Month: August 2018

Digital media company Kin has announced a slate of new video series from singer/actress Jordin Sparks, Bachelorette JoJo Fletcher and Jordan Rodgers (who successfully proposed to Fletcher over on the series).

The company also revealed more details about its programming with Vanessa Lachey (who had already signed on with her husband Nick). She’ll be hosting a competition series called Beauty School Knockout, where contestants compete to create specific looks using unconventional products.

This is all part of what the company calls its “neighborhood” strategy, where it launches a set of interconnected channels, usually featuring stars who became famous on traditional media. The new announcements bring Kin up to five channels, with the goal of creating three more by the end of the year.

“[Ultimately,] We want to create 20 of these channels … a neighborhood of channels for women in what we call the ‘builder’ phase of their lives,” Kin CEO Michael Wayne told me. “And they all have sort of the same like-minded, inspirational, accessible feeling to them, in women lifestyle verticals.”

The company’s first big success with this model was Tia Mowry’s Quick Fix, a series of lifestyle and how-to videos from the Sister, Sister star.

According to research by Nielsen, Quick Fix reached 8.8 million total viewers in the week of June 25, including 3.7 million women between the ages of 18 to 34 — an audience that’s comparable to cable reality hits like Chopped, Property Brothers and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. So Kin said it’s extending its partnership with Mowry to develop more lifestyle content in addition to Quick Fix.

In Wayne’s view, it makes more sense for Kin to work with a “mainstream star” like Mowry rather than someone who recently became famous on social media, especially since the first wave of social media influencers is being “completely disrupted by the next wave.”

He said that Mowry, on the other hand, has been in the public consciousness for decades: “No one searches for Tia because she did a smokey eye video.”

Wayne added that he remains focused on a cross-platform strategy, where individual platforms might get early access to the videos (Beauty School Knockout will premiere on Facebook Watch), but the videos ultimately get posted to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram TV and Amazon. He also said it’s crucial that the “unit economics” of advertising on each series makes sense, so Kin isn’t relying on the platforms or on custom, branded video deals to subsidize production.

“With Tia, I know exactly how much money I’m spending  on Facebook, I know how Amazon will monetize, I can chart this investment and know it’s going to pay off and become profitable within 9 to 12 months,” he said.

GameFly, the video game rental company, will be shutting down its streaming service at the end of the month, Variety reported earlier this week. This closure comes just over three years after the streaming service launched in 2015.

GameFly, the no-console streaming service for gamers, offered packages for $7 and $10 per month that gave users unlimited access to titles — as long as they had a smart TV like an Amazon Fire or Samsung Smart TV, in addition to a controller and access to the internet. Just as GameFly’s original snail-mail rental service for games mimicked Netflix’s from days of yore, many toted the streaming service as the Netflix of gaming.

Support for the service will be maintained through the end of August and accounts will not be charged for the service after that date, according to Variety. But people can still rent physical games (and movies) from the company for $9.50 per month (one rental at a time) or $13.50 per month (two rentals at a time.)

This news comes about three months after EA acquired the technology and team members from GameFly’s cloud gaming division — a division that helped make it possible to save your progress to the cloud while gaming on the streaming service. But the acquisition did not include GameFly’s streaming service.

“We acquired the team in Israel and the technology they’ve developed, we did not acquire the Gamefly streaming service,” an EA spokesperson told Variety. “We have not been involved in any decisions around the service.”

TechCrunch reached out to GameFly for comment but the company did not respond by the time of publication regarding the reasons behind this closure.

Meanwhile, the world of streaming games appears to be continuing on just fine. Sony’s PlayStation Now continues to add titles to its service, French startup Blade’s streaming service is expanding availability this week in the U.S. and EA itself announced at E3 this summer plans to start work on its own streaming service.

Sometimes smart contracts can be pretty dumb.

All of the benefits of a cryptographically secured, publicly verified, anonymized transaction system can be erased by errant code, malicious actors, or poorly defined parameters of an executable agreement.

Hoping to beat back the tide of bad contracts, bad code and bad actors, Sagewise, a new Los Angeles-based startup has raised $1.25 million to bring to market a service that basically hits pause on the execution of a contract so it can be arbitrated in the event that something goes wrong.

Co-founded by a longtime lawyer, Amy Wan, whose experience runs the gamut from the U.S. Department of Commerce to serving as counsel for a peer-to-peer real estate investment platform in Los Angeles, and Dan Rice, a longtime entrepreneur working with blockchain, Sagewise works with both Ethereum and the Hedera Hashgraph (a newer distributed ledger technology, which purports to solve some of the issues around transaction processing speed and security which have bedeviled platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin).

