Year: 2018

Everyone from Elon Musk to AdBlock Plus wants to tell you which news sources are worth trusting. Now news aggregator Nuzzel is joining in.

Specifically, it’s launching NuzzelRank, which founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams described as “our new authority ranking of thousands of top news sources, using signals from top business influencers.” He said it replaces a more “simplistic” ranking system that it was using for its news monitoring and research product Nuzzel Media Intelligence.

You may also see NuzzelRank outside the company’s Media Intelligence reports. For one thing, there’s a new page with rankings of Nuzzel’s top sources. For another, Abrams said publishers will be able to add badges with their NuzzelRank scores to their websites, and he also plans to make this data available through an API.

At this point, you’re probably wondering how Nuzzel does this ranking. You’re definitely wondering that if you looked at the top sources ranking and saw that TechCrunch is comes in at number four overall. That’s right: We score below The New York Times and The Washington Post, but above The New Yorker and Wired — which is both flattering and a little nuts.

Abrams said there are three main ways that Nuzzel calculates the score. First, there’s data within Nuzzel itself, including the reading behavior of its users. Second, it’s looking at “external signals about the engagement and authority of news sources.”

Third, it’s working with a whole bunch o outside organizations that have developed different approaches to scoring news sources and sorting out which ones are and aren’t trustworthy — so Nuzzel is joining the Trust Project and the Credibility Coalition, and it’s also partnering with NewsGuard and Deepnews.ai.

In the announcement, Abrams emphasized that the company isn’t relying on human editors or making these judgments on its own: “Nuzzel has always focused on building scalable solutions that use software to aggregate existing valuable signals to provide useful results, rather than human approaches that are not scalable and subject to bias.”

It’s been a year and a half since Google announced App Maker, its online tool for quickly building and deploying business apps on the web. The company has mostly remained quiet about App Maker ever since and kept it in a private preview mode, but today, it announced that the service is now generally available and open to all developers who want to give it a try.

Access to App Maker comes with any G Suite Business and Enterprise subscription, as well as the G Suite for Education edition. The overall idea here is to help virtually anybody in an organization — including those with little to no coding experience — to build their own line-of-business apps based on data that’s already stored in G Suite, Google’s Cloud SQL database or any other database that supports JDBC or that offers a REST API (that that’s obviously a bit more of an advanced operation).

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To do this, App Maker provides users with a low-code application development environment that lets you build applications through a straightforward drag and drop environment. Though it takes a bit of work to set up the database connectivity, once that’s done, the actual design part looks to be pretty easy — and thanks to a set of responsive templates, those final applications should work, no matter whether you are on a phone or desktop.

While many applications will likely rely on a database, it’s worth noting that developers can access Gmail, Google Calendar, Sheets and other data sources as well. In total, App Maker offers access to 40 Google Services. Unlike other low-code services like Mendix, K2 or even Microsoft’s PowerApps tools, Google’s App Maker seems to focus mostly on Google’s own services and doesn’t offer built-in connectivity with third-party services like Salesforce, for example. Chances are, of course, that now that App Maker is out of preview, Google will start adding more functionality to the service.

If you’re planning to fly into Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport at some point in the future, you might be pleasantly surprised by the transit options. The city struck a deal with Elon Musk today to move forward with its plan to build a high-speed rail between O’Hare and downtown Chicago.

In November, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced his decision to go forward with plans for the high-speed rail line and asked for bids from teams interested in building and financing the project. Emmanuel’s goal is to transport travelers from the airport to Chicago’s center in 20 minutes or fewer, and at roughly a third of the cost of an expensive taxi or ride-sharing app.

After five months of negotiations, the city announced that Musk’s company, The Boring Co., beat out runner-up O’Hare Xpress LLC, a consortium that includes the companies Meridiam, Antarctica Capital, JLC Infrastructure, First Transit and Mott MacDonald (the latter of which has experience in airport transportation, having developed plans for London’s Heathrow.)

