Year: 2018

Craft beer appliance maker PicoBrew is eyeing some bold new directions in drinkables. The company’s taken to Kickstarter with the Pico U, a new machine that’s capable of brewing up a pretty broad range of different beverages.

That list includes, but is not limited to:

• Kombucha
• Coffee
• Tea
• Horchata
• Yerba Matte
• Soda
• And, yes, craft beer

The company’s CEO Bill Mitchell explains the genesis of the machine thusly, “When pioneering the world’s first craft beer brewing machine, we had to ensure incredibly precise process control to accurately produce great beers from around the world. We realized this technology also enabled the most precise brewing of coffee and tea and began exploring a broader world of brewed beverages.”

The system goes live on Kickstarter today, with a starting price of $169. That’s for the single serving configuration, which will jump to $249 at retail. There’s also a deluxe version, which can make up to five liters of craft beer, kombucha and cold brew coffee in a go. That one’s $189/$299.

The system features Wi-Fi, which lets users monitor brews through a smartphone app — or you can just use the display on the front. The company expects the thing to officially launch in Q1 of next year.

GIFs offer a way to compress a ton of information into a small amount of space, and while Gfycat has positioned itself as more of a short-form video centric platform, it’s going to take a step further to see what a step beyond a standard GIF looks like.

The company today said it would be rolling out 360 degree GIF-like short form videos, which will allow users to plant themselves in the middle of what is effectively a looping video like a GIF. While that presents much more of a challenge to users for generating content, CEO Richard Rabbat said the proliferation of tools like 3D cameras and content from the actual producers like video studios would make it an increasingly popular way to interact with short-form content in a compact form factor.

“We’ve always thought that GIFs are amazing from many perspectives,” Rabbat said. “That goes beyond whether you’re looking at the content to use it in messaging, or you’re consuming it for entertainment value, or you’re using it for decoration in the case of the augmented reality effort we’re working on. We want people to really get excited about how they consume the content to the point where they can see the subjects of the content in a much more lifelike way, and really get excited about that.”

It’s not going to be all that unfamiliar from 360 degree videos you might find on Facebook or other platforms. Users on desktop can use their mouse to move a GIF around, while on mobile devices users can pan their phone around in order to see different parts of the GIF. The idea is to give users a way to have a more robust interaction with a piece of content like a GIF in a compact experience without having to strap on a VR headset or anything along those lines.

The company is starting off by rolling out some 360 degree content from Paramount, which is producing 360 degree content around its Mission Impossible films. And while a lot of content on Gfycat — or other platforms — comes from shows, movies or games along those lines, it makes more sense for those studios to use these kinds of tools to increase awareness for their shows or movies.

via Gfycat

There are a lot of companies working on figuring out the best messaging experiences around GIFs. But Google acquiring Tenor, a GIF search tool that works across multiple platforms, may have set a bare minimum bar for the value of companies that are looking to help users share GIFs with their friends. Gfycat positions itself as something that’s geared toward more creator tools, and recently said it hit 180 million monthly active users.

“We’re creating experiences that we think are going to enable others and inspire others to create that same kind of content,” Rabbat said.” We expect it’s going to be a subset of what people do with 2D, but a much more immersive experience where people will spend more time looking at the content. From a consumption perspective, by not requiring people to put on VR headsets, we’re making it much more consumer friendly.”

The mouth tech industry is continuing to pick up steam with electric toothbrush startup Quip’s latest $10 million funding round from Silicon Valley Bank and its acquisition of dental insurance startup Afora. Afora is a New York-based startup that offers an alternative to traditional dental insurance with plans starting at $25 a month. All of its plans include preventive services like two cleanings per year, annual exams and x-rays, and pre-negotiated pricing for additional work, like root canals.

Afora will now be part of Quip’s newly-formed venture studio, Quip Labs. The idea with the studio is to fuel innovation in oral health products, platforms and services. Quip did not explicitly mention any other companies it has its eyes on, but the goal with Quip Labs is to enable the startup to explore new ideas in the dental health space, regardless of whether they’re related to Quip’s core offering, Quip CEO Simon Enever told TechCrunch via email. 

