Year: 2018

The latest trailer for Sony’s Venom delivers the most extensive look yet at the superpowered title character played by Tom Hardy.

The film’s first teaser focused on Hardy and the other human cast members, with no footage of the actual alien “symbiote” (basically, it’s a sentient costume with a bad attitude). When we actually got to see Venom a few months later, some people were really into it. This new trailer goes even further than those previous glimpses of oozing CGI skin and enormous fangs — it’s got big Venom action scenes and even a full-on, joke-y symbiote monologue.

Venom was created by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane (who drew on previous storylines about the symbiote costume). He started out as Spider-Man’s enemy, and that’s the role he filled on-screen a decade ago in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3.

But — as is often the case with comic book characters — Spider-Man and Venom have sometimes shifted into being uneasy allies, and it looks like the new movie will focus on Venom as an antihero rather than outright bad guy. Venom is directed by Zombieland‘s Ruben Fleischer, with an impressive cast that also includes Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed and Jenny Slate.

By the way, you may have noticed “In Association With Marvel” card at the beginning the trailer. That’s a little hint at the film’s convoluted connection to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: While a deal between Sony (which controls the film rights to Spider-Man and associated characters) and Disney/Marvel allowed the studios to collaborate on Spider-Man: Homecoming, Venom is meant to kick off a new cinematic universe for Sony, built around Spider-Man’s supporting characters like Black Cat and Silver Sable.

Yesterday, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe reportedly called an all-hands in which he informed employees of plans to further limit access to blockbuster boys. The policy, which started with Mission: Impossible — Fallout this week3end, was set to extend to upcoming big releases, Christopher Robin and The Meg. The report arrived as the service was experiencing yet another outage.

Today, the company confirmed plans to continue its policy of limiting ticket availability to top films, acknowledging the tremendous cash burn the company has experienced since launching its subscription service nearly a year ago.

The company doesn’t mention specific upcoming films by name, but notes that first run films opening on more than 1,000 screen will be limited in their first two weeks, unless a studio opts to work with MoviePass for promotional purposes.

“In an effort to maintain the integrity of the MoviePass mission, to enhance discovery, and to drive attendance to smaller films and bolster the independent film community, MoviePass will begin to limit ticket availability to Blockbuster films,” the company writes. “This is a strategic move by the company to both limit cash burn and stay loyal to its mission to empower the smaller artistic film communities. Major studios will continue to be able to partner with MoviePass to promote their first run films, seeding them with a valuable moviegoing audience.”

In addition to those limitations, the startup will be increasing the cost of its monthly pass from $9.95 to $14.95 a month. That rate jump will be rolling out some time in the next 30 days, according to the company.

“These changes are meant to protect the longevity of our company and prevent abuse of the service. While no one likes change, these are essential steps to continue providing the most attractive subscription service in the industry,” said Lowe, in a release tied to the news. “Our community has shown an immense amount of enthusiasm over the past year, and we trust that they will continue to share our vision to reinvigorate the movie industry.”

It’s clear that the company has painted itself into a corner here. It’s a lot easier to add features than it is to take them away, and all of those who signed up for the service with the expectation of unfettered movie access for a low monthly fee are starting to feel the sting of reality. It’s been a death by a million cuts as the company has fiddled with its pricing structure and moved the goal posts of movie access, while experience the occasional outage in order to address on-going money concerns.

The company did use the opportunity to promote some positive impact of the service, which, at very least, has reignited interest among a waning movie going public. The service sports three million members and reportedly accounted for around six-percent of U.S. box office receipts for the first half of the year. Ultimately, however, that doesn’t account for a whole hell of a lot if you’re bleeding money.

MoviePass flew too close to the sun here, and its recent stumbles have led competitors to fill the void. Sinemia, for one, has benefitted with a more measured approach to film access.

“By not providing unlimited tickets, but providing two tickets for $9.99 with more flexible options and features, we might not have grown as fast as MoviePass, but we’ve grown more sustainably,” CEO Rifat Oguz told TechCrunch this week. “In fact, we’ve managed to grow more than 50% each month for the last 13 months. Our reasonable pricing structure allows both our users and us to benefit together, making Sinemia a more sustainable model that has staying power.”

AMC, meanwhile, has launched its own competing service, bolstered by relationships with studios and the massive infrastructure that comes with being the world’s largest theater chain.

