Month: July 2018

Goodwall, a US-focused student and graduate professional network which aims to connect young people with college and employment opportunities, has closed a $10.8 million Series A funding raise.

The round was led by Randstad Innovation Fund, a strategic corporate VC fund that focuses on recruitment, and Swiss private equity firm Manixer. Additional investors include Francis Clivaz, Zurich Cantonal Bank and Verve Capital Partners.

The 2014 founded startup says it will be using the new funding to grow the professional network, which has a core demographic of 14-24 year-olds, and more than one million members at this stage.

“Our main initiative with this round of funding is hiring new talent in New York to support our expansion,” says Taha Bawa, co-founder and CEO. “The funding will be used to grow our product team to provide better features for our two demographics: Highschool and college students. We are growing our sales team as well, to handle the demand that enterprises have shown in our talent.”

“The United States is our current focus and will continue to be the focus throughout 2018. We will be growing with our students and serving them in college,” he adds.

“We intend to widen the appeal to the college/post-grad segment by focusing on driving value in terms of being found easily (via a mobile-first experience) by the companies that are interesting to them, whether they be startups or larger companies, for internships or first jobs. Beyond this, as with high school students, we will provide current college students the ability to connect and support each other.”

Goodwall’s business model is based on generating revenue from colleges and enterprises looking to recruit students on the platform. For its target young people, the pull is an online platform where they can connect with fellow students and try to get ahead by showcasing their skills and experience, networking, and learning about education and employment opportunities.

Goodwall says it matches its college student and graduate users to employers for job and internship opportunities, while its high school students get connected to colleges and scholarships.

The startup is competing with traditional college and larger job boards but Bawa argues that its matching process offers an advantage to employers because it’s screening candidates so they get more relevant applications, rather than scores of irrelevant ones which they then have to sift themselves.

The platform generally offers employers a way to source, connect and engage with a pool of motivated students and graduates — with employers able to pay Goodwall to get their brand in front of the types of students or recruits they’re looking for.

“The typical Goodwall user is an English speaking, aspirational go-getter that is either college-bound or in college,” says Bawa. “Goodwall does not aim to only serve the 1% in terms of grades and achievements, though we have many students in this category, from Robotics Fairs winners to Olympic Champions. Rather we strive to serve all ambitious, hardworking students and bring their uniqueness to light via our comprehensive profiles.

“In high school these go-getters may not always be the best students academically, or at the college level, they may not necessarily be enrolled at top ranking institutions. Ultimately, these are the type of students we are looking to work with and the type of talent our partner universities and companies are looking to recruit.”

At the highschool level, Goodwall is also competing with scholarship and college matching websites but Bawa argues it also offers kids additional value — given the platform’s focus on building a community around achievements, connections and mutual support.

The network is also of course competing with LinkedIn — certainly at the older end of its age range. But because Goodwall offers tools for high school students it’s hoping to get in early and build a relationship that lasts right through college and users’ early career path, by acting as “the first resume they build”.

“We grow with them,” is how Bawa puts it. 

While the startup is taking VC funding now to focus on further building its network in the US, he confirms it would be open to an exit to a larger professional or student focused network in the future, saying: “We’d like to continue growing with our members.”

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Paul Jacquin, managing partner at Randstad Innovation Fund, added: “We’re excited to support the Goodwall team in building a new segment with college and graduate demographics after their success in creating a unique and positive community to gain support, receive guidance and opportunities. The level of engagement on Goodwall has been impressive and unique in its community aspect. We are thrilled to bring the platform to its next chapter of growth.”

Apple announced external GPU support at last year’s WWDC, finally rolling out support for the feature back in March. Since then, a handful of manufacturers have brought Thunderbolt 3 functionality to their units, including, notably, Razer back in March.

Alongside the release of new MacBook Pros, the company has taken an extra step toward embracing the tech by giving its seal of approval to a new system from Blackmagic —  the simply named Blackmagic eGPU. The company does these kinds of partnerships from time to time — the LG UltraFine 5K Display being perhaps the most notable example.

The $699 accessory features an AMD Radeon Pro 580 graphics card and 8GB of DDR5 RAM in a fairly small footprint. There’s an HDMI port, four USB 3.1s and three Thunderbolt 3s, the latter of which makes it unique among these peripherals. The company says the on-board cooling system operates pretty quietly, which should fit nicely alongside those new, quieter MacBook keyboards. 

