Technology

Ethos, the startup marketing a new life insurance product for people who probably haven&t really thought about life insurance, may have 99 startup problems but new capital ain&t one.

The companyjust announced that it raised $35 million in a new round of financing.

Thata pretty big number for a company in the normally staid life insurance world, but considering that the companyprevious round of $11.5 million came from the family offices and investment firms of Hollywood and sports celebrities like Will Smith Smith Family Circle; Robert Downey Jr.Downey Ventures; Kevin DurantDurant Company; Arrive, the Roc Nation investment company from Jay Z; and leading Silicon Valley investment firm Sequoia Capital, folks probably shouldn&t be too surprised.

The new funding was led by Accel Partners, with new investor GV (the investment firm formerly known as Google Ventures) also participating alongside return investors Sequoia Capital and Arrive .

Ethos makes its money by providing an online and mobile sales channel for insurance policies created by the Lincoln, Neb.-based life insurance company, Assurity Life.

Rather than selling permanent life insurance, which requires users to pay in perpetuity and which payers often let lapse or opt out over time for a loss, Ethos bills itself as a more equitable insurance provider by only offering term life insurance, which policy-holders only have to pay for a fixed period of time.

The term life insurance policies are less expensive than permanent life insurance offerings.

Given how little insight customers have into the process other insurance providers, which pay their salespeople on commission, have incentives to pitch the more expensive policies that customers often let lapse. Ita win-win for the insurer, according to company chief executive officer, Peter Colis.

Ethos co-founders Peter Colis and Lingke Wang

&They&ll often convince people they need permanent life insurance. And they&ll give a you a bait and switch price that less than 10% of people qualify for,& he said.

By contrast, Ethos doesn&t pay its salespeople on commission and prices are among the lowest in the industry — while the folks that can receive the coverage are among the broadest.

Ita new way to sell an old product to a generation that doesn&t have much use for the stereotypical insurance salesman and can&t stand the process of hours of paperwork. Using population data, Ethos can offer insurance policies in roughly ten minutes based on a few bits of customer information.

Based on those answers, the company will calculate a price for a policy, depending on whether a potential policy-holder wants insurance that would last anywhere from 10 to 30 years.

&We&re processing thousands of apps and customers,& said Colis.

Colis and his co-founder Lingke Wang have deep experience in the life insurance industry. The two previously founded Ovid Life, a company that created a secondary marketplace for life insurance policies where policyholders could cash out of their policies by selling them to willing buyers.

In addition to its cash investment, Ethos also managed to score a debt round from Silicon Valley Bank .

As a result of the investment, Accel partner Nate Niparko will join the Ethos board of directors and GV General Partner Tyson Clark will become an advisor to the companyboard.

Itno surprise that venture investors are becoming more interested in the insurance industry. Startup companies have raised billions and have seen multiple exits already as insurers try to shore up their defenses against incumbents in the industry that are also — backed by venture capitalists. Indeed, many insurance companies have set up their own funds to invest in new technologies before they become &disrupted&.

Airobotics,the developer of automated drones that can fly without a pilot, has raised $30 million in a new round of financing.

The new funding will be used to boost the companymanufacturing efforts to meet new demand and help with the development of the companyglobal headquarters in Arizona as it looks to capitalize on interest from mining companies in North and South America.

&Streamlining manufacturing to achieve growth and scale is what this funding is to be used for,& according to the companychief executive officer and co-founder Ran Krauss.

As the company looks to increase manufacturing, it will likely confine its efforts to the U.S., given the constraints that the Airobotics has on its potential vendors and supply chain thanks to its involvement in the defense industry.

Krauss would not comment on whether the company is doing any work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the much-maligned Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, but ICE has expressed interest in acquiring drone technologies and the company has been pushing hard into the homeland security market (indeed it was a centerpiece of the companylast $32.5 million round in 2017).

&We are deepening our work in the mining industry in Australia and in the U.S. [and] the next step is to be active in smart cities,& said Krauss.

The companymining operations span the globe with deployments through the mining giant BHP in Arizona, South 32 in Australia, Vale in Brazil and additional work in Chile.

&We are looking very seriously into the United States because of our scale. Mining is a significant market in the U.S. and also… flights in cities which is something we&re looking to in two years,& said Krauss.

Airobotics is also making money from contracts doing security and facilities management for companies like Intel, where it is already deployed in one of the companylarge semiconductor fabrication facilities.

&We have a strong business pipeline and to keep up with demand for our technology, we are continuing to expand operations across the countries in which we operate, specifically our new headquarters in the U.S,& said Krauss in a statement. &Additionally, the new funding will drive our continuous work with Aviation Authorities to obtain BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) Certificate of Waiver in every geography we operate in, including in the U.S.&

The new financing was led by Pavilion Capital, a Sino-U.S. investment firm based in New York. Previous investors including Blue Run Ventures China, Charles River Ventures and OurCrowd, as well as additional private investors, also participated in the funding.