Quip began as a subscription-based electric toothbrush service that replaces tooth paste and brush heads, partly because you’re apparently supposed to change your toothbrush every three months. But before this acquisition, Quip had already started evolving its offerings by inviting dentists to join the platform to connect with Quip’s consumer subscribers.

“Our mission has always been to provide an end-to-end solution that makes the preventative care routine — which is so critical to your oral health — more simple, affordable and enjoyable, Enever said.

Quip specifically wants to handle the everything that happens before and after your checkups with the dentist, Enever said. In order to get there, Enever said Quip needed to start with an affordable electric toothbrush, “but we are extremely excited to start accelerating our mission to provide more digital and professional services that complete this loop to more people.”

Other startups in the dental health space include clear teeth aligner startups. One of them, Uniform Teeth, recently closed a $4 million seed round. Whether Quip decides to expand into the clear aligner market remains to be seen, but Enever said “our broad mission is to improve oral health as a whole.”

He added, “Quip labs allows us to explore all aspects of mouth care and the various ways we could help make other health focused services more simple and accessible to more people, always in a manner that aligns with the best practices of the dental professionals behind them.”

Quip’s last funding round came in November 2017, when it raised $10 million from Sherpa Capital, Blue Scorpion VC, Demi Lovato and others. The plan with this round is to further accelerate the company’s expansion into “new physical and digital products and services to serve our members,” Enever said. To date, Quip has raised over $20 million in funding.

Lemonade has made some big moves in the world of insurance. The company uses AI and bots to sell insurance, and has flipped the business model to ensure that Lemonade is never in conflict with customers filing insurance claims.

But the product itself, the actual insurance policy, hasn’t changed much at all. For decades, insurance companies have been held to long, tedious legalese in their insurance contracts. In Lemonade’s case, the document is more than 40 pages long and incredibly difficult to understand.

For a company that wants to make buying insurance as easy and as consumer-centric as possible, the very product they sell is in complete opposition to that. Which is why Lemonade is re-writing the policy from scratch.

“I’m a recovering attorney, and I’ve been clean for 20 years,” said Lemonade CEO and cofounder Daniel Schreiber. “I think my English is pretty good, and I have a passing familiarity with insurance and generally I can’t understand this insurance policy. To do the next big thing in insurance means changing insurance. It’s not been done in generations. This is a historic document that’s been optimized around lawyers.”

So Lemonade has re-written the whole thing to read like a blog post. Policy 2.0, according to Schreiber, is meant to give consumers a clear and easy way to understand what is and what is not covered in their insurance policy.

But, in a little bit of a twist, Lemonade is open-sourcing the policy on GitHub. Anyone, from state regulators to consumer advocacy groups to Lemonade competitors or even interested customers can make edits and contributions to the policy. Plus, Lemonade is opening up use of the policy to other insurance providers under the GNU’s Free Documentation License.

Part of this has to do with transparency to consumers, but another part is simply about Lemonade’s greater mission of making insurance simple.

“We sold you a policy on your phone,” said Schreiber. “We want a policy that makes sense on a five-inch screen.”

I asked Schreiber whether or not there is any concern over rewriting a policy in more plain language when historically, lawyers use specific language to stay within the realms of legal precedent and remove any grey areas that may be litigated.

“Anytime you abandon language that’s been litigated for years you invite legal uncertainty,” answered Schreiber. “But we think if you’re optimizing for the consumer, giving them clarity into exactly what’s covered and exactly what isn’t, you won’t feel cheated if we can’t cover things because you’ll see that you had that info all along, in plain English.”

One hurdle, however, will be regulators. A good deal of the language in that 10,000 word-long insurance policy is legally required to be in the document. This change from Lemonade requires the company to work with regulators to allow the new policy to be sold, and that conversation differs from state to state.

That’s why Schreiber believes Policy 2.0 won’t be available for purchase until sometime in 2019, rolling out on a statewide basis as is approved by regulators.