Developing…

Scalar Capital is a San Francisco-based hedge fund company specializing in crypto assets. In fact, it is one of roughly 300 “crypto” funds that have sprung up in the last year or so.

That kind of market zaniness makes it difficult to carve out a niche, but Scalar has a bit an edge on this front, thanks to its founders’ backgrounds. Linda Xie, who studied economics at UC San Diego, spent a couple of years out of college as a portfolio risk analyst with the insurance giant AIG before joining Coinbase as a product manager, a role she held for more than three years before leaving last fall to start Scalar.

Her cofounder, Jordan Clifford, has a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon and spent a few years as a business analyst with Capital One before bouncing around a couple of startups and landing at Coinbase, where he worked as a software engineer for roughly 18 months, meeting Xie in the process.

Though it’s far too early to say whether Scalar can, well, scale, a source close to the firm says the duo has already raised $20 million from investors that include VC and crypto enthusiast Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam, and angel investor Elad Gil, among others. We spoke with Xie recently to learn more. Our chat has been edited lightly for length.

TC: When did you first become interested in crypto assets?

LX: I first came across bitcoin in 2011. At the time, I was working (first as an intern) at AIG, which was hiring a lot of risk analysts after the financial implosion. And I saw a lot of what went wrong and became very interested in decentralized systems. When Coinbase came along and I saw they were working with [retailer] Overstock, [helping enable bitcoin as a form a payment for its customers], and working with regulators to take bitcoin mainstream, I wrote to them, and they brought me on.

TC: What were you doing there exactly?

LX: Initially, I was working with law enforcement to help them catch criminals. It’s how I became interested in Monero [a privacy coin that launched in 2014 with privacy features meant to give users a degree of anonymity]. Then I later became a product manager at Coinbase, building internal tools, which is when I met Jordan. He was an engineer on the same team, and we were educating people internally about different cryptocurrencies and really enjoyed that and realized we wanted to spend our time investing in this. So we decided to leave last year and start this fund together.

TC: How is Scalar unique in what it’s doing? 

LX: It’s a very volatile space, but we’ve already been able to see what it takes to succeed through our work at Coinbase. I’ve also advised Ox [a decentralized exchange on Ethereum] and through that work seen what it takes to build a successful crypto project from creating a white paper to building community. Full disclosure: the cofounder is my husband. But over two years, I helped set up its structure, connected it with advisors and investors, and helped make sure its tokens are distributed, and I’m taking what I learned and applying it to other projects. Even if it’s a liquid asset that we’re getting involved in, we try to be as helpful as possible, both on a technical level, as well when it comes to strategy and recruiting.

Our fund is focused on crypto assets with a core focus right now on privacy coins, which we think are undervalued. But we’re also investing in different smart contracts platforms and scaling solutions — different technologies that we think are going to be a big deal.

TC: The latter two don’t sound very liquid. As a hedge fund, aren’t your investors expecting returns fairly quickly? Or do you sell the projects’ tokens right away on the secondary market?

LX: I don’t think anyone can promise exact returns. It’s going to take a few years to [start to see] some of the winners in this industry. But we’ve made it really clear to our investors that this industry is [in the very early innings]. We’re still figuring out the technology and how it gets to scale, but we believe that by getting in early, we’ll be able to capture massive amounts of value.

TC: How many different coins have you invested in so far, and how do you think about company or project “stages” and whether and when it makes sense to invest?

LX: We’ve invested in over a dozen privacy coins. For the early-stage ones, where there’s no product or code available, we’re very dependent on background of the team. But even at that idea phase, we’re thinking through the token economics.

When we get to later-stage projects, we’re looking at the open source code; we’re looking at the community; we’re assessing how do you create a moat. Community is definitely one of the most important pieces — are there people using it and giving their feedback or is this a purely speculative community. We’re also looking at the token itself and considering the supply and the ownership that the team has and its vesting schedule. At the end of the day, making sure the tech is sound and the code is secure and that a team is using the best coding practices and that its developers are competent is the most crucial aspect of what we do. Jordan handles a lot of [this work] but we also have technical advisors.

TC: So many tokens are being generated that Thomson Reuters just added 50 tokens to its financial data feed. Should we expect public exchanges that, instead of company shares, sell company tokens? Is that where things are heading?

