Year: 2018

Paidy, a fintech startup that enables Japanese consumers to shop online without using a credit card, announced today that it has raised a $55 million Series C. The round was led by Japanese trade conglomerate Itochu Corporation, with participation from Goldman Sachs.

The Tokyo-based startup says this brings its total funding so far to $80 million, including a $15 million Series B announced two years ago. One notable fact about Paidy’s funding is that it’s raised a sizable amount for Japanese startup, especially one with non-Japanese founders (its CEO and co-founder is Canadian and Goldman Sachs alum Russell Cummer, left in the photo above with CTO and co-founder Lee Smith).

Paidy was launched because even though Japan’s credit card penetration rate is high, their usage rate is relatively low, even for online purchases. Instead, shoppers pay cash on delivery or at convenience stores, which function as combination logistics/payment centers in many Japanese cities.

This is convenient for buyers because they don’t have to enter a credit card online or worry about fraud, but a hassle for businesses that often need to float cash for merchandise that hasn’t been paid for yet or deal with incomplete deliveries.

Paidy makes it possible for people to buy online without creating an account or using their credit cards. Instead, if a merchant uses Paidy, its customers are able to check out by entering their mobile phone numbers and email addresses. Then Paidy authenticates them with a four-digit code sent through SMS or voice. Every month, customers settle their bills, which include all transactions they made using Paidy, at a convenience store or through bank transfers or auto-debits (installment and subscription plans are also available).

The value proposition for businesses is that Paidy can increase their customer base and guarantee they get paid by using machine learning algorithms to underwrite transactions. The company claims that there are now 1.4 million active Paidy accounts, with the ambitious goal of increasing that number to 11 million by 2020 by expanding to bigger merchants and offline transactions.

In a press statement, Cummer said “We are extremely honored that Paidy’s business concept was highly valued by one of Japan’s most prestigious business conglomerates, ITOCHU. Through this tie-up, we expect to launch new merchants in order to deliver Paidy’s frictionless and intuitive financial solution to a much broader audience.”

The millennial generation — people born between 1981 and 1996 — are on the cusp of becoming America’s largest generation, according to projections from the U.S. Census Bureau. What else we know about this demographic: millennials are increasingly choosing to live at home with their parents, put off marriage and children, and not buy stuff like cars and luxury goods but instead access those goods through sharing services.

What they can’t do without: wellness. It’s one area where they’re willing to spend money on compelling brands and experiences, even when they cost an arm and a leg. And that’s something that Soraya Darabi, Will Nathan, and Marina Hadjipateras inherently appreciate as millennials themselves, as well as, more newly, investors.

In fact, after embroiling themselves in startups — Nathan started an interior design startup called Homepolish; Darabi’s last startup was a (now-shuttered) fashion marketplace called Zady; Hadjipateras worked as VP of investor relations for her family’s shipping company, Dorian LPG, which went public in 2014 — the three friends decided to try funding companies that make their peers feel good.

Enter Trail Mix Ventures, a New York-based outfit that invests in the “future of living well.”

It’s a broad mandate, but the trio apparently sold the idea, securing enough capital — $3 million — from founder friends in January of last year to get started. Some of the then-nascent companies they have backed since include The Wing, a 2.5-year-old women’s-only work and community that has now raised $42 million altogether; Parsley Health, a two-year-old, membership-based wellness practice with locations in on both coasts that has raised more than $10 million; and Henry the Dentist, a two-year-old mobile dental clinic whose seed investors also include the early-stage, New York-based venture firm Brand Foundry.

Asked where the three get their deal flow, Nathan points to the many entrepreneurs who Trail Mix counts as investors, including cofounder Neil Parikh of the sleep company Casper; cofounder Nick Taranto of the meal kit company Plated; and Warby Parker cofounder Neil Blumenthal, who is also CEO of the eyewear company.

Nathan says the broader network in New York that the friends have built over the years also “opens doors for us and connections that help founders get to their next level.”

Meanwhile, Darabi notes that while a lot of investors talk about being former founders, having so recent a memory as the three do of being in the trenches adds meaningful value. She calls it “founder-to-founder intimacy.”

Whatever the case, things have gone well enough that the outfit — which is officially closing its debut fund today with $11 million — has now funded 16 companies altogether, typically via first checks that are roughly $300,000 in size.