Musk’s plan proposes a 16-passenger autonomous vehicle that can whip passengers at speeds up to 100 MPH through tunnels between the airport and downtown. The final route of the new transit system is still being finalized, but Musk estimates that these vehicles could transport passengers downtown in only 12 minutes – a dramatic decrease from the usual 30- to 40-minute taxi ride – and for just $20-$25.

Officials from city and Boring have stated that it’s too soon to estimate a timeframe or final cost for this project, but have stated that Boring will be fronting the bill.

While Emmanuel seems optimistic about this new venture, telling the Chicago Tribune “every time [Chicago has] been an innovator in transportation, we have seized the future,” the fact remains that despite Musk’s emerging plans to construct these tunnels in cities like LA, DC and now Chicago, he has yet to actually complete one. As a man who once stated that public transportation “sucks,” time will tell how successful The Boring Co. and its founder can be at actually revamping it.

Influential announced today that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding.

The funding came from existing investors Capital Zed, ECA Ventures, Paradigm Talent Agency, ROAR and Tech Coast Angels, as well as from Hollywood agency WME .

Just a couple weeks ago, Influential said it was working with (and had raised money from) WME. The agency is the first to try out a new Influential product called Talent Pro, which gives agents access to social data around a broader pool of talent.

Influential founder and CEO Ryan Detert said the product will allow WME — and, in the future, other agencies — to sweeten endorsement and promotional deals with more data and to “take an A-list celebrity… and now surround that person with 10 lookalike influencers who are not celebrities themselves.”

One of Influential’s big selling points is its use of artificial intelligence (it’s a developer partner with IBM Watson) to help brands and marketers find influencers who would be a good fit for their campaigns. However, Detert acknowledged that selling access to social media influencers is starting to feel overhyped — as he put it, “People think of influencer marketing sometimes as a four-letter word.”

But in Detert’s view, influencer marketing is just one “tactic” that Influential supports: “We consider ourselves more of social intelligence and activation company.”

And in fact, Influential already offers a social intelligence product that helps customers get a broader understanding of things like the broader competitive landscape.

Detert also said Influential is working to measure the impact of brands’ social media campaigns, so that when they pay an influencer to make a promotional post, they “can actually map back that not only [the consumer] saw it, but that they engaged with it to make a real-world decision — walking into a location, buying a product in a grocery store.”

The company has now raised a total of $26.5 million.

TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF (Sept. 5-7) will be one for the record books, with twice the attendees and twice the programming sessions compared to past Disrupts, which means we can tackle emerging, super exciting categories like biotech with both great speakers and a section of Start Up Alley devoted to biotech startups. (Pssst biotech founders…there is still time to win a free TC Top Picks exhibition spot in Startup Alley complete with three Founder Passes to take in all of Disrupt SF.  Apply here.)

Today we’re delighted to announce a panel of three top biotech investors, who will share their perspectives on key in key trends biotech and where they are looking to make their next investments.

Laura Deming is the founder and partner in the $26 million Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm focused on biological research to reduce or reverse the effects of aging. Deming was accepted to MIT at age 14, but later dropped out to accept the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship and start a venture capital firm. Deming believes that before long we’ll retire the idea of growing old. So far, Deming has backed Unity Biotechnology, Precision Biosciences, Metacrine, Navitor, and Alexo Therapeutics. 

Nina Kjellson is a general partner at Canaan Partners, where she invests in biopharma and digital health companies that serve unmet needs. Kjellson serves as a mentor to Blueprint Health and Springboard Life Sciences and on the boards of Essential Access Health, and the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center. She holds a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University, and her recent investments Annum Health, Dauntless, PACT Pharma, Tizona Therapeutics, and Vineti. 

Arvind Gupta is a general partner at SOSV, a $150 million early stage venture capital fund, where he founded IndieBio, a biotech accelerator based in San Francisco. IndieBio focuses on startups that will either touch a billion people or create a billion in value. Arvind received his B.S. in Genetic Engineering from UCSB and has invested in  like Memphis Meats, Synthex, Medel.AI and Catalog. 