LX: First, the vast majority of tokens right now are terrible. Many of them come with zero rights to company revenue or anything; they’re just used for fundraising. I do think we’ll see a trend toward security, where you can tokenize traditional securities and you’ll have 24/7, liquid markets that are accessible globally.  I do eventually see many companies, but public and private, tokenizing their securities and releasing them in this form.

That’s not what truly excites me, though. That just mirrors our existing financial system. I’m much more excited about concepts where you’re disrupting something using cryptography, where a crypto asset is not seizable by any government and you can store money with it and anyone can have access to it.

TC: There are so many deals out there. How would you characterize your investment pace?

LX: There are so many terrible deals out there. The best deals are highly competitive. As for pace, it goes through cycles. We’ll fund some really compelling projects, then months will pass where there’s nothing.

TC: Who are your typical co-investors, and what size checks are you writing?

LX: We mostly find ourselves in VC rounds, with some of the investors in our management company — people who are thinking longer term and who realize that crypto is in its early days. The size of checks completely vary based on our conviction.

TC: What’s one new area of interest for you?

LX: Ethereum is right now the dominant smart projects platform, but there’ve been some issues with scaling, so we’ve been looking at some competitors in what’s becoming a smart contracts war. There are dozens, but only a handful are really good in our opinion, and a lot of them make trade-offs. You want three attributes in an ideal world: scalability, security, and decentralization. Right now, there’s this state where you can only have two. Security is paramount, so the trade-off is between scaling and decentralization. Ethereum is very focused on decentralization; other projects are more focused on scaling and they’ve made decentralization trade-offs.

 Pictured above: Jordan Clifford and Linda Xie

Facebook’s plan to take on Musical.ly may involve more than just its own take on a lip syncing feature. It appears to also be working on something called “Talent Show,” which would allow users to compete by singing popular songs then submitting their audition for review. The feature isn’t live, but was rather uncovered in the Facebook app’s code by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.

Wong has a history of uncovering yet-to-launch features or those still in testing through the use of reverse engineering tactics. She has previously spotted things like Instagram’s first time-well-spent feature, Lyft’s unlaunched bike or scooter program, Instagram’s upgraded two-factor authentication system, new ways of displaying IGTV videos, and more.

In the case of “Talent Show,” Wong has discovered an interface that allow users to pick a song from a list of popular tunes, which is then followed by a way to start recording yourself singing the track in question.

The app’s code also makes references to the feature as “Talent Show” and includes mentions of elements like “audition” and “stage.” The auditions are loaded as videos, Wong notes.

The development would offer Facebook another way to take advantage of its more recently acquired music licensing rights. The company, starting last year, began forging deals with all the record labels – including the majors like Universal, Sony, and Warner, and several others, as well as the indies. The deals mean Facebook won’t have to take down users’ videos with copyrighted music playing in the background, for starters. But the company also said it planned to leverage its rights to develop new “music-based” products going forward.

One of those is Lip Sync Live, an almost direct copy of the popular tween-and-teen lip syncing app Musical.ly, which today has 200+ million registered users and 60 million actives. Like Musical.ly, Lip Sync Live – which is still in testing – a way to broadcast your lip sync recordings to friends.

Talent Show (assuming the code analysis is on point) seems to take a different angle. Instead of lip syncing for fun, people are actually singing and competing. It’s similar to the newly launched app FameGame. However, Wong notes that the feature may be restricted to Facebook Pages, similar to Facebook’s new trivia game show feature. That is, it may be offered to partners who are building out games on their own pages, and are using Facebook’s platform to do so.

Wong also confirms that Talent Show sources the music via the new Rights Manager, used by the record labels to track copyrighted tracks’ usage on Facebook.

Over the years, Facebook has taken aim at any other social app that gathers a following and then reproduces its own version of the app’s key draw – as it did with Stories, Snapchat’s biggest differentiator. It’s no surprise, then, that it now has Musical.ly in its sights, with regard to lip syncing. And with the Talent Show feature, it could be trying to challenge YouTube as the place where new singing talent can be discovered, too.

If Facebook offers a comment, we’ll update this post. 

Facebook has been given the go ahead to appeal to Ireland’s Supreme Court against an earlier High Court decision to refer key questions relating to the validity of EU-US data flows to Europe’s top court, the Irish Times reports.

