Facebook continues to expand its VR ambitions in the Pacific Northwest. The company has been quietly growing its footprint 16 miles East of Seattle, in Microsoftbackyard.

A new analysis by real estate resource BuildZoom sheds additional light on the Menlo Park-based companyefforts to build a satellite virtual reality HQ in and around Seattle. Over the last three years, Facebook has spent $106 million on construction and development permits for Oculus offices in Redmond.

In 2018 alone, Facebook spent $88.3 million on Oculus -related permits for as many as eight new offices in the area. BuildZoomanalysis identifies five properties in particular, all on Willow Road in Redmond, that span more than 90,000 square feet of lab and office space. Those locations are10545 Willows Rd.,10785 Willows Rd.,9805 Willows Rd.,9845 Willows Rd. and 9461 Willow Road.

Facebook paid $88 million this year to build out its Seattle area Oculus hub

Last November, Seattle-based news site GeekWire reported that Facebook was on the hunt for 200,000 square feet worth of R-D space in Redmond, to expand its existing Oculus research efforts there. At the time, Oculus listed more than 60 job positions in Redmond in additional to a smaller amount of hiring for its Oculus operations in Seattle proper.Oculus is currently hiring for 121 positions in Redmond, with 42 of them in research.

Facebook paid $88 million this year to build out its Seattle area Oculus hub

9805 Willows Rd, via Google Maps

TechCrunch reached out to Facebook about its plans for the new Oculus offices but the company declined to comment. Late last year, an Oculus spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is growing its Seattle team to achieve its goal to &get 1 billion people into VR.&This May, Oculus announced that its Oculus Research division would be rebranded as Facebook Reality Labs.

The growing Oculus offices join nearby Valve, MicrosoftHoloLens and other VR operations nearby to cement Seattle as one of techmajor VR hubs beyond Silicon Valley.

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One year after receiving a whopping $75 million commitment to invest in early stage companies applying artificial intelligence to various industries, Glasswing Ventures has closed its debut fund with $112 million.

Ita significant milestone for a firm that purports to be the largest early stage investor focused on machine learning on the East Coast, and one of the largest early stage funds to be led by women.

Founded by Rudina Seseri alongside her longtime investing partner Rick Grinnell and bolstered by the addition of former portfolio executive Sarah Fay, Glasswing so far has invested in three startups: BotChain (a company spun up from Glasswingearly investment in the AI management company, Talla); Allure Security, a threat detection company; and Terbium Labs, whose service alerts companies when sensitive or stolen information of theirs appears on the Internet.

For Seseri and Glasswing, the close is actually just the beginning. As she said in a statement:

&Raising an AI-focused fund on the East Coast is just the beginning for Glasswing Ventures. As we embark onajourney to shape the future, we are laser-focused on investing in exceptional founders who leverage AI to build disruptive companies and transform markets. Beyond providing smart capital, we are firmly committed to supporting our entrepreneurs with all facets of building and scaling their businesses.&

The story, for Seseri and her co-founder Grinnell actually begins nearly a decade ago at the venture firm Fairhaven Capital, the rebranded investment arm of the TD Bank Group.

At the time of the firmlaunch in 2016, Glasswing was targeting $150 million for its first fund, with a 2.5% management fee and 20% carried interest (pretty standard terms for a venture fund), according to reporting by Dan Primack back when he was at Fortune.

In a pitchdeck seen by Primack the firm was touting 4.25x return multiple on its investments including 6x realized and 1.8x unrealized in deals like Grinnellexit from EqualLogic (which was sold to Dell for $1.46 billion) and Seseriinvestments in Jibo (which is now basically worthless) and SocialFlow (which isn&t).

Fay, who worked at a portfolio investment of Fairhaven&s, was brought on soon after the two partners launched their new venture.

Glasswing definitely benefits from the firmproximity to Bostonstellar universities. And Seseri, a Harvard University graduate maintains close ties with the research community at both Harvard and MIT — tapping luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee to sit on the firmadvisory council for networking.Glasswing Ventures closes its artificial intelligence-focused fund with $112 million

Chase Martin, Marketing and Events Manager, Emma Marty, Operations and Support Coordinator, Rick Grinnell, Founder and Managing Partner, Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner, Sarah Fay, Managing Director, and Andre Rocha, Investment Associate

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Facebook has released its fifth diversity report, and itfine. Unless companies fire everyone and start over, we&re not going to see drastic improvements anytime soon.

&A critical lesson we&ve learned is that recruiting, retaining and developing a diverse, inclusive workforce should be a priority from day one,& Facebook Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams wrote in a blog post. &The later you start taking deliberate action to increase diversity, the harder it becomes.&

Anyway, worldwide, Facebook is 36 percent female, up from 31 percent in 2014. In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.

At the leadership and technical levels, change has not occurred for black employees. Black employees still make up just two percent of people in leadership roles and one percent of employees in technical roles. For Latinx people, employees make up three percent of the technical team and three percent of the leadership team, down from four percent in 2014.