Many developers will no doubt prefer to configure their own, but for those who want an easier solution for playing resource-intensive games or graphics rendering on with a MacBook, this is a fairly simple solution. The eGPU is available now through Apple’s retail channels. 

New MacBook Pros seemed like a no-brainer for WWDC. Like the rest of the company’s hardware line, however, they were a no-show. Sure, Apple used the opportunity to reaffirm its comment to creative professionals — perhaps most notably in the form of some key macOS updates — but there were no new devices available to take advantage of those new features.

The company is addressing that today with its first major hardware release since its big developer conference. Like Mojave, updates to the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bars find the company tipping its hats to creative pros, a key demo long understood to be the core to Apple’s user base.

Nothing has changed on the outside. The new Pros are indistinguishable from last year’s model. As is the case with a majority of updates to the line, all of the really important stuff is happening inside. And these are, indeed, formidable machines. You get a six-core Intel Core i7 or i9 on the bigger machine, backed with up to 4TB of storage and up to 32GB of memory — the latter of which required the company to upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 memory.

That move means a hit to battery life, so the company boosted the battery by an additional 7.7 watt hours. For most users that should mean around the same battery life they would have gotten with the last generation. The 13-inch with Touch Bar gets a similar treatment, bumping up to a quad-core i5 or i7 and up to 2TB of SSD storage.

Apple says it’s still committed to the version without the Touch Bar, but it’s going to have to sit out this round of updates, for the time being.

In case there was any doubt who Apple might be going after with these new models, the company introduced us tech writers to a number of creative pros, whose work runs the gamut from micro neurology (UCSF professor Saul Katoto) to performance art (Aaron Axelrod) to gigapixel imagery (Lucas Gilman). If nothing else, it’s a reminder of just how many fields the admittedly generic “creative professional” tag touches — and why it’s such an important market, both in terms of cache and reach.

It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the overall PC market (around 15 percent by the company’s estimates), but these people are influencers, a title that extends beyond just their output. For every prominent EDM producer (Oak Felder) or music video director (Carlos Perez), there are countless budding artists looking for the right tools for the trade.

Apple had the category on virtual lock for decades, but recent years left some wondering whether the company had begun to take those users for granted. Between simplistic updates to popular platforms like Final Cut and the aimlessness of the Mac Pro line signaled to some devotees that the company had perhaps become complacent, opening up a potential vacuum that Microsoft was more than happy to attempt to fill with its Surface line.

Last year, however, the company took a stand. In April, it offered a rare peek behind its infamously impenetrable curtain, with a refreshing candid conversation about the Mac Pro line. The company offered an uncharacteristic apology for pausing production to “completely rethin[k]” the desktop, according to Phil Schiller. In its stead, the company announced the iMac Pro, a “love letter to developers,” in the words of our video producer, Veanne, who was understandably bummed to return our review unit.

The all-in-one was less of a consolatory gesture than it initially appeared. It was a truly formidable powerhouse in a familiar form factor. And while the company continued fiddling with the aforementioned Mac Pro reset button, it remained the sole representative of Apple’s new offensive. The new MacBook Pros are intended to be the next piece in that puzzle, inheriting a number of features that debuted in that space-gray iMac.

Chief among them is the T2 — a proprietary chip designed to supplement some of the heavy lifting done by Intel’s silicon. The list of jobs managed by the chip is a pretty long one, including everything from audio systems and disk drives to improved tone mapping and face detection in FaceTime.

There’s an important security element on here, as well. From Apple’s press material:

T2 also makes iMac Pro even more secure, thanks to a Secure Enclave coprocessor that provides the foundation for new encrypted storage and secure boot capabilities. The data on your SSD is encrypted using dedicated AES hardware with no effect on the SSD’s performance, while keeping the Intel Xeon processor free for your compute tasks. And secure boot ensures that the lowest levels of software aren’t tampered with and that only operating system software trusted by Apple loads at startup.

Interestingly, Apple’s putting it to even more use here, enabling “hey Siri” on macOS for the first time. It’s an optional addition that you can enable during the setup process, but once it’s on, it will work like any Siri-enabled device, working in tandem with the iPhone and HomePod and giving preference to the microphone in closest proximity. It’s similar to desktop implementations of assistants like Cortana and the Pixelbook’s use of Google Assistant.

True Tone, meanwhile, was borrowed from another source entirely. That one debuted on the iPad back in 2016, bringing with it an automatic temperature adjustment, based on ambient surroundings. Given how aggressively the company has gone after photo and video editors, it’s honestly a bit surprising that the company didn’t embrace the technology earlier for the desktop. It’s one of those features that doesn’t seem particularly important until you use it. Once you’ve got it, however, you wonder how you managed to go so long without it.

