Year: 2018

BrainQ, an Israel-based startup that aims to help stroke victims and those with spinal cord injuries treat their injuries with the help of a personalized electromagnetic treatment protocol, today announced that it has raised a $5.3 million funding round on top of the $3.5 million the company previously raised. The company’s investors include Qure Ventures, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd.com, Norma Investments, IT-Farm and a number of angel investors, including Valtech Cardio founder and CEO Amir Gross.

When we last talked to BrainQ earlier this year, the team was working on two human clinical trials for stroke patients in Israel. At that time, the company had closed its first funding round and had also recently started to work with Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, too.

The general idea behind BrainQ is to use the patient’s brainwaves to generate a tailored treatment protocol. No AI company would be complete without data — it’s what drives these algorithms, after all — and the company says it owns one the largest Brain Computer Interface-based EEG databases for motor tasks. It’s that database that allows it to interpret the patient’s brain waves and generate its treatment protocol.

BrainQ EEG reader device

“We are on the verge of a new era where AI- based precision medicine will be used to treat neurodisorders, which do not have a sufficient solution to date,” said BrainQ CEO Yotam Drechsler in today’s announcement. “At BrainQ, we are thrilled by the opportunity to bring this vision to life in the world of neuro-recovery. In a short time, we have already achieved significant results and are looking forward to the opportunity to push our technology and expand our operations, further positioning BrainQ as a leader in the world of BCI-based precision medicine.”

As is typical for Israeli startups, the team’s background is quite impressive and includes former members of the country’s elite intelligence units and academics with a background in AI and neuroscience.

Sports is one of the biggest drivers of traffic and engagement on the internet, and today a startup leveraging this, plus the popularity of user-generated content and a back-end infrastructure built to handle scale, is announcing a significant round of funding to take its sports media platform global.

Minute Media — which provides user-generated sports articles and videos from some 5,000 contributors that then gets distributed by brands like Sports Illustrated, as well as on Minute Media’s own sports websites that collectively attract between 80 million and 90 million users per month — has raised $17 million in funding, capital that it will use to expand into new markets like China as well as start to formulate its next steps for tackling other content beyond sports.

This Series F was led by Goldman Sachs, La Maison and Vintage, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital, Qumra Capital, Pro7 and North Base Media. It brings the total raised by Minute Media to $77 million.

Asaf Peled, Minute Media’s founder and CEO, said the startup is not be disclosing its valuation, but according to figures from PitchBook, it appears to be around $200 million. Peled noted that the 80-90 million audience the startup has today is on the back of a growth rate of 130 percent in 2017.

There are many ways of divvying up the lucrative digital market for sports these days. Categories include streamed events, bringing together communities around those events to talk about them, and possibly bet on them, and producing news and analysis related to games, athletes, teams and more.

Minute Media roughly falls into the latter of these, and it’s been developing its business up to now on two tracks.

The first of these is for developing content that Minute Media posts on its own sites — which include football (soccer) site 90min (the biggest with 60 million visitors per month), esports-focused DBLTAP, and the US-focused 12up, plus a range of more localised sites across some 12 markets. These are both accessed by people directly, and in many cases are tapped by local communities of sports enthusiasts, who link to and discuss the content, driving traffic to the sites.

“We have over 1,500 influencer communities integrating with our platform,” Peled said. One example is a group of Real Madrid fans in Vietnam, he said. “They will take pieces of our content and share them among their community, driving traffic to the relevant part of our site. It’s essentially a B2B2C model that is driving a lot of our traffic.”

Most of the content today is word-based, although video is growing, with about 200 million video views on its site each month. Interestingly, this is an area where Minute Media has taken a very different route and stayed away from relying on popular video hosting platforms like Facebook or YouTube, and, by way of AWS, serves everything from its own sites.

The second of these is based around content that Minute Media pushes to the sites of its partners, which Peled said include Sports Illustrated, MSN in the US, ProSieben in Germany and Yahoo Sports in Europe (disclaimer: TC is owned by Verizon’s Oath, which also owns Yahoo), and others that both integrate with Minute Media’s platform and pay a fee to use its content by way of licensing arrangements. The latter makes up around one-third of the startup’s business, Peled said.

You might think what Minute Media is doing a form of a content farm, but Peled would take issue with that. Minute Media’s belief is that sports publishing has lacked a lot of innovation for years, and that — plus sports’ enduring popularity — made it an interesting and lucrative area to tackle.

