Technology

Project A, the Berlin-based VC that backs startups in Europe at seed and Series A stage, has raised a new $200 million fund (€180 million). This brings total assets under management to $486 million (€440 million) and is the third fund Project A has raised.

The venture capital firm, whose investments include the likes of WorldRemit, Catawiki, Voi and Uberall, is also announcing that it will now have a presence in London and Stockholm in order to put people on the ground in what it says are &two of its favourite ecosystems&.

Meanwhile, it is just over two years since Project A raised its last fund. Fund two sat at €140 million, so this new fund is a slight increase in size. As is the initial cheque size the VC plans to write out of fund three: &up to $7 million,& the firm says.

&We are pleased that our approach as an operational venture capital investor convinces both startups and co-investors. Over the next few years, the new fund will enable us to continue backing passionate European founders and their teams at Seed and A stages & working both on B2B as well as B2C innovations,& says Thies Sander, General Partner at Project A, in a statement.

Describing itself as the only European &Operational VC& — which is highly debatable, given that tons of European VCs offer operational support and have Partners that are ex-founders with exits behind them — Project A says its portfolio companies receive support from 100 &functional experts& in engineering, marketing, product, design, communications, business intelligence, sales - customer success, organizational building and hiring.

&Project A can provide support in all critical functions across the entire startup building stack, at all stages of a founding teams& startup journey,& says the Berlin-based firm.

Sectors that Project A plans to invest span fintech, digital health, proptech, Industry 4.0, enterprise software, mobility and logistics — all areas the VC says it has &deep expertise,& and where European startups are uniquely positioned to build &transformational& global businesses.

And it is certainly true that these are sectors where European startups are punching above their weight, which hasn&t gone unnoticed by venture firms and LPs in the U.S. In fact, with fund three, it is the first time that Project A has attracted LPs from the U.S., with Top Tier Capital Partners now a backer.

Cue a statement from Florian Heinemann, General Partner at Project A: &The European digital ecosystem matured enormously within a few years. We see more and more ambitious serial entrepreneurs working on groundbreaking product innovations based on their experience in the established economy combined with their prior expertise. We also see more and more competence-driven acquisitions and strongly believe that they will increase significantly over the next few years&.

Congratulations to all the motivated hackers, coders, devs and designers who took action and secured their spot in theTechCrunch HackathonatDisrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. We limited participation to 800 people, and we&re thrilled that the event is completely full.

We can&t wait to see what 800 of the worldbest code warriors create over the course of roughly 24 high-pressure hours. And we&re pretty sure you can&t wait to hear more about our hackathon sponsors and the real-world challenges they&ve created to test your mettle. This is the post you&ve been waiting for.

Each sponsor offers prizes for the team that creates the best solution for the specific challenge — prizes can include cash, and they vary depending on the sponsor. Oh, but wait there is more. On top of the sponsor prizes, TechCrunch will select one teamproject as the best overall hack and award them $10,000 prize. Want more details? Check out theHackathonwebsite.

Alright, the time has come. Here are the sponsors, contests and prizes for the TechCrunch HackathonatDisrupt SF 2019. Let the games begin!

Humana

Create a prototype for Humana and win one of three cash prizes. First place: $10,000; second place: $5,000 and third place: $2,500. Examples of a prototype include a mobile app, a website, animations, video, etc. Here are the prototype guidelines.

• The prototype should either demonstrate what a customer would experience visually/in audio or be a technical prototype with basic UX to understand the concept
• Teams are encouraged to showcase a demo with a use case that brings the solution to life, simulating movement/animation of the user experience.

Kinship

We want to see Kinship data used in ways that has never been thought of or explored and applied in a manner that translates into real and positive change for pets. Create a solution that improves the lives of pets or pet parents using at least one Kinship data source and win one of three prizes.

• First prize: $10,000 between the team and a Whistle GO Explore pet tracker for up to five team members
• Second prize: $5,000 between the team and a Wisdom Panel Health canine test for up to five team members
• Third prize: $2,000 between the team

Intersystems

Mapping all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy? InterSystems is there. Providing interoperability for over a billion medical records around the globe? InterSystems has that covered. Processing over a billion transactions a day for a global investment bank? InterSystems is quietly at work in the background. Whether ithealthcare, business, or government, digital transformation has changed consumers& expectations about how their data is accessed and managed. Speed, scale, transactional processing, cloud deployment, and high availability, are all cornerstones of what users expect out of their applications. InterSystems challenges you to explore and build your own business solutions using our IRIS Data Platform tools to solve for healthcare, business, or consumer-facing problems. InterSystems will offer a $4,000 prize for the best use of our IRIS for Health platform to solve for healthcare challenges and $4,000 for best use of IRIS Data Platform to solve for business or consumer application challenges. Use of our extensive libraries that enable connectivity both within and between hospital systems is not required for healthcare solution proposals.

But wait…in the coming days we&ll have even more juicy details about contests and prizes sponsored by Plaid and United Airlines!

Disrupt SF 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we just can&t wait to see what the brilliant minds at the TechCrunch Hackathon will produce under pressure.

Is your company interested in sponsoring the Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

At its developer conference Wednesday, Oculus showed off a pair of prototype designs for its next high-end headsets.

Two years ago, Oculus showed off its Half Dome prototype which utilized a technology called varifocal lenses to allow users to adjust where the points of focus were in an image, this is technology similar to what Magic Leap uses on its headset, but is designed to allow for a much greater range of focal planes.

The company showed off tow new prototypes including a &Half Dome 2& prototype and a &Half Dome 3& prototype.

&Half Dome 2& is optimized for weight and size significantly shrinking down the form factor of the previous prototype while reducing the weight by 200 grams. The device is also shrinking the 140 degree field-of-view of the first design, though the company says the headset will still boast a FoV that20% wider than the Rift.

The headset still utilizes a system that mechanically moves the lenses inside the headset to adjust the focus, but Oculus is also looking further down the line.

&Half Dome 3& integrated the technology of its previous designs with an electronic varifocal module that has no moving parts and integrates a number of stacked lenses that can be turned on and off to let users move through various planes of focus (the company detailed the headset could switch between 64 planes of focus with this setup). This will enable users to view items in focus at closer distances and will let headsets function more like human eyes.

There weren&t any timelines thrown around for either prototype being productized, but Oculus is clearly investing in the high-end still inside Facebook Reality Labs.