Mixmax, a service that aims to make email and other outbound communications more usable and effective, today announced the official launch of its new IFTTT-like rules for automating many of the most repetitive aspects of your daily email workflow.
On the one hand, this new feature is a bit like your standard email filter on steroids (and with connections to third-party tools like Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign, Greenhouse and Pipedrive). Thanks to this, you can now receive an SMS when a customer who spends more than $5,000 a month emails you, for example.
But rules can also be triggered by any of the third-party services the company currently supports. Maybe you want to send out a meeting reminder based on your calendar entries, for example. You can then set up a rule that always emails a reminder a day before the meeting, together with all the standard info you’d want to send in that email.
“One way we think about Mixmax is that we want to do for externally facing teams and people who talk a lot of customers what Github did for engineering and what Slack did for internal team communication,” Mixmax co-founder and CEO Olof Mathé told me. “That’s what we do for external communication.”
While the service started out as a basic Chrome extension for Gmail, it’s now a full-blown email automation system that offers everything from easy calendar sharing to tracking when recipients open an email and, now, building rules around that. Mathé likened it to an executive assistant, but he stressed that he doesn’t think Mixmax is taking anybody’s jobs away. “We’re not here to replace other people,” he said. “We amplify what you are able to do as an individual and give you superpowers so you can become your own personal chief of staff so you get more time.”
The new rules feature takes this to the next level and Mathé and his team plan to build this out more over time. He teased a new feature called ‘beast mode’ that’s coming in the near future and that will see Mixmax propose actions you can take across different applications, for example.
Many of the new rules and connectors will be available to all paying users, though some features, like access to your Salesforce account, will only be available to those on higher-tier plans.
Twitch has teamed up with The Pokémon Company to allow viewers to binge watch the Pokémon: The Series TV show and related movies on its site, and “catch” Pokémon badges along the way. While the former is one of Twitch’s many retro binge watch fests – it’s previously streamed old shows like Bob Ross, Julia Child, Mister Rogers, SNL, and most recently, Knight Rider – the interactive feature it’s debuting is something new.
According to the company, Twitch will launch its own Pokémon extension to accompany the broadcast. This overlay, called “Twitch Presents: Pokémon Badge Collector,” will encourage viewers to collect Pokémon badges that appear on the screen for points, which places them on a leaderboard.
This is only the second time Twitch has added an interactive element like this to one of its viewing events, and its addition could see users watching for longer periods of time, as a result. The first was a “watch and win” extension during a Doctor Who broadcast, but it was different as it focused on collecting contest entries.
Twitch also notes this will be the longest viewing event it’s ever held.
The binge will see 16 movies and 19 TV seasons with 932 episodes streamed across Twitch’s network, starting on August 27, 2018, and spanning until 2019. This will kick off with the first season, Pokémon: Indigo League at 10 AM PDT on the 27ths for audiences in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The content will air on TwitchPresents and on its companion channels in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
“The Twitch community has a passion for Pokémon based on the warm embrace the series received when we celebrated the brand’s 20th anniversary, as well as the cultural milestone that was set when over a hundred thousand Twitch members played Pokémon together,” said Jane Weedon, Director of Business Development at Twitch, in a statement about the launch.
The viewing event comes at a time when reports claim Twitch is going after a wider audience than just gamers. The company has been wooing creatives like vloggers, cooks, artists, and others to come to its site, instead of only broadcasting on YouTube. And it’s been airing non-esports content through marathon events like this new one with Pokémon. According to Bloomberg, TV show livestreams are one of the two fastest-growing genres on the site, the other being “IRL” (in real life) content.
The Pokémon viewing event, in particular, is aimed at a younger audience who may not have the level of nostalgia for the classic TV shows Twitch previously aired. Instead, Twitch says the livestream is appropriate for fans 13 and up – which means it could attract those whose first real exposure to Pokémon was the mobile game that went viral following its launch in 2016.
The dates and times of the Pokémon series and movies will be on Twitch Presents. The binge fest won’t include newer series, like the Sun & Moon or Sun & Moon Ultra Adventures, however.
