Year: 2018

EAT Club, the corporate lunch service with a customer base that includes Flipboard, Mastercard and TaskRabbit, has acquired Farm Hill, a lunch box delivery service, to solidify and expand its presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Farm Hill had previously raised $4 million in capital.

EAT Club also brought on Doug Leeds, the former CEO at IAC Publishing and former executive in residence at August Capital, as its new CEO. Leeds is EAT Club’s third CEO since 2016, when its first CEO Frank Han moved into the COO role. Han left the company entirely in November 2017, according to his LinkedIn. Following Han’s departure as CEO, EAT Club brought on Mike Griffith, who served as president and CEO for less than two years. Griffith left in March because of a cultural mismatch of sorts, EAT Club co-founder Rodrigo Santibáñez told me. With Leeds on board, the plan is to “build a big company,” Santibáñez said.

“We understand that the stronger the team we have, the better chance we have of building a long-lasting company,” Santibáñez said. “We’re at a stage right now where we’re looking for someone who can set the strategic direction of company based on expertise.”

Leeds has the expertise EAT Club seems to be looking for, as the former CEO of IAC Publishing and Ask.com. While running IAC, Leeds’ role evolved through acquiring other companies, he told me. Those acquisitions meant his job was essentially to manage other CEOs, rather than the day-to-day operations of the business.

“I wanted to get back to a world where I was operating a company,” Leeds said. “When I thought about my life and what I’d want to operate, I wanted to bring joy to people’s lives where if what I did went away, customers would be upset.”

EAT Club, he said, came to the top of the list for him, due in part to the fact that he was a customer while at IAC. The company is also in a position to grow and scale, he said.

EAT Club says it makes money off every meal the company delivers in California. EAT Club, which currently serves more than 1,000 companies in three markets, says the average order amount per company is $500. To date, EAT Club has raised more than $46 million from investors like August Capital, Trinity Ventures and Sodexo Ventures.

The founders of Centra Tech, a company that raised a $32 million ICO, have been indicted for wire fraud and securities fraud, charges that could lead to a minimum of five years in jail.

The founders, Raymond Trapani, Sohrab Sharma, and Robert Farkas, were found guilty of trying to defraud investors with their ICO. The primary fraudulent statement concerned Centra Tech’s fake partnerships with Visa and MasterCard to help sell tokens. The team, wrote Robert Khuzami, Attorney for the United States in the Southern District of New York, “purported to offer cryptocurrency-related financial products, with conspiring to commit, and the commission of, securities and wire fraud in connection with a scheme to induce victims to invest millions of dollars’ worth of digital funds for the purchase of unregistered securities, in the form of digital currency tokens issued by Centra Tech, through material misrepresentations and omissions.”

Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled posted support for Centra Tech on Instagram during the run-up to the token sale, writing that they were excited to use Centra Tech’s card to pay for things using Bitcoin, Ethereum, and “other coins.” Mayweather’s post appeared here but is now gone.

What the three partners allegedly did was especially egregious which is why the SEC was able to attack so forcefully. Khuzami alleges that the team made up a fake CEO to look more credible as well as a laundry list of other claims.

After SHARMA and TRAPANI worked together at a luxury car rental company in Florida called “Miami Exotics,” they and FARKAS co-founded a startup company called Centra Tech that claimed to offer cryptocurrency-related financial productions, including a purported debit card, the “Centra Card,” that supposedly allowed users to spend various types of cryptocurrency to make purchases at any establishment that accepts Visa or Mastercard payment cards. In approximately July 2017, SHARMA, TRAPANI, and FARKAS began soliciting investors to purchase unregistered securities, in the form of digital tokens issued by Centra Tech, through a so-called “initial coin offering” or “ICO.” As part of this effort, SHARMA, TRAPANI, and FARKAS, in oral and written offering materials that were disseminated via the internet, represented: (a) that Centra Tech had an experienced executive team with impressive credentials, including a purported CEO named “Michael Edwards” with more than 20 years of banking industry experience and a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University; (b) that Centra Tech had formed partnerships with Bancorp, Visa, and Mastercard to issue Centra Cards licensed by Visa or Mastercard; and (c) that Centra Tech had money transmitter and other licenses in 38 states, among other claims. Based in part on these claims, victims provided millions of dollars’ worth of digital funds in investments for the purchase of Centra Tech tokens. In or about October 2017, at the end of Centra Tech’s ICO, those digital funds raised from victims were worth more than $25 million. Due to appreciation in the value of those digital funds raised from victims, those digital funds are presently worth more than $60 million.

