Crowdfunding platform for startups Republic has acquired crowdfunding platform for games Fig, joining forces to help creators get their ideas off the ground. Users of each service will be happy to know they&ll continue as-is for the foreseeable future.

The model of publicly accessible micro-equity has proven an effective one, and both platforms have recent successes under their belts. Startups of a wide variety have raised hundreds of thousands on Republic, while Fig has had a great year with games like the critically acclaimed (and popular) Outer Wilds and What the Golf.

The scale of the sites is small compared with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but the projects are more carefully curated and, although they are all crowdfunding platforms, the Republic/Fig model is different, awarding equity rather than product. Or in addition to product — who can resist wanting to have their own weird new Intellivision console?

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the general idea is to merge the two sites without compromising either. Ideally both will see an increased audience, and users will see an increased variety of projects to potentially back. Gaming is a growing area of investment, especially niche indie games that might be the next big unexpected hit, so Republic saw Fig as a natural extension of its existing platform.

&One of the best things going for Fig is how successful they&ve been in making positive returns for investors. Capital raised is used to develop the game, games are sold, and sales revenue is shared with investors,& said Republic Funding Portal CEO Chuck Pettid in a statement sent to TechCrunch. &Most private investments take 7-10 years for investors to get meaningful returns. Fig has accelerated that outcome and even boasts 3 straight years (2017, 2018 and 2019) of positive returns for investors. There isn&t another crowdfunding platform in the world that can say that.&

FigCEO, Justin Bailey, will stay on as a board member at Republic and help guide the intelligent integration of the two sites.

&Fig will continue on and over time will slowly become a part of Republic,& he said. &Republic will keep the core parts of Figcommunity publishing platform and then add in its ingredients such as its commitment to diversity which will create an even stronger platform for indie game developers. In the end, Figmission is to help support independent developers and making games possible that wouldn&t be.&

Both CEOs went out of their way to mention that the sites especially value underserved and underrepresented groups, which may find crowdfunding the only way to collect enough capital to pursue an idea. &More than half of the campaigns featured on Republic have come from underrepresented founders,& said Pettid. &In the past few years, the tech and video game industry has pushed the diversity message, but not enough is being done.&

Bailey noted that the pandemic has led to a major disruption of traditional investment methods. Crowdfunding is already successful, but in the modified post-coronavirus world it may be even more valid.

&Developers should always be rethinking how to raise funding,& he said. &Innovation and creative thinking leads to the best campaigns, and we will be there to assist them.&

Before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the world and reshaped the economy, Boston was quietly setting records.

According to new venture data compiled by TechCrunch, the region set what was at least a local maximum in venture capital raised in the space of a single quarter in Q1 2020.

But while Bostonstartup market announced a number of huge rounds that bolstered its total venture dollars raised in the first quarter, there were signs of weakness: Deal volume was its best since Q2 2019, according to a set of data compiled and released by PwC and CB Insights, but was still a little under the pace set in 2018.

So Bostonstartups raised lots of money, but couldn&t match prior highs when it came to the number of checks written. And those results were largely recorded before COVID-19 shuttered the city. Since then, we&ve seen a number of area startups lay off staff, something we explored last week.

Now, with fresh data in hand, we can take a closer look at the cityfirst quarter of 2020. To better understand what we&re unpacking, we asked a number of local venture capitalists to weigh in. Letlook back at BostonQ1 as we stride into Q2 with the help of Venture Lane, .406 Ventures, Volition Capital and Flybridge Capital Partners.

The data

Starting with a programming note is counter-flow, but bear with us. TechCrunch is starting a regular, monthly series on Boston and its startup market. This is a second prelude of sorts. Normally we&d hold news and interviews for a later date so that we&d have plenty of material for a column. In the face of relentless change, however, we didn&t want to hold off on reporting and synthesizing new information. When things are more normal, our pace will follow.

Per PwC and CB Insights, herethe last few quarters of data, along with a few yearly totals to draw you the picture we can now see:

Microsoft on Thursday gave the newest Windows 10 upgrade a name, calling it the "May 2020 Update," signaling that it will launch the refresh next month.