Autonomous vehicles need more than a brain to operate safely in a world filled with obstacles. They need maps. Or more specifically, self-driving vehicles need maps that constantly refresh and can deliver important information—like that sudden lane closure due to construction or a double parked vehicle—so they can take the safest and most efficient route possible.
This specific need has provided an opening for startups in what once looked like a locked up mapping market dominated by a few giants.
Carmera, a New York-based mapping and data analytics startup, is one of them. The company, which came out of stealth two years ago, has now raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. Carmera previously raised $6.5 million.
The company announced the funding raise Thursday along with a few other updates including a new feature on its autonomous mapping product and a partnership with New York City. The capital will be used to hire more talent and expand.
“We’ll be doing the most aggressive hiring we’ve ever done this next year,” Carmera co-founder and CEO Ro Gupta told TechCrunch, adding that the company will mostly focus on building out its New York and Seattle offices. Carmera, which has about 25 employees, plans to have more than 50 by the end of next year.
“The money also allows us to be more prospective than simply reacting to customer needs,” Gupta added.
In other words, Carmera can move into new markets where it suspects there will be a need in the future, not just wait for a call from their customers. One of those customers is Voyage, the autonomous driving startup that currently operates self-driving cars in retirement communities.
Carmera has an interesting business model, and one that’s likely attractive to investors looking for startups with a present-day revenue stream. The company describes itself as a street intelligence platform for autonomy. It’s main product is the Carmera autonomous map, a high-definition map for autonomous vehicle customers like automakers, suppliers, and robotaxis.
The twist here is that the company uses data gleaned from its other product—a fleet monitoring service used by commercial customers with vehicles driven by humans—to keep those AV maps fresh. The fleet product is a telematics and video monitoring service used by professional fleets that want to manage risk with their vehicles and drivers.
These fleets of camera-equipped human-driven vehicles deliver new information to the autonomous map as they go about their daily business in cities. Carmera calls this a “pro-sourcing” swarm.
The startup has now added a real-time events and change management engine to its autonomous map that Gupta contends is a major leap forward because it not only provides more detailed information to self-driving vehicles, it gives these driverless vehicles a suggested path.
In some mapping products, there’s general a base map and then a dynamic overlay. The problem, Gupta explains, is that when things change like a lane closure, the dynamic map only flags it, leaving it up to the vehicle to figure out what to do next.
“That works fine when humans are driving, it just doesn’t go far enough for AVs,” Gupta said. “What they need to know is how do I path plan around it?”
Carmera’s real-time events and change management feature.
The map will detect a change in milliseconds, classify it within seconds and then validate and redraw the base map within minutes, according to Carmera. The company is giving companies deploying autonomous vehicles API access to this data at every stage.
Carmera also has a “site intelligence product,” a jargon term that means the company provides spatial data and street analytics (like how pedestrians move within a particular intersection) to urban planners.
Carmera announced Thursday it will begin sharing data such as historical pedestrian analytics and real-time construction detection with New York City’s Department of Transportation. Carmera will get access to key city data sets in return. The partnership with NYC DOT follows an earlier data sharing initiative with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are no longer solely the domain of super cheap smart speakers. Google, in particular, has been courting third-party hardware makers pretty aggressively in an attempt to put the consumer AI on as wide a range of products as possible.
Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound 1 and 2 certainly hit the high of the spectrum. The pricey speakers are the first in the company’s line to get Google Assistant functionality, though B&O has already promised to add it across its devices. Both models already feature the tech necessary for such an addition, including an array of five mics.
The company’s also added four buttons on top of the device, which can be assigned to various functions, like weather, news and the like. New models will ship with Assistant on board starting next month, priced at of $1,750 and $2,250 for the 1 and two, respectively.
The success of Airbnb has created a major disruption in how people choose where to stay when they visit other places. Gone are the days of assuming a hotel is the best or only option; a selection of private accommodations might prove to be more interesting, cheaper and more flexible. Now, an Airbnb-like startup out of Germany called Homelike — which focuses on rentals of a month or more, often for business but also other customers — has raised $14 million to expand its business to more of Europe, starting with the UK.