The company’s technology works as a middleware including an SDK and a contract notification and monitoring service. “The SDK is analogous to an arbitration clause in code form — when the smart contract executes a function, that execution is delayed for a pre-set amount of time (i.e., 24 hrs) and users receive a text/email notification regarding the execution,” Wan wrote to me an email. “If the execution is not the intent of the parties, they can freeze execution of the smart contract, giving them the luxury of time to fix whatever is wrong.”

Sagewise approaches the contract resolution process as a marketplace where priority is given to larger deals. “Once frozen, parties can fix coding bugs, patch up security vulnerabilities, or amend/terminate the smart contract, or self-resolve a dispute. If a dispute cannot be self-resolved, parties then graduate to a dispute resolution marketplace of third party vendors,” Wan writes. “After all, a $5 bar bet would be resolved differently from a $5M enterprise dispute. Thus, we are dispute process agnostic.”

Wavemaker Genesis led the round, which also included and strategic investments from affiliates of Ari Paul (Blocktower Capital), Miko Matsumura (Gumi Cryptos), Youbi Capital, Maja Vujinovic (Cipher Principles), Jordan Clifford (Scalar Capital), Terrence Yang (Yang Ventures) and James Sowers.

“Smart contracts are coded by developers and audited by security auditing firms, but the quality of smart contract coding and auditing varies drastically among service providers,” said Wan, the chief executive of Sagewise, in a statement. “Inevitably, this discrepancy becomes the basis for smart contract disputes, which is where Sagewise steps in to provide the infrastructure that allows the blockchain and smart contract industry to achieve transactional confidence.”

In an email, Wan elaboraged on the thesis to me writing that, “smart contracts may have coding errors, security vulnerabilities, or parties may need to amend or terminate their smart contracts due to changing situations.”

Contracts could also be disputed if their execution was triggered accidentally or due to the actions of attackers trying to hack a platform.

“Sagewise seeks to bring transactional confidence into the blockchain industry by building a smart contract safety net where smart contracts do not fulfill the original transactional intent,” Wan wrote.

A Y Combinator-backed startup, JetLenses, is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites, like 1-800-Contacts, Lens.com, and other online ordering systems offered by major retailers, such as Walmart. The startup’s goal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, in areas like prescription verification, order tracking, compliance and fulfillment, then pass those savings on to customers.

The company also promises fair and transparent pricing, so there aren’t surprises at checkout, and offers customers free shipping on their orders.

JetLenses was founded by Dhaivat Pandya, the son of an eye doctor who studied Statistics and Computer Science at Harvard. His background allowed him to identify the market inefficiencies in this business, in order to develop a new solution, he says.

“It was a space where doing this kind of work – engineering and data science – would have an immediate impact that I could see on a day-to-day basis,” Pandya explains as to why he decided to target the prescription lenses market. “A lot the reason why contact lenses are so expensive is just overhead,” he says.

Around 20 percent of the time, the online sites run into issues when verifying customer prescriptions. For example, the eye doctor may have relocated their practice, and their phone and fax numbers changed.

This ends up eating away a lot of time in terms of human labor, as staff has to research if the practice still exists and locate their new contact information before they can proceed with the verification. JetLenses, meanwhile, will instead try to first match the doctor’s information to a data set it maintains of existing practices to find a match, then locate the new phone number and fax automatically

It also automatically faxes the office to verify the prescription, and processes the doctor’s office response.

The company is leveraging data science around the logistics of order fulfillment, too, in order to determine which fulfillment partner to use for each incoming order.

These sorts of engineering tasks may already be common to larger e-commerce shopping sites, but haven’t really been put to work in the prescription lenses market, Pandya says.

He says JetLenses’ lower pricing comes from these improvements – it’s not just slashing prices to attract customers.

“Our margins are basically identical to others in the space,” he notes. “The goal is not to alter the business by just selling [lenses] for cheaper.”

While not a comprehensive review, I tried out online ordering on JetLenses before speaking to the company, to see how it compared with my usual site, 1800Contacts.com. I was fairly surprised to find that a 6-pack of my Acuvue Oasys for Astigmatism lenses were $32.99 on JetLenses, compared with the $51.99 I usually pay. (1800Contacts encourages shoppers to buy 4 boxes per eye at once, to get a $40 rebate on these lenses. But that’s a lot to spend all at once.)

