Year: 2018

Startups looking to get deep-dive into Silicon Valley but who don’t want to give away equity have not had many options to choose from in the past. There are several government-backed accelerators which simply house startups in facilities and arrange pitch nights. But many of those demos tend to sink without trace. What if you were hand-picked by a programme which simply charged you for a service?

That’s the general idea behind Founders Embassy which is now releasing its first class of 8 founders joining them in SF this summer.

Created by two women founders, the idea behind Founders Embassy is to democratize access to Silicon Valley for the most talented international startups that often lack the privilege of insider connections and resources. Believe me, I know so many international founders who I have met on my travels who would appreciate such a service.

Founders Embassy was created by Andee Gardiner and Anastasia Crew.

As an Irish citizen and the daughter of two immigrants, Gardiner is passionate about leveraging her startup knowledge, network, and creativity for international entrepreneurs entering the Valley ecosystem. Crew, a Russian native, arrived in the US 10 years ago and has previously developed programs and events for international startups, corporates, and non-profits.

Gardeiner says: “Silicon Valley has an over-preference towards people who are local, who have insider knowledge and who have a specific pedigree (such as attending an Ivy League college). It has neglected foreign startups and immigrant founders with different backgrounds, which has prevented investors from being able to find the best startups from outside the country. We wanted to create a program that gave anyone who has a great startup around the world the insider knowledge that they need to navigate Silicon Valley and create a thriving startup whether here or in their home country. We want to democratize access to the insider knowledge necessary to leverage the skills that they already have.”

The program is a 2 week bootcamp program for approximately 10 international startups to come to silicon valley, live under one roof, and receive an intensive regimen of workshops and fundraising, growth, hiring, legal, branding, PR, engineering – every possible aspect of startup growth but also the specifics of Silicon Valley: How to act at networking events, how to handle introductions, how to find the right investors for your company, how to position yourself in the Valley. They’ll also have a Summit where startups will be able to demo their startups in front of investors, potential hires, and potential partners. Meanwhile, they’re going to set up individualized programming for each of the companies based on their industries and needs, connecting them to industry-specific mentors and investors.

Most accelerators take a significant amount of equity, which, if a company is valued at something reasonable like $30 million dollars, that equity amasses to a significant amount of money for those companies. By offering startups a chance to pay cash to be introduced to the Valley ecosystem instead, they get to keep their equity. And because the program is only 2 weeks, they don’t have to be away from their team for 3 months or longer which is actually a massive opportunity cost.

Crew says: “We work with startups that have already shown that they’re somewhat de-risked and already have traction. They don’t need $50 or $100 thousand dollars, they need the skills and understanding to help them raise 2 million or more. That combined with sponsorships is how we make money and we’re now open to looking for our flagship sponsors for our first program.”

Founders Embassy will be running its “Borderless” acceleration program from May 30th to June 13th in San Francisco. And The Borderless Summit will be held on June 5th in SF, which will welcome a few hundred investors, thought leaders, and global founders. Summit speakers include some big names in tech such as Justin Kan, Baiju Bhatt, Tom McLeod, Ashley Carroll, and Erik Torenberg among others.

Just days after Google announced that it would acquire Velostrata to help customers migrating more of their operations into cloud environments, HPE under its new CEO Antonio Neri is also upping its game in the same department. Today the company announced that it would acquire Plexxi, a specialist in software-defined data center solutions, aimed at optimising application performance for enterprises that are using hybrid cloud environments.

A spokesperson confirmed that the companies are not currently revealing the terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018 (ending July 31).

For some book-ended context, Plexxi was last valued at around $267 million as of its last financing round, more than two years ago in January 2016, according to PitchBook, and the previous cloud infrastructure acquisition HPE made, of SimpliVity over a year ago, was for $650 million. Plexxi’s investors included GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix and more.

Ric Lewis, the VP & GM of HPE’s software-defined and cloud group, said that the plan will be to integrate Plexxi into HPE’s existing products in two areas. The first of these is in the company’s hyperconverged solutions business, where HPE’s acquisition of SimpliVity also sites. “Plexxi will enable us to deliver the industry’s only hyperconverged offering that incorporates compute, storage and data fabric networking into a single solution, with a single management interface and support,” he wrote in a blog post.

The second of these will be to bring Plexxi’s HCN tech to HPE Synergy and its composable infrastructure business. This, Lewis explained, is “a new category of infrastructure that delivers fluid pools of storage and compute resources that can be composed and recomposed as business needs dictate.” Plexxi will enable this approach to extend also to rack-based solutions in private clouds.

