Year: 2018

Apple is reportedly working on a new, likely more expensive, set of AirPods with noise-cancellation, according to Bloomberg.

The report cites people familiar with the matter, who said that Apple is exploring making the AirPods water resistant. That said, you still don’t want to go swimming with these things, as the rumored water resistant AirPods would be more likely to only stand up against perspiration and rain rather than being submerged.

Bloomberg said that one source suggested Apple could add biometric sensors to the next-gen AirPods, furthering the company’s health tracking efforts. Sources also say that the updated AirPods would come with a new case that is compatible with the Apple’s new wireless charging pad.

As it stands now, AirPods cost $159 in the U.S. The new, rumored pair of in-ear wireless headphones will likely cost more, allowing Apple to price AirPods the same way it prices iPhones, offering a more expensive high-end model and a low-end model like the iPhone SE.

This news comes in the middle of a big year for Apple’s auditory efforts.

On the one hand, Apple’s Amazon Echo competitor, the HomePod, was delayed quite a bit following its announcement. Bloomberg says Cupertino is already hard at work developing a new model.

Apple is also reportedly working on over-the-ear headphones. The headphones would be Apple-branded, and would be on the higher-end of the spectrum with Boze and Sennheiser. The company already sells over-the-ear headphones via Beats, which Apple acquired in 2014 for $3 billion.

RRE Ventures has raised $265 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded back in 1994, and this is its seventh fund (eighth if you include a separate “opportunity” fund for making follow-on investments). Exits in the last few years include Bitly (acquired by Spectrum Equity), Business Insider (acquired by Axel Springer) and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter).

General Partner Raju Rishi said that RRE will continue to follow its current investment strategy. That means putting about 60 percent of its money into Series A investments, 5 to 10 percent into seed deals and the rest in B or C rounds.

It also means investing making about half its investments on the East Coast — mostly New York City, where RRE is based. Rishi suggested that with the growth of “a very virtualized tech community of developer from around the world,” New York makes more sense for startups, thanks to the density of industries like media and fashion: “The ecosystem question has become, ‘Where can I be closest to my customer?'”

RRE invests beyond New York too. In those cases, Rishi said it’s usually based on specific sectors that the investment team has researched deeply. Currently, those sectors include healthcare IT, space technology, blockchain, robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality. In contrast, there are some other sectors that RRE sees as “a little bit waning.”

“A great example is, we made the initial investment in 3D printing — we were the original investors in MakerBot,” Rishi said. “Now, we don’t see a striking amount of innovation that space. That doesn’t mean we cut it off at the knees and not invest in it, but it’s not something we’re actively looking at.”

Vice President of Business Development Maria Palma added that the firm has also been growing its platform strategy to support portfolio companies in the last couple years.

“You can’t pick a platform strategy that’s unique, but you can pick a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute,” she said.

For RRE, that means helping startups connect with larger companies for potential partnerships, and also working with founders to better understand things like leadership and hiring. In some cases, she said the firm doesn’t have “the capabilities to deliver that type of training at scale,” so instead it it focuses on “what we call community learning — really kind of peer groups … across our companies so they can more easily get answers to their questions.”

Rishi said RRE has had fairly consistent fund sizes (it raised a $280 million sixth fund about four years ago), because its “sweet spot is Series As,” and raising a larger fund would mean investing in more late-stage deals.

“We usually target $250 million, and frankly they always sort of creep up because of existing LPs who want to continue to bet on us,” he said.

And while the fundraising announcement is only happening today, RRE has already backed several startups with the new fund — Bend Financial (health savings accounts), Gem (cryptocurrency), Hypr (decentralized authentication), Ladder (life insurance), Latch (smart locks) and TheWaveVR (VR experiences for music).

RRE Ventures has raised $265 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded back in 1994, and this is its seventh fund (eighth if you include a separate “opportunity” fund for making follow-on investments). Exits in the last few years include Bitly (acquired by Spectrum Equity), Business Insider (acquired by Axel Springer) and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter).

