Technology

Well, you have to admire a staggered PR plan. Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that just announced £85 million in Series E funding and its entrance into the fintech unicorn club, is rolling out a new feature today. The banking upstart is adding interest-earning savings accounts as an upgrade to its existing &Pots& functionality that launched last November.

The new &Savings Pots& feature is being offered in partnership with third party bank Investec Corporate - Investment Banking and lets you earn 1 percent interest on the money you specifically allocate to a Savings Pot. It is the first time Monzo customers have been able to earn interest on their savings through the Monzo app, and is part of wider &marketplace banking& strategy that will see Monzo increasingly offer various financial products via third party fintech startups or incumbent providers.

The idea behind Pots is to let you set money aside for specific things, such as a planned holiday, preparing for Christmas, or simply saving for a rainy day. You can create up to 10 Pots, each with their own name, and then add money to them manually, schedule payments in and out, or round up your day-to-day transactions to the nearest pound and add the additional change to a Pot, piggybank style.

To that end, you&ll need a minimum of £1,000 to open a Savings Pot, and above this can put as much money as you want in a Savings Pot. The savings accounts are flexible, so you can take money out of your Savings Pots at any time, where it will arrive back in your main Monzo account the next working day. Investec will hold the money in your Savings Pots and pay the 1 percent interest.

Savings Pots are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), meaning up to £85,000 of customers& savings are protected (ie £85,000 across all of your Savings Pots as well as any other money you&ve deposited with Investec. Money you have banked with Monzo outside of Savings Pots is protected by the FSCS separately, again up to £85,000.

Monzo says it will be gradually rolling the feature out to its more than one million customers, and that the bank will email customers once they&re able to start using Savings Pots. I had the feature from yesterday and it is pretty self-explanatory to use.

Exactly one year to the day since it launchedits line of menhealth products, HIMS is announcing its foray into womenwellness.

The company is using its mountain of venture capital to support the new brand, called HERS. In September, HIMS raised another $50 million in a round led by IVP. The financing valued the startup, which has brought in $97 million to date, at $500 million, according to PitchBook.

&Our goal is to help women make the most informed choices about their health at every stage of their healthcare journey,& HERS brand lead Hilary Coles told TechCrunch.

Upon launch, HERS is offering three categories of products: sexual wellness, skin care and hair loss treatments. Itsline of sexual health productsincludes a prescription-based birth control pill and Addyi, the only FDA-approved medication for women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

&We thought it was offensive really that there have been 26 options out there for men to get hard and this is the first thing offered for women,& Coles said, referring to Addyi— the ‘female viagra.& &Itanother area that has been super stigmatized.&

HERS will also sell a hair, skin and nails vitamin supplement and shampoo - conditioner that protects against damaged hair that sheds. For the skin, HERS will offer a prescription topical cream to treat acne, an anti-aging creamand a melasma corrector for hyperpigmentation.

The company will also beginselling women Minoxidil, a treatment for hairthinningusually prescribed to men, in January.With the exception of birth control and Addyi, the products range from $15 to $75 per month.

HIMS is known for selling erectile dysfunctionmedication, oral hygiene and skin care products to men. Founded in 2017, the San Francisco-based company is backed by Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, SV Angel, 8VC and more.

2018 is a record year for funding in the femtech space, which has included fundings for fertility and birth control startups likeNurx, Future Family and Maven. North of$400 million is expected to be funneled into the sector this year — a more than 10 percent increase than the $354 million raised by femtech startups in 2017.

Shape Security, a fraud-fighting cybersecurity company, has closed a $26 million round of Series E funding.

This will be the fifth round of funding — more than $130 million — since the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was founded in 2011. This latest round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Allegis Capital and others — including JetBlue Ventures and Singtel.

Shape Security said that the addition of JetBlueinvestmentwas because it has benefitted first-hand from its fraud-fighting technology.

The companyprimary focus is on preventing imitation attacks — such as when hackers use stolen logins or malware to walk in through the front door. Shapeenterprise defense technology protects web and mobile apps against automated attacks by utilizing artificial intelligence to differentiate ordinary customers from hackers. Using its massive trove of data, including geolocation and even mouse movements, combined with Shapemachine learning technology, the company says it can shut down suspicious activity and attacks in real time. The companyflagship service Blackfish also protects against credential stuffing — where attackers use your stolen credentials to break into other sites.

In total, Shape says it protects 150 million logins each day, and covers one-fifth of the consumer brands in the Fortune 500.

With its $26 million cash injection, Shape said it plans a greater international expansion across the U.K., Europe and the Middle East and Asia to support its growing user base — about half of its customers are located outside of the U.S. And, the company will be bolstering its product development work with new products set to be announced down the pike.

Shape declined to say what it was valued at, but PitchBook puts the companyvaluation now at $495 million.