It’s not clear what roles Plexxi execs, which include CEO Rich Napolitano — who had been the president of EMC before joining the startup — will have at HPE. We’re asking and will update as we learn more.

“Plexxi and HPE’s values and vision for the future are closely aligned,” Napolitano wrote in his own announcement. “We share the same mission, to help the enterprise effectively leverage modern IT to accelerate their business in the digital age.”

While the two wait for the deal to close, it seems to be business as usual for Plexxi. Just earlier today, the company announced an expansion of its integrations with VMware.

 

Do you remember the Surface Hub? Chances are you forgot it even existed. And yet, Microsoft just announced a second version of the Surface Hub. The company hasn’t shared any specifications or price, but it won’t be available before 2019 — selected customers will test the Surface Hub 2 starting this year.

The Surface Hub was a crazy expensive digital whiteboard that could handle anything from video conferences to document collaboration. Microsoft says that there are 5,000 companies using Surface Hubs, including half of Fortune 100 companies.

It’s unclear if each company has bought one Surface Hub or a thousand. But it seems like there was enough interest to work on a second version. At heart, it’s still a gigantic touchscreen-enabled display. It runs Windows 10 and supports the Surface Pen.

Compared to the previous version, Microsoft has drastically reduced the bezels. It looks like a modern TV now, but with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Surprisingly, the video camera is now gone from the main device. You’ll need to plug a webcam above the display to start video conferences.

The most interesting part is the concept video. You can see a device with fluid use cases. You can hook it to a wall, you can put it on a rolling case, you can create a wall of Surface Hubs.

Users log in by putting their finger on the fingerprint sensor. This way, you can find all your documents and data and accept calls from your account.

Microsoft is trying to push the needle when it comes to computers. This is an innovative form factor that could fit well in your company’s workflow. It’s interesting to see that the company isn’t standing still. The Mac hasn’t drastically evolved while Microsoft still has bold ideas to share.

In a new interview with Bloomberg television, Apple CEO Tim Cook says he addressed China trade tariffs in a late-April meeting with President Trump.

“I talked about trade and the importance of trade, and how I felt that two countries trading together make the pie larger,” Cook said, adding that while there are existing problems with U.S./China trade policies, Trump’s approach is not the right way forward. “I felt that tariffs were not the right approach there, and I showed him some more analytical kinds of things to demonstrate why.”

The tariffs are largely regarded as one key element in a looming trade war between the two superpowers. Apple, for its part, could easily get caught in the crossfire, as the company relies on China as a key to its international sales.

Apple has been hit with declining sales in the country, along with other top smartphone vendors, but its 41 retail stores in China are the most in a single region outside the U.S. It’s easy to see how the company could get caught in the midst of an escalating war trade war between the countries.

Of course, Trump does appear to have made some concessions in an unexpected area. Over the weekend, he announced plans to give ZTE a reprieve on its seven-year U.S. trade ban, after the company violated Iran sanctions. Trump cited, of all things, a loss of jobs in China as a key reason behind the reversal.

For his part, Cook is very much behind corporate tax cuts, which have been benefited Apple.“We’re also going to buy some of our stock because we view our stock as a good value,” Cook said in the interview “It’s good for the economy as well because if people sell stock they pay taxes on their gains.”

Instagram may be jumping into the time well spent movement, following the unveiling of Google’s new time management controls last week. Code buried in Instagram’s Android app reveals a “Usage Insights” feature that will show users their “time spent”. It’s not exactly clear whether that will be your total time spent in Instagram ever, which could be a pretty scary number to some users, or within some shorter time frame like a day, week, or month.

By being upfront with users about how much of their lives they’re investing in their favorite apps, tech giants could encourage people to adopt healthier habits and avoid the long, passive, anti-social browsing sessions that can harm their well-being. These features could also help parents keep track of what their kids are doing online. Both might lead people to spend less time on apps like Instagram, but they could be happier with companies like Instagram.

The Usage Insights screenshot and “time spent” code were discovered by prolific app investigator Jane Manchun Wong inside the Instagram for Android application package, or “APK”. When asked by TechCrunch for more evidence about how the feature worked, she tweeted screenshot below of Instagram’s code. Several of Wong’s other recent discoveries of unlaunched features like Facebook Avatars and Twitter encrypted DMs were subsequently confirmed by the companies as being in testing.

An Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch the company has no comment on this discovery for now, but may return with more info later. We’ll update when we hear back. Until then we’ll have to wait and see what exactly the time spent dashboard will show. For comparison, the new Android time management tool shows a daily look at how much time you spent on different apps, and lets you set time limits. But since most of Google’s apps outside of YouTube are utilities designed to be used as quickly as possible, it might have less to lose by revealing how users spend time on their phones than Facebook .