Really though, it’s those performance boosts that Apple’s small army of creative pros kept touting over and over at this week’s event. The phrase “cuts the time in half” was the most common phrase bandied about, whether it was the trio of developers (Leah Culver, Akshaya Dinesh and John Ciocca), running simulations of iOS apps or University of Utah Assistant Professor Janet Iwasa rendering complex animated representations of molecular biology.

For Apple, all of this is designed to make a broader point that such complex tasks no longer require that a professional be tethered to a work station. It’s an enticing concept. Over the past decade, smartphones have liberated a number of tasks (the question of how they’ve simultaneously tethered us is one for another day), so it only makes sense that we’d ask similar things of our PCs.

Of course, for a number of pros, the laptop still won’t replace the processing power of a high-end workstation, but the leaps it made in portable computing over the past several generations is certainly impressive, and the new MacBook Pros are nothing if not formidable machines.

Their ability to support two 5K displays and an external GPU through Thunderbolt 3, meanwhile, delivers the promise of modularity. Many of the aforementioned creative types praised the ability to plug and play into a desktop for all of the heavy lifting and tossing the system in a backpack to have it by their side when inspiration strikes.

It’s all part of a difficult balance for Apple. A majority of users will never edit 4K feature films or develop VR games. For most of us, the truly high-end upgrades will have little impact on our day-to-day use. Though the addition of Siri functionality and that newer, quieter keyboard are certainly welcome.

Catering to pros, meanwhile, is the sort of thing that pays off in spades down the road, much like Apple’s longstanding education play. The company was seen as taking its eye off the ball and allowed the competition to usurp some of that ownership. With the iMac and MacBook Pros, coupled with those upcoming macOS updates, the company is making it clear that the category is still a key to Apple’s future.

The 13- and 15-inch models go on sale today, starting at $1,799 and $2,399, respectively.

Selling much more than breadsticks and calamari, app marketing platform AppLovin has launched a new application publishing studio to allow developers (of primarily mobile games) to concentrate on building great apps while AppLovin takes care of everything else.

The company declined to comment on how much it charges, or what kind of equity it may take in a company in return for its services, but it did say that it has managed to juice downloads of a number of top games — including recent number ones like Love Balls and Weave the Line; the game Draw In, and Cash, Inc.

While the new studio and AppLovin’s other marketing services can’t assure that any developers’ apps will stay in the number one slot, the company has been making money hand over fist to use its tools to help applications get to (or at least near) the top of the charts.

According to the company it has helped developers get their apps downloaded 200 million times and published five $1 overall apps.

In a statement, the company’s vice president of strategic initiatives, Rafael Vivas, said:

“AppLovin’s platform fuels growth of the mobile development ecosystem and helps level the playing field by allowing independent developers to create apps and get them discovered… Lion Studios is an extension of this goal, and goes one step further to help developers publish and promote their apps – empowering great talent to have access to the same resources as larger companies.”

 

Like any other line of work, tech journalists tend to get fixated on details. When Apple showed off its new MacBook Pros at an event this week, the company (and a small army of creative professionals) had a lot to say about specs. A majority of our questions, however, revolved around that third-generation keyboard.

To answer all of your no doubt burning questions on that front, I can say definitively that the keyboard is noticeably quieter than its predecessor. I wasn’t able to get a side by side comparison yet (we’ll have to save that for the inevitable review), but as someone who uses a Pro with the second-gen keyboard every day, I can confirm that the improvement is immediately apparent.

That addresses one of the key complaints with the system and should make life a little easier for users who regularly bring their MacBooks into meetings — or worse yet, the library. If John Krasinski was using last year’s MacBook in that quiet film, he almost certainly would have been eaten by one of the murder monsters or whatever that movie is about (no spoilers). The new Pros should give him a bit more of a fighting chance.

Otherwise, there’s really no difference with the new keyboards from a mechanical perspective. The butterfly switches are the same, and they offer the same amount of key travel as their predecessors. The company won’t actually say what it’s done here to lower the clickity-clack (that’s going to be a job for some teardown artists), but it’s certainly an improvement.

Why the company didn’t go all-in on a keyboard overhaul is anyone’s guess. There are a number of possibilities. For one thing, the issues of key failure only really came to a head fairly recently, which might not have given the company enough lead time to do a ground-up rethink of the technology. Also, in spite of some criticism, the new keyboards do have their fans — in fact, we’ve got a number of them on staff (I won’t call any out by name… yet).