That said, Schreiber said he’s already in conversation with regulators and is seeing willingness to be flexible on this.

When Policy 2.0 does come to the main stage, current Lemonade subscribers will be able to immediately change over to the new policy or keep their original policy.

Lemonade has raised a total of $180 million, including a whopping $120 million round led by Sequoia from December.

Warnings that Tencent, Asia’s highest-valued tech company, might suffer a rare poor quarter of business proved unwarranted after the company smashed analyst expectations for its latest earnings thanks to its fast-growing mobile games business.

The company reported a net profit of 23.29 billion CNY ($3.7 billion) on revenue of 73.53 billion yuan ($11.5 billion) — beating a Thomson Reuters estimate of 71.04 billion CNY revenue. Net profit was up 61 percent year-on-year, while revenue increased 48 percent over the same period.

Tencent has historically done well in the games space with the PC its cash cow, but last year its smartphone games business overtook that of PC based on revenue.

The gap is now becoming noticeable and there’s plenty of scope for it to increase further.

Tencent has a hand in the two biggest games in the smartphone world today: Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Fortnite . The company secured the rights to distribute both ‘battle royale’ games in China and beyond and said it is just beginning to monetize them. (Fortnite is due to launch in China imminently). Another title — Honour of Kings — was the world’s highest-grossing mobile game last year thanks to its China-based users and Tencent has been pushing it to worldwide audiences. Finally, a fourth game — QQ Speed Mobile — showed promising revenue after being taken from PC to mobile.

Tencent said mobile game revenue hit 21.7 billion RMB ($3.4 billion) during the quarter, up 68 year-on-year. PC-based games, meanwhile, took in sales of 14.1 billion RMB ($2.2 billion) to remain flat over the past 12 months.

Elsewhere, the company said that its WeChat messaging service surpassed one billion active user accounts for the first time. Also in WeChat, the company has built upon its Mini Program feature — which lets developers create apps that tie into WeChat — by introducing Mini Games, there are currently over 500. It also merged WeChat Pay, its mobile payment service which supports offline, with Mini Programs.

One final shout-out across Europe to all the creative coders, hackers, programmers and tech makers who suffer from severe procrastination. This is your last chance to register for a spot in the next TechCrunch Hackathon, which takes place at VivaTech on May 25-26 at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. You have one week left to get your free ticket.

The TC Hackathon — open to residents from one of these European countries — represents an amazing opportunity for you to show off your creative coding skills to the movers and shakers in the European tech scene. Whether you come to build something fun, innovative or life-changing, you’ll be surrounded — and pushed toward greatness — by the best and brightest coders on the continent.

Here’s how the Hackathon works. Competitors form ad hoc teams, and they have just 24 hours to create, code and hack their way to a working product using BeMyApp, the official Hackathon platform. You’ll have to rely on your legal stimulant of choice — coffee, energy drinks or sugar — because once the 24-hour clock stops, each tired team gets just 60 seconds to pitch their creation to a panel of judges. And they’re wide awake.

The judges will award each team a score between 1-5. The top-scoring team wins the €5,000 grand-prize, and each team that averages a three or better wins five tickets to VivaTech 2019 plus two Innovator tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in November.

But we’re not quite finished in the cash-and-prizes department. Thanks to our generous sponsors, you can hack away at any of these contest challenges from leboncoin, Renault, GEFCO & Talan, Microsoft and also our final sponsor IBM:

IBM Challenge: Think you can build an awesome AI-powered app for iOS in a few hours? You can with IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Core ML. You’ll train your own machine learning models and use them in your apps quickly. Your challenge? Let your imagination run wild as you build an app that couples AI with videos and photos to face down real problems; perhaps monitor a baby’s sleep for harmful situations. The prize is €5,000, but beyond that, this hackathon will let you deliver a lasting and significant impact.

Hackathon tickets won’t cost you a thing, but once they’re gone, that’s it — no second chances.

The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech takes place at the Expo Porte de Versailles in Paris on May 25-26. We can’t wait to see what you create, but you have only one week left to secure your spot. Register for the Hackathon right now!