General Partner Raju Rishi said that RRE will continue to follow its current investment strategy. That means putting about 60 percent of its money into Series A investments, 5 to 10 percent into seed deals and the rest in B or C rounds.

It also means investing making about half its investments on the East Coast — mostly New York City, where RRE is based. Rishi suggested that with the growth of “a very virtualized tech community of developer from around the world,” New York makes more sense for startups, thanks to the density of industries like media and fashion: “The ecosystem question has become, ‘Where can I be closest to my customer?'”

RRE invests beyond New York too. In those cases, Rishi said it’s usually based on specific sectors that the investment team has researched deeply. Currently, those sectors include healthcare IT, space technology, blockchain, robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality. In contrast, there are some other sectors that RRE sees as “a little bit waning.”

“A great example is, we made the initial investment in 3D printing — we were the original investors in MakerBot,” Rishi said. “Now, we don’t see a striking amount of innovation that space. That doesn’t mean we cut it off at the knees and not invest in it, but it’s not something we’re actively looking at.”

Vice President of Business Development Maria Palma added that the firm has also been growing its platform strategy to support portfolio companies in the last couple years.

“You can’t pick a platform strategy that’s unique, but you can pick a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute,” she said.

For RRE, that means helping startups connect with larger companies for potential partnerships, and also working with founders to better understand things like leadership and hiring. In some cases, she said the firm doesn’t have “the capabilities to deliver that type of training at scale,” so instead it it focuses on “what we call community learning — really kind of peer groups … across our companies so they can more easily get answers to their questions.”

Rishi said RRE has had fairly consistent fund sizes (it raised a $280 million sixth fund about four years ago), because its “sweet spot is Series As,” and raising a larger fund would mean investing in more late-stage deals.

“We usually target $250 million, and frankly they always sort of creep up because of existing LPs who want to continue to bet on us,” he said.

And while the fundraising announcement is only happening today, RRE has already backed several startups with the new fund — Bend Financial (health savings accounts), Gem (cryptocurrency), Hypr (decentralized authentication), Ladder (life insurance), Latch (smart locks) and TheWaveVR (VR experiences for music).

BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It’s been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.

BigID has a product that helps companies inventory their data, even extremely large data stores, and identify the most sensitive information, a convenient feature at a time where GDPR data privacy rules, which went into effect at the end of May, require that companies doing business in the EU have a grip on their customer data.

That’s certainly something that caught the eye of Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners. “We talked to a lot of companies, how they feel more specifically about about GDPR, and more broadly about how they think about data within in their organizations, and we got a very strong signal that there is a lot of concern around the regulation and how to prepare for that, but also more fundamentally, that CIOs and chief data officers don’t have a good sense of where data resides within their their organizations,” he explained.

Dimitri Sirota, CEO and co-founder, says that GDPR is a nice business driver, but he sees the potential to grow the data security market much more broadly than simply as a way to comply with one regulatory ruling or another. He says that American companies are calling, even some without operations in Europe because they see getting a grip on their customer data as a fundamental business imperative.

BigID product collage. Graphic: BigID

The company plans to expand their partner go-to market strategy in the coming the months, another approach that could translate to increased sales. That will include global systems integrators. Sirota says to expect announcements involving the usual suspects in the coming months. “You’ll see over the next little bit, several announcements with many of the names that you’re familiar with in terms of go-to market and global relationships,” he said.

Finally there are the strategic investors in this deal, including Comcast and SAP, which Sirota thinks will also ultimately help them get enterprise deals they might not have landed up until now. The $30 million runway also gives customers who might have been skittish about dealing with a young-ish startup, more confidence to make the deal.

BigID seems to have the right product at the right time. Scale’s Tseitlin, who will join the board as part of the deal, certainly sees the potential of this company to scale far beyond its current state.