Computerworld had argued that Microsoft would be better served, and better serve customers, if it pushed back the release of Windows 10 2004, the four-digit label it had assigned earlier, by several months. The COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on businesses, notably a massive shift to working at home, the argument went, had so stretched IT resources that adding a Windows upgrade risked breakdowns or even catastrophic failure of core business tools.

To read this article in full, please click here

The Mendel Air Sensor app is the first app I open every morning. Before Reddit, before Gmail, before NYT. I roll over, grab my phone and check my plants. I don&t know if therea higher honor I can bestow on an app.

The Mendel Air Sensor is a game-changer for indoor growers. It offers a sophisticated suite of sensors that collects critical information about growing conditions. With a price of $99, therevery little else on the market that offers the same sort of data collection at an affordable price.

The company behind the Mendel Air Sensor started by building similar sensors for at-home aquariums. This group knows data collection and teamed up with an experienced manufacturer to develop and ship the Mendel Air Sensor.

I know very little about growing plants indoors. I&ve watched some YouTube videos, read a lot of blog posts and asked friends for advice. And yet I have a small growing operation in my basement: tomatoes, romaine lettuce, carrots and, you know, other leafy greens.

Several weeks in, I&m starting to appreciate the data behind growing plants. Therea lot to consider, from the temperature to types and amount of light, to humidity and how the plants react to humidity through a calculation to determine the vapor pressure deficit (VPD).

I have a Mendel Air Sensor hanging in one grow tent (pictured at the top), and itmy new obsession. The small green device collects four data points every 15 minutes and displays the information through a web app or smartphone app. This is allowing me to fine-tune the controlled environment through exhaust fans, light placement and humidifier levels.

As I&ve found, itcritical to watch this data throughout the day. I&ve yet to stabilize the environment to a point where I set it and forget it. About twice a day, because of the Mendel Air Sensor, I make slight changes to the growing tent, which results in dramatic changes to the environment. Without access to this data, I wouldn&t know something is off until the plant shows warning signs — and as I understand it, thatwhen ittoo late.

At $99, ita good value, and there are only a few competitors in the space. Most are double or triple the price, though their charting products seem more mature.

CEO Nate Levine tells TechCrunch Mendel started as a 50/50 partnership with another bootstrapped company, RapidLED out of the Bay Area. This company has sold lights for indoor growers for the last few years and already has an established base of customers in this field. But Levine didn&t start to build a product for monitoring plants; instead, he created, FishBit, a product for monitoring aquariums.

The parallels between the two markets helped Levineteam jump into the indoor gardening space. As Levine told TechCrunch, the consumer demands are similar, and like with aquariums, indoor growers are increasingly looking for ways to increase capabilities. Instead of keeping fish alive, though, they&re trying to get more tomatoes. Or weed.

Levine said that unlike with aquariums, indoor growers can be less stingy with their cash, though, right now, with cannabis, margins are slim. There isn&t a gold rush, he said, but noted that the cannabis market, in particular, is at the right spot for companies to launch new products.

The company is marketing the same product to home growers, and commercial growers thought this could be a challenge with the current web app. It lacks robust features found on other products. For a small grower like me, itokay, but I expect commercial customers expect better logging, more detailed analysis and a variable monitoring cycle instead of just every 15 minutes.

To make it available for international users, the company needs to swap out the USB power supply.

Don&t call this is a pivot. Or at least Levine doesn&t call it a pivot. As he told TechCrunch, if he goes back to the original pitch deck, the company is still driving at the same goal for FishBit, and everything the team learns on Mendel is implemented in FishBit, too. The goal is to build an entire product line of smart hardware and software for the indoor grower.

RapidLED approached Levine and the team at an aquarium conference and offered to build the hardware if Levine could make the software. My plants are happy that the two companies forged the partnership.

As for my plants, I&ve learned a few things because of the Mendel Air Sensor. First, my grow lights put out much more heat than I expected, and I need to dump the cheap set and get a name brand unit. Second, the humidity was much lower than I had expected, so I added a humidifier. Finally, monitoring the VPD is much easier than it seems if the calculations are automated.