And that’s not all – we have a lot more coming in health and biotech, plus 23andMe’s Ann Wojcicki, whom we have already announced.

Get your passes now!

The taxi of tomorrow might be dead but Ford today announced two new models that combine forward-looking technology with proven body styles. For the first time, Ford is offering a hybrid powertrain in a taxi model that is said to get a 40 mpg in the city. This news comes several weeks after Ford’s bombshell that it was dramatically reducing the number of traditional cars it will sell in the North American market.

The Fusion Hybrid Taxi is Ford’s first hybrid taxi model and is said to be Ford’s most fuel-efficient taxis to date. In addition to the new powertrain, the model features additional bits that should make cabbies happy. The midsize sedan shares parts with the Ford Police Responder Hybrid such as a police-tuned suspension, higher ride and improved brakes. And steelies. Got to have steelies.

Ford also today announced the Transit Connect Taxi that rocks a 1.5-liter diesel engine and more room behind the second row than the competing Nissan NV200 Taxi.

Today’s announcement is important signaling to the automotive market. The Ford Crown Victoria once ruled the taxi market and there is still countless tapped for duty across the United States. Ford is clearly attempting to stay relevant in this market and is doing so through the use of non-traditional powertrains, though, I guess, an argument could be made that hybrid and diesel powertrains are now nearly traditional powertrains.

Amazon may be facing new competition from Microsoft on its cashierless, automated store technology, according to a new report from Reuters out this morning. The report claims Microsoft is in the process of developing its own systems for tracking what people place in their shopping carts, but doesn’t offer the details of how Microsoft’s technology operates, or how it may differ from others on the market.

Presumably, it would be similar to existing systems, like Amazon’s.

The Amazon Go convenience stores utilize a complex network of sensors on shelves, cameras, and A.I. to track what people pick up and place in their bag. Other startups are working on their own machine vision-powered checkout systems, as well, like Standard Cognition, AiFi, and AVA Retail, for example. The latter, along with half a dozen others, are already Microsoft partners building their own checkout-free services or related technology on Microsoft’s cloud.

Microsoft also has an internal team of 10 to 15 working on retail store technologies within its Business AI group, including a computer vision specialist hired from Amazon Go, the report noted. The team has tested things like attaching cameras to shopping carts and using smartphones to pay in various ways.

The focus of these efforts is not just to develop the new store technology itself, but also make it affordable for retailers, who tend to have small margins to work with.

Microsoft has been talking to retailers about its efforts, and has shown off sample technology during these discussions, which have included Walmart. Neither company commented on Reuters’ report.

If Microsoft were to take on Amazon in this space, it could give brick-and-mortar retailers a chance at fighting back as Amazon enters their own turf with its cashier-free stores and its grocery chain. But many of the retailers who are poised to lose to Amazon in this area can’t afford to develop this same sort of technology in-house, which they will need a partner like Microsoft.

Ethos, the company that bills itself as making life insurance accessible, affordable and simple, has officially come out of stealth with an $11.5 million investment led by on of the world’s top venture firms, Sequoia Capital, and additional participation from the family offices of Hollywood’s biggest stars and an NBA all-star.

Jay Z’s Roc Nation, the family funds of Kevin Durant, Robert Downey Jr. and Will Smith all participated in the new round for Ethos, and Sequoia Partner Roelof Botha is taking a seat on the company’s board. Because nothing says star power like a life insurance startup.

The life insurance market is one that’s been attracting interest from venture investors for a little over a year now. Companies like England’s Anorak, HealthIQ, Ladder, Mira Financial, France’s Alan, which is backed by Partech Investments (among others), Fabric, and Quilt, are all pitching life insurance products as well.

Ethos is licensed in 49 states, which is pretty comparable to the offering from providers like Haven Life, the Mass Mutual-backed life insurance product.

What has made the life insurance market interesting for investors is the fact that consumers’ interest in it continues to decline. Whether it’s because no one trusts insurers to actually pay out, or because Americans are putting their faith in the anti-aging technologies from funds like the Longevity Fund, folks just aren’t buying insurance products the way they used to.

