Technology

Lyft and Uber race to an IPO is heating up.

Lyft has selected JPMorgan Chase - Co. as the lead underwriter of its initial public offering, along with Credit Suisse Group and Jefferies Group,the WSJ reported, citing &people familiar with the companyplans.&

Lyft declined to comment.

Lyft is expected to file an IPO in the first half of 2019. Choosing an underwriter marks the next official step in the process. Meanwhile, Uber is making its own preparations.

Uber, which has received proposals from banks that placed its value at as much as $120 billion, is also considering an early 2019 listing.

Some people familiar with the plan said Lyftvaluation will exceed the $15.1 billion it was valued at earlier this year. While Lyftvalue is still considerably lower than Uber&s, iton the upswing.

Lyftsaid in June 2018 that it raised an additional $600 million in a Series I financing round led by Fidelity Management - Research Company, pushing its post-money valuation to $15.1 billion. The valuation had more than doubled in a 14-month span.

Lyft has spent the past 18 months aggressively expanding into new U.S. cities, as wellas into Canadaand pursuing itsautonomous vehicleambitions. Lyft has increased its market share in the U.S. to 35 percent. In January 2017, Lyft had just 22 percent market share in the United States.

Lyft has raised $2.9 billion in primary capital since April 2017.In total, Lyft has raised $5.1 billion since its inception.

Twitter today inserts activity-based tweets into your timeline, alerting you to things like the popular tweets liked by people you follow, or those Twitter accounts that a lot of people in your network have just started to follow. These alerts can be useful, but their timing is sporadic and they can be easily missed. Plus, if you turn off Twitter algorithmic timeline (as may be possible for some), you&ll lose access to this sort of info. A new Twitter app called Macaw aims to help.

Macaw, which recently launched on Product Hunt, offers a set of similar information as Twitter does, with a few changes.

Macaw works by first pulling in a list of people you follow. It then tracks what tweets they like throughout the day and turns that into a feed of tweets that were most popular. Macaw does the same thing for users, too & that is, it shows you if a number of people have suddenly started following someone, for example.

Beyond this, Macaw will also show you the &Latest& tweets receiving likes from your network in a separate tab, as well as tweets where someone has asked a question.

This &Asks& section will highlight tweets where someone on Twitter has asked something like &Does anyone know…& or &what are the best…&, for example. This can help you find new conversations to participate in and help you expand your network.

The end result is a curated version of Twitter, where you can catch up with whatimportant, without so much endless scrolling through your timeline.

Even if you&re on Twitter itself a lot, Macaw can still be useful.

Its default setting will hide top tweets posted by someone in your network & because, chances are, you&ve already read them. With this setting turned on, you&ll only be shown top tweets by users you don&t yet follow.

You can also configure how many likes are required for something to be considered a &top& tweet. By default, this is set to 25, but you can change it to 10, 100, or even 1,000. You can adjust the default setting for the age of the tweet, too, from 6 hours to 2 hours, 24 hours, or 96 hours, based on how often you check in.

The app, however, is not a Twitter client.

That is, it doesn&t take the place of Twitter or other apps like Twitterific or Tweetbot, as you can&t use it to post tweets, access direct messages, update your profile, or follow users. You&ll need a different app, like the main Twitter client, for that. But a tap in Macaw will launch Twitter for you, making the transition feel seamless.

The app was built by Zachary Hamed, who had previously built Daily 140 for tracking a similar set of data, shared via email. He says he started building Macaw as a side project and launched it into private beta in August. It doesn&t currently have a business model, beyond a plan to maybe charge for additional features later on.

In some ways, Macaw is similar to Nuzzel, another Twitter summarization app that provides a list of top links that your network is sharing and discussing. But many of the best things on Twitter aren&t links, they&re individual tweets or tweetstorms. (Like that recent Google+ rant, for example).

Hamed admits Nuzzel was a source of inspiration for Macaw (a bird that screams constantly, by the way. Ha!)

&I was actually inspired by those notifications in the main Twitter app since I&ve always found them fascinating and by Nuzzel, which is one of my most used apps & and whose founder Jonathan I really respect,& Hamed says. &I think there is a lot of hidden insight to be found in posts people have liked and who they start following, especially if there is momentum around certain names or topics. As of now, Twitter only shares one to two of those recommendations, not all of it,& he adds.

*While we do like Macaw, the app, one thing we&re not a fan of are the fake reviews on the Macaw website, which pretend to be from @Jack, Mary Meeker, and Chamath Palihapitiya. Itobviously meant to be a joke, but it falls flat & Macaw doesn&t need this sort of false promotion, and itwrong because it could confuse less savvy users.

Macaw is a free download on the App Store.

Thirty Madison, the healthcare startup behind the hair loss brand Keeps, has brought in a $15.25 million Series A co-led byMaveron and Northzone.

The company provides a subscription-based online marketplace for menhair loss prevention medications Finasteride and Minoxidil. Keeps sells these drugs direct-to-consumer, working with manufacturers to keep the costs low.

On Keeps, a subscription of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter topical treatment often referred to by the brand name Rogaine, is $10 monthly. A subscription to Finasteride, a prescription drug taken daily, is $25 per month.

&Itan end-to-end platform that is the single best place for guys who are looking to keep their hair,& Thirty Madison co-founderSteven Gutentag told TechCrunch.

Keeps is tapping into a big market. According to the American Hair Loss Association, two-thirds of American men experience some hair loss by the age of 35.

You may have heard of Hims, a venture-backed menhealthcare company that similarly sells subscriptions to hair loss treatments, as well as oral care, skin care andtreatments for erectiledysfunction. Keeps is its smaller competitor. For now, the company is focused solely on haircare, though with the new funds, Thirty Madison plans to launch Cove, a sister brand to Keeps that will provide treatments to migraine sufferers.

The company was founded last year byGutentag andDemetri Karagas with a plan to develop several digital healthcare brands under the Thirty Madison umbrella.

&Going through this process myself of starting to experience hair loss, I was not sure where to turn,& Gutentag said. &I went online and looked up ‘why am I losing my hair,& and if you search on Google, really for any medical condition, you usually walk away thinking you&re going to die … Iwas so fortunate that I got access to this high-quality specialist who could help me with my problem and I was in the position to afford those treatments, but most peopledon&t get that access.&

Keeps also providedigital accessto a network of doctors at a cost of roughly $30 per visit.

TechCrunchConnie Loizos wrote last year that &itnever been a better time to be a man who privately suffers from erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation or hair loss& because of advances and investments in telemedicine. Since then, even more money has been funneled into the space.

Hims has raised nearly $100 million to date and is rumored to be working on a line of womenproducts. Roman, a cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction, raised an $88 million Series A last month and is launching a &quit smoking kit.& And LemonaidHealth, which also provides prescriptions to erectile dysfunction medications and more, secured $11 million last year.

Greycroft, Steadfast Venture Capital, First Round, ERA, HillCour and Two River also participated in Thirty Madisonfundraise, which brings its total raised to date to $22.75 million.