The FBI seized 91,000 Ether worth $90 million from the team. The team is facing “one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, which carries a maximum potential sentence of five years in prison; one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in prison; one count of securities fraud, which carries a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in prison; and one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in prison.”

In recent releases, Activision has taken its Call of Duty franchise into space (with its Infinite Warfare) and back in time (with the World War II release); now it’s looking to its past to bring it back to glory, while adding the massive multi-player Battle Royale mode.

The new Black Ops game is set within a narrative universe between Black Ops II and Black Ops III and stresses multi-player gaming like the battle royale, improved league play and collaborative features for gamers.

Critical to that is the franchise’s introduction of Battle Royale mode, bringing favorite characters, favorite weapons and the most iconic parts of players’ favorite maps along with the ever-popular zombies into a winner-take-all competitive landscape.

It’s a nod to the new ways gamers are playing and a pitch to rejuvenate Call of Duty — one of the world’s most popular game titles, with Black Ops as perhaps the most compelling title in the company’s arsenal. Previous releases have failed to capture the imagination in the same way as its early releases. Black Ops IIII is returning to the complete boots on the ground game play, and stressing the multi-player functionality that made the first games such a hit.

The game will launch in October and will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.

Black Ops IIII doesn’t have a traditional campaign, but weaves narrative into each of the game’s modes. “This is a game that’s built to last for years to come,” said Treyarch chairman Mark Lamia.

The game developers stressed more nuanced game play, with improved sound and graphics capabilities like more refined muzzle flashes and better audio for improved orientation. Weapons mods are getting an upgrade; each weapon will get its own set of attachments. There are operator mods and better, more realistic recoil.

For players familiar with the game, Treyarch developers stressed changes to make the game more tactical, including a new healing mechanic and better situational awareness for more measured, strategic play.

“Tactical players can choose when to disengage and look for a better opportunity to survive,” said one of the Treyarch developers presenting onstage in a cavernous hangar at the Jet Center Los Angeles for the Call of Duty IIII community reveal. As part of the tactical emphasis, the company reintroduced characters like FireBreak to deal with aerial threats and two new specialists, a reconnaissance expert and a defensive player who can create tactical positions for teams.

Zombie mode 

Black Ops IIII also adds new features and first-time experiences for fans of its Zombie mode. “As with the rest of the Black Ops IIII we’ve gone back to the drawing board on Zombies,” says Jason Blundell. “The zombies community has always been our most loyal…. So 10 years after it all began we’re about to begin a brand new chapter with the Zombie story right here.”

There are three zombie game-play scenarios. Two new scenarios include one set in a past, mythical Romanesque era while the other is set in the luxurious venue of the Titanic as the maiden voyage turns deadly and zombifying. 

For both experiences there are going to be customizable tools and social experiences so that the new Zombie world can exist in an evergreen mode. On offer will be customizable zombie modes for ways fans can customize and trade their own zombies. There’s also a Black Ops stamp system to validate the work that’s been done.

Activision and Treyarch also introduced limited-time creative challenges for modding zombies, and promised new ways to play the game and updated seasonal themes based, in part, on player modifications. For Zombies, Black Ops IIII will include bot support to play with an artificial intelligence. Zombie Rush is a new mode designed to introduce players to the zombie universe and adding in-game tutorials. Difficulty settings are also customizable to encourage repeat game play.

PC focus

Black Ops IIII is the first title to be released on the multi-player Battle.net PC platform. The company is focused on PC as “its own unique platform, integrated with all the social features on Battle.net.” Players can talk across Black Ops IIII and Overwatch, and the company is emphasizing the customizable elements for PC gamers.

After 14 months of silence since launching, Facebook Stories has finally announced a 150 million daily active user count for its Snapchat Stories clone. And now it’s time to earn some money off it. Facebook Stories will start testing its first ads today in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil.