Pointedly, the company, does not believe that it is competing directly with Airbnb, in part because of its focus on those longer rentals and in part because none of the properties posted on the platform are private homes. “Homelike starts where Airbnb ends,” said co-founder and CEO Dustin Figge in an interview. Since being founded in 2015, it’s found a willing customer base on both sides of its marketplace. It currently has listings for 45,000 furnished apartments and works with more than 15,000 corporate clients across 100 cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with the aim to cover all the major business hubs in Europe by the end of next year.
Led by Spark Capital, this round also included previous investors Cherry Ventures and coparion, among others. (Of note, this is the latest in a growing number of investments in Europe for Bay Area-based Spark that have focused on marketplaces and commerce. Others have included another rentals platform, Badi; insurance startup Coya; and elderly care platform Careship, in addition to social payments app Verse.) This brings the total raised by Homelike to $18 million in disclosed investments, alongside earlier, undisclosed rounds, Figge said.
Homelike’s funding and general growth come at a time when Airbnb has been on a roll. The company has said it would be ready to IPO from the end of June 2019, and in the meantime is already profitable on an Ebitda basis as it expands into a plethora of other services to diversify and position itself as a “travel experiences” business — including working with a growing number of corporate clients and integrating with business travel booking services. But with that growth has not always been smooth, with the company facing a fair amount of regulatory tussles across a number of markets.
Figge says that his company’s focus on working with people who own or manage properties that were designed for renting out, and its focus on the longer the timeframe — the minimum is around one month, woth the average stay more like four months, he said — has helped it play nice with official bodies as well as stay out of direct competition with the much larger Airbnb and other big platforms that have been hotly competing with it.
Homelike’s main clients are businesses ranging in size from larger corporates to small startups, and the idea is that it’s tapping into the fact that in our global economy, workers might need to move to new cities on a temporary basis, or might need to make permanent moves with little advance warning. When you are living in a city for more than a week or two, living out of a hotel can become less convenient — not to mention more expensive — and that is the gap that Homelike is hoping to fill.
But there are use cases. For example, if you are living in a home or apartment that you need to vacate if it’s, say, undergoing a big renovation (or maybe you have simply rented it out for too many Airbnb weekends! I kid…), sometimes it can be hard to find short-term leases. This is also where Homelike can come in handy.
Just as Airbnb has expanded into areas like things to do once you arrive at your destination, and helping you plan your travel from point A to point B, so, too, does Homelike hope to grow not just by expanding to more cities and users, but also by expanding the services is provides to its users.
“We want to fix the prob for longer term apartment rental first of all, but when you are relocating you need more services, too,” Figge said. “Local service recommendations, insurance, mobility information, cleaning services, gym memberships, there is a lot where we could help with in the next couple of years. There are so many things you can optimise.”
And that’s on the renter side only. On the supply side, he noted that many property owners are still stuck in the offline world when it comes to the management systems and accounting services they use. The aim, he said, will be to provide something end-to-end for both renting customers and those supplying properties, where information doesn’t need to be entered repeatedly and works more efficiently. Homelike won’t be the first to think about this: Lovely also saw a similar opportunity several years ago in the very-long-term — year or more — rental market. It was eventually was acquired by RentPath.
Interestingly, it sounds like Homelike has also been attracting attention from bigger players in the same space of temporary accommodation, where Homelike’s service and footprint might complement what the bigger business has already built. Figge got cagey when I asked about this, but if the startup keeps growing as it has, I have a feeling this may not be the last time we hear about Homelike.
Apple today announced a pair of initiatives that will allow its customers to support America’s National Parks. Starting tomorrow, August 24, and continuing through the 31st, Apple says it will donate $1 to the National Park Foundation for every purchase made using Apple Pay online at apple.com, or through the Apple Store app in the U.S. It’s also introducing a National Park-themed Apple Watch Activity Challenge to accompany the donation program.
Starting on September 1, Apple Watch users worldwide who either walk, run, or do a wheelchair workout of 50 minutes or more will earn an Activity app award and stickers that are inspired by national parks. The 50 minutes is a tribute to Redwood National Park’s 50th anniversary, which is this year.
Related to these efforts, the App Store will also feature a round-up of some of the best apps to use to explore the U.S. National Parks.
