use the funds to expand its product offering with this fundraise by moving into pensions while also expanding geographically to France and Spain.

In June, the company reported an increase of five-fold increase in consumer saving since January 2020 and a 163% increase in utility switching via the Plum app. 

Plum employs around 60 people split across London, UK and Athens, Greece. The startup aims to scale up further to 80 by the end of 2020, having already added 35 staff in its product team during the Covid-19 lockdown, according to Trokoudes. 

Check out Plum's redacted pitch deck below:

SEE ALSO: Check out the pitch deck investing app Moneybox used to raise $38 million

• Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has expanded its relationship with Waymo, making the Alphabet self-driving division its exclusive partner.
• Waymo will provide its autonomous "Driver" technology to FCA's entire vehicle brand portfolio.
• FCA and Waymo had already collaborated on the Waymo One ride-hailing service in Arizona; Waymo One uses Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
• The companies said they would commence a new effort for commercial vehicles, using the RAM ProMaster cargo vehicle.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On Wednesday, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced that it had chosen Waymo, the self-driving company spun off Alphabet in 2016, to bring autonomous technology to all of its vehicle brands.

"FCA has selected Waymo as its exclusive, strategic technology partner for [level 4] fully self-driving technology across FCA's full product portfolio," the automaker said in a statement posted at the Waymo blog.

"We've already started to work together to imagine future FCA products for the movement of people and goods operated by the Waymo Driver."

The "Driver" is Waymo terminology for a combination of hardware and software that can perform as well as, or ideally better than, a human driver. "Level 4" has been defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as "high automation," with a self-driving vehicle capable of performing all driving functions "under certain conditions," with a human driver still able to take control. NHTSA says that it's one step short of level 5, where the vehicle can drive itself under all conditions.

"FCA was our first [major auto industry] partner, and we've come a long way together," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in a statement.

Introducing the Waymo Driver throughout the FCA portfolio

Waymo has been using Chrysler Pacifica minivans for its Waymo One service in the Phoenix, Arizona, area since late 2018. Waymo has worked with other automakers, including Jaguar Land Rover, but this deal means that FCA will be using only Waymo tech to provide autonomy for its entire lineup.

"Guided by the Waymo Driver," FCA CEOP Mike Manley said in a statement, those Pacificas "have now safely and reliably driven more fully autonomous miles than any other vehicle on the planet."

He added that the companies would open "new frontiers for ride-hailing, commercial delivery, and personal-use vehicles around the world."

On the commercial front, the next FCA vehicle to get the Waymo Driver will be the RAM ProMaster, a cargo vehicle. Waymo said the ProMaster would be incorporated into Waymo Via, its freight and delivery division.

FCA had previously said it would work with Aurora, a California-based autonomy startup, on commercial vehicles.

This looks like the beginning of a deepening partnership for Waymo and FCA. "We've already started to work together to imagine future FCA products for the movement of people and goods operated by the Waymo Driver," Waymo said.

Neither company provided details, but FCA is in the process of merging with France's PSA Group, with the tie-up scheduled to officially happen in 2021, and presumably, the FCA-Waymo plan would be absorbed into the conjoined automakers.

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NOW WATCH: Waymo is now letting ordinary people sign up to test its self-driving cars in Phoenix

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday. Sign up here to get this email in your inbox every morning.

