Month: August 2018

Uber recorded gross bookings, which is the total taken for all of Uber’s transportation services, of $12 billion, a 6 percent quarter-over-quarter increase and a 41 percent year-over-year increase. However, Uber also saw its losses grow to $404 million in the second quarter compared to a $304 million shortfall in the first quarter.

TraceLink, a nine-year-old, software-as-a-service platform for tracking pharmaceuticals and trying to weed out counterfeit prescription drugs in the process, has raised $93 million in Series D funding. Most of the money — $60 million — was used to buy primary shares, with another $33 million used to buy up the shares of previous shareholders.

Georgian Partners led the round round, with participation from Vulcan Capital and Willett Advisors, along with all of the company’s earlier investors. These include Goldman Sachs, whose growth equity arm had led the company’s $51.5 million Series C round last year, as well as FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital and F-Prime Capital.

As TC had reported at the time of that last round, TraceLink helps pharma companies comply with country-specific track-and-trace requirements through their supply chain, which has grown increasingly important following the passage of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in 2013. The consumer-protection measure aims to prevent individuals’ exposure to drugs that could be counterfeit, stolen, contaminated or otherwise harmful.

At the time of its enactment, it also gave the industry one decade before unit-level traceability becomes enforced, meaning the clock is ticking.

Like Uber, WeWork, and small-but-growing number of private companies, TraceLink also appears to be preparing for life as a publicly traded outfit by releasing some of its financial metrics, including, in TraceLink’s case, quarterly revenue and customer growth numbers.

Just last week, the company published its “financial growth highlights,” which include a 62 percent year-over-year increase in its second quarter revenue; a 42 percent year-over-year increase in all bookings over the same period; and two-year revenue compound annual growth rate of 71 percent.

In June, we reported on TraceLink’s initial $60 million of funding after spying an SEC form relating to its fundraising. The company, based in North Reading, Ma., has now raised $167 million altogether.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple has been working on multiple new Macs. In particular, Apple could be planning to release a new entry-level laptop to replace the aging MacBook Air.

This isn’t the first rumor about a MacBook Air refresh. While Apple has released a 12-inch retina MacBook, it’s not nearly as cheap as the MacBook Air. It’s also not as versatile as it only has a single USB Type-C port.

And yet, the MacBook Air is arguably Apple’s most popular laptop design in recent years. Many MacBook Air users are still using their trusty device as there isn’t a clear replacement in the lineup right now. According to Bloomberg, the updated MacBook Air could get a retina display. Other details are still unclear.

After Apple updated the MacBook Air in March 2015, the company neglected the laptop for a while. It received an update in June 2017, but it was such a minor update that it looked like the MacBook Air was on life support.

It sounds like neither the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro (the one without a Touch Bar) nor the 12-inch MacBook have fostered as much customer interest as the MacBook Air.

Bloomberg also says that the Mac Mini is going to receive an update. The story of the Mac Mini is quite similar as the product has been neglected for years. Apple last updated the Mac Mini in October 2014 — it’s been nearly four years.

And the fact that Apple still sells the Mac Mini from 2014 is embarrassing. You can find tiny desktop PCs that are cheaper, smaller and more powerful. They don’t run macOS, but that’s the only downside.

It’s clear that laptops have taken over the computer market. Desktop computers have become a niche market. That’s why the updated Mac Mini could focus on people looking for a home server and who don’t want to mess around with a Raspberry Pi.

A new way to attack Facebook is to fraudulently report a news story as false in hopes of reducing its visibility, either because someone wants to censor it or just doesn’t agree with it. Sometimes known as “brigading,” a concerted effort by trolls to flag a piece of content can reduce its visibility. Facebook now sends stories reported as false to third-party fact checkers, and these purposefully inaccurate reports can clog the already-overcrowded queues that fact checkers struggle to worth through.

That’s why Facebook gives users a trustworthiness score ranging from 0 to 1 depend on the reliability of their flags of false news, The Washington Post reports. If they flag something as false news but fact checkers verify it as true, that could hurt their score and reduce how heavily Facebook factors in their future flagging. If users consistently report false news that’s indeed proven to be false, their score improves and Facebook will trust their future flagging more.

Facebook’s News Feed product manager Tessa Lyons confirmed the scoring system exists. There’s currently no way to see your own or someone else’s trustworthiness score. And other signals are used to compute the score as well, though Facebook won’t reveal them for fear of trolls gaming the system.