“The area where we tend to spend a lot of time, and I think is what what attracted Dimitri to having us as an investor, is that we really help with the scaling phase of company growth,” he said. True to their name, Scale tries to get the company to that next level beyond product/market fit to where they can deliver consistently and continually grow revenue. They have done this with Box and DocuSign and others and hope that BigID is next.

BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It’s been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.

BigID has a product that helps companies inventory their data, even extremely large data stores, and identify the most sensitive information, a convenient feature at a time where GDPR data privacy rules, which went into effect at the end of May, require that companies doing business in the EU have a grip on their customer data.

That’s certainly something that caught the eye of Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners. “We talked to a lot of companies, how they feel more specifically about about GDPR, and more broadly about how they think about data within in their organizations, and we got a very strong signal that there is a lot of concern around the regulation and how to prepare for that, but also more fundamentally, that CIOs and chief data officers don’t have a good sense of where data resides within their their organizations,” he explained.

Dimitri Sirota, CEO and co-founder, says that GDPR is a nice business driver, but he sees the potential to grow the data security market much more broadly than simply as a way to comply with one regulatory ruling or another. He says that American companies are calling, even some without operations in Europe because they see getting a grip on their customer data as a fundamental business imperative.

BigID product collage. Graphic: BigID

The company plans to expand their partner go-to market strategy in the coming the months, another approach that could translate to increased sales. That will include global systems integrators. Sirota says to expect announcements involving the usual suspects in the coming months. “You’ll see over the next little bit, several announcements with many of the names that you’re familiar with in terms of go-to market and global relationships,” he said.

Finally there are the strategic investors in this deal, including Comcast and SAP, which Sirota thinks will also ultimately help them get enterprise deals they might not have landed up until now. The $30 million runway also gives customers who might have been skittish about dealing with a young-ish startup, more confidence to make the deal.

BigID seems to have the right product at the right time. Scale’s Tseitlin, who will join the board as part of the deal, certainly sees the potential of this company to scale far beyond its current state.

“The area where we tend to spend a lot of time, and I think is what what attracted Dimitri to having us as an investor, is that we really help with the scaling phase of company growth,” he said. True to their name, Scale tries to get the company to that next level beyond product/market fit to where they can deliver consistently and continually grow revenue. They have done this with Box and DocuSign and others and hope that BigID is next.

India’s PolicyBazaar, which runs a digital insurance business of the same name and a lending marketplace called PaisaBazaar.com, is the latest company to join SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund after it announced a new funding round of over $200 million.

The deal was led by the Vision Fund with participation from existing investors including InfoEdge, the company behind jobs platform Naukri.com. The startup’s other investors count Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global and True North, but an announcement from PolicyBazaar didn’t specifically mention if any of those names took place in this latest round.

This new round takes PolicyBazaar to nearly $350 million to date. The deal is another investment in India for the Vision Fund, which so far has backed OYO Rooms, Flipkart and Paytm parent One97 Communication among others.

PolicyBazaar was founded in 2008 initially as an information portal for learning about insurance and insurance programs. Today, the company operates its own digital insurance brand and a marketplace that aggregates and selects deal from across the industry.

Across both services, PolicyBazaar claims to process 100 million visitors in website traffic per year with a transaction volume that’s approaching 300,000 per month. More broadly, the company estimates that PolicyBazaar.com is used to purchase over 20 percent of life insurance coverage in India and seven percent of the country’s retail health coverage.

Going forward, PolicyBazaar is targeting 10 million transacting customers by 2020, which it believes it can reach by growing at a compound annual growth rate of 80 percent.

“Over the last decade, PolicyBazaar has become synonymous with online insurance shopping in India. We believe that the Indian insurance market continues to remain massively under-developed and PolicyBazaar, supported by SoftBank’s capital and ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to dramatically increase the adoption of insurance products in the country,” Munish Varma, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement.

PolicyBazaar’s closest ideological rival is Acko, but the two companies are quite contrasted.