1. Snapchat's parent company is investigating allegations of racism and sexism within the company after some employees complained of a 'whitewashed' culture. Snap has hired a third-party law firm to investigate after former employees alleged discrimination inside the company, sources say.
2. Two Chinese hackers are accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of trade secrets from companies and targeting firms developing a vaccine for the coronavirus, in a new US indictment. The US has accused two Chinese hackers of targeting firms developing a COVID-19 vaccine.
3. Some US investors of ByteDance, including Sequoia Capital, are reportedly considering buying a majority stake in TikTok. The US investors involved in the deal could possibly include Sequoia Capital, a famed Silicon Valley venture firm.
4. Research lab OpenAI has released a "natural language generation" tool called GPT-3 that learns from a massive set of data to write impressively human-like text. Developers have been using GPT-3 to write creative fiction, design websites, and write business proposals with very little indication a robot created them.
5. Amazon is debating a price point over $1,000 for its new Alexa home robot under development, code-named "Vesta," according to people familiar with the matter. The high price tag would be a change for Amazon's hardware strategy, which typically releases affordable products that are more commonly used.
6. A female exec is suing $3 billion software firm Carta, alleging that the CEO likened her to an alcoholic and called her an 'a--hole.'Emily Kramer said she faced discrimination and retaliation at the company after she became more vocal about the lack of women and people of color in leadership positions at the company.
7. Home insurtech startup Hippo said Tuesday it had secured $150 million in Series E funding, bringing the unicorn's valuation up to $1.5 billion. Hippo plans to hire 100 new employees and is building a new office in Austin, Texas as it prepares for an IPO it hopes to complete in 2021.
8. Elon Musk says his space company SpaceX will try launching a full-size Starship prototype 'later this week,' and the rocket may fly 150 meters high. SpaceX has been working feverishly to develop a potentially revolutionary rocket system called Starship in Boca Chica, a remote region in southeastern Texas that sits on the Gulf of Mexico.
9. Instagram is rolling out a tool that will allow users to raise money on the app, GoFundMe-style. Only users 18 years old and older can create a Personal Fundraiser for a small business or for a "cause that's important to you."
10. London-based fintech startup Plum has raised $10 million in fresh VC funding amid a boom in its services during the coronavirus. Founded in 2017, the financial management app raised funds from Global Brain and the EBRD to expand its services and products across Europe. 

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

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NOW WATCH: We tested a machine that brews beer at the push of a button

• Molly Gillies is a clay modeler at Ford; she worked on the all-new Bronco SUV, which debuted last week to enthusiastic consumer reaction.
• Gillies late grandfather, Frank DeBono, was a clay sculptor at Ford who worked on the original Bronco from the 1960s.
• Gillies' hands-on role with the new Bronco was important for Ford, as the carmaker increasingly practices "human-centric" design.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Molly Gillies has been a fan of the Ford Bronco since she was 16.

Now 25, Gillies is a clay modeler at Ford. It's one of those jobs that everyone in the automotive world knows about, but few outside have ever heard of. And for Gillies, it's a multigenerational experience: her grandfather, Frank DeBono, was a clay sculptor at Ford for 40 years — and had worked on the original Bronco from the mid-1960s. (DeBono died just as the new Bronco was launched last week.)

Gillies created clay models of the new Bronco using handmade tools passed down to her by her grandfather. 

"The concept of the tools is the same," she said in an interview with Business Insider, right before the new Bronco's debut. "They're tried and true, and they've kept their quality."

Gillies learned how to be an artist and a craftsperson quite literally at her grandfather's knee. The two built birdhouses together when she was a child. She later moved on to making pottery in high school, and then went to art school before joining Ford, initially as an intern.

For Bronco, she worked closely with a master modeler, who would assign her to work on part of the design. Clays are created in various sizes, from tabletop models to full-size mock-ups of a vehicle that showcase every detail and character line. Car designers typically learn how to work with clay when they're still in school. And modelers such as Gillies play an essential role in the new-car development process.

"It's a lot of trial and error," Gillies said. "We could spend weeks working on a fender, making minute changes."

Designers have an urgent need to see what they've created in a sketchbook or digital drafting program translated into reality. For Bronco, it was even more imperative, as the entire program was guided by "human-centric" design, a passion of Ford CEO Jim Hackett. The Bronco was designed from the beginning to be used for serious off-roading and outdoorsy activities.

"The designers are working in two dimension, and they want to see what their line really looks like," Gillies said.

Thus far, Gillies and her Ford colleagues have been rewarded for their attention to detail. The Bronco is among the most eagerly anticipated vehicles of the past few years; enthusiasts have been pining for a new version of the SUV since the previous generation was discontinued in 1996. And when the new Bronco family of vehicles was revealed — a two-door, a four-door, and a smaller Sport trim, all with proper four-wheel-drive — Ford was confronted by so many $100 preorders that the website set up to receive them briefly crashed.

Gillies could have anticipated that reaction.

"It's easy for people to view cars as hunks of metal," she said. "But so much time and passion goes into these vehicles."

That was a revelation that her time with her late grandfather had prepared her for.

"It's more than just model making," she said.

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NOW WATCH: 'Ford v Ferrari' won 2 Oscars for film editing and sound editing. Here's the real story behind the movie and how Ford changed racing history.