Friend-ranking scores

This isn’t the only way Facebook ranks users, though. It assigns you a shifting score of affinity toward each of your friends that determines how frequently you see them in the News Feed. This “friend-ranking” score is essentially a measure of graph distance from you to someone else.

If you like a ton of someone’s posts, get tagged in photos with them, search for them, view their profile, communicate with them, have lots of mutual friends, are in the same Groups and have similar biographical characteristics like location and age, your score toward them is lower and you’ll see more of them in your feed. However, they have a different score for you depending on their behavior, so constantly viewing someone else’s profile won’t make you show up in their feed more if they don’t reciprocate the interest.

I first reported on these friend scores almost exactly seven years ago, and you can still view them for yourself using this browser bookmarklet built by Jeremy Keeshin. Visit this site, drag the “Facebook Friends Rankings” link into your desktop browser’s bookmark bar, open Facebook while logged in, and tap the bookmarklet to reveal the Friend Ranking scores of your friends. It snoops the Facebook JavaScript to pull out the scores. The people you see at the top are who you’re closest to.

The need for this score highlights the difficulties of Facebook’s battle against fake news. Between subjectivity and purposeful trolling, there’s a lot of noise coming in with the signal about what should be removed. Anyone saying Facebook should have easily solved the fake news problems is likely underappreciating the nuance required and the intelligent human adversaries Facebook must defeat.

Facebook has a huge array of signals it can use to calculate Friend Rankings or trustworthiness scores. The question will be whether it can intelligently sort those signals to make coherent inferences about what to show us and when to believe us.

23andMe is beefing up its African, East Asian and Native American ancestry capabilities — something it has sorely lacked. Specifically, 23andMe has added to its database 12 new regions across Africa and East Asia. When I first tried 23andMe a few years ago, it told me I was 71 percent West African, which tells me next to nothing about which countries the bulk of my ancestry comes from. Well, that’s all changing — though, I already received the information from Ancestry — with 23andMe’s latest product update.

“Key to this update is really the availability of more data from around the world, specifically in Africa and Asia,” 23andMe Senior Product Manager Robin Smith told TechCrunch. “It’s possible through certain initiatives, like the African Genetics Project and Global Genetics Project.”

Before, 23andMe only provided three subgroups in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. Now, there are eight additional subgroups in the area, as well as four additional populations in East Asia.

Here are the 12 additional populations on 23andMe:

1. Southern East African
2. Congolese
3. Coastal West African
4. Ethiopian & Eritrean
5. Senegambian & Guinean
6. Nigerian
7. Somali
8. Sudanese
9. Chinese Dai
10. . Vietnamese
11.  Filipino
12. . Indonesian, Thai, Khmer & Myanma

23andMe first launched in 2007, but it’s taken a long time to collect the data needed to provide a more comprehensive genealogical view to certain populations. Roughly 75 percent of 23andMe’s customers are of European descent, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki said at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017. So, 23andMe realized “at some point that we needed these initiatives to go out and get the data,” Smith said.

For early 23andMe adopters, they’re going to have to re-take the test because this update is only available for people on the most recent genotyping chip, Smith said. 23andMe is now on the fifth version of its chip, which he said is “reflective of a better idea of the diversity of the world.”

That means they’ll either have to buy a new kit or opt-in for a yet-to-be-available upgrade program, Smith said. Beyond this update, 23andMe plans to regularly release updates and continue adding new populations.

“We haven’t done an update like this in a long time,” Smith said. “It’s been on our roadmap for many years now.”

Last September, 23andMe raised $250 million at around a $1.75 billion valuation. As part of that capital raise, Wojcicki said, 23andMe planned to work to expand the diversity of the data and the research on that diversity.

In addition to ancestral information, 23andMe also offers health reports. Earlier in 2017, the Food and Drug Administration started allowing 23andMe to test for 10 different genetic risk tests, including ones for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In addition to testing risks for certain diseases, 23andMe also tells you fun facts like how your DNA influences your appearance, preferences and physical responses.

I’ll be retaking the 23andMe test soon and will let you all know what I find. In the meantime, a researcher over at 23andMe shared a before and after look at their results. Check it out below.

 

HTC continues to bet big on VR, today announcing the launch of pre-orders for the Vive Wireless Adapter. The adapter allows Vive and Vive Pro owners to cut the cord, so to speak, and allow users to tether wirelessly to their PC.

The Base Adapter works with both the Vive and Vive Pro, though the Vive Pro requires an extra $60 compatibility pack that includes a connection cable for the Vive Pro, foam padding, and an attachment device that works with the Vive Pro.