They’re 5- to 15-second video ads users can skip, and while there’s no click-through or call to action now, Facebook plans to add that in the coming months. Advertisers can easily extend their Instagram Stories ads to this new surface, or have Facebook automatically reformat their News Feed ads with color-matched borders and text at the bottom. Facebook also plans to give businesses more metrics on their Stories performance to convince them the feature is worth their ad dollars.

Facebook has to nail Stories ads to preserve its business, as CPO Chris Cox said this month that Stories sometime next year will surpass feed posts as the top way to share. CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned that Facebook must ensure “that ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.” Despite criticism that the feature is obtrusive and redundant with Instagram Stories, Facebook is proving there’s no retreating from the ephemeral slideshow format. And Snapchat could see ad spend slip over to Facebook, especially since the big blue social network has so much targeting data on us.

The race for storytellers

Facebook is defining a daily user for Stories as anyone who watches one. That’s useful, because it means it’s not counting users who simply cross-post their Stories from Instagram or Messenger to Facebook, which would inflate the number.

For context, here’s a breakdown of Stories daily user counts and total monthly user counts across the top players, ranked by size:

1. WhatsApp Status: 450 million daily out of 1.5 billion monthly as of May 2018
2. Instagram Stories: 300 million daily out of 800 million monthly as of November 2017
3. Snapchat (whole app): 191 million daily as of May 2018, launched
4. Facebook Stories: 150 million daily out of 2.2 billion monthly as of May 2018
5. Messenger Day/Stories: 70 million daily out of 1.3 billion monthly as of September 2017

Instagram Stories also started showing ads when it hit 150 million users, though that was just five months after launch, while it’s taken Facebook Stories 14 months to get there.

The real opportunity for Facebook’s future engagement growth is bringing the Stories format to the international market that Snapchat has largely neglected for four years and only recently got serious about by re-engineering its Android app. WhatsApp capitalized on Snap’s focus on U.S. teens by surging to become the top Stories product thanks to youth across the globe. And now Facebook is specifically building Stories features for countries like India, such as the new audio posts to help users with non-native language keyboards, and cloud storage so you can privately save photos and videos to Facebook for those without room on their phones.

Since testing in January 2017 and then launching in March 2017, Facebook has been rapidly iterating on its version of Stories in hopes of making it more unique and apt to its audience. That includes adding cross-posting from its other apps and a desktop interface, advanced shutter formats like Boomerang and new augmented reality features like 3D doodling and real-world QR and image triggers that anchor AR to a location.

Oh, and there’s one bonus unannounced feature we’ve spotted. Facebook Stories can now shoot 360 photos without a 360 camera. It uses a cool interface that shows you where to “paint” your camera over your surroundings, so unlike a panorama where you only get one shot, you can go back and fill in missed spots.

Snap’s beaten; time to monetize

All of Facebook’s efforts seem to be paying off. Snapchat sunk to its slowest daily user growth rate ever, a paltry 2.13 percent last quarter, while the much more saturated Facebook grew a strong 3.42 percent. Snapchat actually shrank in user count during March.

That might have been the signal Facebook needed to start putting ads in its Stories. It’s effectively beaten Snapchat into submission. Without as strong of a competitor, Facebook has more leeway to pollute the Stories user experience with ads. And that comes just as Snapchat is desperate to ramp up ad sales after missing revenue estimates in Q1 and mounting losses of $385 million.

“Ads in stories have added a lot of value for businesses on Instagram, and we believe we can do the same on Facebook,” Facebook product manager Zoheb Hajiyani tells me. “Ensuring that this is a good experience for people using the product will be our top priority.” Facebook has lined up a number of ad test partners it’s not disclosing, but also will be running its own ads for Oculus inside Stories.

With existing Facebook and Instagram advertisers able to easily port their ads over to Facebook Stories, and much greater total reach, they might not go to the trouble of advertising on Snap unless they seek young teens. Stories could in fact be the answer to Facebook’s issue with running out of ad space in the News Feed while it shuts down its sidebar units. Stories could generate the ad inventory needed to keep pushing more marketing into the social network.