Offering “Usage Insights” aligns with Facebook’s recent discussion of research that shows active social networking, like messaging, posting, or commenting can be positive for people’s well-being, but endless zombie scrolling can make people feel worse. While Facebook hasn’t created anything like this feature in its own apps, it’s started to change its algorithm to promote active interactions while downranking viral videos that people consume passively. That led to Facebook’s first ever decline in its North American daily user count in Q4 2017, though it was growing again in the region by Q1 2018.

Instagram’s photo and video-heavy feed especially lends itself to the negative social networking behaviors like envy spiraling, where users constantly compare themselves against the glamorous highlights posted by their friends. Letting users know how long they’re Instagramming, or even let them set time limits, could push people to go out and live life instead of watching through a screen as others live it.

Target is lowering the price of its next-day delivery service for household essentials, Target Restock, which will now be free for Target REDcard purchases and $2.99 for all other orders, as the service expands nationwide. Previously, the service cost $4.99 per order – a price meant to rival Amazon’s Prime Pantry, which today charges a flat shipping fee of $7.99 for orders if customers don’t have the $4.99 monthly subscription that makes orders over $40 ship free.

The price change comes only a year after Target began testing the Restock service in limited markets, and follows the retailer’s recent launch of a free Drive Up service for users of its mobile app. The company is also offering free, two-day shipping on hundreds of thousands of Target orders, and is expanding same-day grocery delivery through its Shipt service, as part of its further efforts in challenging the retail giants, Walmart and Amazon.

Unlike Amazon Prime, Target Restock doesn’t require a membership fee – that an angle Walmart adopted with its free shipping program, too.

With Restock, customers have the ability to shop from an assortment of 35,000 household essentials – think, things like baby food, diapers, paper towels, detergent, health and beauty products, and other packaged goods, like peanut butter or snacks.

To use Restock, customers shop online filling their box – up to 45 lbs, which is about the size of a shopping cart – with their selections. They have up until 7 PM Monday through Friday to place the order, then the box is delivered to their door the next day.

Alternately, customers can shop by voice using their Google Home smart speaker or a smartphone with the Google Assistant app installed, as enabled by Target’s partnership with Google on voice-activated shopping.

Target is able to fill orders quickly because it’s using its retail stores as the fulfillment centers – it stocks the boxes directly from its store shelves.

The company said in September that Restock then reached over 70 million customers across the U.S., or about one-fifth of the U.S. population. This morning, the retailer says Restock is broadly available coast to coast, reaching more than 75 percent of the U.S. population.

Instacart, the on-demand grocery delivery platform that finds itself at the center of ever-increasing competition, has today announced that David Hahn will be taking over as Instacart’s new Chief Product Officer.

Hahn previously served as VP of Product at LinkedIn, after which time he went to Greylock to serve as an entrepreneur in residence, helping portfolio companies think through their products and monetization strategies.

Most recently, Hahn was President and Chief Product Officer at GoFundMe.

Hahn joins Instacart during an interesting time for the grocery space. Online grocery shopping a delivery has reached “a tipping point,” in the words of Hahn, as incumbents like Walmart and Target formulate their own delivery options. Meanwhile, as we all know, Amazon is working to integrate newly acquired Whole Foods into its Prime delivery portfolio.

“Just a few years from now, everyone will get their groceries this way,” said Hahn. “I’m excited to be part of a company leading that change in such a large and important market.”

Hahn said that he’ll be prioritizing a few things as he acclimates to the role, including the front-end product for consumers and back-end products for retailers that help with inventory management.

Indeed, one of the biggest hurdles at Instacart is integrating with dozens of retailers, many of whom use varying inventory management systems, to consistently and accurately list what is available now in stores to Instacart users.

When this information isn’t correct, it sets off a series of events wherein the shopper has to replace ordered items, which could result in a less-than-perfect delivery.

While the task may seem daunting, Hahn is excited to join Instacart at this particular part of its journey. 

“It’s quite rare to find a business at this particular stage,” said Hahn. “Instacart has reached a super impressive scale with an impressive growth rate, but there is a lot of opportunity ahead and lots of building to do.”

Vesper Technologies, a new microphone technology developer, has raised $23 million from some of the biggest names in audio technology to finance the commercialization of its piezoelectric microphones.

As audio technology and voice controlled devices become more ubiquitous, manufacturers are hoping to turn to higher performance MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems) microphones that use acoustic sensors made on semiconductor production lines using silicon wafers.