The Vive Wireless Adapter itself retails for $299.

According to the blog post, installation works like this:

Installation of the Vive Wireless Adapter occurs in minutes by installing a PCI-e card and attaching a sensor from the PC that broadcasts to and from the newly wireless Vive headset. The adapter has a broadcast range of 6 meters with a 150 degree field of view from the sensor and runs in the interference-free 60Ghz band using Intel’s WiGig specification, which, combined with DisplayLink’s XR codec, means low latency and high performance with hours of battery life.

The Adapter is powered by the HTC QC 3.0 PowerBank, which doubles as a portable charger for a smartphone, and is included in the price with the Adapter.

This isn’t the only wireless adapter for the HTC Vive . TPCast unveiled an adapter in 2016 for $220, as well as an enterprise version of the adapter that delivers 2k content to several HTC Vive units with sub-2ms latency.

Pre-orders for HTC’s own Adapter will begin on September 5 from retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Microsoft, NewEgg, and Vive.com.

Early this year, the attorneys general of 22 states and the District of Columbia filed a suit attempting to block the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial revesal of Obama era net neutrality regulations.

The old team is back together, filing a brief that asks  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse the reversal. Together, the AGs represent states totaling 165 million people — more than half of the U.S. population. The list includes a number of populous states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

New York Attorney General General Barbara Underwood is leading the charge. “A free and open internet is critical to New York – and to our democracy,” Underwood writes in the new filing. “As we detail in our brief filed today, the rollback of net neutrality will have a devastating impact on millions of New Yorkers and Americans across the country, putting them at risk of abusive practices while undermining state and local regulation of the broadband industry.”

The Attorneys General are hardly alone on this one. As Reuters notes, Mozilla, Vimeo and Etsy also joined forces today to file a legal challenge, while governors in six states have signed executive orders and three states have passed their own net neutrality laws.

From new wearables that detect breast cancer to creating the industrial supply chain for the meat replacement industry, the latest crop of Y Combinator companies showcased the breadth of entrepreneurial innovation that encapsulates the waning days of 2018. While the entire batch of 63 companies was impressive, a few in particular caught our eye.

So take a look below at our picks for some of the hits from this year’s summer cohort of companies.

Oxygen

Breaking freelancers from the month-to-month boom-and-bust payment cycles that bind them, Oxygen provides working capital loans to freelancers who can go months without getting a paycheck. The company is more than willing to work with a group of borrowers who collectively make $1.4 trillion in 1099 income annually and who are locked out of loans. Oxygen offers flat-fee access to credit and free mobile banking, all while using machine learning to determine credit worthiness. Freelance workers of the world unite, indeed!

Why we liked it: Opening a new market in the lending space is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for the company that gets it right.

Higia

By monitoring thermal patterns inside a breast, the startup Higia hopes it can offer women a better, non-invasive method to detect breast cancer. The company’s wearable device, called EVA, can be placed under any sports bra, and offers a new way to fill the gaps that current screening techniques aren’t addressing — things like early breast cancer detection in women with high breast density. The company has already pre-sold 5,000 units in Mexico and will begin shipping them in the fall of 2018. Aiming for accurate and immediate risk assessments, Higia will release its device for $299, focusing on the U.S. market at first and moving forward with clinical trials at Stanford.

Read more about Higia here.

Why we liked it: A new diagnostic tool in the battle against breast cancer that clocks in at a reasonable price point for consumers could be a huge win for investors and the world.

C16 Biosciences

C16 Biosciences is aiming to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the globe with their lab-grown palm oil, an alternative to a product that is found in a truly massive amount of goods. C16’s alternative is grown in bioreactors and is 20 percent less expensive to customers but “doesn’t destroy the planet,” the company says.

The startup has already begun early partnerships with a number of beauty and food distributors that together spend $1.2 billion on palm oil annually.

Why we liked it: While everything old is new again in this venture capital cycle, highly touted technologies that were part of the first round of “clean tech” innovation have a chance to hit their stride in the current market.

JITX

Designing circuit boards as a service won JITX a spot in this latest batch of Y Combinator companies. Currently, every circuit board is designed manually by skilled engineers, but using JITX’s machine learning software, circuit boards can be created automatically, which can save both time and money for hardware companies. JITX is already selling circuit board designs that were totally computer generated and HP is on board, alongside at least one other major company they can’t name yet. The team out of Berkeley is taking aim at a $9.2 billion market, charging 20 percent of what a human-crafted design would cost.