The eventual outcome of what is already years of legal to-ing and fro-ing — in a case that’s colloquially referred to as ‘Schrems II’ — could have major implications for the thousands of companies that rely on transferring EU citizens’ personal data to the US for processing.

The case was originally lodged with the Irish Data Protection Commission by European privacy campaigner, Max Schrems — as a complaint over the legality of Facebook’s use of Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) for transferring EU citizens’ data. Although it was Ireland’s DPC that took the decision to go to court — seeking a definitive ruling on the legality of the data transfer mechanism.

The High Court then added its concerns about another mechanism: The EU-US Privacy Shield.

Facebook is disputing the court’s earlier findings, including of “mass indiscriminate processing” of data by U.S. government agencies — under the PRISM and Upstream data harvesting programs (details of which were made public in documents released in 2013, by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden).

In May Facebook was denied a stay against the CJEU referral by the High Court. So the decision by the Supreme Court to hear its appeal sidesteps that earlier block — albeit, the referral to the CJEU stands, and has neither been blocked nor revoked by today’s decision.

However, if the Supreme Court hears Facebook’s appeal before the end of the year — as slated — that’s likely to be before the CJEU delivers its verdict on the referred questions. So there’s at least a possibility that the outcome of the Irish appeal could feed into the CJEU judgment, i.e. when Europe’s supreme court conducts its own assessment of the validity of EU-US data transfer mechanisms.

Equally, there’s no guarantee that Facebook’s arguments will persuade Ireland’s Supreme Court judges there was anything wrong with the High Court’s findings of fact in the first place.

The company’s decision to ask the Supreme Court to hear its appeal against the High Court’s CJEU referral lacks precedent in Ireland — so the company is challenging local case law.

The Irish Times reports that the judges rejected arguments made by the DPC and Schrems against the appeal, deeming it “at least arguable” that Facebook could persuade the court that at least some of the facts under challenge should be reversed.

According to the newspaper, the court granted Facebook leave to appeal on all eleven grounds which its lawyers had presented.

It was also eleven questions that the High Court referred to the CJEU in April — seeking guidance on a range of fine-grained points around whether rights afforded to EU citizens are being adequately protected by the current data transfer mechanisms and regimes, including Privacy Shield and SCCs; how to determine which rules and regulations take precedence across borders and/or where legal priorities clash and overlap; and whether, in cases of rights violations caused by surveillance law, data protection authorities have to suspend data flows or whether they can use discretion to not do so.

The case is based on an even earlier (2013) complaint by Schrems, related to US surveillance law, when he challenged Facebook (and other tech giants) over how user data they held was accessed by US intelligence agencies under US government mass surveillance programs — arguing such bulk access contravenes Europeans’ fundamental privacy rights.

The result, in 2015, was a landmark CJEU judgement which struck down a long-standing EU-US data transfer mechanism (called Safe Harbor).

The European Commission has since negotiated an updated replacement mechanism (aka: The EU-US Privacy Shield) — which is now used by more than 3,400 companies to simplify the process of authorizing transfers of EU citizens’ personal data to the US.

However this replacement is under increasing attack at home, with European MEPs angry at decisions taken by the current US administration which they see as counter to the spirit of the agreement and/or risking undermining actual protections agreed by EU and US negotiators during the Obama presidency.

US lawmakers’ continued backing for warrantless surveillance is one example — when the hope in Europe had rather been for reform of Section 702 of FISA, not the six-year renewal that Trump signed off on.

The Trump administration has also failed to fully enact certain aspects of the Privacy Shield arrangement (two years on from launch there’s still no permanent appointment to an ombudsperson role intended to handle EU citizens’ complaints, for example).

And in June the EU Parliament’s LIBE committee called for Privacy Shield to be suspended by September 1 unless the US comes into full compliance. Earlier this month the EU parliament also adopted a resolution calling for the suspension of the EU-US Privacy Shield.

The annual review of the Privacy Shield mechanism is due to take place in October — so Commission really needs to eke out some substantial concessions from its US counterparts or face further political heat in its own backyard.

Aside from the CJEU, the Commission is the only EU institution with the power to suspend Privacy Shield, although the executive body has shown no appetite for that. Rather its priorities align with ensuring ‘business as usual’ — at least where all important data flows are concerned — vs taking a principled stance in defense of EU citizens’ fundamental rights. For that, Europeans typically have to look to the courts. Or, sometimes, the parliament.