• Pakistan's telecoms regulator has issued TikTok with a "final warning," threatening to ban it over complaints about "immoral, obscene and vulgar content."
• The regulator has already blocked live streaming app Bigo on the same grounds.
• Earlier this month, TikTok and Bigo were both blocked in India as part of a ban on 59 Chinese apps.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

TikTok will be banned in Pakistan unless it cracks down on "immoral, obscene, and vulgar content," the country's government has said.

The warning came after Pakistan blocked live streaming app Bigo. "On complaints of immoral, obscene and vulgar content, streaming app Bigo has been blocked in Pakistan. TikTok has also been served with final warning on same grounds," Pakistan's telecoms regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), said in a statement on Monday.

The PTA said it had already warned both companies that their content was infringing the country's morality laws. "However, the response of these companies has not been satisfactory," the PTA said in its statement. It's not clear from the PTA's statement exactly how long TikTok has to change its practices before it is banned.

A spokesperson for ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, told Business Insider that the company was "committed to further strengthening our safeguards to ensure the safety of our users, while increasing our dialogue with the authorities to explain our policies and demonstrate our dedication to user security."

They added that TikTok removed more than 3.7 million user videos from Pakistan in the second half of 2019, most of which were removed before they had been viewed.

The warning from Pakistan comes less than a month after both TikTok and Bigo were banned in India, although the country's cite different reasons. Bigo is Chinese, and TikTok is owned by a Chinese company — both were blocked on June 29 as part of a wholesale ban on 59 Chinese apps. India claimed the move would preserve "data sovereignty."

The ban came after a border clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers in the disputed territory of Ladakh on June 15.

TikTok is also facing scrutiny in the US, where President Trump has suggested he might ban the app as a way of punishing China for the coronavirus pandemic.

Pakistan also announced a temporary ban on July 3 on popular multiplayer battle royale game PUBG (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds), saying it had received complaints the game is "addictive, [a] wastage of time and poses serious negative impact on physical and psychological health of the children."

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NOW WATCH: What makes 'Parasite' so shocking is the twist that happens in a 10-minute sequence

• There's a lot riding on Tesla's second-quarter earnings report Wednesday afternoon.
• Analysts expect the company to post a $75 million loss for the three-month period ended June 31.
• Despite factory shutdowns and falling deliveries, the stock has soared 213% since March.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Tesla's second-quarter earnings report could be one of the most closely watched in the company's history.

Despite a global pandemic that forced the shutdown of both of its car factories, an economic recession induced by the US' failure to contain the virus, and slump in vehicle deliveries, shares of the electric car maker have continued to soar.

Wednesday afternoon's report — when analysts polled by Bloomberg expect the company's bottom line to pivot back to losses — could prove vindication for the gambling investors who've helped the stock gain more than 200% in the last three months, handily outpacing the broader market. Tesla has added over $200 billion to its market value since March.

Analysts expect an adjusted loss per share of $0.15 — down from the $1.14 profit in the first quarter — on revenues of $5.2 billion, which would be the company's lowest in a year. Profitability aside, investors will be looking for clarity on growth in China and technology updates ahead of Tesla's "Battery Day," which is now set for September.

"This quarter is another step forward in the Tesla story as Musk & Co. must deliver to match euphoric Street expectations baked into the stock," Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush with one of the Street's most bullish price targets of $1,250, said in a note to clients.

Geographic nuances with regard to the previously disclosed quarterly deliveries and tax credit revenues, which Tesla makes by selling regulatory credits to other automakers, are also sure to be on investors' minds. Sales of regulatory credits totaled $594 million in 2019, or about 2.5% of revenue.

Tesla's stock tear, fueled in part by speculation it could be added to the benchmark S&P 500 index and the June deliveries beat, has propelled CEO Elon Musk's wealth to record highs, surpassing names like Warren Buffett and Larry Page while also helping the billionaire unlock the first tranches of his massive, $55 billion billion pay package.

The run also has some of the most bullish Wall Street analysts wondering how much farther it can go. Their average price target is currently $843, according to a Bloomberg poll, well below current trading prices.

"It's hard to see how competitors can catch up," said Piper Sandler's Alexander Potter earlier in July as he slapped the highest ever price target, $2,322 on the stock. "Tesla's own capacity is the biggest constraint to share gains."

Tesla reports its second-quarter earnings Wednesday after the market close.

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