Why we liked it: This startup is generating a ton of buzz already among investors, and while its current round is slated to clock in at $800,000, we’re hearing that it’s already three times oversubscribed. The draw? Put simply, the company is pitching a better way to make one of the building blocks of all tech hardware.

HoneyLove

HoneyLove aims to disrupt the traditional shapewear market by making an affordable, high-quality product that actually works.

The $89 product uses supportive structures inside the seams of the garment, similar to the flexible boning used in old-school corsets, and encases those structures in a soft channel of protective fabric. This simple enhancement ensures that the garment doesn’t bunch up around the legs or waistband. The company has already sold $500,000 in product

Read more about HoneyLove here.

Why we liked it: The market is huge and we’re hearing that the company’s early numbers are really, really promising.

Camelot

Camelot is a mobile app for esports betting… and one of the first companies to blaze a trail in the sure-to-be-lucrative business operating at the intersection of video gaming and sports betting. The company gives fans access to live updates and stats and an interface to bet against friends. In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, there are billions of dollars to be made facilitating betting in any sport — including esports. Camelot is rolling the dice that it can hit the right number in this emerging market.

Why we liked it: Sports betting is already a billion-dollar business (at least). Expect esports to follow the same trajectory.

Inokyo

Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go, with a cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of the app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you’ve picked up.

The first store is now open on Mountain View’s Castro Street, selling an array of kombuchas, snacks, protein powders and bath products.

Read more about Inokyo here.

Why we liked it: White-labeling the technology that Amazon and Alibaba have spent untold millions to perfect for a lower price and with rapid deployments for retailers is a persuasive pitch for any startup.

Hepatx

Hepatx is creating therapies for severely damaged livers. Chronic liver disease affects 3.9 million Americans and is the cause of death for more than 40,000. The founders of Hepatx are developing a regenerative solution enabling hepatocyte production for therapeutic purposes. That means regenerating liver cells to avoid the cost and morbidity of whole-organ transplant. More than 200,000 people in the U.S. need a liver transplant but only a few thousand get one. Hepatx aims to fix the liver by taking fat tissue, turning that into liver cells and introducing that into patients to regrow the liver.

Why we liked it: Regenerating or creating new liver tissue is a big swing at a problem that is literally life-or-death. With a solid founding team and positive early trials, Hepatx seems like it could be a home run.

Cambridge Glycoscience

Looking to bake the perfect treat with a sugar substitute that can mimic not just the sweetness, but the gooey caramelization and stickiness that typically only comes from real sugar? Well, YC company Cambridge Glycoscience has the sweetener for you. The company expects to produce its sugar substitutes at a cost that can make low- and no-sugar foods even more accessible for mainstream consumers. So toss that corn syrup and get ready for a new flavor revolution.

Their manufacturing process will let them produce their sugar substitute at scale and they have a patent portfolio to protect their innovation. Notably, they have signed letters of intent with five companies already, including Haribo.

Why we liked it: Roughly 74 percent of packaged foods and beverages in the U.S. are made with some form of sweetener, which would size that market at roughly $100 billion, according to an article in Fortune citing a study from The Lancet.  If Cambridge Glycoscience can make its replacement at scale, that’s a sweet opportunity.

Seattle Food Tech 

At this point the notion of tastier, better, plant-based meat substitutes is no longer a fantasy. Investors have poured millions into making it a reality. The pitch from Seattle Food Tech is making that tastier, better, cheaper plant-based meat substitute at scale. They are using novel and efficient food processing equipment and facilities that can enable large-scale, low-cost production that can transform the way institutional food service companies that supply the office and university cafeterias across the country deliver tasty foods to hungry breakfast, lunch, and dinner diners.

“We’re using aerospace engineering to make plant-based chicken nuggets,” says chief executive Christie Lagally, a former Boeing engineer and technical project manager.

Why we liked it: While the company’s pitch onstage emphasized those tasty nuggs, what makes Seattle Food Tech compelling is its potential to create an industrial supply chain for the meat replacement market.

The average US household with children spent nearly $170 per week on groceries in 2017, and the race is on among companies that want to be the recipient of that spending, with more traditional grocery providers going head to head with companies opting for a digital-first, e-commerce experience. In the latest development, a startup called Boxed — which focuses on bulk-sized groceries through an online-only storefront — said that it has raised $111 million in funding.

Boxed is not disclosing its valuation but a write up in the NYT notes it is now $600 million. Notably, the company was in talks earlier this year for a possible sale to Kroger for between $400 million and $500 million — a deal that the startup reportedly rejected. The company never commented on the negotiations, but notably its CFO parted ways with the startup not long after. That potentially gives you an idea of its pre-money valuation with this round.