The Irish Times reports that Facebook’s grounds for appeal to the Supreme Court in the Schrems II case include the necessity of the High Court making a reference in light of Privacy Shield — with the company arguing the court is bound by the finding on US law contained within the Privacy Shield decision. (A decision that was, however, made by the Commission, not by an EU court.)

It also argues that the High Court should have taken into account the effect of the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation on the legal context which will operate when the CJEU comes to consider the reference — with the referral taking place prior to GDPR coming into force on May 25.

The company is also claiming the court made several errors in its assessment of US law — including in its finding of “mass indiscriminate” processing; and that US laws and practices did not provide EU citizens with an effective remedy, as required under the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, for breach of data privacy rights.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and to Schrems for comment on the appeal.

A mere four months after coming out of stealth mode with $3 million in seed funding, real estate investment startup Skyline AI announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, a returning investor, and TLV Partners, with participation from JLL Spark, a division of real estate investment management firm JLL. The strategic funding will allow Skyline AI to add more asset classes to its platform, which uses data science and machine learning algorithms to help institutional investors make better decisions about properties.

Skyline AI says its technology is trained on what it claims is the most comprehensive data set in the industry, drawing from more than 100 sources, with market information covering the last 50 years. Its technology is meant to provide faster and more accurate analysis than traditional methods, so investors can react more quickly to changes in the real estate market.

Co-founder and CEO Guy Zipori told TechCrunch in an email that the startup decided to raise its Series A so soon after coming out of sleath because of positive response from investors, adding that the round was oversubscribed. “The timing of the round also worked out perfectly with our current deal flow and expansion plans. The round was significant, putting us in a great position to move forward,” he said.

Skyline AI has had a busy few months since emerging from stealth. In June, it teamed up with an unnamed partner in the U.S. to acquire two residential complexes in Philadelphia for $26 million. Zipori said they decided to make an unsolicited offer after Skyline AI’s platforms determined the properties were being mismanaged. Then in July, Skyline AI announced a partnership with Greystone, a real estate lending, investment and advisory firm, to collaborate on improving the dealmaking and loan underwriting processes.

JLL and other strategic investors in Skyline AI’s Series A will allow the startup to add analysis and underwriting for new asset classes, including industrial, retail and office properties, to its platform. “This in turn will enable us to deepen and strengthen cooperation with the leading commercial real estate investment firms across the U.S.,” said Zipori. Some of the capital will also be spent on growing its research and development, data science and AI teams in Tel Aviv, and its recently opened sales and real estate office in New York.

In a press statement, Sequoia Capital partner Haim Sadger said “Over the last few years, we’ve seen AI disrupt a number of traditional industries and the real estate market should be no different. The power of Skyline AI technology to understand vast amounts of data that affect real estate transactions, will unlock billions of dollars in untapped value.”

I worked Circuit City when the PlayStation 2 launched. For weeks, we were sold out, and there was always a crowd around the blue demo unit in the gaming department. It’s easy to see why the PlayStation 2 was a hit looking back. It was powerful, inventive and excelled at local gaming. It was the right system for the time.

If Nintendo’s recent success proves anything, building for the time is more important than making for the future.

Nintendo is coming off a massive quarter that saw 88% year over year operating profit on the back of the Nintendo Switch. The company has sold nearly 20 million Switch systems since its launch, surpassing the total amount of Wii U systems sold and closing in on Gamecube’s tally of 21.7 million units.

The Switch is great. I can’t get over how good it is. Again, like other systems before it, the Switch is the right system for the time. It’s portable, it’s small, and it leans heavily on cloud services. It’s not the most powerful system on the market nor does it pack 4k gaming or VR capabilities. The Switch doesn’t even have YouTube or Netflix. It’s a game system.

The Switch was a big bet for Nintendo. The company was coming off of the nascent Wii U, which besides Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon, was a game system without good games. It seemed Nintendo had lost its edge. The Wii U, in a way, was a trial for the Switch. It brought gaming off the TV and into the hands of gamers — but those gamers had to be in the same room as the Wii U base station. The Wii U didn’t go far enough in all sense of the phrase.