“When we started looking into sports publishing, we thought the landscape was interesting from a consumer point of view, but lacking in innovation,” he said. “That’s why we decided to take a tech approach, building a platform that would allow us to grow globally, from a single location into a number of localised places.”

On average, Minute Media receives between 4,000 and 5,000 pieces of content per day. Using a team of curators and editors, who will also work with writers and videographers to modify work before it’s published, ultimately it will publish around 1,000 of those items.

Contributors, Peled said, are a mixed bag, ranging from budding journalists, to simply fans who like to write (and might have in the past put this content on to a blog of their own). All contributors, he said, get paid — some more than others. He would not go into the details except to say that it’s partly based on traffic.

The company today counts London as its head office, but it got its start in Israel and still traces its tech DNA back to the country.

As with many startups that come out of Israel, the engineers at Minute Media cut their teeth in the military, and the contribution that this plays here, Peled said, is in building a platform that can scale, handle lots of traffic and optimise itself based on the location where its content is being consumed.

Specifically, he noted that content will load quickly regardless of a viewer’s location or network speed, which is a significant feat if you’ve ever, for example, tried to watch a US-based video when you are in a far-flung location. “This is not an easy problem to solve,” he said, “which is why so many of our competitors are localised.”

Video in emerging markets, Peled explained, specifically “requires a lot of tech scale and backend work and devops that we could not have enabled if we hadn’t been able to recruit such a deep tech team out of Israel. The only other place we could have built something like this is in Silicon Valley. Under one roof we have deep tech and media knowledge.” Some 80 of Minute Media’s 180 employees work in engineering, he said.

That combination is also what attracted the investment.

“The team at Minute Media is rewriting the playbook for sports media”, said Aaron Siegel, MD at Goldman Sachs, in a statement. “Their focus on product, fan empowerment and global scale are key differentiating ingredients in the sector. We look forward to being a part of the continued growth.”

Coinbase is courting Wall Street after it announced plans to launch a range of new services aimed at institutional investors, who are finally beginning to embrace crypto.

The main new arrival is Coinbase Custody, a service first announced last year that provides specialist level services to allow institutions to hold bitcoin and other crypto with Coinbase. Right now, there’s precious difference in customer care regardless of whether they hold $1,000 or $10 million, but Custody is an effort go beyond that and offer a higher standard of service in line with what institutions require.

Specifically, that includes the use of an SEC-qualified custodian, third-party auditing and financial reporting validation, all of which Coinbase is getting via a range of partners.

“We have leveraged our experience safely storing more than $20 billion of cryptocurrency to create Coinbase Custody, the most secure crypto storage solution available,” Coinbase general manager Adam White wrote in a blog post.

Coinbase also announced a new platform dedicated to institutional customers called Prime.

Prime offers a trading service that’s customized to such customers, but it will also be expand to cover lending and margin financing products, services like over-the-counter (OTC) trading and algorithmic orders, and market data and research products.

Finally, Coinbase is expanding its ranks by opening an office in Chicago. The primary focus of that location, White said, will be to work on providing a centralized pool of liquidity for Coinbase services. That, combined with other features, is aimed at driving better conditions for trading for institutional customers.

The moves makes sense. Coinbase is positioning itself as the go-to in the crypto ecosystem — something reiterated recently by new CTO Balaji Srinivasan — and beyond being a consumer name, the company needs to court the bigger players, who keen on crypto after seeing bitcoin stabilize after a crazy run in January and the introduction of bitcoin futures.

They also represent a lucrative customer segment that brings new revenue options, too.

As Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says on the Coinbase Custody website: “Over 100 hedge funds have been created in the past year exclusively to trade digital currency. By some estimates there is $10B of institutional money waiting on the sidelines to invest in digital currency today.”

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Prisma, a Berlin and San Francisco startup that is betting big on GraphQL — the data query language originally developed by Facebook to make it easier for front-end code to talk to application servers — has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.

Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins led the round, with participation from a number of angel investors, many of whom have deep roots in the developer and/or open source space, including Nick Schrock, one of the creators of GraphQL itself.

TechCrunch first learned of Kleiner’s pending investment in Prisma (formerly Graphcool) back in March, when the deal hadn’t yet closed. In a brief call yesterday, Prisma co-founder and CEO Johannes Schickling confirmed the investment and explained that the startup sought to raise from West Coast VCs and investors, rather than European VCs, who “really understand Open Source,” noting that any serious developer offering has to take a bottom up approach in order to become adopted by the wider developer community.