In her blog post, Williams noted that &diversity is critical to our success as a company.&

Ittrue and the data is there to back it up.Companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity at the executive level are 33 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile, according to McKinseyreport, &Delivering through Diversity.&

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal went down, some pointed to Facebookoverall lack of diversity as part of the problem. Thatbecause homogenous cultures lead to limited perspectives and potential lack of awareness of things that may be more obvious to diverse groups of people. Perhaps if Facebook had been more diverse, that all fiasco could&ve been prevented.

You can check out Facebookfull report here.

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We announced recently that TechCrunch is staging its first ever Startup Battlefield Latin America on Nov. 8 in São Paulo to find the best early stage startup in Latin America.

To spread the word, TechCrunch staff will visit São Paulo and Mexico City next week and Bueno Aires and Santiago the following one to meet with the startup community and hold meetups for anyone interested in learning more about the Startup Battlefield and how to apply. Tickets to the meetups are free, but they will go fast so sign up now.

Here are the details:

São Paulo

Tuesday,July 17th,7:00pm & 9:00pm

Hack Station Sao Paulo&Avenida Paulista, 1374, Bela Vista, Sao Paulo

Register here.

Mexico City

Thursday, July19th,6:00pm & 8:00pm

MassChallenge Mexico,23 The Gold, Mexico City

Register Here.

At the meetup, we will provide a brief presentation on Startup Battlefield and answer questions. Our goal is to encourage founders to apply to Startup Battlefield because, who doesn&t want a shot at startup stardom After applications close next month, the editors will choose 15 companies to compete, and one willwin $25,000 and a free trip to the next Disrupt SF. All the companies, however, will receive global exposure, winners or not, because video from their pitches on stage in front of top tier judges will be posted on TechCrunch.

Startup Battlefield is the worldpremier startup launch competition. To date, the Startup Battlefield alumni community comprises almost 750 companies that have raised over $8 billion USD, and produced over 100 successful exits and IPOs.

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Paidy, a fintech startup that enables Japanese consumers to shop online without using a credit card, announced today that it has raised a $55 million Series C. The round was led by Japanese trade conglomerate Itochu Corporation, with participation from Goldman Sachs.

The Tokyo-based startup says this brings its total funding so far to $80 million, including a $15 million Series B announced two years ago. One notable fact about Paidyfunding is that itraised a sizable amount for Japanese startup, especially one with non-Japanese founders (its CEO and co-founder is Canadian and Goldman Sachs alum Russell Cummer, left in the photo above with CTO and co-founder Lee Smith).

Paidy was launched because even though Japancredit card penetration rate is high, their usage rate is relatively low, even for online purchases. Instead, shoppers pay cash on delivery or at convenience stores, which function as combination logistics/payment centers in many Japanese cities.

This is convenient for buyers because they don&t have to enter a credit card online or worry about fraud, but a hassle for businesses that often need to float cash for merchandise that hasn&t been paid for yet or deal with incomplete deliveries.

Paidy makes it possible for people to buy online without creating an account or using their credit cards. Instead, if a merchant uses Paidy, its customers are able to check out by entering their mobile phone numbers and email addresses. Then Paidy authenticates them with a four-digit code sent through SMS or voice. Every month, customers settle their bills, which include all transactions they made using Paidy, at a convenience store or through bank transfers or auto-debits (installment and subscription plans are also available).

The value proposition for businesses is that Paidy can increase their customer base and guarantee they get paid by using machine learning algorithms to underwrite transactions. The company claims that there are now 1.4 million active Paidy accounts, with the ambitious goal of increasing that number to 11 million by 2020 by expanding to bigger merchants and offline transactions.

In a press statement, Cummer said &We are extremely honored that Paidybusiness concept was highly valued by one of Japanmost prestigious business conglomerates, ITOCHU. Through this tie-up, we expect to launch new merchants in order to deliver Paidyfrictionless and intuitive financial solution to a much broader audience.&

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Your typical cloud monitoring service integrates with dozens of service and provides you a pretty dashboard and some automation to help you keep tabs on how your applications are doing. Datadog has long done that but today, it is adding a new service called Watchdog, which uses machine learning to automatically detect anomalies for you.

The company notes that a traditional monitoring setup involves defining your parameters based on how you expect the application to behave and then set up dashboards and alerts to monitor them. Given the complexity of modern cloud applications, that approach has its limits, so an additional layer of automation becomes necessary.

Thatwhere Watchdog comes in. The service observes all of the performance data it can get its paws on, learns whatnormal, and then provides alerts when something unusual happens and — ideally — provides insights into where exactly the issue started.

&Watchdog builds upon our years of research and training of algorithms on our customers data sets. This technology is unique in that it not only identifies an issue programmatically, but also points users to probable root causes to kick off an investigation,& Datadog head of data science Homin Lee notes in todayannouncement.

The service is now available to all Datadog customers in its Enterprise APM plan.

Through luck and grit, Datadog is fusing the culture of developers and operations

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