Apple says the proceeds from the donation program will support the National Park Foundation’s mission to protect national parks. This includes projects focused on habitat restoration, historic preservation, and the Open OutDoors for Kids program.
“America’s national parks are treasures everyone should experience, and we’re proud to support them again this month by donating a dollar for every purchase made with Apple Pay at one of our stores,” said Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, in a statement about the program. “These awe-inspiring places are our national inheritance, and Apple is doing our part to pass them on to future generations — just as extraordinary, beautiful and wild as we found them.”
The company also took the time today to highlight the success of a related initiative, saying it has protected and created enough sustainably managed forests to cover its current and future paper use. In partnership with The Conversation Fund, Apple has protected 36,000 acres of U.S. forests that are sustainably managed, it noted.
This is not the first time Apple has hosted such a challenge for the U.S. National Parks.
Last year, it ran the same event, making mention of the fact that Apple Pay was accepted at some national parks, like Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Muir Woods National Monument, for example. The event itself now has political undertones, given the current administration’s rethinking of national parks, and its interest in deregulating the oil and gas extraction on public lands.
The Mavic Pro was a revelation. Introduced in 2016, the folding drone wasn’t perfect, but it helped usher in a new era of devices for DJI and the industry at large. The original Mavic helped make consumer drones more portable and accessible, and spurred a line that now includes the Mavic Air and Mavic Spark.
Two years later, the world’s largest drone manufacturer hit New York City to unveil the product’s successor. Like the original Pro, imaging is at the heart of the upgrade. In fact, the Mavic 2 is being positioned as two distinct devices — the Mavic 2 Pro and Mavic 2 Zoom, the on-board camera being the only real difference between the two.
It’s a confusing bit of branding, perhaps, for two products that amount to little more than different SKUs of the same device, but DJI wants to make it clear that the camera’s the thing here. Understandably so — photographers and videographers have long been a core demographic for the company. And more to the point, really, beyond camera upgrades, the Mavic 2 doesn’t represent a huge upgrade over its predecessor.
The company called the products “our most technologically advanced drones” at a press unveiling in New York City this morning. A few of the camera features have been upgraded across the board, including the addition of enhanced dynamic range, for better shots in mixed lighting settings.
The Mavic 2 Pro is, as the name implies, the pricier of the two models. It’s the first DJI device to bask in the fruit of the drone-maker’s 2017 acquisition of Hasselblad. The camera is much larger than the one on the Zoom, bringing with it improved image quality over its predecessor.
The camera captures 20 megapixel shots and uses Hasselblad’s proprietary Natural Color Solution (HNCS) tech to get more accurate color reproduction. The aperture is adjustable as well, giving shooters between f/2.8-f/11 for various lighting conditions.
The Mavic 2 Zoom, meanwhile, is pretty much what it sounds like. The big focus here is the 2x optical (24-48mm) and 2x digital zoom, which combine to simulate the effects of a 96mm lens. The 12-megapixel camera also uses a new “Super Resolution” feature that stitches nine zoomed-in photos for a super high-res 48-megapixel shot, a feature targeted at landscape photography.
Zoom is a solid addition here, given how difficult it can be to try to get a drone close to a subject, for any number of reasons.
There’s also the very cool Dolly Zoom shot mode. This one might be my favorite of the bunch, though while we had the opportunity to fly the new drone atop a Manhattan rooftop, we didn’t have the clearance to try out the new feature, which requires the kind of room that we just weren’t zoned for. The new addition zooms in on an object while the drone flies in the opposite direction, creating a disorienting shot familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Hitchcock film.
There are a number of other additional preprogrammed Hyperlapse shots on-board, as well. I’ll defer to DJI’s description of those:
Free – pilots the drone manually while shooting a Hyperlapse video.
Circle – automatically flies the drone in a circular pattern around a subject you select to create a timelapse video that captures the action.
Course Lock – keeps the camera fixed on shooting subject while the drone flies in a straight direction to create a unique perspective.
Waypoint – plans a complex flight path based on both altitude and GPS coordinates to capture complex shots.
DJI’s done a solid job of creating these sort of single touch features that make you look like a much more competent photographer than you actually are.