Most relevant of all, perhaps, the instances of true keyboard failure do seem to be relatively rare in the overall context of the Apple user base. The company has since acknowledged the black eye and agreed to free fixes for those with impacted systems. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see an overhaul of the tech at some point in the not too distant future. In the meantime, the new version is definitely an improvement. 

After years of producing cases for the iPhone and iPad, Apple finally got into the laptop sleeve business late last year. The leather case sported “high-quality European leather with a soft microfiber lining,” along with the obligatory Apple logo and “designed by Apple in California” guarantee. For whatever reason, however, it was a MacBook-only proposition.

That changes today, however. Today’s new MacBook Pros mean new MacBook Pro sleeves. They’re essentially the same leather/microfiber combo as the standard MacBooks, albeit altered to fit the larger notebooks’ footprint.

And like their predecessors, they come in Brown and Midnight Blue — though Apple’s also tossed in a Black version for good measure. Like the new MacBook Pros, they’re available starting today for those who want to keep repping Cupertino even when stashing their laptops away from the dangerous world outside.

Netskope, a company that focuses on security in the cloud, announced today it has acquired Sift Security, a startup launched in 2014 to help secure cloud infrastructure services like Amazon, Microsoft and Google using machine learning.

The company did not share terms of the deal, but Sift’s 10 technical employees will become part of Netskope’s 500+ person team and Sift CEO Neil King will lead the Netskope IaaS product management team moving forward.

While Netskope provides comprehensive cloud and website security from a single interface, Sift uses machine learning to provide breach detection and automated response for Infrastructure as a Service environments, even across multiple clouds.

Netskope founder and CEO Sanjay Beri says together the two companies can offer more security visibility than they had previously. “Sift Security enhances Netskope’s ability to uniquely gather and visualize the richest set of contextualized data on transactions across nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud — including transaction visibility, DLP (data loss prevention), threat protection, adaptive access control and anomaly detection,” he explained.

As with many deals these days involving companies with machine learning expertise, while Netskope clearly values the Sift Security technology, it also is getting a technical team with machine learning chops in the bargain.

“Sift Security has robust deep machine learning and behavioral analytics capabilities that help with the detection, correlation and response. Sift engineers also bring valuable expertise in machine learning and anomaly detection to Netskope’s growing team of data scientists,” Beri said.

Beri explained that it was ultimately more than a pure technology purchase or talent acquisition because at the end of the day the two companies have to work together. That requires a good cultural fit too. “Neil King — Sift’s CEO and now head of IaaS Product Management for Netskope — and I met and started talking early in the year and over time through many discussions (and over time having our engineering teams meet and spend time together) realized that together our companies would be a great fit,” Beri wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

While the infrastructure cloud vendors do a good job of securing their data centers against attack, Beri says best practices point to a “shared responsibility model”, which holds that both cloud providers and their customers play a role in overall security.

“Public cloud vendors are the first to tell [their customers] that they themselves are also responsible for protecting their data. For instance, companies should not rely on public cloud vendors for application level security; nor can they rely on public cloud companies to centralize the governance of multiple IaaS platforms,” Beri says. That’s where a company like his comes in.

Netskope was founded in 2012 and has raised over $231 million. Sift Science was founded in 2014 and raised over $3 million in seed capital. The deal closed last month.

Brazil’s macroeconomic picture may be gloomy, but technology investors still see hope in the nation’s burgeoning technology sector — and a recent $124 million financing for the mobile conglomerate Movile is the latest proof that that the pace of investment isn’t slowing down.

Brazil was already the hottest spot for technology investment throughout Latin America — with Sao Paulo drawing in the majority of the record-breaking $1 billion in financing that the region’s startups attracted in 2017. And with this latest funding for Movile, led by Naspers, that trend looks likely to continue.

Indeed, Naspers investments in Movile (supplemented by co-investors like Innova, which participated in the most recent round) have been one of the driving forces sustaining the Brazilian startup community. In all, the South African technology media and investment conglomerate has invested $375 million into Movile over the course of several rounds that likely value the company at close to $1 billion.

Another Brazilian tech company, the financial services giant Nubank, has raised around $528 million (according to Crunchbase) and is valued at roughly $2 billion, putting it squarely in the “unicorn club”, as the Latin American Venture Capital Association noted, earlier this year.

