Technology

Gusto, which sells payroll, benefits and human resources management and monitoring services to small businesses, has raised $140 million in its latest round of funding.

The company said it will use the money to add new services to increase payment flexibility for employees. The company launched a new service called Flexible Pay, which gives employees a way to get paid no matter when a companypay schedule dictates. It seems sort of like a payday loan, where a percentage of the salary is taken by Gusto for providing money upfront.

The late-stage round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates portfolio, MSD Capital (the family investment fund for Michael Dell), Dragoneer Investment Group and Y Combinator Continuity Fund.

Previous investors, including General Catalyst, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, 137 Ventures and Emergence Capital, also participated in the round.

The company claims that it processes tens of billions of dollars in payroll and offers a range of benefits, including health insurance, 401(k) plans and college savings plans.

For developers, the process of determining whether every new update is going to botch some core functionality can take up a lot of time and resources, and things get far more complicated when you&re managing a multitude of apps.

Test.ai is building a comprehensive system for app testing that relies on bots, not human labor, to see whether an app is ready to start raking in the downloads.

The startup has just closed an $11 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, GoogleAI-focused venture fund. Also participating in the round weree.ventures, Uncork Capital and Zetta Venture Partners. Test.ai, which was founded in 2015, has raised $17.6 million to date.

&Every advancement in training AI systems enables an advancement in user testing, and test.ai is theleader in AI-powered testing technology. We&re excited to help them supercharge their growth as theytest every app in the world,& Gradient Ventures founder Anna Patterson said in a statement.&In a couple years, AI testing will be ingrained into every companyproduct flow.&

The companytechnology doesn&t just leverage AI to cut down on how long it takes for an app to be tested; there are much lengthier processes it helps eliminate when it comes to developers readying lists of scenarios to be tested. Test.ai has trained their bots on &tens of thousands of apps& to help it understand what an app looks like and what interface patterns they&re typically composed of. From there, they&re able to build their own scenario list and find what works and what doesn&t.

That can mean, in the case of an app like our own, tracking down a bookmark button and then deducing that there are certain process that users would go through to use its functionality.

Right now, the utility is in the fact that bots scale so broadly and so quickly. While a startup working on a single app may have the flexibility to choose amongst a few options, larger enterprises with several aging products having to grapple with updated systems are in a bit more of a bind. Some of Test.ailarger unnamed partners that &make app stores& or devices are working at the stratospheric level having to verify tens of thousands of apps to ensure that everything is in working order.

&Thatan easy sell for us, almost too easy, because they don&t have the resources to individually test ten thousand apps every time something like Android gets updated,& CEOJason Arbon tells TechCrunch.

The startupcapabilities operate on a much more quantitative scale than human-powered competitors like UserTesting, which tend to emphasize testing for feedback thata bit more qualitative in nature. Test.aifounders believe that their system will be able to grapple with more nebulous concepts in the future as it analyzes more apps, and that italready gaining insights into concepts like whether a product appears &trustworthy,& though there are certainly other areas where bots are trailing the insights that can be delivered by human testers.

The founders say they hope to use this latest funding to scale operations for their growing list of enterprise clients and hire some new people.

According to COO Sheryl Sandberg, getting ahead of an event called &No Unite the Right 2, DC& is the reason behind Facebook decision to disclose new platform behavior that closely resembles previous Russian state-sponsored activity meant to sow political discord in the U.S.

&We&re sharing this today because the connection between these actors and the event planned in Washington next week,& Sandberg said, calling the disclosure &early& and noting that the company still does not have all the facts.

A Facebook Page called &Resisters& created the event, set to take place on August 10, as a protest against Unite the Right 2 — a follow-up event to last yeardeadly rally in Charlottesville, Va. that left peaceful counter-protester Heather Heyer dead.

The Page, which Facebook identified as displaying &coordinated inauthentic behavior,& also worked with the admins from five authentic Facebook Pages to co-host the event and arrange transportation and logistics. Facebook has notified those users of its findings and taken down the event page.

This isn&t the first event coordinated by fake Facebook accounts with the likely intention of further polarizing U.S. voters. In a call today, Facebook noted that the new inauthentic accounts it found had created around 30 events. While the dates for two have yet to pass, &the others have taken place over the past year or so.&

Facebook will not yet formally attribute its new findings to the Russian state-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA). Still, the Resisters Page hosting &No Unite the Right 2, DC& listed a previously identified IRA account as a co-admin for &only seven minutes.&

That link, and whatever else the public doesn&t know at this time, is enough for the Senate Intel committee vice chairman Mark Warner to credit the Russian government with what appears to be an ongoing campaign of political influence.

&Todaydisclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity,& Warner said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. &I also expect Facebook, along with other platform companies, will continue to identify Russian troll activity and to work with Congress on updating our laws to better protect our democracy in the future.&

Facebookchief security officer, Alex Stamos, maintained that the company &doesn&t think itappropriate for Facebook to give public commentary on political motivations of nation states& and calls the IRA link &interesting but not determinant.&