Technology

Venture capitalists are still hungry for food delivery startups.

Foodsby, the provider of a lunch delivery service based out of Minneapolis, has raised a $13.5 million Series B led by Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking. Greycroft Partners, Corazon Capital and Rally Ventures also participated. With the new capital, Foodsby plans to expand to 15 to 25 new markets.The round brings Foodsbytotal raised to $21 million.

&We have established a successful model for new market entry with a tried and true combination of talent and technology,& Foodsby founder and CEO Ben Cattoor said in a statement. &We look forward to building on our early successes and learnings to deliver continued growth for our investors and our team.&

Founded in 2012, the company connects employees in office buildings in 15 cities with local restaurants. How it works: A hungry worker uses Foodsby to pre-order a meal from a restaurant in its network, Foodsby aggregates all the orders it receives, sends the orders to the restaurants and the restaurants then make all the deliveries at once, streamlining what can be a logistically complicated process.

That strategy, the company says, sets Foodsby apart from competitors. Because Foodsby only works with businesses and has restaurants make the deliveries rather than its own fleet of delivery agents, the overall costs of the operation are lower. Itfree to join the Foodsby network as both a company that wants to provide the service to its employees and as a restaurant. Deliveries cost $1.99 per person.

While continued VC support may give the company a vote of confidence, the food delivery space is crowded and competitive. Foodsby is not unlike Peach, a Seattle-based office lunch delivery service that shed one-third of its staff in March. Peach had also landed VC support, raising about $11 million from Madrona and others. Munchery, another similar meal delivery service, also looks to be in hot water, laying off 30 percent of its workforce in May and ceasing operations in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.

Food delivery startups are hit or miss, but VCs continue to flock to investment rounds in hopes of betting on the next Uber of food delivery — though Uber itself is really the Uber of food delivery, its food delivery service is reportedly the most profitable arm of the ride-hailing giant. And Uber, much like Amazon, is not a company you want to be going head-to-head with.

In the years to come, who will hospitality hiring managers trust to credential students: Cornell University or the Four Seasons Will it be Google or Penn State that sets the standards that determine who qualifies as a good computer programmer Could GE define competency in aeronautic engineering rather than Vaughn College Should employers place more value in a fashion credential backed by the editors ofVogueor the Pratt Institute

Institutions of higher education are, of course, not unfamiliar with branding. The brands of top-tier institutions shape not just consumer sentiment, but the market and regulatory landscapes that have governed their existence for decades. The single greatest determinant ofU.S. News - World Reportrankings is reliance on &reputation.& Eight of the top 20U.S. Newsuniversities are Ivy League schools which are, on average, more than 250 years old.

Brands evolve slowly in any industry. Just ask Arizona State UniversityMichael Crow or other leaders of a cadre of innovative colleges and universities that tout dramatic accomplishments, but fail to crack the spaces dominated for centuries by big brands like Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

But the role of brands in higher education may be changing. Mega brands fromoutsideeducation are beginning to transform the way students and employers think about learning.

Owners of global consumer brands sense two broad shifts in higher education that make it ripe for &brand extensions.& First, traditional education is under assault. Employers are increasingly skeptical of the correlation between a college performance and workplace outcomes. Depending on how you count, coding schools may be graduating as many computer scientists as traditional universities.

Peter Thiel offers $100,000 to brilliant minds willing to drop out of college. Major companies like Google and IBM are looking beyond the degree to find employees with the skills and competencies they demand — regardless of whether they went to college. TheNew York Timespartnered with Cambridge Information Group, which operates SothebyMasterdegree-granting Institute of Art, on art business, contemporary art and fine and decorative arts and design. And startup MasterClass has made a splash by teaming up with celebrities like Wolfgang Puck, Serena Williams and Malcolm Gladwell to teach classes in their respective fields.

The definition of education credential, too, is changing. As the shelf life of skills shrinks, the degree is fast losing relevance as the primary unit of measurement for post-secondary education. Our nationcolleges and universities are, increasingly, using digital credentials to help their graduates show-what-they-know and enable employers to make sense of skills or accomplishments. Even the U.S. Department of Education is supporting &experimental sites& thatdecouple financial aid from the credit hour in favor of a focus on the underlyingcompetencies that employers valuemost.

The economics of higher education also makes sense to big brands. Consider the potential for old-line media companies faced with falling revenues as digital distribution models take market share and compete for advertising dollars. Media brands desperately seeking product extensions understand that education is a big market, with over $500 billion of higher education spend in the U.S. alone. No-name private colleges charge $50,000 in tuition and fees. Name-brand colleges create massive profits, and emerging brands like General Assembly command premium fees to train students for thehybrid jobsof the future. Contrast the lifetime value of credential seekers with average revenues per customer selling ads and magazine subscriptions.

But the opportunity for brands is not just economic. Media companies bring other assets to the table, including more curated, and often times high-quality, content than virtually any university. Imagine working with Thomas Friedman,New York Timescolumnist and author ofThe World Is Flat, to create a course on the Middle East — or a product manager of Samsung on mobile computing.