It’s too soon to say how any of bets will fare longer term, of course. But one is doing sufficiently well that Trail Mix is right assembling a special purpose vehicle (essentially a pop-up fund designed to invest in one startup) to enable its backers to invest more in the company.

Asked if more of these SPVs are in the firm’s future, she says, “Absolutely. We receive a lot of inbound interest from our [investors] in doing these.”

Given that kind of traction, along with the opportunity the group is chasing — new startups are cropping up every day focused on broadening access to wellness — we’d guess a new fundraising effort can’t be too far off for Trail Mix, either. Stay tuned.

In recent months, we’ve seen more and more funding flowing into tools for mental wellness — whether that’s AI-driven tools to help patients find help to meditation apps — and it seems like that trend is starting to pick up even more steam as smaller companies are grabbing the attention of investors.

There’s another one picking up funding today in Spring Health, a platform for smaller companies to help their employees get more access to mental health treatment. The startup looks to give employers get access to a simple, effective way to start offering that treatment for their employees in the form of personalized mental wellness plans. The employees get access to confidential plans in addition to access to a network and ways to get in touch with a therapist or psychiatrist as quickly as possible. The company said it has raised an additional $6 million in funding led by Rethink Impact, with Work-Bench, BBG Ventures, and NYC Partnership joining the round. RRE Ventures and the William K. Warren Foundation also participated.

“…I realized that mental health care is largely a guessing game: you use trial-and-error to find a compatible therapist, and you use trial-and-error to find the right treatment regimen, whether that’s a specific cocktail of medications or a specific type of psychotherapy,” CEO and co-founder April Koh said. “Everything around us is personalized these days – like shopping on Amazon, search results on Google, and restaurant recommendations on Yelp – but you can’t get personalized recommendations for your mental health care. I wanted to build a platform that connects you with the right care for you from the very beginning. So I partnered with leading expert on personalized psychiatry, Dr. Adam Chekroud our Chief Scientist, and my friend Abhishek Chandra, our CTO, to start Spring Health.”

The startup bills itself as an online mental health clinic that offers recommendations for employees, such as treatment options or tweaks to their daily routines (like exercise regimens). Like other machine learning-driven platforms, Spring Health puts a questionnaire in front of the end employee that adapts to the responses they are giving and then generates a wellness plan for that specific individual. As more and more patients get on the service, it gets more data, and can improve those recommendations over time. Those patients are then matched with clinicians and licensed medical health professionals from the company’s network.

“We found that employers were asking for it,” Koh said. “As a company we started off by selling an AI-enabled clinical decision support tool to health systems to empower their doctors to make data-driven decisions. While selling that tool to one big health system, word reached their benefits department, and they reached out to us and told us they need something in benefits to deal with mental health needs of their employee base. When that happened, we decided to completely focus on selling a “full-stack” mental health solution to employers for their employees. Instead of selling a tool to doctors, we decided we would create our own network of best-in-class mental health providers who would use our tools to deliver the best mental health care possible.”

However, Spring Health isn’t the only startup looking to create an intelligent matching system for employees seeking mental health. Lyra Health, another tool to help employees securely and confidentially begin the process of getting mental health treatment, raised $45 million in May this year. But Spring Health and Lyra Health are both part of a wave of startups looking to create ways for employees to more efficiently seek care powered by machine learning and capitalizing on the cost and difficulty of those tools dropping dramatically.

And it’s not the only service in the mental wellness category also picking up traction, with meditation app Calm raising $27 million at a $250 million valuation. Employers naturally have a stake in the health of their employees, and as all these apps look to make getting mental health treatment or improving mental wellness easier — and less of a taboo — the hope is they’ll continue to lower the barrier to entry, both from the actual product inertia and getting people comfortable with seeking help in the first place.

“I think VC’s are realizing there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt mental health care and make it accessible, convenient and affordable. But from our perspective, the problem with the space is that there is a lot of unvetted, non-evidence-based technology. There’s a ton of vaporware surrounding AI, big data, and machine-learning, especially in mental health care. We want to set a higher standard in mental healthcare that is based on evidence and clinical validation. Unlike most mental health care solutions on the market, we have multiple peer-reviewed publications in top medical journals like JAMA, describing and substantiating our technology. We know that our personalized recommendations and our Care Navigation approach are evidence-based and proven to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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