JetLenses will honor the manufacturer rebates, too, and works with customers’ vision insurance plans.

The website itself is a little wonky in parts, but it’s only been online since the fall. You’ll need to know your lens brand and do a search rather than try to browse your way. as the site navigation is somewhat lacking, I found. But to save nearly $20 a box? Worth it.

JetLenses isn’t the only contacts lens e-commerce startup out there right now. Another, Hubble, raised $73.7 million last year for its own brand of daily disposable lenses, sold on subscription. That’s the not route JetLenses is going.

Instead, it aims to apply these data science techniques to other prescription businesses, like dental products or prescription creams.

For now, the startup is focused on raising a seed round following Y Combinator’s Demo Day to scale the business more quickly.

NASA has announced the names of the first astronauts who’ll fly to the International Space Station on American-made, commercial spacecraft.

The crews will fly to the space station on rockets built by NASA commercial partners Boeing and SpaceX. “Today, our country’s dreams of greater achievements in space are within our grasp,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, in a statement. “Today’s announcement advances our great American vision and strengthens the nation’s leadership in space.”

Nine astronauts were selected to crew the first test flights and missions of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. 

“The men and women we assign to these first flights are at the forefront of this exciting new time for human spaceflight,” said Mark Geyer, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a statement.

After each company completes their crewed test flights successfully, NASA will start the process to finally certify the spacecraft and systems for regular crew missions to the space station.

So far, NASA has contracted for six missions with each company, with as many as four astronauts crewing each commercial spacecraft.

In the 18 years that NASA has had a presence on the space station, the space agency has conducted experiments in biology, biotechnology, physics and space science that have resulted in thousands of spin-off technologies, the agency said.

With the new spaceflight capabilities through Boeing and SpaceX (initially), NASA says it will maintain a crew of seven astronauts on the space station for continued scientific research and experimentation on understanding and mitigating the challenges of long-duration spaceflight.

Here are the astronauts who will be taking flight:

Starliner Test-Flight Astronauts

Eric Boe: The Miami-born and Atlanta-raised Boe came to NASA from the Air Force, where he rose to the rank of colonel as a fighter pilot and test pilot. Boe was first selected as an astronaut in 2000 and piloted the space shuttle Endeavor. Boe was also on the final flight of the Discovery before the Space Shuttle Program was sunset.

Christopher Ferguson: A retired Navy captain who hails from Philadelphia, Ferguson piloted space shuttle Atlantis, and commanded the shuttle Endeavour. Ferguson was on the Atlantis for its final flight with the Space Shuttle Program.

Nicole Aunapu Mann: A lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Nicole Aunapu Mann is an F/A-18 test pilot with more than 2,500 flight hours in more than 25 aircraft and was selected to be an astronaut in 2013. The test flight with Boeing will be her first trip to space.

The Starliner will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, according to a NASA statement.

Crew Dragon Test-Flight Astronauts

Robert Behnken: Missouri native Robert Behnken has a doctorate in engineering and is a flight test engineer and colonel in the Air Force. Behnken first joined the astronaut corps in 2000 and flew aboard space shuttle Endeavour twice, performing six spacewalks that totaled 37 hours.

Douglas Hurley: Douglas Hurley joined the Marine Corps and served as a test pilot before joining NASA in 2000. The Apalachin, N.Y. native piloted both the space shuttle Endeavor and Atlantis.

According to NASA, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Starliner First-Mission Astronauts

Josh Cassada: From his home in Minnesota to a career in the Navy, commander and test pilot Josh Cassada has spent more than 3,500 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft. He was selected as an astronaut in 2013. His Starliner mission will be his first spaceflight.

Sunita Williams: A Needham, Mass. by-way-of Euclid, Ohio naval test pilot, Williams was a captain in the Navy before her retirement. She was selected as an astronaut in 1998 and has spent 322 days on the International Space Station. Williams commanded the space station and has also performed seven spacewalks.

Crew Dragon First-Mission Astronauts

Victor Glover: Pomona, Calif.-born Victor Glover is a Navy commander, aviator and test pilot who has flown more than 3,000 hours in more than 40 different aircraft. With 24 combat missions and 400 carrier landings, Glover was selected as part of the 2013 astronaut candidate class and will be making his first spaceflight aboard the Dragon.