Snapchat, in hot competition with the likes of YouTube and InstagramIGTV to capture a growing audience that is replacing traditional TV with online and mobile video programs, now has 5 million people in the UK watching Shows on Snapchat that are produced by premium partners out of the US. Now, parent company Snap is taking the first step towards growing and monetising that audience by giving them more content: it is adding 25 new series out of the UK to the platform from some 17 different content producers, aimed at millennial audiences.

Although Snapchat has been building Discover in the UK for almost a year now, and it has partners producing local content in various other markets around the world, this will be the first time that the company is working specifically with local partners to produce serialised Show content for the platform,Rami Saad, Head of International Content Partnerships at Snap, told TechCrunch at a presentation today. These programs are built and aimed at a US market, he added, but (as with the US content) they will not be geofenced and will be viewable by all Snapchat users.

Todaynews underscores the focus that Snap is putting on building more engagement directly in specific markets, and subsequently its revenues, and how it is looking to TV-style content to do that.

Producers of the programs will range from established brands that have already been producing content for Discover, such as Sky News and Sky Sports and Vice, through to new partners like Culture Trip and Gleam Futures — which describes itself as a management company for digital-first talent and influencers.

Shows will include &Hotspots& looking at controversial story lines in the news; &Most Expensiveist& exploring how the 1% spend their money; and a food/travel show that will highlight extremes in eating and stories behind the scenes of far flung locations.

&We&re happy to be partnering with Snapchat to showcase our brand new digital series Hungerlust, celebrating local dishes from around the world and the passionate people behind the food,& said Mike Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Culture Trip, in a statement.&At Culture Trip, we&re focused on telling stories that capture what is unique and special about places, people and cultures. Snapchat Stories provides an ideal platform to help get our creative video content in front of a curious, inspiration-hungry audience.&

(The full list of partners:Sky News, Sky Sports, VICE, Gleam Futures, The Guardian, Culture Trip, Hearst / Cosmopolitan UK, Tastemade, COPA90, Channel 4 [trial], Global, Boiler Room, GRM Daily, JOE.co.uk, Brave Bison, PinkNews and Manchester City.)

While some of these shows will be produced specifically for this Shows launch, they are not, to be clear, Snapchat Originals — the content that Snap launched earlier this month where it is working closely with content producers to build video series that are debuting exclusively on Snapchat. Those will come over time, Saad, said.

&Originals are a great strategy for Snap,& he said. &If and when the time is right to launch originals we&ll do a great job now is not the time.&

Indeed, Snap is taking baby steps with the new content and format. These new shows for now will not have a lot of monetising features wrapped around them at launch.

Saad confirmed that Snap is not co-investing &right now& in their production, and it is not running advertising alongside them. But Shows, he said, &present an opportunity to help us bring commercials to the platform,& which he said would be six-second ads that are not skippable. Snap he said will share revenue with content companies on these but he declined to say what the split would be.

Nor will it be offering merchandising functions. All of these have been major selling points on other platforms that have more established audiences for video content. FacebookInstagram has, in fact, been using extra monetising perks as a unique selling point when wooing creators to its platform over YouTube.

For that reason, itlikely we will see much more of that coming to Snapchat as it tries to grow its business, as a way of attracting more producers, and keeping companies creating content for the longer run rather than running away when the enthusiasm and/or budget of the marketing team runs out.

&We&ve been burning with funding for content, but then the funding runs out and you are left with the team or the classic pivot to video,& noted Alan Strange of Sky. &Ita wasteland out there.&

In the US, Snap has already begun allow stories to utilise commerce functions, Saad pointed out. For now that has been centered around the &swipe up& gesture to buy items shown in videos. &There are no plans to introduce that in the UK immediately,& Saad said, although he also added that it will likely appear over time.

&Commerce is an important part,& he said, &and we are always looking at new ways for Snapchatters to access a catalog& of merchandise. The long-term aim, he said, &is to build a mobile wallet that allows a Snapchatter to swipe up and purchase goods using their safely storied details. Thatthe world we want to get to, and itonly a matter of time.&

The longer term trajectory, if Shows follows the success of Discover, are that it will be a big opportunity for Snap potentially. Discover launched in January 2015 with 18 brand partners, and now there are more than 100 partners globally.

So far, the time spent watching Shows on Snapchat globally has more than tripled since the beginning of the year, Snap said, with21 unique Shows in Discover reaching a monthly active audience of over 10 million viewers globally in Q3.