By the time the Switch came out, the looming threat of mobile games seemed to be over. A few years earlier, it appeared that the smartphone was going to take over and eat up the casual gaming market. Even Sony got in on the theme, releasing a hybrid smartphone and game system called the Xperia Play. While the smartphone game market is alive and thriving, it never gobbled up the home console market. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launched and gamers settled into the couch. The Switch offers something different and timely.

To state the obvious, the Switch is mobile, and that’s what’s needed in today’s environment. It’s different from the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and in the best way possible. Like previous Nintendo products, the graphics are below the market average, and the capabilities are less than competitors. But that doesn’t matter. The Switch’s gaming experience, to some, is superior. I take my Switch on long flights. I can’t do that with a PlayStation 4.

Gamers agree. With nearly 20 million units sold since it launched in 2017, the Switch is nearing the sales amount of the Xbox One, which launched in 2013 and has sold between 25 and 30 million units. The PlayStation 4 is the clear winner of this generation of game systems, though, with nearly 80 million units sold — and an argument could be made that Sony built the Playstation 4 for today’s gamers too, bypassing all the extras Microsoft included in the Xbox One and instead focusing solely on games.

Nintendo has done this in the past, too. Think back to the Wii. It launched in 2006 and went on to sell over 100 million units. In 2006 Sony and Microsoft were pushing heavily into HD gaming with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. And for a good reason, too. Consumers were heavily shopping for their first HDTV at the time, and Sony and Microsoft wanted to build a system for the future. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 went on to long, healthy lives but they never saw the runaway success of the Wii.

The Wii was the must-have Christmas gift for 2006 and 2007. It was novel more than beautiful. Compared to the graphics of the PS3, the Wii looked childish. But that was part of the appeal. First generation gamers were aging and having families, and the Wii was built for all ages. Anyone could pick up a Wiimote and swing it around to hit the tennis ball. To many outside the core gaming crowd, the Wii was magical. It was the right system at the right time.

The next part seems to be the hardest for Nintendo. Now that the Switch is a success, Nintendo needs to maintain it by building and supporting a robust ecosystem of games. And Nintendo cannot be the source of all the best games. Nintendo must court developers and publishers and keep them engaged in the advantages of the Switch gaming system. If it can do that, the Switch has a chance to be a generational product like the Wii before it.

For those of us unlucky enough to be forced to accommodate mother nature’s whims on a monthly basis, you know that — in addition to cramps, headaches and mood swings — it can be a challenge to find time in your schedule to buy the period products you need.

Desperate trips to the pharmacy when disaster hits can suffice, but the co-founders of the tampon subscription service Athena Club, Maria Markina and Allie Griswold, thought there had to be a better way to provide women the products they need in a cheap and empowering way.

“We’ve both had our fair share of tampon war stories,” Griswold told TechCrunch. “It’s something that every woman goes through at some point in her life and it’s a universal problem that we wanted to make easier. There are so many other amazing things that women can and should be doing than worrying about [where to get tampons] every month.”

Athena Club launches today after receiving $3.8 million in seed funding led by Henry Kravis of KKR. The company currently offers two tampon types (Premium and Organic) and a variety of absorbances (ranging from light to super+ for its Premium product and regular to super for its Organic one). The company also has plans to expand its products into pads and liners as the brand progresses.

In each order, customers can decide how many bags they need (each reusable bag includes 18 tampons), what type of tampon and what mix of absorbances they want, and how frequently they need them delivered. A selection of its Premium tampons cost $6.50/bag and its Organic selections are $7.50/bag.

For the founders, this level of customization was an important part of giving women autonomy over their periods.

“[We chose] the name Athena Club because we believe Athena is a really strong, fearless, independent woman and we’re very excited to bring that essence to our brand.” said Griswold. “Like Athena, women today have many passions and talents. They can’t all fit into one box and we want to provide [the option] to find the right customized package that works for their body.”

Athena Club also recognizes that for some women, access to tampons and period products is more than just a nuisance but a critical health issue. To help provide security and education surrounding periods and women’s health to women in need, Athena Club is committed to supporting groups like Period.org and Support the Girls. To date, Athena Club has already donated 10,000 tampons to women in need through Period.org and has plans to continue that support on a yearly basis.