Sometimes two companies get along so well together and fit each other so perfectly, they almost have to come together. That’s what happened when Dialpad, a business communications platform whose products include UberConference, started working with TalkIQ. They liked them so much, they bought the company.

Dialpad CEO Craig Walker says the two companies actually started working together about 8 months ago when Dialpad began looking at artificial intelligence options and they found that most weren’t real time and were expensive.

Walker liked the fact that TalkIQ had that near real-time solution and that it was also built on the Google Cloud Platform like his company. In addition, the principals from both companies each came out of Google and had actually worked together at various points.

When the teams came together under that commercial agreement, Walker says, they really clicked. At some point, they began talking about making it a permanent arrangement.

TalkIQ CEO Dan O’Connell says there was natural synergy they both recognized right away. “All acquisitions have challenges and opportunities. For me making a decision [to sell] was a pretty easy decision. We knew each other and with culture sometimes you don’t know what you are getting. Our values aligned really well,” he said.

With TalkIQ, the Dialpad platform gets an injection of intelligence. Specifically, they can capture voice in near real time and apply sentiment analysis and analytics. This could provide a customer service operation with feedback in real time along with advice for managers when to intervene in a call.

Call is being analyzed in real time and the manager can see the intervene recommendation. Photo: Dialpad

The TalkIQ functionality will be incorporated natively right into the Dialpad suite of apps, which includes voice and video along with customer service call center management and UberConference for conference calling. “Part of why we wanted to go all the way and acquire this technology was that we wanted it to be seamless and integrated and simple and not weird for end users,” Walker said.

To that end, the initial offering called VoiceAI will include real-time transcription along with smart notes, which automatically pick out the salient points in a meeting or call. It also comes with the real-time sentiment analysis and coaching for call centers.

Starting today, customers will be offered the opportunity to opt in on the new functionality and can use it for free during the Beta period. They will begin charging for it in July, but are still working out exactly how that will work. It could come with a certain amount of the AI-fueled functionality for free and then higher paid tier for more advanced functions.

The deal closed a few weeks ago and TalkIQ’s 29 employees are already part of the company with the San Francisco-based employees moving into the Dialpad headquarters. The TalkIQ engineering team will continue to work out an office in Waterloo, Ontario.

Dialpad was founded in 2011 and has raised $70 million. TalkIQ was founded in 2014 and has raised $14 million dollars. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price.

Sometimes I think of spreadsheets as the dirty secret of the IT world today. We’ve seen a huge explosion in the number of productivity tools on the market tailored to help workers with different aspects of doing their job and organising their information, in part to keep them from simply dumping lots of information into Excel or whatever program they happen to use. And yet, spreadsheets are still one of the very, very most common pieces of software in use today to organise and share information: Excel alone now has around 1 billion users, and for those who are devotees, spreadsheets are not going to go away soon.

So it’s interesting that there are now startups — and larger companies like Microsoft — emerging that are tapping into that, creating new services that still appear like spreadsheets in the front end, while doing something completely different in the back.

One of the latest is a startup called dashdash, a startup out of Berlin and Porto that is building a platform for people, who might to be programmers but know their way around a spreadsheet, to use those skills to build, modify and update web apps.

The dashdash platform looks and acts like a spreadsheet up front, but behind the scenes, each ‘macro’ links to a web app computing feature, or a design element, to build something that ultimately will look nothing like a spreadsheet, bypassing all the lines of code that traditionally go into building web apps.

The startup is still in stealth mode, with plans to launch formally later this year. Today, it’s announcing that it has received $8 million in Series A funding to get there, with the round being led by Accel, with participation from Cherry Ventures, Atlantic Labs, and angel investors including Felix Jahn, founder of Home24. (It’s raised $9 million to date including a $1 seed.)

Co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Humberto Ayres Pereira and Torben Schulz — who had also been co-founders of food delivery startup EatFirst — Ayres Pereira said that the idea came out of their own observations in work life and the bottleneck of getting things fixed or modified in a company’s apps (both internal and customer-facing).