To that end, Schickling tells me Prisma itself has pivoted away from its narrower Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) model to an Open Source one, with the core offering — dubbed “Prisma 1.0” — released as a standalone infrastructure component under an Apache 2 open source license.

The company is building what it describes as the GraphQL data layer for all databases, in recognition that modern backends typically combine and connect to multiple specialised databases e.g. Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Neo4j etc. This requires complex “mapping logic” to the underlying databases, which is precisely the heaving-lifting that Prisma has set out to solve. Prisma wants you to be able to access all of your databases in a single GraphQL query.

Schickling says the new funding will be used to bolster the team, including opening an office in San Francisco in addition to its Berlin engineering base. On the product roadmap is support for more databases. Prisma currently plugs into MySQL and Postgres, but plans to add the likes of MongoDB, Elastic, and Cassandra.

Alongside the startup’s open source product, it offers Prisma Enterprise to enable critical security workflows (compliance, access control, audit logging etc.) and Prisma Cloud for teams to collaborate and easily manage databases.

Prisma’s other seed investors include Robin Vasan (board member of HashiCorp, Couchbase, InfluxData), John Komkov (Fathom Capital), Augusto Marietti (CEO Kong), Guillermo Rauch (CEO Zeit), Spencer Kimball (CEO CockroachDB), and Nicholas Dessaigne (CEO Algolia).

FileMaker, the wholly owned Apple subsidiary, today launched version 17 of its low-code development platform, following the company’s standard annual release cadence. With today’s release, the company is doubling down on the basics that have lead it to a million active subscribers who now use the service across industries and in both small- and medium-sized companies, as well as large enterprises.

In the last release, the company added a number of tools that helped professional developers bring in outside data through APIs and other more pro-oriented features. Today’s release builds on that, but focuses more on the “lower-end of the tech acumen spectrum,” as FileMaker’s director of platform evangelism Andrew LeCates told me. He did note, though, that the company doesn’t really think about the distinction between professional and more casual users, though, since even professional developers often use it to quickly get a project off the ground.

With this release, FileMaker is launching a number of new starter apps that allow even novice users to quickly build a contacts app, a task management service, or an asset and inventory tracker, for example.

The service always featured starter apps, of course, but as LeCates noted, over time, those became larger and more complex, to the point where new users couldn’t just take them and easily learn from them. With the new starter apps, the FileMaker team focused on making them both easily adaptable to most companies’ needs, but also as a learning tool that gives new users an accessible way to see how the team structured the databases that power those apps, among other things.

Also new in this version is a redesigned layout mode that now makes the overall layout tools more discoverable. And for users who want to create a master-detail layout like in the example below (with the navigation ‘master’ items in a menu on the left and the details in a large pane on the right), FileMaker now offers the tools to do that, too. Until now, that wasn’t really possible because of the way the software handled some of the database queries necessary to build this kind of structure.

With this update, the team also made it easier to capture the sensor data from iPads and iPhones, including barometric pressure or compass headings, for example. That’s a small addition, but it builds upon other features like the addition of iBeacon support in previous versions. And talking about iBeacons, FileMaker now also supports local notifications on iOS that can be triggered when you get close to a beacon or cross into a geofenced area, for example.

Other new features include support for dragging and dropping text, photos and files between apps running on iOS 11.2 and up, as well as improvements to the Admin Console of the self-hosted FileMaker Server and to the more pro-oriented Data API.

It’s worth noting that with this update, FileMaker is also simplifying its product lineup a bit. The company is consolidating the FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced versions into a single product. Quite a few customers were clearly confused as to which version would be best for them (with Pro Advanced offering more hard-core developer features). Now, everybody will get the tools that were already available in the advanced version.

XD, Adobe’s user interface and user experience design and prototyping tool, came out of beta last October to join the group of products in the company’s Creative Cloud subscription program. Today, it’s expanding the availability of XD to a wider range of potential users with the launch of a free starter plan for individual users of XD. This plan is available to all users, no matter whether they are students or professionals.

The company also today announced the Adobe Fund for Design, a $10 million fund that will make investments and offer grants to companies in the Creative Cloud ecosystem, with a focus on XD.