Michael Hopkins: A former farm boy who grew up near Richland, Mo., Michael Hopkins went on to be a colonel in the air force where he was a flight-test engineer before being selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009. Hopkins spent 166 days on the International Space Station and has been on two space walks.

NASA said that additional crew members would be assigned by international partners at a later date.

Forking over your cold, hard cash isn’t the only way you can score a ticket to Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. We’re looking for volunteers willing to trade their time to help us produce our biggest, most ambitious Disrupt conference ever. And what do you get in return? One complimentary Innovator Pass that gives you access to all three days of Disrupt. Interested? Apply here to volunteer today.

This is a chance to attend the show without spending a dime while getting an up-close-and-personal look at what it takes to produce one of the most iconic startup events of the year. Whether you aspire to be a startup founder, marketer or event coordinator, this is a great way to see how it all gets done.

We’ll put you to work at a variety of tasks, which might include stuffing VIP goodie bags, assisting with registration, scanning tickets, directing attendees, placing signage or helping with pre-marketing efforts — any number of things to help make Disrupt SF 2018 an outstanding experience for everyone.

Here’s what you need to know (a.k.a., the fine print):

• The deadline for volunteer applications is August 15.
• You must attend a mandatory in-person orientation on Tuesday, September 4, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Moscone Center West.
• You must be available to work up to 16 hours during the entire conference starting from September 4 (the day before the conference starts) to September 7. You’ll find volunteer shift availability in the application. We might select you for some pre-event opportunities, which would count toward your hours.
• You must provide your own housing and transportation.
• Due to the high volume of applications, we will notify only the selected applicants.

There you have it. Work exchange is an awesome way to attend Disrupt SF 2018 without spending money, to see what goes into producing an event this size, and to experience three program-packed days of tech-startup goodness. The deadline for volunteer applications is August 15. Apply right here. We appreciate the assist!

Crypto skeptics rejoice! A new way to short the cryptocurrency market is coming from dYdX, a decentralized financial derivatives startup. In two months it will launch its protocol for creating short and leverage positions for Ethereum and other ERC20 tokens that allow investors to amp up their bets for or against these currencies.

To get the startup there, dYdX recently closed a $2 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain, and joined by Kindred and Abstract plus angels, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and serial investor Elad Gil.

“The main use for cryptocurrency so far has been trading and speculation — buying and holding. That’s not how sophisticated financial institutions trade,” says dYdX founder Antonio Juliano. “The derivatives market is usually an order of magnitude bigger than the spot trading or buy/sell market. The cryptocurrency market is probably on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion in volume, so you’d expect the derivatives market would be 10X bigger. I think there’s a really big opportunity there.”

How dYdX works

The idea is that you buy the short Ethereum token with ETH or a stable coin from an exchange or dYdX. The short Ethereum’s token price is inversely pegged to ETH, so it goes up in value when ETH goes down and vice versa. You can then sell the short Ethereum token for a profit if you correctly predicted an ETH price drop.

On the backend, lenders earn an interest rate by providing ETH as collateral locked into smart contracts that back up the short Ethereum tokens. Only a small number of actors have to work with the smart contract to mint or close the short Tokens. Meanwhile, dYdX also offers leveraged Ethereum tokens that let investors borrow to boost their profits if ETH’s price goes up.

The plan is to offer short and leveraged tokens for any ERC20 currency in the future. dYdX is building its own user-facing application for buying the tokens, but is also partnering with exchanges to offer the margin tokens “where people are already trading,” says Juliano.

“We think of it as more than just shorting your favorite shitcoin. We think of them as mature financial products.”

Infrastructure to lure big funds into crypto

Coinbase has proven to be an incredible incubator for blockchain startup founders. Juliano was employed there as a software engineer after briefly working at Uber and graduating in computer science from Princeton in 2015. “The first thing I started was a search engine for decentralized apps. I worked for months on it full-time, but nobody was building decentralized apps so no one was searching for them. It was too early,” Juliano explains.

But along the way he noticed the lack of financial instruments for decentralized derivatives despite exploding consumer interest in buying and selling cryptocurrencies. He figured the big hedge funds would eventually come knocking if someone built them a bridge into the blockchain world.

Juliano built dYdX to create a protocol to first begin offering margin tokens. It’s open source, so technically anyone can fork it to issue tokens themselves. But dYdX plans to be the standard-bearer, with its version offering the maximum liquidity to investors trying to buy or sell the margin tokens. His five-person team in San Francisco with experience from Google, Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, NerdWallet and ConsenSys is working to find as many investors as possible to collateralize the tokens and exchanges to trade them. “It’s a race to build liquidity faster than anyone else,” says Juliano.