So when investors see the numbers of users of a formerly ubiquitous product decline from 77% in 1989 to below 60% in 2018, the assumption is that there’s room for new companies to come in and provide better service.

Scads of investors have taken the same bet, which makes Ethos a marketing play as much as anything else. In the company’s press release it touts the fast, easy, and inexpensive process for getting a quote.

The initial process requires only four questions to et a quote and a ten minute survey to get a policy (in most cases). The company says 99% of its applicants don’t need a medical exam or blood test to get a policy.

What may have been most interesting to investors is the pedigree of the company’s co-founders. Peter Colis and Lingke Wang have both worked in the insurance industry before. They previously co-founded a life insurance marketplace called, Ovid Life

“Life insurance is critical for families, but the process is broken for those who want and need it,” said Peter Colis. “We are consumer advocates, intensely focused on expanding life insurance accessibility to the millions of US families who have college debt, mortgages​, spouses and children​ to care for, and who want to be financially empowered to live their lives without worry.”

Today Snapchat finally gets a true developer platform, confirming TechCrunch’s scoop from last month about Snap Kit. This set of APIs lets other apps piggyback on Snap’s login for signup, build Bitmoji avatars into their keyboards, display public Our Stories and Snap Map content, and generate branded stickers with referral links users can share back inside Snapchat. Snap Kit’s big selling point is privacy — a differentiator from Facebook. It doesn’t even let you share your social graph with apps to prevent a Cambridge Analytica-style scandal.

Launch partners include Tinder bringing Bitmojis to your chats with matches, Patreon letting fans watch creators’ Stories from within its app, and Postmates offering order ETA stickers you can share in Snapchat that open the restaurant’s page in the delivery app. Developers that want to join the platform can sign up here.

Snap Kit could help the stumbling public company colonize the mobile app ecosystem with its buttons and content, which could inspire Snapchat signups from new users and reengagement from old ones. “Growth is one of our three goals for 2018, so we absolutely hope it can contribute to that, and continue to strengthen engagement, which has always been a key metric for us” Snap’s VP of product Jacob Andrea tells me. That’s critical since Snapchat sunk to its lowest user growth rate ever last quarter under the weight of competition from Instagram and WhatsApp.

“There have been areas inside of our products where we’ve really set standards” Andreou explains. “Early, that was seen in examples like Stories, but today with things like how we treat user data, what we collect, what we share when people login and register for our service . . . Snap Kit is a set of developer tools that really allow people to take the best parts of our products and the standards that we’ve set in a few of these areas, and bring them into their apps.”

This focus on privacy manifests as a limit of 90 days of inactivity before your connection with an app is severed. And the login features only requires you bring along your changeable Snapchat display name, and optionally, your Bitmoji. Snap Kit apps can’t even ask for your email, phone number, location, who you follow, or who you’re friends with.

“It really became challenging for us to see our users then use other products throughout their day and have to lower their expectations. . . having to be ok with the fact that all of their information and data would be shared” Andreou gripes. This messaging is a stark turnaround from four years ago when it took 10 days for CEO Evan Spiegel to apologize for security laziness causing the leak of 4 million users’ phone numbers. But now with Facebook as everyone’s favorite privacy punching bag, Snapchat is seizing the PR opportunity.

“I think one of the parts that [Spiegel] was really excited about with this release is how much better our approach to our users in that way really is — Without relying on things like policy or developer’s best intentions or them writing perfect bug free code, but instead by design, not even exposing these things to begin with.”

Yet judging by Facebook’s continued growth and recovered share price, privacy is too abstract of a concept for many people to grasp. Snap Kit will have to win on the merits of what it brings other apps, and the strength of its partnerships team. Done right, Snapchat could gain an army of allies to battle the blue menace.

Snapvengers Assemble

Snap’s desire to maintain an iron grip on its ‘cool’ brand has kept its work with developers minimal until now. Its first accidental brush with a developer platform was actually a massive security hazard.