Both chief executive Fabricio Bloisi and a spokesperson from Naspers declined to comment on Movile’s valuation. “My dream is not to become a unicorn my dream is to become much bigger than that,” Bloisi said in an interview.

Nubank and Movile are the two most recent privately held independent companies to achieve or approach unicorn status in Brazil, but they’re not alone in reaching or approaching the billion dollar threshold in Latin America. MercadoLibre was an early runaway success for the region (hailing from Argentina) and the ride hailing service 99Taxis was acquired by the Chinese ride-hailing behemoth Didi for a roughly $1 billion dollar valuation last year.

All of this points to an appetite for Latin American tech that Movile is hoping it can seize upon with its new $124 million in financing.

The company is looking to expand its food delivery business iFood, its payment company, Zoop, and its ticketing platform, Sympla.

Both Movile and Naspers look to Chinese companies as their model and inspiration for growth, with Bloisi saying that he’s eyeing the eventual public offering for Meituan — the Chinese online retailer as the company to emulate in the market these days.

“The Chinese companies are doing extremely well and Movile is very similar to a Chinese company,” says Bloisi. And the company’s buy and build strategy certainly mirrors that of a tech business in the world’s largest emerging market economy moreso than it does a typical U.S. startup.

That extends to Movile’s investment in the tech ecosystem in its native Brazil and the broader Latin American region. Already the company boasts 150 million users per month across its application ecosystem. Through on-click payment services provided by Zoop, Movile offers a WePay and WeChat like experience for buyers in Latin America, Bloisi said.

It’s a playbook that the company’s backers have run before — with WeChat. Naspers came to prominence and untold riches by being an early backer of Tencent who’s WeChat and WePay applications have become the backbone of mobile commerce in China.

Now it’s looking to replicate that with Movile in Brazil and beyond. Like its Chinese counterparts, Movile is more than just one of the largest startup companies in the Brazilian ecosystem… it’s also a big investor. Indeed, subsidiaries like iFood began as small investments the company made in promising businesses.

It was with its last $82 million round of financing from Naspers and other co-investors that Movile backed Mercadoni, a Colombian grocery business, and its payment services play in Brazil — Zoop (which is one of the company’s main areas of interest going forward).

For Bloisi, that future outlook seems pretty bright. “Our confidence is extremely high,” he says of the recent financing. “For me it’s an indicator that things are growing. There was a hot moment in Latin America in 2010-2012. Then there was a recession, now while Movile is raising more there are also many more players,” who are coming to market with convincing offerings for investors. 

Movile itself isn’t afraid to let its checkbook do the talking for it when it comes to confidence in the market for online retail and commerce in Brazil. Bloisi estimates that his company has made nearly 35 transactions over the past few years, and will continue to invest heavily in the sector.

“Many of our business are growing at over 100% per year,” Bloisi said.

Investors like Martin Tschopp the chief executive of Naspers can’t complain about that kind of growth across multiple business units.

As the executive said in a satement:

“Naspers has been a long-term partner of Movile because of its ability to build transformative mobile businesses in Latin America and beyond. Movile has great expertise in identifying high-potential companies in consumer segments with opportunity for massive growth, including food delivery with iFood, which is why we continue to support the company.”

That sentiment, an optimism about the future of technology enabled businesses in Brazil and the broader Latin American region has captured investors’ imagination from billionaire backed offices like the Russian investment firm DST and large multinational U.S.-based players like Goldman Sachs.

As HIllel Moerman, head of Goldman’s private capital investment group told The Financial Times, “The [venture capital] ecosystem is still nascent compared to the US and other international markets — therefore there is a large opportunity for start-ups.”

Beyond the relative maturity of the venture community, there are macroeconomic forces at play that continue to make the Brazilian market attractive.

“Brazil has a large market, a pretty tech savvy population with attractive demographics and decent engineering and computing talent. You have all the right ingredients for an ecosystem to develop,” Tom Stafford, an investor with DST Global, told the British paper in an interview.

 

Finding the right talent is a make-or-break situation for any company — especially smaller ones, which might not have the robust tools (or pocket books) of larger companies like Google that have a complete system in place. Recruiting platform Greenhouse hopes to make that process a little bit easier, and it has caught the attention of investors.

The company said it has raised a new $50 million financing round from Riverwood Capital, bringing its total funding to $110 million. Greenhouse definitely isn’t the only company that’s starting to pick up a significant amount of funding recently by trying to crack open the process of talent acquisition and make it a little more data-driven. But as the cost and difficulty of collecting enormous amounts of data on different kinds of human activity has dropped with the emergence of new machine learning tools, the problems behind recruiting may also be one that can get a lot of help from employing the same data science rigor that powers a smart Google search result.