The cameras aren’t swappable — that’s why DJI opted to go with two distinct SKUs on this one. It’s a bit of a bummer for photogs, but a modular camera system is certainly the kind of thing that could make sense for future upgrades.
The drone’s body has been tweaked to make it more aerodynamic. DJI says the new design reduces body drag by up to 19 percent, which helps the drone achieve speeds of up to 44 miles per hour. Making the drone larger is a bit of a surprising choice, given how key portability is to the line, though obviously DJI has even more portable choices on the market now for those who prioritize size over everything else.
The propellers have a raked design on the wing tips, designed to help cut down on air drag and reduce sound. The drone is a bit quieter than the first Mavic, though you’re still not going to be able to sneak up on anyone with the thing.
The battery has been increased ever so slightly, as well, in part to compensate for the newer, larger size. Now the drone is capable of flying up to 31 minutes on a charge. That’s not a huge boost from its predecessor’s 28 minutes, but when it comes to keeping a drone in the air, well, you take what you can get.
Obstacle avoidance has been beefed up here — definitely a good thing, given our past track record with Mavics. So too has the Advanced Pilot Assistance System (APAS), helping the drone fly around obstacles rather than simply stopping to avoid collisions. There also are lights on the bottom of the drone to help improve landings in low light.
ActiveTrack, meanwhile, now utilizes three on-board front facing cameras to create a 3D map of its subject, in order to better follow along.
We had the opportunity to fly the drone around a bit on a Manhattan. I wouldn’t recommend flying on a city rooftop for first times, but the drone handled fairly well and was pretty responsive to the included controller. I’ve flown a few other models in the Mavic line and found the handling to be more or less on-par, while a loud alarm sounded every time it came within several feet of an obstacle. Better safe than sorry.
We’ll be able to say a bit more when we’re able to spend a bit more hands-on time with the product, which should be in the very near future.
The 2 Pro and 2 Zoom run $1,499 and $1,249, respectively. There’s also the standard DJI Fly More kit, which includes a bunch of extras, like two batteries, a multi-battery charging hub, extra propellers and a bag to carry all of that around. That’s $319 and can be purchased at any point.
The drones are available starting today through DJI.
Oh, and for those who love to anthropomorphize their devices, here’s an image of the Zoom and Pro, gasping and screaming, apparently witness something horrific happening, just out of frame:
Pets are expensive. I’ll be the first to admit that. The adoption fees, the shots, the food, the medical care. But at the end of the day, it’s worth it for the judgement-free, uninhibited love of a furry companion.
If you’re looking to save a buck a two, a robotic dog is probably not the way to go. Not this robotic dog, at least. For all of its many charms, the rebooted Sony Aibo ain’t cheap. At an event today in New York City, the electronics giant offered a bit more insight into the long-awaited robotic pet, including its $2,899 price tag.
For all of the new Aibo’s charms (and there are many), any suggestion that the product might be anything but a niche device can now be laid to rest. While Sony North America President and COO Mike Fasulo tells me that the company has its sights on playing a key role in the home robotics moving forward, Aibo is not the mainstream device we’ve been promised for decades.
Rather, the robotic dog is a kind of sign post of what we’re capable in this current moment. It’s an opportunity for Sony to showcase the state of the industry of consumer robotics in 2018 — what happens when current artificial intelligence is used to build the foundation of a consumer product. The result, it turns out, is fairly adorable. I was at the company’s CES press conference, when the new Aibo was unveiled for the first time, and there was a collective gasp. It takes a lot to melt the hearts of a roomful of jaded tech journalists, and Aibo succeeded at that in spades.
“It shows our capability of innovation,” Fasulo tells TechCrunch. “There’s 4,000 parts in this product. Its eyes are made of OLEd, which makes it adorable, but also makes it a great device for photo capturing. The core technology inside is built around our image sensors. It’s got 22 axes of movement and more flexibility than I’ve seen in a robot. It’s showing Sony’s innovation and commit to the future and probably a bit of branding along the way.