Stories were inevitable. First launched by Snapchat in October 2013, it took almost three years for Facebook to wake up to the format as an existential threat to the company. But with the quick success of Instagram’s clone, Facebook has wisely swallowed its pride and pivoted its apps toward this style of visual communication. It was another moment, like the shift to mobile, where Facebook could have faltered. But willingness to admit its mistakes and ruthlessly compete may have won another epoch of social dominance.

For more on Stories, check out our feature piece:

Intel and its subsidiary Mobileye have started testing 100 self-driving cars in Jerusalem. In the “coming months,” the plan is to deploy the fleet in the U.S. and other regions, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shahsua wrote in a blog post.

Through this test, Intel/Mobileye hope to demonstrate that its cars are 1,000 times safer than human drivers “without the need for billions of miles of validation testing on public roads.”

These cars are equipped with 12 cameras to create a 360 view of its surroundings. Eight of those cameras are for long-range viewing purposes while the other four are for parking. In phase two of development, which will happen in the next few weeks, Intel-Mobileye will add a layer of radar and LIDAR.

“The camera-only phase is our strategy for achieving what we refer to as “true redundancy” of sensing,” Shahsua wrote. “True redundancy refers to a sensing system consisting of multiple independently engineered sensing systems, each of which can support fully autonomous driving on its own.”

Intel and Mobileye landed on Jerusalem as its test city to prove its tech can work “in any geography and under all conditions.” Shahsua also noted Jerusalem is “notorious for aggressive driving” and doesn’t always have clearly marked roads. Jerusalem, he said, also has complicated merging situations and people walking outside of crosswalks.

“You can’t have an autonomous car traveling at an overly cautious speed, congesting traffic or potentially causing an accident,” he wrote. “You must drive assertively and make quick decisions like a local driver.”

Intel-Mobileye’s goal is to deploy Level 4 and Level autonomous vehicles on the roads by 2021 in partnership with its vehicle manufacturers. Earlier today, Reuters reported Mobileye signed a contract with an automaker based in Europe to supply eight million of its cars with Mobileye technology. The company’s known vehicle partners include General Motors, Nissan, Audi, BMW, Fiat Chrysler, Honda and China’s Nio.

There’s a whole lot of data and information that’s stored in the cloud, and it’s critical that consumers and enterprises alike be able to trust that this information is safe and accurate. Such is the primary investing thesis of Underscore VC, a three-year-old, Boston-based early-stage firm that is today taking the wraps off a second fund that it just closed with $115 million in capital commitments. Among its investors: Boston Children’s Hospital, the fund of funds Greenspring Associates, and family offices, including that Henry McCance, chairman emeritus of Greylock Partners.

If you haven’t heard of Underscore, you probably don’t live in Boston, where the firm sprung up in 2015, created by veterans of the startup scene there. Cofounder Michael Skok spent the previous 12 years with Boston-based firm North Bridge Venture Partners. Cofounder John Pearce is the former CEO of Demandware.

Other members of the investing team include co-founder Richard Dulude, who worked previously as an associate with Founder Collective, and Lily Lyman, who received her M.B.A. from Stanford in 2014 and worked previously as a program manager at Facebook, joining Underscore earlier this year. (Another cofounder, C.A. Webb, who’d spent three years as president of the New England Venture Capital Association, left the firm early last year, writing in a Medium post that Underscore was no longer the right fit for her.)

Underscore closed its debut fund in 2016 with $85 million, capital that it will spread across roughly 20 companies when all is said and done. (It’s not fully invested just yet.)

The largest investment it has made so far is in Salsify, a “product experience management platform” whose $30 million Series C round was led by Underscore. Another company that has received an outsize portion of Underscore’s capital is Zaius, a maker of marketing software. Underscore wrote its initial seed check and co-led its Series A round and, last month, participated in its $30 million Series B round, which was led by Insight Venture Partners.

Skok says Underscore invests anywhere from “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into the “millions or beyond,” adding that in the case of Salsify, in order to maintain Underscore’s pro rata share, it spun up a special purpose vehicle — essentially a pop-up venture fund that comes together to invest in a single company — and it expects to do the same with future portfolio companies.

As you might imagine, being based in Boston, Underscore is “Boston biased” says Skok, noting the “incredible founders in this ecosystem, combined with talent and innovation from world class academic institutions and research labs.” Among these other bets are locals Moltin and Mautic, which are five- and four-years-old, respectively. (The latter moved from Raleigh, North Carolina to be closer to talent in Boston, Skok says.)