“Hiring tools and software in the market had been built for the previous generation, with an applicant tracking mindset to cover the basics of collecting resumes on your website,” Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait said. “We saw that winning companies in the talent market were ones who were able to attract the right talent, identify difference makers in a sea of LinkedIn profiles, make really smart decisions in who to hire, deliver winning experiences, use data to optimize. They needed tools to accomplish those goals and much broader than the recruiting software.”

The typical consumer’s experience with Greenhouse has probably been a bunch of job listings on a website somewhere, where an employee can submit an application or additional information that the company wants. Under the hood, Greenhouse provides companies with ways to find the right funnels for their applications — whether that’s something like GlassDoor or smaller niches on the Internet with more isolated pockets of talent — and discover the right employees for the roles that are available. Data is collected on all this behavior, which in turn helps Greenhouse give better recommendations for companies as to where to find potential recruits that fit their needs.

All that has to be packaged together with a generally nice user experience, both for the typical consumer and for the companies. That can boil down to actually understanding the right questions to ask, the right requirements to post in a job listing, and also making sure the process is pretty quick for people that are applying for jobs. Greenhouse implements scorecards to help interviewers — which can turn out to be a big group, depending on the position — determine whether or not candidates are the right person for the job in a more rigorous manner. And Greenhouse also hopes to work with companies with its tools to eliminate bias in the recruiting process to produce a more diverse set of hires.

“Companies are continuing to invest in recruiting and talent acquisition software,” Chait said. “As issues of talent and hiring have become more central at the C-suite, companies continue to invest in this area. Companies are starting to see the difference between HR and talent acquisition as its own specialty. If you’re a big company that has an all-in-one HR suite, it’s all well and good to have payroll and benefits in your org chart in one place, but when it comes to hiring, iit’s very dynamic.”

Greenhouse is still pretty dependent on its partners, but the startup has a wide array of companies that it works with to ensure that all the right tools are available to clients to find the right candidates. If a change is coming on LinkedIn — one of the biggest homes of candidate profiles on the planet — Greenhouse is going to work with the company to ensure that nothing breaks, Chait said. Greenhouse provides an API-driven ecosystem to ensure that its tools reach all the right spots on the Internet to help companies find the best talent.

But Greenhouse isn’t the only recruiting-driven company to attract a significant round of funding. It isn’t even the only one to do so in the last month — Hired, another recruiting platform, said it raised $30 million just weeks ago to create a sort of subscription model to help funnel the right candidates to companies. But all this interest, including Greenhouse, is a product of attempts to try to find the right talent in what might be unexpected spots powered by machine learning tools that are now getting to the point where the predictions are actually pretty good.

Have you ever wondered why photos on Airbnb, UberEats and your favorite hotel platform always look so good? French startup Meero has been working on a marketplace and AI-powered technology to make it easy to get good photos of products and places.

The company has raised a new $45 million round led by Alven Capital and Idinvest. Eight months ago, Meero already raised $15 million from Global Founders Capital, Aglaé Ventures, Alven Capital and White Star Capital.

“We focused on this idea because we wanted to make the web beautiful,” co-founder and CEO Thomas Rebaud told me last year. “We realized that we are all on Instagram and that photos are beautiful. But then, you go on a marketplace and photos aren’t great.”

The company first looked at the real estate market and partnered with real estate companies to optimize the photography process as much as possible.

It starts with finding a photographer. Instead of working with hundreds of photographers in hundreds of cities, Meero lets you find a photographer in over a hundred countries. Prices, contracts and processes are all standardized in order to avoid any surprise. Meero takes a cut on every transaction.

After the shooting, photographers usually have to spend hours selecting and editing the best photos. This usually takes even longer than the shooting itself.

Meero has been working on AI-powered algorithms so that you don’t have much to do. You upload your photos, and the service will automagically take care of the editing. By speeding up this process, a photographer can work on more projects. And Meero can also cut variable costs drastically — this is key when it comes to Meero’s scalability.

With today’s funding round, the startup is going to open new offices in the U.S. and somewhere in Asia. Meero will also hire more computer vision experts in France.

Meero currently has 40,000 clients and processes a new transaction every 30 seconds. Clients usually get photos within 24 hours. The company now also lets you order videos from the same platform.