Third-party apps promising a way to secretly screenshot messages asked users to login with their Snapchat usernames and passwords, then proceeded to get hacked, exposing some users’ risqué photos. Snap later cut off an innocent music video app called Mindie for finding a way to share to users’ Stories. Last year I wrote how A year ago I wrote that “Snap’s anti-developer attitude is an augmented liability”, as it’d need help to populate the physical world with AR.

2017 saw Snap cautiously extend the drawbridge, inviting in ads, analytics, and marketing developer partners to help brands be hip, and letting hacker/designers make their own AR lenses. But the real transition moment was when Spiegel said on the Q4 2017 earnings call that “We feel strongly that Snapchat should not be confined to our mobile application—the amazing Snaps created by our community deserve wider distribution so they can be enjoyed by everyone.”

At the time that meant Snaps on the web, embedded in news sites, and on Jumbotrons. Today it means in other apps. But Snap will avoid one of the key pitfalls of the Facebook platform: over-promising. Snap Deputy General Counsel for Privacy Katherine Tassi tells me “It was also very important to us that there wasn’t going to be the exchange of the friends graph as part of the value proposition to third party developers.”

How Snap Kit Works

Snap Kit breaks down to four core pieces of functionality that will appeal to different apps looking to simplify signup, make communication visual, host eye-catching content, or score referral traffic. Developers that want access to Snap Kit must pass a human review and approval process. Snap will review their functionality to ensure they’re not doing anything shady.

Once authorized, they’ll have access to these APIs:

• Login Kit is the foundation of Snap Kit. It’s a OAuth-style alternative to Facebook Login that lets users skip creating a proprietary username and password by instead using their Snapchat credential. But all the app gets is their changeable, pseudonym-allowed Snapchat display name, and optionally, their Bitmoji avatar to use as a profile pic if the user approves. Getting that login button in lots of apps could remind people Snapchat exists, and turn it into a fundamental identity utility people will be loathe to abandon.
• Creative Kit is how apps will get a chance to create stickers and filters for use back in the Snapchat camera. Similar to April’s F8 launch of the abilitu to share from other apps to Instagram and Facebook Stories, developers can turn content like high scores, workout stats and more into stickers that users can overlay on their Snaps to drive awareness of the source app. Developers can also set a deep link where those stickers send people to generate referral traffic, which could be appealing to those looking to tap Snap’s 191 million teens.
• Bitmoji Kit lets developers integrate Snapchat’s personalized avatars directly into their app’s keyboard. It’s an easy way to make chat more visually expressive without having to reinvent the wheel. This follows the expansion of Friendmoji that feature avatars of you and a pal rolling out to the iOS keyboard. But Bitmoji Kit means developers do the integration work instead of having to rely on users installing anything extra.
• Story Kit allows developers to embed Snapchat Stories into their apps and websites. Beyond specific Stories, apps can also search through public Stories submitted to Our Story or Snap Map by location, time, or captions. That way, a journalism app could surface first-hand reports from the scene of breaking news or a meme app could pull in puppy Snaps. Snap will add extra reminders to the Our Story submission process to ensure users know their Stories could appear outside of Snapchat’s own app.

One thing that’s not in Snap Kit, at least yet, is the ability to embed Snapchat’s whole software camera into other apps which TechCrunch erroneously reported. Our sources mistakenly confused Creative Kit’s ability to generate stickers as opposed a way to share whole stories, which Andreou called “an interesting first step” for making Snapchat the broadcast channel for other apps.

Additional launch partners include bringing Bitmoji to Quip’s word processor, RSVP stickers from Eventbrite, GIF-enhanced Stories search in Giphy, Stories from touring musicians in Bands In Town, Storytelling about your dinner reservation on Quandoo, music discovery sharing from SoundHound, and real-time sports score sharing from ScoreStream.

When asked why Snapchat was building Snap Kit, Andreou explained that “We think that giving people more tools to be able to express themselves freely, have fun and be creative, both on Snapchat and other apps is a good thing. We also think that helping more people outside of Snapchat learn about our platform and our features is a good thing.”