“People have a lot of frustration with the IT department, and their generally access to it,” he said in an interview. “If you are part of an internet business, it’s very hard to get features prioritised in an app, no matter how small they are. Tech is like a big train on iron tracks, and it can be hard to steer it in a different direction.”

On the other hand, even among the less technical staff, there will be proficiency with certain software, including spreadsheets. “Programming and spreadsheets already store and transform data,” Ayers Pereira said. “There are already a lot of people trying to do more with incumbent spreadsheets, and [combining that with] non-IT people frustrated at having no solution for working on apps, we saw an opportunity to use this to build an elegant platform the empower people. We can’t teach people to program but we can provide them with the tools to do the exact same job.”

While in stealth mode, he said that early users have ranged from smaller businesses such as pharmacies, to “a multi-billion-dollar internet company.” (No names, of course, but it’s interesting to me that this problem even exists at large tech businesses.)

Dashdash is not the only company that is tapping this opportunity. The other week, and IoT startup called Hanhaa launched a service that would let those using Hanhaa IoT sensors in their networks to monitor and interact with them by way of an Excel spreadsheet — another tip of the hat to the realisation that those who might need to keep tabs on devices in the network might not be the people who are the engineers and technicians who have set them up.

That, in turn, is part of a bigger effort from Microsoft to catapult Excel from its reputation as a piece of clunky legacy software into something much more dynamic, playing on the company’s push into cloud services and Office 365.

In September of 2017, Microsoft gave a developer preview of new “streaming functions” for Excel on Office 365, which lets developers, IT professionals and end users the ability to bring streams of data from a variety of sources such as websites, stock tickers and hardware directly into a cell or cells in an Excel spreadsheet, by way of a custom function. “Because Excel is so widely used and familiar to so many people, the ability to do all kinds of amazing things with that data and without complex integration is now possible,” said Ben Summers, a senior product manager for the Office 365 ecosystem team, in a statement to TechCrunch.

That ability to remove the bottleneck from web app building, combined with the track record of the founders, are two of the reasons that Accel decided to invest before the product even launched.

“We believe in dashdash’s mission to democratise app creation and are excited to back Humberto and Torben at such an early stage in their journey,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, the Accel principal who led the deal. “The team has the experience and vision to build a high-impact company that brings computing to the fingertips of a broad audience. Over the past decade we’ve seen a proliferation of web services and APIs, but regular business users still need to rely on central IT and colleagues with development skills to leverage these in their day-to-day processes. With dashdash anyone will be able to access these powerful web services directly with minimal effort, empowering them to automate their day to day tasks and work more effectively.”

With every tool that emerges that frees up accessibility to more people — be they employees or consumers — there are inevitably questions about how that power will be used. In the case of dashdash, my first thought is about those who I know who work in IT: they generally don’t want anyone able to modify or “fix” their code, lest it just creates more problems. And that’s before you start wondering about how all these democratised web apps will look, and if they might inadvertently will add to more overall UI and UX confusion.

Ayres Pereira said dash dash is mindful of the design question, and will introduce ways of helping to direct this, for example for companies to implement their own house styles. And similarly, a business can put in place other controls to help channel how webapps created through dashdash’s spreadsheet interface ultimately get applied.

The HR departments of large companies face a common challenge: how to scale the hiring process when they receive hundreds if not thousands of applicants, and how to remove unconscious bias so the best or most suitable candidates are shortlisted. That’s the specific problem MeVitae, an Oxford-based startup founded by neuroscientist Riham Satti and computer scientist Vivek Doriaiswamy, has set out to solve.

Dubbed “Augmented Intelligence,” more broadly the burgeoning company is developing AI technology that uses what Satti describes as “cognitive techniques” designed to compensate for the limitations of humans.

The premise — in part backed up by her neuroscience research at Oxford University — is that our brains have limitations that restrict our cognitive ability, including the relatively slow speed when processing information, unconscious biases, and limited memory. Limitations, she says, that machines do not possess. Applying to this to various aspects of recruitment is the startup’s initial bet.