Skok has always loved Boston’s startup scene, even while it has changed dramatically over the last decade or so. He note, for example, that there was no “kickstarting, crowdfunding, accelerating, incubating” or “AngelList’ing,” all of which have made it easier than ever to start a company. Naturally, he also argues that remains as hard as ever to scale and break through all the noise of those many startups getting going.

It’s easy to see why Underscore’s investors have faith. While at North Bridge, Skok  backed Demandware and Acquia. Demandware, a cloud-based provider of e-commerce services to businesses, sold to Salesforce in 2016 for $2.8 billion. Acquia  — a software company that helps developers build web applications in JavaScript, among other things — remains privately held but is believed to be moving toward an eventual IPO.  Skok also worked as a U.K.-based managing director for Symantec for five years.

Meanwhile, Pearce, before joining DemandWare, had worked at numerous enterprise companies as an executive, including AppIQ where he was CFO (AppIQ was acquired by Hewlett-Packard), and SilverStream Software, which Pearce cofounded and later served as CFO and SVP of worldwide sales.

There’s also a broader case to make for investing in Underscore. When firms like CRV and General Catalyst that once operated solely out of Boston moved the bulk of their operations out West, they created a funding vacuum in the city, which is still comparatively underbanked when it comes to iSeries A and later-stage funding needs.

Underscore, among others, is now helping them fill it.

Photo above courtesy of Underscore.

The worst thing about Spectacles is how closely tied they are to Snapchat. The proprietary circular photo and video format looks great inside Snapchat where you can tip your phone around while always staying full screen, but it gets reduced to a small circle with a big white border when you export it to your phone for sharing elsewhere.

Luckily, Snapchat has started beta testing new export formats for Spectacles through the beta version of its app. This lets you choose a black border instead of a white one, but importantly, also a horizontal 16:9 rectangular format that would fit well on YouTube and other traditional video players. The test was first spotted by Eric Johnson, and, when asked, a Snapchat spokesperson told TechCrunch “I can confirm we’re testing it, yes.”

Allowing Spectacles to be more compatible with other services could make the v2 of its $150 photo and video-recording sunglasses much more convenient and popular. I actually ran into the Snapchat Spectacles team this weekend at the FORM Arcosanti music festival in Arizona where they were testing the new Specs and looking for ideas for their next camera. I suggested open sourcing the circular format or partnering so other apps could show it natively with the swivel effect, and Snap declined to comment about that. But now it looks like they’re embracing compatibility by just letting you ditch the proprietary format.

Breaking away from purely vertical or circular formats is also a bit of a coup for Snapchat, which has touted vertical as the media orientation of the future as that’s how we hold our phones. Many other apps, including Facebook’s Snapchat clones, adopted this idea. But with Snapchat’s growth slipping to its lowest rate ever, it may need to think about new ways to gain exposure elsewhere.

Seeing Spectacles content on other apps without ugly borders could draw attention back to Snapchat, or at least help Spectacles sell better than v1, which only sold 220,000 pairs and had to write-off hundreds of thousands more that were gathering dust in warehouses. While it makes sense why Snap might have wanted to keep the best Spectacles content viewing experience on its own app, without user growth, that’s proven a software limitation for what’s supposed to be a camera company.

The Washington Post reported just yesterday that Apple was talking with Virginia officials for a new campus in Northern Virginia. But WRAL is now reporting that Apple is about to announce a new campus in North Carolina.

According to WRAL’s sources, it’s “a done deal.” The company and legislators plan to talk about a tax break to seal the deal. If North Carolina agrees to reduce the taxes, Apple could create a new campus in the Research Triangle Park.

Multiple tech companies already have offices in the Research Triangle Park as it is close to top universities (Duke University, NC State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). IBM and Cisco have established huge offices in the region.

It’s also worth noting that Apple CEO Tim Cook got his MBA at Duke University.

This report doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple didn’t talk with Virginia officials. The company could be considering opening a big office in one of those two locations and a smaller one in the other.

Apple has been looking for a new location for its new campus. The company already has thousands of employees in Cupertino and Austin. Apple expects to hire 20,000 employees over the next five years in those three locations.