Alpha Square Group, CDIB Capital, consumer technology investor Gabriel Naouri and existing investors also participated. Its long list of previous backers include American Express, Founders Fund, GGV, DST, Bessemer and FJ Labs.

Competing specifically against the likes of Costco — which alongside Amazon and Target had also reportedly tried to buy Boxed — in targeting families and other consumers who like to look for bargains by shopping for food and other groceries in bulk sizes, Boxed said that this latest round of funding is led by a strategic backer: Aeon, the largest retailer in Japan in terms of sales.

The deal will not mean that Boxed is soon adding Japan to its footprint — currently the company says it only sells to the contiguous United States — but the two companies said that they will start with a “knowledge share” in areas like logistics, robotics, AI-driven data usage, and to help consult Aeon on putting more digital processes into its business.

“Our industry is constantly evolving. Our latest fundraising efforts will allow us to capitalize on those changes. We’ll also continue to expand our national footprint by focusing on reaching our core consumer in various key markets, to increase national brand awareness of Boxed,” Chieh Huang, co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.

In times past, grocery businesses, and food production in general, was largely focused around small businesses, but the last 75 years has seen a big swing to economies of scale, both in terms of the companies making what is sold and those who are selling it. That means a tricky playing field for smaller startups that are building grocery shop businesses from scratch, who have not only to contend with established brick-and-mortar chains, but also those new entrants, like Amazon, that are putting huge amounts of investment into their own efforts, leveraging their existing e-commerce and logistics empires to develop their own sizeable stakes in the market.

This latest funding brings the total raised by Boxed to $243 million, which is a sizeable amount of funding across startups, but ironically on the more modest side when it comes to e-commerce, which is capital intensive both because of the nature of the business (in Boxed’s case, it is buying in goods), as well as for marketing and customer acquisition, before you consider the technology that needs to underpin it.

In the case of Boxed, it sounds like the funding is largely aimed at developing the last of these categories, with a bit of the second category mixed it. It says it plans to “ramp up automation of facilities with hardware developed by Boxed’s in-house robotics team.” The company claims it is “one of the very few commerce companies in the world that writes its own software, runs its own fulfillment centers and builds its own automation robotics in-house.”

“The autonomous vehicles our robotics team has created will help support our rapid growth, enabling us to meet customer demand through increased efficiency, and put us at the forefront of fulfillment center technology,” said Huang in a statement. It’s also looking to expand in Chicago, it said.

Talla is taking aim at the customer service industry with its latest release, an AI-infused knowledge base. Today, the company released version 2.0 of the Talla Intelligent Knowledge Base.

The company also announced that Paula Long, most recently CEO at Data Gravity, has joined the company as SVP of engineering.

This tool combines customer content with automation, chatbots and machine learning. It’s designed to help teams who work directly with customers get at the information they need faster and the machine learning element should allow it to improve over time.

You can deploy the product as a widget on your website to give customers direct access to the information, but Rob May, company founder and CEO says the most common use case involves helping sales, customer service and customer success teams get access to the most relevant and current information, whether that’s maintenance or pricing.

The information can get into the knowledge base in several ways. First of all you can enter elements like product pages and FAQs directly in the Talla product as with any knowledge base. Secondly if an employee asks a questions and there isn’t an adequate answer, it exposes the gaps in information.

“It really shows you the unknown unknowns in your business. What are the questions people are asking that you didn’t realize you don’t have content for or you don’t have answers for. And so that allows you to write new content and better content,” May explained.

Finally, the company can import information into the knowledge base from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira or wherever it happens to live, and that can be added to a new page or incorporated into existing page as appropriate.

Employees interact with the system by asking a bot questions and it supplies the answers if one exists. It works with Slack, Microsoft Teams or Talla Chat.

Customer service remains a major pain point for many companies. It is the direct link to customers when they are having issues. A single bad experience can taint a person’s view of a brand, and chances are when a customer is unhappy they let their friends know on social media, making an isolated incident much bigger. Having quicker access to more accurate information could help limit negative experiences.

Today’s announcement builds on an earlier version of the product that took aim at IT help desks. Talla found customers kept asking for a solution that provided similar functionality with customer-facing information and they have tuned it for that.

May launched Talla in 2015 after selling his former startup Backupify to Datto in 2014. The company, which is based near Boston, has raised $12.3 million.