While PolicyBazaar is a decade old, Acko is very much a newcomer which has raised $42 million since its launch some 18 months ago. Most recently, Acko added Amazon after the U.S. retail giant led a $12 million investment that was announced last month. In addition, Acko founder Varun Dua is a co-founder of Coverfox, an online insurance policy aggregator that also rivals PolicyBazaar.com.

India’s PolicyBazaar, which runs a digital insurance business of the same name and a lending marketplace called PaisaBazaar.com, is the latest company to join SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund after it announced a new funding round of over $200 million.

The deal was led by the Vision Fund with participation from existing investors including InfoEdge, the company behind jobs platform Naukri.com. The startup’s other investors count Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global and True North, but an announcement from PolicyBazaar didn’t specifically mention if any of those names took place in this latest round.

This new round takes PolicyBazaar to nearly $350 million to date. The deal is another investment in India for the Vision Fund, which so far has backed OYO Rooms, Flipkart and Paytm parent One97 Communication among others.

PolicyBazaar was founded in 2008 initially as an information portal for learning about insurance and insurance programs. Today, the company operates its own digital insurance brand and a marketplace that aggregates and selects deal from across the industry.

Across both services, PolicyBazaar claims to process 100 million visitors in website traffic per year with a transaction volume that’s approaching 300,000 per month. More broadly, the company estimates that PolicyBazaar.com is used to purchase over 20 percent of life insurance coverage in India and seven percent of the country’s retail health coverage.

Going forward, PolicyBazaar is targeting 10 million transacting customers by 2020, which it believes it can reach by growing at a compound annual growth rate of 80 percent.

“Over the last decade, PolicyBazaar has become synonymous with online insurance shopping in India. We believe that the Indian insurance market continues to remain massively under-developed and PolicyBazaar, supported by SoftBank’s capital and ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to dramatically increase the adoption of insurance products in the country,” Munish Varma, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement.

PolicyBazaar’s closest ideological rival is Acko, but the two companies are quite contrasted.

While PolicyBazaar is a decade old, Acko is very much a newcomer which has raised $42 million since its launch some 18 months ago. Most recently, Acko added Amazon after the U.S. retail giant led a $12 million investment that was announced last month. In addition, Acko founder Varun Dua is a co-founder of Coverfox, an online insurance policy aggregator that also rivals PolicyBazaar.com.

Another legacy carrier built on offering phone services is now taking a deeper dive into the world of advertising and specifically ad tech to help catapult itself into the next generation of tech and communications. Today, AT&T confirmed that it is buying AppNexus, a programmatic advertising marketplace that competes against the likes of Google and Facebook and describes itself as the world’s largest independent digital ad exchange.

Today’s release did not reveal any financial terms, except to note that the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. An AT&T spokesperson has told TechCrunch that AT&T is not commenting on the terms of the deal.

The news caps off a week of speculation after it was reported last week that AT&T was eyeing up the company for about $1.6 billion, and it comes just weeks after AT&T closed its deal to buy TimeWarner for nearly $85 billion.

AppNexus reportedly confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2016, valuing the company at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion although that deal appeared never to materialise. AppNexus had raised about $344 million from a range of investors including News Corp., WPP, Fidelity, TCV, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, Khosla, and many more.

AppNexus says that some 34,000 publishers and 177,000 brands use its marketplace today to connect ads with ad placements and audiences to see them. The company is also an ad tech play, providing a range of tools to measure engagement and optimise performance of ads. AT&T said that it plans to put AppNexus under its existing advertising and analytics division.

As with Verizon and other carriers, AT&T has been working on ways of expanding its advertising business on top of its existing mobile network and broadband access operations, and now its extensive content operations.

Carriers like AT&T are between a rock and a hard place these days. On one side, their broadband and mobile (and, to an increasingly lesser extent, fixed voice) networks have become increasingly commoditised over the years. On the other side, they are being squeezed by companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and a plethora of media and other tech companies. These companies dominate in content and “owning” consumers as subscribers, app users and smartphone brands, leaving little room for carrier to do much.