“We want everybody to be fluent in the field of experience design,” Adobe Chief Product Officer and Executive VP (and Behance co-founder) Scott Belsky told me. He noted that experience design isn’t just for designers anymore, but also for marketers, the C-suite “and everybody in-between.”

For Adobe, XD is clearly a significant bet. It’s also the first major new product the company is launching and it’s in a market where others are trying to play, too, including popular tools like Sketch. While Sketch doesn’t offer a free plan, it’s hard not to look at Adobe’s move today as a sign that the company wants to take the competition head-on. And while XD is part of the somewhat pricey Creative Cloud plan, you also can get a $9.99 monthly license for XD only.

The free plan covers the MacOS and Windows versions of XD, as well as its mobile preview apps on iOS and Android, and it’ll include all of the design and prototyping features of the application.

Belsky freely talked about the competition and noted that Sketch is MacOS-only, for example, and that in his view, none of the competitors can match XD’s performance. “We believe that this is the best platform and industrial grade experience design solution out there,” he said. Belsky also noted he believes that, in the long run, XD will be as big as Photoshop.

As for the investment fund, Belsky noted that the company wants to optimize for flexibility. That means the fund is global and not just for investments but also outright grants. The idea here is to provide assistance to developers and startups that push the overall Creative Cloud ecosystem forward through plugins and integrations, though the focus right now is on XD. There is no time limit on this fund.

Adobe isn’t just launching these new plans and the new fund today. It’s also launching one of its regular updates to XD itself. As part of this update, the company is improving its integration with Sketch and Photoshop, for example, and it’s giving XD another performance boost to ensure it stays responsive (or “buttery,” as Belsky calls it), even with hundreds of artboards open. You can also now paste assets into multiple artboards and drag-and-drop assets to swap symbols. Password-protected Design Specs, which the company previously announced, are also not available as a beta.

Looking ahead, the company has a number of interesting new features on the roadmap. Maybe the most interesting of these are timed transitions, for when you want to design an onboarding experience, for example. Adobe’s group product manager for XD, Cicco Guzman, also demoed a new animation feature that allows designers to create more complex animations based on user input without having to learn a complex timeline-based tool. Quite a few designers today build these with other Adobe tools like After Effects, but the idea here is to keep them within a tool they have already mastered. “Part of what we’re trying to do with XD is to remove that friction that designers experience,” Guzman told me.

In a major policy change, Uber has announced it’s ending mandatary arbitration for individual claims of sexual assault or sexual harassment by Uber drivers, riders or employees.

It is also ending the requirement that victims sign a confidentiality provision preventing them from speaking about the sexual assault or sexual harassment they suffered — saying survivors will now have the option to settle their claims with Uber without having to agree to being publicly silenced in order to do so.

Last month a group of women alleging sexual violence from Uber drivers sent an open letter to the company’s board asking to be released from the mandatory arbitration clause in the Uber app’s terms of service.

Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler — who was instrumental in highlighting internal problems with sexual harassment and sexism at Uber when she blogged about her experiences at the company last year — also urged CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to end the policy. And in a Twitter exchange in March Khosrowshahi signaled he was willing to consider ending forced arbitration. “I will take it seriously, but we have to take all of our constituents into consideration,” he wrote to Fowler then.

Concerns about safety and Uber’s attitude to reporting serious crimes were also among the reasons identified by London’s transport regulator for withdrawing Uber’s license to operate in the UK capital last September.

Also today Uber has announced that it will be publishing what it describes as a “safety transparency report” — which it says will include data on sexual assaults and “other incidents” that occur as a result of activity on its platform.

Announcing the moves in a blog post today, entitled ‘Turning the lights on’, Uber’s chief legal officer Tony West writes that the company has committed to doing “the right thing” under its new CEO — a new attitude which requires “three key elements: transparency, integrity, and accountability”.

Describing sexual violence as “a huge problem globally”, he continues: “The last 18 months have exposed a silent epidemic of sexual assault and harassment that haunts every industry and every community. Uber is not immune to this deeply rooted problem, and we believe that it is up to us to be a big part of the solution.”

Commenting on Uber’s policy changes to end mandatory arbitration, Jeanne Christensen, a partner at New York based law firm Wigdor LLP, which filed a class action lawsuit against Uber last year on behalf of women who said they were assaulted or raped by Uber drivers, described it as a critical step to “reduce future suffering by women passengers”.

But she also flagged Uber’s decision to not end forced arbitration for groups of victims acting on a class basis — saying this shows the company is “not fully committed to meaningful change”.