This is not an either-or for universities. ParsonspartneredwithTeen Vogue Magazineto launch Certificate in Fashion Industry Essentials. Bellevue University teamed up with Chipotle to build a restaurant-orientedbusiness degree programthat maps to the Chipotle career path. And Queen Latifah — perhaps one of the best lessons in branding — is building with Strayer University an online course for aspiring entrepreneurs coveringconfidence and perseverance. Smart global brands and universities with stellar reputations will partner with each other to build up their respective competencies. Great universities will bring tradition and academic excellence — while the global brand has connections to employers and incredible content.

The formula is simple: Well-structured, branded programs will be superior to an unbranded degree. They will give elite institutions a run for their money. Itonly a matter of time before theU.S. News - World Reportrankings are riddled with global brands.

Back in January, we told you about a young, Austin, Tex.-based startup that fights online disinformation for corporate customers. Turns out we weren&t alone in finding it interesting. The now four-year-old, 40-person outfit, New Knowledge, just sealed up $11 million in new funding led by the cross-border venture firm GGV Capital, with participation from Lux Capital. GGV had also participated in the company$1.9 million seed round.

We talked yesterday with co-founder and CEO Jonathon Morgan and the companydirector of research, Renee DiResta, to learn more about its work, which appears to be going well. (They say revenue has grown 1,000 percent over last year.) Our conversation, edited for length, follows.

TC: A lot of people associate coordinated manipulation by bad actors online with trying to disrupt elections here in the U.S. or withpro-government agendas elsewhere, but you&re working with companies that are also battling online propaganda. Who are some of them

JM: Election interference is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of social media manipulation. Our customers are a little sensitive about being identified, but they are Fortune 100 companies in the entertainment industry, as well as consumer brands. We also have national security customers, though most of our business comes from the private sector.

TC: Renee, just a few weeks ago, you testified beforethe Senate Intelligence Committee about how social media platforms have enabled foreign-influence operations against the United States. What was that like

RD: It was a great opportunity to educate the public on what happens and to speak directly to the senators about the need for government to be more proactive and to establish a deterrent strategy because [these disinformation campaigns] aren&t impacting just our elections but our society and American industry.

TC: How do companies typically get caught up in these similar practices

JM: Itpretty typical for consumer-facing brands, because they are so high-profile, to get involved in quasi-political conversations, whether or not they like it. Communities that know how to game the system will come after them over a pro-immigration stance for example. They mobilize and use the same black market social media content providers, the same tools and tactics that are used by Russia and Iran and other bad actors.

TC: In other words, this is about ideology, not financial gain.

JM: Where we see this more for financial gain is when it involves state intelligence agencies trying to undermine companies where they have nationalized an industry that competes with U.S. institutions like oil and gas and agriculture companies. You can see this is the promotion of anti-GMO narratives, for example. Agricultural tech in the U.S. is a big business, and on the fringes, theresome debate about whether GMOs are safe to eat, even though the scientific community is clear that they&re completely safe.

Meanwhile, there are documented examples of groups aligned with Russian intelligence using purchased social media to circulate conspiracy theories and manipulate the public conversation about GMOs. They find a grain of truth in a scientific article, then misrepresent the findings through quasi-legitimate outlets, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that are in turn amplified by social media automation.

TC: So you&re selling software-as-a-service that does what exactly

JM: We have a SaaS product and a team of analysts who come out of the intelligence community and who help customers understand threats to their brand. Itan AI-driven system that detects subtle social signs of manipulation across accounts. We then help the companies understand who is targeting them, why, and what they can do about it.

TC: Which is what

JM: First, they can&t be blindsided. Many can&t tell the difference between real and manufactured public outcry, so they don&t even know about it when ithappening. But therea pretty predictable set of tactics that are used to create false public perception. They plant a seed with accounts they control directly that can look quasi-legitimate. Then they amplify it via paid automation, and they target specific individuals who may have an interest in what they have to say. The thinking is that if they can manipulate these microinfluencers, they&ll amplify the message by sharing it with their followers. By then, you can&t put the cat back in the bag. You need to identify [these campaigns] when they&ve lit the match, but haven&t yet started a fire.

At the early stage, we canprovide information to social media platforms to determine if whatgoing on is acceptable within their policies. Longer term, we&re trying to find consensus between governments and also social media platforms themselves over what is and what isn&t acceptable — whataggressive conversation on these platforms and whatout of bounds.

TC: How can you work with them when they can&t even decide on their own policies

JM: First, different platforms are used for different reasons. You see peer-to-peer disinformation, where a small group of accounts drives a malicious narrative on Facebook, which can be problematic at the very local level. Twitter is the platform where media gets its pulse on whathappening, so attacks launched on Twitter are much more likely to be made into mainstream opinion. There are also a lot of disinformation campaigns on Reddit, but those conversations are less likely to be elevated into a topic on CNN, even while they can shape the opinions of large numbers of avid users. Then there are the off-brand platforms like 4chan, where a lot of these campaigns are born. They are all susceptible in different ways.

The platforms have been very receptive. They take these campaigns much more seriously than when they first began looking at election integrity. But platforms are increasingly evolving from more open to more closed spaces, whether itWhatsApp groups or private Discord channels or private Facebook channels, and thatmaking it harder for the platforms to observe. Italso making it harder for outsiders who are interested in how these campaigns evolve.