Conventional wisdom has it that the first generation of the product was ahead of its time. Consumer AI, cloud technology and any number of other aspects that have since come to fruition simple weren’t in place at the time. But have the advancements the industry has made in the intervening 19 years been enough to create a truly compelling robotic pet?
Sony is certainly hedging its bets with the new Aibo. At $2,899, the product is too expensive to appeal to all but the most enthusiastic early adopters. That said, the product sold surprisingly well in Japan, at around 20,000 units — more than Sony bargained for, apparently. The goal for the U.S. market is “in the thousands,” according to Fasulo.
But while Aibo isn’t destined to be a mainstream product and future generations likely won’t see a major price cut, the company’s committed to the line for a few years at least, this time around. The robot will be available in the U.S. as the “First Litter Edition,” which ships with a three-year AI Cloud Plan, meaning the dog should be kicking for that long at least.
Those looking for an insanely expensive holiday gift can purchase Aibo starting in September. It will also be on display at the Sony Square store in New York, through late October.
French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug to a TV or a monitor and start playing.
Shadow has been building a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you get a gaming PC in a data center near you. Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.
The company started with a dedicated box from day one. The first Shadow box was an oddly-shaped black box with a few USB ports and DisplayPorts. This way, you could replace your PC at home with this box and use the same peripherals.
When you turn it on, it feels like you’re booting up your gaming PC, but you’re actually just starting a computer with a low-powered CPU that connects to your gaming PC in the cloud.
Over the past few months, Shadow has slowly decorrelated the service from the physical device in your home. When you subscribe, you don’t get a box by default. You can install the Shadow app on your existing computer, phone or tablet and start playing.
If you still want the box to connect to your Shadow instance without an existing PC, you can rent it for $10 per month or purchase it for $140. It could be particularly useful for a TV for instance.
Compared to the previous generation, Shadow Ghost is completely silent as the fan is gone — that was my main complaint with the first Shadow box. You won’t need as many dongles either as there’s an HDMI port by default (instead of a DisplayPort) and it supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s also much more energy efficient as it should consume three times less power than the existing Shadow device.
Shadow Ghost will be available for the same price at some point during the last quarter of 2018. The service itself is currently available in France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the U.S., the company has a data center near San Francisco and another one on the East Coast.
Armory, a startup that has built a CI/CD platform on top the open source Spinnaker project, announced a $10 million Series A today led by Crosslink Capital. Other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, YCombinator and Robin Vasan.
Software development certainly has changed over the last several years, going from long cycles between updates to a continuous delivery model. The concept is actually called CI/CD or continuous integration/continuous delivery. Armory’s product is designed to eliminate some of the complexity associated with deploying this kind of solution.
When they started the company, the founders made a decision to hitch their wagon to Spinnaker, a project that had the backing of industry heavyweights like Google and Netflix. “Spinnaker would become an emerging standard for enabling truly multi-cloud deployments at scale. Instead of re-creating the wheel and building another in-house continuous delivery platform, we made a big bet on having Spinnaker at the core of Armory’s Platform,” company CEO and co-founder Daniel R. Odio wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.
The bet apparently paid off and the company’s version of Spinnaker is widely deployed enterprise solution (at least according to them). The startup’s ultimate goal is to help Fortune 2000 companies deploy software much faster — and accessing and understanding CI/CD is a big part of that.
As every company out there becomes a software company, they find themselves outside their comfort zones. While Google and Netflix and other hyper-scale organizations have learned to deploy software at startling speed using state of the art methodologies, it’s not so easy for most companies with much smaller engineering teams to pull off.
That’s where a company like Armory could come into play. It takes this open source project and it packages it in such a way that it simplifies (to an extent) the complex world that these larger companies operate in on a regular basis, putting Spinnaker and CI/CD concepts in reach of organizations whose core competency might not involve sophisticated software deployment.
All of this relates to multi-cloud and cloud-native approaches to software development, which lets you manage your applications and infrastructure wherever they live across any cloud vendor or even on-prem in consistent way. Being able to manage continuous deployment is part of that.
Armory launched in 2016 and is based in the Bay area. It has raised a total of $14 million with a $4 million seed round coming last year. They were also a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2017 class and count Y Combinator as an investor in this round.