Intended to be deployed after a new job opening has been advertised, the MeVitae software plugs into a company’s current Application Tracking System. It then sifts through all of the applications/CVs that have been received and analyses each CV (relative to the job spec) giving it a score.

“This is done by analysing every component of a CV (e.g. education, experience etc.) and using the web to reason and validate each score,” explains Satti.

The hiring company then receives the ranked and shortlisted applicants within their ATS system, and — crucially — is also able to see a “road map” explaining MeVitae’s reasoning behind each score. In addition, through the use of NLP, MeVitae takes each CV and find parts of it that could result in discrimination (e.g. gender, ethnicity) and redacts this information for an employer i.e. CV blinding.

The result is that employers now have ranked and redacted applicant CVs and can quickly shortlist top and diverse talent. “The ranked and anonymised candidates are provided to the recruiter/employer of the company to review,” says the MeVitae co-founder. “The employer will decide who they want to interview from the shortlist… [and] over time the system learns from each employer’s choices for more intelligent decision-making”. In other words, the longer MeVitae is employed by an individual company the more responsive it becomes to that company’s hiring priorities and isn’t a one size fits all solution.

Meanwhile, MeVitae is disclosing that it has raised £500,000 in funding, in a round led by angel investor club Startup Funding Club. Others participating include Force Over Mass, Twenty Ten Capital, BBH ZAG (brand arm of Bartle Bogle Hegartyand), and the tax-payer funded London Co-Investment Fund (launched by the Deputy Mayor of London). Dhiraj Mukherjee, (co-founder of Shazam), Simon Samuel (search and recruitment executive), and Geoff Hughes (Microsoft director and Honorary Research Associate at UCL) have also invested and join the MeVitae board.

Prior to this, the startup has been funded by a number of grants, totalling around £250,000. These came from Innovate UK, European Space Agency BIC, and Regional Growth Fund, amongst others. The funding was used to finance over 3 years of R&D as MeVitae built the technology and got its current product offering to market.

Teatime Games, a new Icelandic “social games” startup from the same team behind the hugely popular QuizUp (acquired in by Glu Mobile), is disclosing $9 million in funding, made up of seed and Series A rounds.

Index Ventures led both, but have been joined by Atomico, the European VC fund founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, for the $7.5 million Series A round. I understand this is the first time the two VC firms have done a Series A deal together in over a decade.

Both VCs have a decent track record in gaming. Index counts King, Roblox and Supercell as previous gaming investments, whilst Atomico also backed Supercell, along with Rovio, and most recently Bossa Studios.

As part of the round, Guzman Diaz of Index Ventures, Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, and David Helgason, founder of Unity, have joined the Teatime Games board of directors.

Meanwhile, Teatime Games is keeping shtum publicly on exactly what the stealthy startup is working on, except that it plays broadly in the social and mobile gaming space. In a call with co-founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson yesterday, he said a little more off the record and on condition that I don’t write about it yet.

What he was willing to describe publicly, however, is the general problem the company has set out to solve, which is how to make mobile games more social and personalised. Specifically, in a way that any social features — including communicating with friends and other players in real-time — enhances the gameplay rather than gets in its way or is simply bolted on as an adjunct to the game itself.

The company’s macro thesis is that games have always been inherently social throughout different eras (e.g. card games, board games, arcades, and consoles), and that most games truly come to life “through the interaction between people, opponents, and the audience”. However, in many respects this has been lost in the age of mobile gaming, which can feel like quite a solitary experience. That’s either because they are single player games or turn-based and played against invisible opponents.

Teatime plans to use the newly-disclosed investment to double the size of its team in Iceland, with a particular focus on software engineers, and to further develop its social gaming offering for third party developers. Yes, that’s right, this is clearly a developer platform play, as much as anything else.

On that note, Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman says the next “breakout opportunity” in games will see a move beyond individual studios and titles to what he describes as fundamental enabling technologies. Linked to this he argues that the next generation of games companies being developed will “become ever more mass market and socially connected”. You can read much more on Ljungman and Atomico’s gaming thesis in a blog post recently published by the VC firm.