The technology allows for far smaller microphones that are incredibly sensitive, but the mics themselves typically don’t withstand the wear and tear of harsh environments all that well. Enter Vesper. It’s piezoelectric microphone technology received a full-throated endorsement from Amazon last year (after the company invested through its Alexa Fund).

Traditionally, manufacturers have used arrays of MEMS microphones to pick up sound, but as systems become more complex, they’re more susceptible to breaking down thanks to the sensitivity of the microphone technology. Amazon (and others) are betting that Vesper can solve the problem thanks to its novel approach to manufacturing MEMS using piezo-electric technologies.

The innovation from Vesper basically hinges on the company’s design for a MEMS microphone that doesn’t require a back plate, which lets flexible microphone plates bend and respond to stress without degrading, according to Amazon senior sound engineer, Dave Berol.

 

Piezoelectric MEMS design replaces the diaphragm and back plate with flexible alternatives that result in a waterproof, dustproof, particle-resistant, and shockproof microphone that requires no workarounds to be used in high-reliability arrays.

 

 

According to Yole Developpement, the MEMS and sensor market will reach $66 billion by 2021. Vesper Technologies chief executive Matt Crowley, thinks his company can command a huge share of that market.

“Our vision is for Alexa to be everywhere, and that means devices need to be built with durable, high-quality components that stand up to the demands of many different environments, especially on-the-go scenarios that require better power efficiency,” said Paul Bernard, director of the Amazon Alexa Fund, in a statement. “Vesper has become further embedded in the Alexa community through its integrations with various development kits and integrated solutions for Amazon AVS, and this follow-on investment is a testament to their continued momentum.”

Crowley was working at a company making MEMS with quartz crystals for clocking, but the clock market wasn’t so appealing back in 2012, so the serial entrepreneur began looking at other opportunities.

“We thought the microphone was going to be a growth market back in 2012,” Crowley recalled. So he began looking for technologies that could compliment the manufacturing work his company was doing.

Through hours of online research, Crowley came across the NASA-backed work of Bobby Littrell, who had come up with an entirely new way to build commercially viable piezoelectric microphones. 

“I had these piezoelectric manufacturing expertise and i need to find a better product,” Crowley said. “I actually just started looking on the web for a piezoelectric microphone and it was like all roads led to [Littrell]… I read his doctoral thesis and then i actually read his patents and i actually contacted him through LinkedIn.”

Crowley also noted that the lower power demands of piezo electric sensors means that the microphones can enable a broader range of uses. From turning on television using nothing more than a voice command (without the need to touch a remote) to work with doorbells and security cameras and even augmented reality-based “hearables” like those designed by Bose.

Vesper raised its initial capital from Jeff Fagnan’s Accomplice fund, before getting its first strategic investment from AAC Technologies.

The most recent round was actually led by Madison, Wis.-based American Family Ventures, the investment arm of American Family Insurance, which has built quite an interesting portfolio of hardware and software services companies since its launch eight years ago. Additional institutional venture investors in the Vesper round include Hyperplane, ZZ Capital, and Accomplice.

“People have been trying to make piezoelectric microphones since the 70s,” said Crowley. “The breakthrough was making really thin layers of these piezoelectric technologies and it was Broadcom which was using this stuff… We couldn’t have started this company five years earlier. It had to be now, when the material science wasn’t right where it needs to be.”

 

 

Lerer Hippeau has raised two new funds — $122 million for a sixth fund devoted to seed stage investments, as well as $60 million for a “Select Fund” focused on later-stage deals.

Managing Partner Eric Hippeau said both funds will be used to continue the firm’s existing strategy: “We continue to be seed-first investors and New York-first investors. We’re big believers in New York.”

And while Hippeau acknowledged that the New York ecosystem is still be waiting for the kind of massive exit that makes “a lot of people very rich, who will then leave and start their own companies,” he pointed to recent success stories like Oracle’s acquisition of Moat and Roche’s acquisition of Flatiron Health. (Lerer Hippeau invested in Moat but not Flatiron; both are New York-based.)

“There’s a huge pipeline in New York of companies that have been valued in the hundreds of millions and in some cases billions of dollars — a lot of them are our companies, but not always,” Hippeau said. “That’s where the strength of New York is going to come from in the short term, all of these companies really popping to the surface and adding a few billion dollars of value, one at a time.”

The firm announced its first follow-on fund last year. At the time, Hippeau said it had only raised $28 million so that the two funds could be “synced up,” which is what’s happening now.

The first Select Fund was used to make follow-on investments in companies that Lerer Hippeau had already backed at the seed stage, like Allbirds and Casper. That will continue with the new fund, but Hippeau said it could also be used for Series A investments in startups that the firm didn’t back initially, and which might now seem like missed opportunities.