Athena Club is joining a fairly crowded feminine care subscription space, but the founders say that its price point will help it stand apart from the crowd. Tampon subscription companies like LOLA offer a subscription plan priced at $10/box for 18 plastic applicator tampons (the same type and count as Athena Club) and Cora offers 18 tampons for $13/box. Other more extravagant boxes, like Hello Flo incorporate add-ons like chocolate or underwear in their boxes and can be priced upwards of $40.

And, all of these models are up against long-term, reusable period solutions like Thinx period underwear (which can cost up to $39 for two tampons worth of absorption per use) and plastic menstrual cups like the Diva Cup (which retails for $40.99.)

With so many options, Athena Club presents itself as the cheap, no-fuss solution for women who are through letting periods disrupt their lives.

 

Freshworks, a company that offers a variety of business software tools ranging from IT management to CRM for sales and customer support software, today announced that it has raised a $100 million funding round co-led by Sequoia and Accel Partners, with participation from CaptialG.

The company’s last funding round came in the form of a $55 million Series F round led by Sequoia in 2016. Today’s round brings the San Bruno-based company’s total funding to $250 million, at a valuation that’s now north of $1.5 billion, the company tells us. Freshworks also today noted that it now pulls in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

In addition to the new funding, Freshworks also today announced that it has hired a former AppDynamics VP of finance and treasury Suresh Seshardi as its CFO. Seshardi helped AppDynamics prepare for its IPO, so it’s a fair bet that he’ll do the same at Freshworks. AppDynamics, of course, famously didn’t actually IPO but was instead acquired by Cisco only hours before the team was supposed to ring the bell on Wall Street.

Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham tells us we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for his company to IPO. “Freshworks hasn’t started the IPO process but we do feel that we will eventually go public in the U.S.,” he said. “With that said, our primary focus right now is on growing the business and investing in our platform. When the timing is right, we’ll make that decision.”

Freshworks, which launched its first product back in 2010, also tells us that it plans to use the new cash to invest in its platform and especially in looking at how it can use AI to bring new innovations to its tools.

Current Freshworks users include the likes of Sling TV, Honda, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco. In total, the company’s tools are now in use by about 150,000 businesses, making it one of the larger SaaS providers you have probably never heard of.

 

“Happy to spend 10 minutes on our vision and the journey we’re on, but then, really, 15 minutes on what we’ve got today, what it is we’ve achieved, what it is our AI does,” says Tractable co-founder and CEO Alexandre Dalyac when I video called him a couple of weeks ago. “You can probably speed up all of that,” I quip back.

The resulting conversation, lasting well over an hour, spanned all of the above and more, including what is required to build a successful AI business and why he and his team think they can help prevent another “AI winter.”

Founded in 2014 by Dalyac, Adrien Cohen and Razvan Ranca after going through company builder Entrepreneur First, London-based Tractable is applying artificial intelligence to accident and disaster recovery. Specifically, through the use of deep learning to automate visual damage appraisal, and therefore help speed up insurance payouts and access to other types of financial aid.

Dalyac launches into what is clearly a well-rehearsed and evidently polished pitch. “We are on a journey to help the world recover faster from accidents and disasters. Our belief is that when accidents and disasters hit, the response could be 10 times faster thanks to AI. So what we mean there is, everything from road accidents, burst piping to large-scale floods and hurricane. Whenever any of these things happen, things get damaged.”

Those things, he says, broadly break down into cars, homes and crops, roughly equating to $1 trillion in damage each year. But, perhaps more importantly, livelihoods get impacted.

“If a car gets damaged, mobility is reduced. If a home gets damaged, shelter is reduced. And if crops get damaged, food is reduced. Across all of those accidents and disasters, we’re talking hundreds of millions of lives affected.”

It is here where a little lateral (and non-artificial) thinking is required. Accident and disaster recovery starts with visual damage appraisal: look at the damage, say how much it’s going to cost, unlock the funds and rebuild. The problem (and Tractable’s opportunity) is that having an appraiser look at a car, house or field can take days to weeks depending on availability — and therefore so can accessing funds to start rebuilding — whereas the claim is that computer vision and AI technology can potentially do the same job in minutes.

“When you assess, that is basically a very powerful but very narrow visual task, which is, look at the damage, how much is it gonna cost? Today, as you can imagine, these kind of assessments are manual. And they take days to weeks. And so you instantly know that with AI that can be 10 times faster,” says Dalyac.