So how will dYdX make money? As is common in crypto, Juliano isn’t exactly sure, and just wants to build up usage first. “We plan to capture value at the protocol level in the future likely through a value adding token,” the founder says. “It would’ve been easy for us to rush into adding a questionable token as we’ve seen many other protocols do; however, we believe it’s worth thinking deeply about the best way to integrate a token in our ecosystem in a way that creates rather than destroys value for end users.”

“Antonio and his team are among the top engineers in the crypto ecosystem building a novel software system for peer-to-peer financial contracts. We believe this will be immensely valuable and used by millions of people,” says Polychain partner Olaf Carlson-Wee. “I am not concerned with short-term revenue models but rather the opportunity to permanently improve global financial markets.”

Timing the decentralized revolution

With the launch less than two months away, Juliano is also racing to safeguard the protocol from attacks. “You have to take smart contract security extremely seriously. We’re almost done with the second independent security audit,” he tells me.

The security provided by decentralization is one of dYdX’s selling points versus centralized competitors like Poloniex that offer margin trading opportunities. There, investors have to lock up ETH as collateral for extended periods of time, putting it at risk if the exchange gets hacked, and they don’t benefit from shared liquidity like dYdX will.

It also could compete for crypto haters with the CBOE that now offers Bitcoin futures and margin trading, though it doesn’t handle Ethereum yet. Juliano hopes that since dYdX’s protocol can mint short tokens for other ERC20 tokens, you could bet for or against a certain cryptocurrency relative to the whole crypto market by mixing and matching. dYdX will have to nail the user experience and proper partnerships if it’s going to beat the convenience of centralized exchanges and the institutional futures market.

If all goes well, dYdX wants to move into offering options or swaps. “Those derivatives are more often traded by sophisticated traders. We don’t think there are too many traders like that in the market right now,” Juliano explains. “The other types of derivatives that we’ll move to in the future will be really big once the market matures.” That “once the market matures” refrain is one sung by plenty of blockchain projects. The question is who’ll survive long enough to see that future, if it ever arrives.

[Featured Image via Nuzu and Bryce Durbin]

Even as the wealth of Jeff Bezos balloons and Amazon eats everyone’s online retail lunch, there are still a few other e-commerce entrepreneurs faring rather well.

In 2011, eBay purchased GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion, at the same time divesting wholly from the sports merchandise business in Fanatics and significantly from the sites ShopRunner and Rue La La which together were set up under a new holding company named Kynetic that was put under the control of GSI CEO Michael Rubin.

Seven years later, Rubin is worth an estimated $3 billion from his online shopping empire that has dialed in on key niches thanks to high-profile partnerships rather than a spiderweb network of other retailers, a strategy the company is hoping will protect it from Amazon’s growing land grab.

Today, Fanatics helps leagues and teams sell their official sports merchandise directly to consumers.

The sports merchandising space relies heavily on partnerships with major organizations and the MLB and NFL have both directly invested in Fanatics as a direct avenue for getting jerseys onto fans. In addition to selling gear, Fanatics is manufacturing much of it itself. The company acquired Majestic sportswear early last year, which has been behind much of the MLB’s merchandise for years, as it strikes to build out these operations.

How big of a business is all of this? Well, the company was valued at $4.5 billion one year ago raising $1 billion from Softbank which, after betting big on Alibaba, is placing Fanatics as one of its strongest Vision Fund bets to be the next commerce hit.

Rubin will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss his path as an entrepreneur and what’s next for his commerce empire. He will join other commerce-focused speakers including executives from Glossier, Warby Parker and Adidas.

The full agenda is here. You can purchase tickets here.

Foundry Group, the Boulder, Co.-based venture firm cofounded 11 years ago by startup whisperer Brad Feld, has raised a $750 million seventh fund to target early-stage and growth-stage companies, as well as to invest in other venture funds.

It sounds like — and is — a lot of money, though the firm notes that it encompasses all of its various investment strategies, whereas its last fund, a $500 million vehicle that it closed in 2016, was used to invest in other venture funds and growth-stage companies alone; Foundry was separately managing its early-stage bets in a different fund.