Meanwhile, the Lerer Hippeau team has also been growing, with the recent hiring of Caitlin Strandberg (formerly vice president at FirstMark) as principal and Isabelle Phelps as associate, as well as Amanda Mulay as senior talent manager.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join the most active early-stage firm in New York, just as it gets fresh capital,” Strandberg said in an emailed statement. “Lerer Hippeau has built a fantastic reputation as being a hands-on, accessible and helpful investor all while cultivating a powerful and engaged community. I’m looking forward to investing in the next great generation of startups, supporting our existing founders and teams, and continuing to build a great tech ecosystem here in NYC.”

Lerer Hippeau now has around 20 people on the team. And while firms like Andreessen Horowitz (where Mulay used to work) have made their huge support staff a selling point, Hippeau said that at his firm, “We don’t really want to have dozens of people doing this. We want to be very precise and very selective about how can help.”

Still, he said that “the service that’s most in-demand is help with recruiting,” so it made sense to bring on Mulay to help startups hire,  and also to help them “set up a proper HR function.”

Lerer Hippeau’s investment team built its reputation in media — Hippeau was formerly CEO at The Huffington Post, Kenneth Lerer cofounded HuffPost and is now chairman at BuzzFeed and Ben Lerer is CEO at Group Nine Media. (The three of them are pictured at the top of this post.) But with the seemingly constant news about digital media layoffs and shutdowns, would Hippeau invest in a media startup today?

Actually, the firm did back one such startup recently, podcast network Wondery. But Hippeau said media has “never been more than 10 percent of our portfolio.” (Other recent investments include cryptocurrency wallet Casa and cannabis talent network Vangst.)

“We love media, we continue to look at media companies, but we are relatively selective,” he said.

23andMe, Color, and other genomic sequencing startups have exposed demand from consumers for cheap ways to test for potential problems they may have — and Amir Trabelsi hopes to bring that mentality to medical institutions around the world.

That’s the hope for Genoox, a genomic analysis startup that’s geared toward doctors, clinicians and researchers that hopes to lower the cost of getting data from gene sequencing, and speed that process up, in the same ways that 23andMe and Color have done for consumers. Genoox at its heart is a data science company, taking the raw data from a genome sequencing and figuring out how to convey actionable information to medical professionals — and, hopefully, on a more complete scale than just consumer startups targeting specific health problems. The company said it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Triventures, a healthcare-focused venture firm.

“We want to bring [medical institutions] the ability to run clinical applications and use genomic data part of the clinical routine,” Genoox co-founder Trabelsi said. “We understand the direct-to-consumer market is growing and the demand is growing, but there is a gap in clinical applications. Genomic data is complicated especially when it comes to clinical outcomes — how can you make things more actionable for [professionals], how can you reduce the cost and overhead, and how can you filter out what is relevant and not relevant.”

Trabelsi said the goal is not to just hand a patient information based on their genome, but rather target clinical experts that might be able to use that data and better determine diagnoses for patients. The physician is the one that will have the final say in the decision or diagnosis, and the whole point here is to just take massive amounts of data and figure out a few points that a physician can use in order to make a better judgment call. And beyond that, Genoox can update those doctors as more and more research comes out regarding the potential health complications a patient may have.

Right now Genoox is targeting rare diseases — starting from one launching point, much like Color or 23andMe — but hopes to expand beyond that into other processes like carrier screening or hereditary cancer. This is a strategy that those direct-to-consumer companies are also employing, with Color recently rolling out a test that tries to search for hereditary risk for heart conditions like arrhythmia. As companies get more and more data, they’re able to better sift through a person’s genomic information and flag potential aberrations that could signal increased risk for various conditions.

“We see the growing demand for direct-to-consumer, but we’re also seeing more and more clinical practices using genetic data,” Tabelsi said. “It’s still not efficient or 100% there, but I think the next two years we’re going to see dramatically increased use of genetic data of clinical applications or clinical use. It’s not about the tech, which was proven to be powerful by some cases we were able to solve. I think the technology was kind of proven, along the years, and through some papers we published the question was not about the tech but whether the market is here or where are we in using genetic data.”

Genoox, however, is not the only one targeting clinicians with a data-oriented approach to understanding a patient’s genome. Sophia Genetics is also looking to use genomic data and physician input to better diagnose patients, and also raised an additional $30 million in September last year. As the cost of gene sequencing continues to decline, more and more companies will be going after it as a data play — whether that’s in the consumer or clinician-focused space — and that means Genoox will likely not be alone as it looks to snap up the attention of clinicians and professionals.