Snap needs all the help it can get right now. If other apps are willing to be a billboard for it in exchange for some of its teen-approved functionality, Snapchat could find new growth channels amidst stiff competition.

While Salesforce and Microsoft have a dominant position in the world of sales software today, there are a number of startups nipping at their heels, and today one of the more promising of them has announced a growth round to help them in the effort. Pipedrive, a startup co-headquartered in Estonia and New York that offers tools to salespeople to help them close deals that are still in their pipeline, has picked up $50 million to expand its product, develop its business globally and potentially make acquisitions in the CRM space.

The Series C round was co-led by new investor Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation also from Rembrandt Venture Partners and Atomico (which itself has Estonian roots: Atomico’s founder, Niklas Zennstrom, was the co-founder of Skype, which developed and built the core IP voice and messaging product in the country). It brings the total raised by Pipedrive to $80 million.

Timo Rein, Pipedrive’s co-founder and CEO (and a former salesman himself), would not disclose the company’s valuation, saying only that it was “a pretty good round.” For some more context, Pitchbook writes that Pipedrive’s last funding, in 2016, valued the company at $188 million. Sources very close to the company tell us that the valuation now is $300 million+. (We’re asking around and will update this as and when we learn more.)

The CRM market is currently estimated to be worth over $40 billion, according to Gartner, and so unsurprisingly there are a number of startups in the fray, from those that are infusing the process with AI (such as Clari) through to other startups that help organise leads to act on them better (such as Zoho and Hubspot), through to those focusing on specific verticals like software companies (Paddle out of the UK).

Rein said that there was some skepticism when the company first launched that it would be possible to make a dent in landscape dominated by the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft.

“When we entered the market in 2010, people asked us, ‘Why build a product in an area where Salesforce is already strong?’ But having been in sales for more than a decade ourselves, we realized that it’s not just the sheer number of features you offer users. The difference is finding the right spot on the spectrum where you are getting what you need out of a product that you can use,” Reim said. “We have proven that users are migrating from Salesforce and others and are coming to Pipedrive. We definitely have less functionality, but professional salespeople know that performance is largely about your personality.”

In the case of Pipedrive, this translates to a software platform whose aim is to cut down on busywork to focus you on selling: all of your activity across emails and phone calls gets and other actions (it integrates some 100 other apps used in business, for example Google Apps, Trello, Zapier, MailChimp, Yesware and PandaDoc) is tracked without you needing to update the system, with the aim of making it easier for you to see what you might tackle next (and that gets tracked, too).

This is not about finding sales leads, Reim said: that may be something the company would consider down the line, but for now it’s looking at what happens when you already have a lead and need to make it as easy as possible to close that deal.

Ironically, Reim said that Pipedrive hasn’t been using its own tools in the majority of its own sales efforts. “In areas where we can use Pipedrive, we do,” he said, “but the service we offer is almost the opposite of what we built.” Pipedrive’s target customer is a larger business, which by their nature are fewer in number. They, in turn, are often focused on selling to a wider array of smaller customers. It’s priced on a monthly, SaaS basis ranging from $12.50 per user per month to $62.50 depending on number of users and features.

One way to think of Pipedrive’s approach is akin to something like Razer for the gaming world, which touts its ethos as “For Gamers. By Gamers.”

“Pipedrive is built primarily for salespeople, not just their managers,” said Teddie Wardi, a partner at Insight who also led the company’s Series B when he was still at Atomico. “This principle has helped them to create a product loved by users around the world, differentiate from competitors and propel the company to stellar growth.”

And that growth has come: today the company has 75,000 customers in 170 countries, with triple digital revenue growth each year since it first opened for business in 2010.

The plethora of startups in the market focusing on different aspects of the sales cycle and the CRM that surrounds that creates a ripe landscape not just for what Pipedrive might choose to tackle next, but how it might go about that.

“Post-sales, when you already have a customer and now need to help manage it, is an opportunity,” Reim said. “But our main effort and focus has been a product to help sales people deal with their pressure, and their own need to stay focused on the steady flow of sales, from the beginning to the actual close.”