It’s a little confusing, but if you really want to know the details, Feld breaks them out in a post:

For historical reference, our early-stage funds (FG 2007, FG 2010, FG 2013, and FG 2016) are all $225 million in size. Our first early growth fund raised in 2013, Foundry Group Select, is also $225m in size. In 2016, when we raised Foundry Group Next, we approximately doubled the size of that fund to $500 million since 30% of it was going to be invested in partner funds and 70% in early growth. So, at the beginning of 2016, we effectively raised $725 million (FG 2016 and Foundry Group Next). Foundry Group Next 2018 is simply the combination of those two funds rounded up slightly.

Foundry was founded by Feld, Ryan McIntyre, Jason Mendelson, and Seth Levine — “four equal partners,” as Feld describes them.

With this newest fund, he says, Foundry now has “seven equal partners,” meaning each receives the same amount of carry — or profits from the firm’s successful investments — no matter that three of the partners are newer to the table.

Foundry’s newer partners include Lindel Eakman, who joined in 2015 to help Foundry identify venture funds in which to invest. (Very meta, we know.) Eakman had previously spent 13 years with the University of Texas Investment Management Company (or UTIMCO), which was Foundry Group’s largest investor.

The firm last year also added Chris Moody, who’d been the CEO of Twitter data reseller Gnip before Twitter acquired the company in 2014 and made Moody a GM and VP of its data and enterprise business. (Foundry was an investor in Gnip.)

The firm’s newest partner is Jamey Sperans, who was as an early member and managing director of Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, where he served on the global investment and executive committees. Sperans, who joined earlier this year, has also founded five companies over the years.

In case you are wondering, yes, that is seven men. (Just remarking.)

Foundry has had at least 44 exits over the years, according to Crunchbase. Among its most recent wins: the email service provider Sendgrid, which staged a successful IPO last November, and the 2015 IPO of Fitbit, the wearable device company, whose shares are trading at roughly $5.50 apiece right now but were as high as $47 in the months after the offering.

Among its newest investments is Chowbotics, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that makes a salad-making robot and raised $11 million in Series A-1 funding last month; and Sensu, a year-old, Portland, Ore.-based full-stack monitoring platform that raised $10 million in Series A funding back in April.

It has also re-upped in plenty of its portfolio companies in recent months, including Urban Airship, an eight-year-old, Portland, Or.-based company behind a digital customer engagement platform. In June, it raised $25 million in Series F funding led by Foundry Group, which had also led the company’s Series B round in 2010.

Lemonade, the New York-based insurance platform, looks set drop the lawsuit it filed against German company ONE Insurance, its parent company Wefox, and Wefox founder Julian Teicke.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court Southern District of NY, alleged that Wefox reverse engineered Lemonade to create ONE, infringed Lemonade’s intellectual property, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and breached the contract in Lemonade’s terms of service.

At the time of the filing, a statement issued on behalf for Wefox said the allegations had no merit and “ultimately appear to be an attempt to disrupt our business rather than a serious dispute,” dubbing Lemonade’s concerns as meritless. “We intend to defend ourselves vigorously. This lawsuit appears to be an attempt to bait the media into covering a non-issue,” concluded the statement.

However, in a slightly bizarre turn of events, Wefox founder Teicke has taken to his personal LinkedIn profile to post what appears to be a mea culpa of sorts — also revealing that he and Lemonade founder Daniel Schreiber recently met in person to discuss Lemonade’s lawsuit against ONE Insurance (as adults are supposed to do).

Posted to LinkedIn on the 2nd of August, Teicke writes: “Here’s the bottom line: Lemonade created something truly revolutionary, and their innovation inspired many in our industry – including myself. There’s a fine line between inspiration and imitation, and we acknowledge that Lemonade’s perspective is that we crossed it in some parts”.

Continues Teicke:

“While ONE has many unique features, I’m committed to addressing this concern of Lemonade. To that end, ONE will immediately undertake a redesign of elements in the app, website and marketing material that are similar to Lemonade. I am looking forward to putting this conflict aside and to exploring possibilities for cooperation in the future”.

In response, Schreiber shared Teicke’s post on his own LinkedIn profile, and thanked him for a “very amicable and constructive meeting” and for committing to remedy the issues raised in the complaint. He also said he is “committed to dropping the lawsuit once all these changes are implemented”.

I have reached out Teicke, who said he was unable to comment, and to Schreiber, who declined to comment on record. If and when the lawsuit is dropped, which I understand could be within a matter of a couple of weeks, we’ll endeavour to update our reporting. As always, watch this space.