“Victims are more likely to come forward knowing they can proceed as a group. This is the beginning of a longer process needed to meaningfully improve safety,” Christensen added in a statement.

We’ve reached out to Uber for comment on why it’s not ending mandatory arbitration for group claims.

On the decision to end mandatory arbitration for individuals, West writes: “We have learned it’s important to give sexual assault and harassment survivors control of how they pursue their claims. So moving forward, survivors will be free to choose to resolve their individual claims in the venue they prefer: in a mediation where they can choose confidentiality; in arbitration, where they can choose to maintain their privacy while pursuing their case; or in open court. Whatever they decide, they will be free to tell their story wherever and however they see fit.”

On the changes to confidentiality provisions, he says: “Divulging the details of what happened in a sexual assault or harassment should be up to the survivor, not us.”

And on the new transparency report, West admits Uber struggled with the decision to publish data — saying this is “because data on safety and sexual assaults is sparse and inconsistent”, and there is no uniform industry standard for reporting it.

He also flags the problem of crimes of sexual violence being underreported.

However, in the end, Uber has decided it will go ahead and publish data. Although it’s not clear when the first report will go live (we’ve also asked about that).

“We’re working with experts in the field to develop a taxonomy to categorize the incidents that are reported to us,” adds West. “We hope to open-source this methodology so we can encourage others in the ridesharing, transportation and travel industries, both private and public, to join us in taking this step. We know that a project of this magnitude will take some time, but we pledge to keep you updated along the way.”

TechCrunch Tel Aviv, our inaugural one-day conference centered on boundary-pushing mobile technology, takes place on June 7, 2018. There’s amazing mobile tech coming out of Israel; we’re excited to dive in, and we want you to join us. But here’s the thing. You have just 48 hours left to score the early-bird ticket price — 265 ILS. Don’t waste another minute. Buy your tickets now.

We’re thrilled that drone masters Yariv Bash of Flytrex (the world’s first on-demand drone delivery service) and Ran Krauss of Airobotics (a pilotless drone solution), will grace the TC stage to discuss the future of commercial drones. That’s some leading-edge technology right there, and it’s just a one example of the great speakers you can expect to hear at TC Tel Aviv.

Want a few more? We’ve got you covered.

• Liad Itzhak of HERE Technologies and Oren Shovelof Via will talk about the effect that mobility-as-a-service will have on autonomous cars
• Ryan Sturgillof Gaza Sky Geeks will join Fadi Swiden of Hybrid to discuss Arab-Israeli innovation
• Omer David Kailaf of Innoviz Technologies and Rani Wellingstein of Oryx Vision will talk about the technology behind the “eyes” and “ears” of cars
• Chemi Peres of Pitango Venture Capital will join Mike Granoffof Maniv Mobility  and Yahal Zilka of Magma Venture Partners to discuss investing in Israel

Drum roll, please — for the first time ever, Startup Alley makes an appearance in Tel Aviv, and you don’t want to miss the broad range of tech on display. The Alley goes beyond mobile tech and includes more than 200 early-stage startups working on products and services in cybersecurity, AR/VR, robotics, fintech, biotech, artificial intelligence, blockchain and more.

But hold on now. Why not consider exhibiting in Startup Alley? It’s the perfect way to place your company in front of influential tech leaders, prospective customers, investors and media. The day-long Startup Demo ticket costs 1,700 ILS and includes two tickets to TechCrunch Tel Aviv 2018, a demo table, Wi-Fi, power, linens and a branded table-top sign. You can secure your exhibit table right here.

TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018 at the Tel Aviv Convention Center, Pavilion 10. That sound you hear is the 48-hour clock ticking. Get your early-bird tickets today.

Veridium Labs has been trying to solve a hard problem about how to trade carbon offset credits in an open market. The trouble is that more complex credits don’t have a simple value like a stock, and there hasn’t been a formula to determine their individual value. That has made accounting for them and selling them on open exchanges difficult or impossible. It’s a problem Veridium believes they can finally solve with tokens and the blockchain.

This week the company announced a partnership with IBM to sell carbon offset tokens on the Stellar blockchain. Each company has a role here with Veridium setting up the structure and determining the value formula. Stellar acts as the digital ledger for the transactions and IBM will handle the nuts and bolts of the trade activity of buying, selling and managing the tokens.