“In some sense this is a perfect class of AI tasks, because it’s very heavy on image classification. And image classification is a task where AI can surpass human performance as of this decade. If you have instant appraisal, that means faster recovery. Hence the mission.”

Dalyac says that part of Tractable’s secret sauce is in the many millions of proprietary labels the company has produced. This has been aided by its patented “interactive machine learning technology,” which allows it to label images faster and cheaper than typical labeling services.

The team’s focus to date has been to train its AI to understand car damage, technology it has already deployed in six countries, seeing the startup work primarily with insurers.

Related to this I’m shown a simple demo of Tractable’s car damage appraisal tool. Dalyac opens a folder of car images on his laptop and uploads them to the software. Within seconds, the AI has seemingly identified the different parts of the car and determined which parts can be repaired and which parts need to be entirely written-off and therefore replaced fully. Each has an AI-generated estimated cost.

It all happens within a matter of minutes, although I have no way of knowing how difficult the pre-determined and fully controlled task is. It’s also unclear how an AI can possibly do the full job of a human assessor based on a limited set of 2D images alone, and without the ability to peek under the hood or undertake further investigations.

“We’re trying to figure out how much damage there is to a vehicle based on photos,” explains Dalyac. “There’s some really tough correlations to pick out, which are: based on the photos of the outside, what’s the internal damage? When you’re a human you are going to have seen and torn down maybe about a thousand to two thousand cars in your whole life of 20 or 30 years of doing that. Our AI has already been trained on tens of millions of these cases, so that’s a perfect case of us already having distilled thousands of people’s work experience. That allows us to get hold of some very challenging correlations that humans just can’t do.”

With that said, he does concede that a photo doesn’t always contain all of the necessary information, and that it might only have a certain level of accuracy. “You might need to then get a tear-down of the car and get photos of the internal damage. You might even want to get some data from the dashboard. And you can think that as cars get more sensors… the appraisal will be not just visual but also based on IoT data. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that we are convinced that it will be AI that will be doing this entirely.”

What is abundantly clear is Dalyac’s commitment to developing AI technology with real-world use that is commercially viable. If that doesn’t happen, he believes it won’t just be Tractable that will suffer, but the continued belief and investment in AI as a whole. Here, of course, he’s talking about the prospect of another so-called “AI winter,” citing a recent Crunchbase report that says funding for artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. has levelled off and even started to decline at seed stage.

“If you’re trying to make the $15 billion that has been invested into AI not fuck up and lead to something successful that will prevent an AI winter that will lead to continuous improvement, you need a really good return on that asset class. And for that you need those businesses to be successful.

“To make an AI company successful, really successful — not just an acqui-hire, not just an IP exit but a real commercial success that’s going to prevent an AI winter — you need to find real-world use cases that will make a difference, where you can surpass human performance, where you can change the way things work,” he says.

The reference to acqui-hire or IP exit takes on more meaning when you consider that Tractable was in the same cohort at Entrepreneur First as Magic Pony Technology, the AI startup acquired by Twitter for up to $150 million for its image enhancing technology. And most recently, the team behind Bloomsbury AI, another EF company, was acqui-hired by Facebook for $20-30 million.

To ensure that Tractable can continue its mission of applying AI to accident and disaster recovery — and presumably not sell too early — the startup has closed $20 million in Series B investment in a round led by U.S. venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors, including Ignition Partners, Zetta Venture Partners, Acequia Capital and Plug and Play Ventures, also participated. The new capital is to be spent on accelerating growth, expanding its research and development and entering new markets.

(The Series B also included an additional $5 million in secondary funding, seeing some investors at least partially exit. I understand Tractable’s founders sold a relatively small number of shares as they were permitted to take money off the table. Dalyac declined to comment.)

As we wrap up our call, I note that all of Tractable’s main investors, not including EF, are from the U.S. — something Dalyac says was a deliberate decision after he discovered the gulf between European and U.S. valuations.

“That’s a shame, isn’t it?” I say with my European tech ecosystem hat on.

“It isn’t; it’s enormous exports for the U.K.,” says the Tractable CEO who is French-born but raised in the U.K. “We have, as of today, the vast majority of our headcount in London. The entire product team is in London. The entire R&D team is in London. But most of the revenue comes from the United States. We are making AI an export industry of the U.K.”