Buying TimeWarner will have given AT&T a seat at the table when it comes to video and other entertainment, and now it is adding more technology to help monetise that content.

Advertising — and ad tech — represent opportunities for carriers like AT&T to grow their revenues around the data that they already have about their connectivity customers — which in AT&T’s case exceeds 170 million “direct-to-consumer relationships across its wireless, video and broadband businesses.” Notably, AppNexus is “independent” of any of that range of media and tech titans. And while AT&T is focused mainly on the US market, AppNexus will give it further reach into Asia-Pacific, Australia, Europe, and Latin America.

(This was also the rationale behind Verizon’s acquisition of AOL, which owns TechCrunch, and later Yahoo, which together are now branded as Oath.)

“Ad tech unites real-time analytics and technology with our premium TV and video content,” said Brian Lesser, CEO of the division at AT&T. “So, we went out and found the strongest player in the space. AppNexus has scale of infrastructure, advanced technology and diverse talent. The combination of AT&T advertising & analytics and AppNexus will help deliver a world-class advertising platform that provides brands and publishers a new and innovative way to reach consumers in the marketplace today.”

Although AT&T could have built this from the ground up, this bolts on some 400 engineers and IP and an existing business to the company.

AT&T says it “will continue to invest in and build on AppNexus’ foundational technology as it integrates with AT&T’s first-party data, premium video content and distribution.”

“Innovation is core to the heritage of both AT&T and AppNexus, and we have an exciting opportunity to chart the future course of advertising together,” said Brian O’Kelley, CEO, AppNexus, in a statement. “Combining AT&T’s incredible assets with our technology, we will help brands and marketers power new advertising experiences for consumers. It’s what the market is asking for, and together we’re poised to deliver it.”

AT&T’s ad-supported premium video content portfolio currently includes Turner Networks, Audience Network, and Otter Media.

Apple News has a new old mission: Curating political news and analysis by paying a team of experienced human editors to quality-assess journalism, rather than letting unchecked algorithms run wild and exaggerate anything — no matter how awful, obnoxious or untrue.

‘Fakebook’ eat your heart out.

Apple says human curation is not a new direction for Apple News — describing it as a “guiding principle” across the product since it launched three years ago.

Although it certainly wasn’t shouting so loudly about it back then when algorithmic feeds were still riding high. But the company says Apple News has always had a team of editors — which it says are focused on “discovering and spotlighting well-sourced fact-based stories to provide readers with relevant, reliable news and information from a wide range of publishers”.

Those “experienced” editors are also now being put to work assessing political reportage and commentary around the US midterms. With only publishers they deem to be “reliable” getting to be political sources for Apple News.

The launch is focused on the US 2018 midterm elections, at least initially, which will get a dedicated section in the product — providing what Cupertino bills as “timely, trustworthy midterm election information” along with “the most important reporting and analysis from a diverse set of publishers”.

We’ve asked the company whether it plans to expand the Apple News election section approach to other markets.

“Today more than ever people want information from reliable sources, especially when it comes to making voting decisions,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News, in a statement. “An election is not just a contest; it should raise conversations and spark national discourse. By presenting quality news from trustworthy sources and curating a diverse range of opinions, Apple News aims to be a responsible steward of those conversations and help readers understand the candidates and the issues.”

Apple is clearly keen to avoid accusations of political bias — hence stressing the section will include a “diverse range of opinions”, with content being sourced from the likes of Fox News, Vox, the Washington Post, Politico and Axios, plus other unnamed publishers.

Though there will equally clearly be portions of the political spectrum who decry Apple News’ political output as biased against them — and thus akin to political censorship.

Safe to say, don’t expect Breitbart to be a fan. But as any journalist worth their salt will tell you, you can’t please all the people all of the time. And not trying to do so is essentially a founding tenet of the profession. It’s also why algorithms suck at being editors.