Two weeks after Bluesmart called it quits, another smart luggage maker is pulling the plug. New York-based travel startup Raden posted a note (spotted by The Verge) on its site announcing that the company is “no longer in operation.”

Unlike Bluesmart, which sold its remaining assets to luggage conglomerate Travelpro, this appears to be the end of Raden as both a company and brand for the time being. As a result, the company is also ending support returns, exchanges and repairs.

The company notes that it’s the latest startup to fall victim to last year’s smart luggage ban, which found the US’s largest domestic carriers joining forces to limit the use of battery-powered suitcases. Companies warned that the new rules, which went into effect in January, would have a profound impact on their survival, and it’s only taken a few months for that to come to fruition.

“The changes in policies concerning batteries in luggage in December by all major airlines severely impacted the usefulness of our products, their value to our customers, our business performance and ultimately the ability to continue operating,” the company writes on the site.

It notes that “all existing shipments have been processed for delivery,” and while the Raden app will still pair with its luggage, batteries must be removed from the products in order to take them on a flight. That, effectively, renders the whole smart functionality bit useless.

It’s been about two years since Built.io launched Contentstack, a headless content management system for the enterprise. Contentstack was always a bit of an odd product at Built.io, which mostly focuses on providing integration tools like Flow for large companies (think IFTTT, but for enterprise workflows). Contentstack is pretty successful in its own right, though, with customers ranging from the Miami Heat to Cisco and Best Buy. Because of this, Built.io decided to spin out the service into its own business at the beginning of this year, and now it’s doubling down on serving modern enterprises that want to bring their CMS strategy into the 21st century.

As Built.io COO Matthew Baier told me, the last few years were quite good to Contentstack . The company doubled its deal sizes since January, for example, and it’s now seeing hockey-stick growth. Contentstack now has about 40 employees and a dedicated support team and sales staff. Why spin it out as its own company? “This has been a red-hot space for us,” Baier said. “What we decided to do last year was to do both opportunities justice and really double down on Contentstack as a separate business.”

Back when Contentstack launched, the service positioned itself as an alternative to Drupal and WordPress. Now, the team is looking at it more in terms of Adobe’s CMS tools.

And these days, it’s all about headless CMS, which essentially decouples the backend from the front-end presentation. That’s a relatively new trend in the world of CMS, but one that enables companies to bring their content (be that text, images or video and audio) to not just the web but also mobile apps and new platforms like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Using this model, the CMS essentially becomes another API the front-end developers can use. Contentstack likes to call this “Content-as-a-Service,” but I’m tired of X-as-a-Service monikers, so I won’t do that. It is worth noting that in this context, “content” can be anything from blog posts to the descriptions and images that go with a product on an e-commerce site.

“Headless CMS is exciting because it is modernizing the space,” explained Baier. “It’s probably the most exciting thing to happen in this space in 25 years. […] We are doing for CMS what Salesforce did for CRM.”

Not every company needs this kind of system that’s ready for an omni-channel strategy, of course, but even for companies that still mostly focus on the web — or whose website is the main product — a service like Contentstack makes sense because it allows them to quickly iterate on the front end without having to worry about the backend service that powers it.

The latest version of Contentstack introduces a number of new features for content editors, including a better workflow management system that streamlines the creating, review and deployment of content in the system, as well as support for publishing rules that ensure only approved content makes it into the official channels (it wouldn’t be an enterprise product if it didn’t have some role-based controls, right?). Also new in today’s update is the ability to bundle content together and then release it en masse, maybe to coincide with a major release, promotional campaign or other event.

Looking ahead, Baier tells me that the team wants to delve a bit deeper into how it can integrate with more third-party services. Given that this is Built.io’s bread and butter, that’s probably no major surprise, but in the CMS world, integrations are often a major paint point. It’s those integrations, though, that users really need as they now rely on more third-party services than ever to run their businesses. “We believe the future is in these composable stacks,” Baier noted.

The team is also looking at how it can best use AI and machine learning, especially in the context of SEO.

One thing Contentstack and Built.io have never done is take outside money. Baier says “never say never,” but it doesn’t look like the company is likely to look for outside funding anytime soon.