Technology

Render, a participant in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, has a big idea. It wants to take on the worldbiggest cloud vendors by offering developers a cheaper alternative that also removes a lot of the complexity around managing cloud infrastructure.

Render goal is to help developers, especially those in smaller companies, who don&t have large DevOps teams, to still take advantage of modern development approaches in the cloud. &We are focused on being the easiest and most flexible provider for teams to run any application in the cloud,& CEO and founder Anurag Goel explained.

He says that one of the biggest pain points for developers and startups, even fairly large startups, is that they have to build up a lot of DevOps expertise when they run applications in the cloud. &That means they are going to hire extremely expensive DevOps engineers or consultants to build out the infrastructure on AWS,& he said. Even after they set up the cloud infrastructure, and move applications there, he points out that there is ongoing maintenance around patching, security and identity access management. &Render abstracts all of that away, and automates all of it,& Goel said.

Itnot easy competing with the big players on scale, but he says so far they have been doing pretty well, and plan to move much of their operations to bare metal servers, which he believes will help stabilize costs further.

&Longer term, we have a lot of ideas [about how to reduce our costs], and the simplest thing we can do is to switch to bare metal to reduce our costs pretty much instantly.& He says the way they have built Render will make that easier to do. The plan now is to start moving their services to bare metal in the fourth quarter this year.

Even though the company only launched in April, it is already seeing great traction. &The response has been great. We&re now doing over 100 million HTTP requests every week. And we have thousands of developers and startups and everyone from people doing small hobby projects to even a major presidential campaign,& he said.

Although he couldn&t share the candidatename, he said they were using Render for everything including their infrastructure for hosting their web site and their back-end administration. &Basically all of their cloud infrastructure is on Render,& he said.

Render has raised a $2.2 million seed round and is continuing to add services to the product, including several new services it will announce this week around storage, infrastructure as code and one-click deployment.

The biggest players in online stock trading all just copied Robinhood by removing their fees for stock and ETF trading. Charles Schwab announced yesterday it would drop its $4.95 fee, leading to plummeting share prices for it as well as competitors. By the end of yesterday, Ameritrade announced it too would axe its $6.95 fees, and then E*Trade followed suit this morning killing off its own $6.95 fee. However, none of their share price recovered.

From yesterday before Schwabannouncement through now, Schwab fell 12%, from $41.84 to $36.54; E*Trade fell 19%, from $43.69 to $35.20; and Ameritrade fell 28%, from $46.70 to $33.54. Clearly investors aren&t thrilled that these financial giants are bowing to pressure from a measly startup.

Yet the move could definitely hurt growth for the $7.6 billion-valued fintech upstart Robinhood. It has relied on the free stock trades to pull in users that it then monetizes with its Robinhood Gold subscription to premium services, including the ability to trade on margin by temporarily borrowing money from the company.

Schwab drops its fees

&The changes taking place across the brokerage industry reflect a focus on the customer that‘s been inherent to Robinhood since the beginning,& said a spokesperson for the startup. &We remain focused on offering intuitively designed products that reduce barriers to our financial system, including account minimums and commission fees.&

Robinhood was hoping a high 3% interest rate checking account feature announced in December might help differentiate it from online stock brokerages. But after it prematurely launched the checking product without proper insurance, massive backlash ensued and the company announced it would shelve and rethink the idea. But that hiccup didn&t stop it from raising another $323 million this July to bring its total raised to $862 million. Its young user base and cryptocurrency exchange could give it potential that aged trading platforms lack.

Meet Sendmi, a fintech startup that is launching today in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Sendmi works pretty much like a 401k or a Flexible Spending Account. But instead of saving money for later, you set it aside to send it to your family abroad.

And this mix of payroll and remittance is what sets Sendmi apart from the countless foreign exchange services out there. It could be particularly valuable for people living paycheck to paycheck as you don&t have to take money out of your bank account to send it abroad.

Sendmi wants to sell its service to companies directly. When companies choose to partner with Sendmi, they can then offer Sendmi as a perk to their employees. And theresome form of trust between an employer and its employees.

After that, employees can make a payroll election and decide the amount of post-tax payroll that they move to their Sendmi account.

And because all funds come from your paycheck directly, Sendmi reduces exposure to money laundering mechanisms. Many services, such as TransferWise or Western Union, have to ask you where the money is coming from to make sure that it wasn&t generated from illegal activities.

You can then connect to your Sendmi account at any time from the companymobile app to transfer some money. Right now, Sendmi supports transfers between the U.S. and Mexico, but the startup is already working on adding support to more corridors.

Sendmi has set up partnerships in the U.S. and Mexico so that your recipient receives money in just a few minutes. Eventually, the startup wants to offer additional financial services in the Sendmi app, such as insurance services, consumer lending, etc.

The company currently has 9 employees. It is officially launching its product today, but Sendmi has been testing it with a few clients already. The startup has raised $3.1 million so far.