The launch of a dedicated section for an election event within Apple’s news product is clearly a response to major failures where tech platforms have intersected with political events — at least where business models rely on fencing content at vast scale and thus favor algorithmic curation (with all the resulting clickbaity, democracy-eroding pitfalls that flow from that).

Concern about algorithmic impacts on democratic processes continues to preoccupy politicians and regulators in the US and beyond. And while it’s fair to say that multiple tech platforms have a fake news and political polarization problem, Facebook has been carrying the biggest can here, given how extensively Kremlin agents owned its platform during the 2016 US presidential elections.

Since then the company has announced a raft of changes intended to combat this type of content — including systems to verify political advertisers; working with third party fact checkers; closing scores of suspect accounts around elections; and de-emphasizing news generally in its News Feed in favor of friends’ based updates which are harder for malicious agents to game at scale.

But its core algorithmic approach to programming the hierarchies of content on its platform has not changed.

And while it’s ramping up the number of content moderation and safety staff on its books — saying it will have 20,000 people working on that by the end of this year — that’s still reactive content assessment; which is the polar opposite of editorial selection and curation.

So Apple evidently sees an opportunity for its News product to step in and fill the trust gap with reliable political information.

As well as general news and commentary from the selected trusted publishers, Apple says it will also include “special features with stories curated by Apple News editors from trusted publishers”, including opinion columns “about hot-button issues that are intended to offer readers a full range of ideas and debate about important subjects, from news sources they may not already follow” (so it’s also taking aim at algorithmically generated filter bubbles); and an election dashboard from the Washington Post — which contextualizes “key data like current polling, what pundits are saying and survey data on voter enthusiasm”.

Local news is another focus for the section, with a feature that aims to highlight “quality reporting about issues that matter to local constituents on the most important races”.

The 2018 Midterm Elections section is available to Apple News users in the US from now until November.

It’s not often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce to agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.AI, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice.

Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as strategic investors in the company this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures also participated. Tact has now raised over $53 million, according to Crunchbase.

Amazon is of course deeply invested in voice interfaces and has recognized what Tact is trying to do in an enterprise setting with this investment. In fact, Tact was one of the first services to launch as part of Alexa for Business last fall. “Just as people were quick to adopt voice technology in the home, we see an enormous opportunity for voice services in the enterprise,” Paul Bernard, Director of the Amazon Alexa Fund said. He sees Tact on the forefront of that movement.

As though to prove Amazon’s point, the company also announced a product enhancement to improve the voice experience in the car. The feature dubbed ‘Voice Intelligence’ acts like a car-based virtual assistant. Sales people spend much of their time in the car, and the tool can not only give them the basics about the next meeting, it can also provide details about the deal and other relevant information, such as recently filed service tickets. All of this info can arm the salesperson for a potentially more effective meeting, Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi explained.

“We want sales professionals who are on the road, keeping their eyes on the road ahead, so we are pushing information to them and initiating a conversation, which is exactly what a human assistant would do,” he said.

Ganapathi understands the limitations of CRM tools perhaps better than anyone. That’s because before he started Tact, he had been helping build them for more than 20 years — first custom systems with Ernst and Young, then on prem with Seybold Systems and finally with Salesforce in the cloud.

CRM’s value proposition has always been that it provides companies with a central place for storing customer data, an electronic rolodex of sorts, but entering and retrieving data has mostly been a chore for busy sales people. Ganapathi launched Tact in 2012 with the vision of using voice to help make it easier to interact with these tools. He was clearly ahead of his time, but the technology has finally caught up with his idea, and the strategic investors in this deal certainly recognize the value of a voice interface for sales people.

Ganapathi says the idea behind Tact is to reduce the friction involved in adding and retrieving information from the database, and making life easier for sales to do their job. If sales pros can get the information they need, they can potentially make more sales and that’s a fairly compelling argument for any company.