Todd Lemons, CEO and cofounder of Veridium Labs, which is part of a larger environmental company called EnVision Corporation, says that even companies with the best of intentions have struggled with how to account for the complex carbon credits. There are simpler offset credits that are sold on exchanges, but ones that seek to measure the impact of a product through the entire supply chain are much more difficult to determine.  As one example, how does a company making a candy bar source its cocoa and sugar. It’s not always easy to determine through a web of suppliers and sellers.

Moving forward

To partly solve this problem, another Envision company, InfiniteEARTH developed a way to account for them called the Redd+ forest carbon accounting methodology. It is widely accepted to the point that it has been incorporated in the Paris Climate Agreement, but it doesn’t provide a way to turn the credits into what are called fungible assets, that is an easily tradable one. The problem is the value of a given credit shifts according to the overall environmental impact of producing a good and getting it to market. That value can change according to the product.

Jared Klee, blockchain manager for token initiatives at IBM, says that buying and accounting for Redd+ credits on the company balance sheet has been a huge challenge for organizations. “It’s a major pain point. Today Redd+ credits are over the counter assets and there is no central exchange,” he said. That means they are essentially one-off transactions and the company is forced to hold these assets on the books with no easy way to account for their actual value. That often results in a big loss, he says, and companies are looking for ways to comply in a more cost-efficient way.

Putting it together

The three companies — Veridium, IBM and Stellar — have come together to solve this problem by creating a digital token that acts as a layer on top of the carbon credit to give it a value and make it easier to account for. In addition, the tokens can be bought and sold on the blockchain.

The blockchain provides all the usual advantages of a decentralized record keeping system, immutable records and encrypted transactions.

Veridium is working on the underlying formula for token valuation that measures “carbon density per dollar times product group,” Lemons explained. “That can be coded into a token and carried out automatically,” he added. They are working with various world bodies like the United Nations and The World Resource Institute to help figure out the values for each product group.

All of the details are still being worked out as the idea works its way through the various regulatory bodies, but the companies hope to be making the tokens available for sale some time later this year.

Ultimately this is about finding ways to help businesses comply with environmental initiatives and remove some of the complexity inherent in that process today. “We hope the tokens will provide less friction and a much higher adoption rate,” Lemons said.

Jyoti Bansal, the founder of AppDynamics, which he sold for $3.7 billion just as it was about to go public, and John Vrionis, a former venture partner at Lightspeed, where he invested in companies like MuleSoft, Nimble Storage and Bansal’s AppDynamics, today announced the launch of Unusual Ventures, a new $160 million seed fund.

Vrionis will take board seats and handle the day-to-day activities of the fund while Bansal will focus on mentoring the startups (and his own startups).

According to Bansal and Vrionis, early-stage investing is at an interesting stage. They argue that many of the larger funds have moved to larger investments and many of the seed-stage investors aren’t necessarily in a position to really help fledgling entrepreneurs through the hardest few years of building their companies. And when larger funds make seed investments, they often can’t provide the right kind of resources to help these companies.

“If you look at the mega-funds today, the model has really changed over the last years,” Vrionis told me. “Now the funds say they do everything from pre-seed to pre-IPO rounds.” But while VCs tell founders to focus, the VCs themselves don’t.

So to better help entrepreneurs, Bansal and Vrionis decided to tackle the issue from first principles. They concluded that what founders really need is help to learn fast. “In a two-year period, you have to learn so much,” Bansal explained. “How to lead people, how to inspire people, how to define product/market fit, packaging, pricing.”

To tackle this issue, Unusual Ventures will offer regular classes for its entrepreneurs, something that many accelerators also do, but with a few twists. The so-called Unusual Ventures Academy will consist of two cohorts a year, with eight companies each. The plan is to bring a group of master practitioners who, once a week, will lead three- or four-hour in-person sessions over the course of a six-week span. Vrionis noted that the focus of every session will be on one particular kind of challenge that startups face and that founders will have to create their own solutions — and then teach them to the other participants.

Unusual Ventures will also offer its startups a lot of hands-on support. The fund will have its own recruitment team, for example, to help founders hire the right engineers right from the get-go, and offer legal help and other infrastructure services so that founders can focus on building the product.

One other interesting twist here is about how the fund itself is funded. Bansal and Vrionis told me they were fortunate enough to be able to rethink this model, too. So the fund’s partners aren’t the traditional insurance companies and pension plans, but nonprofits. Most of these are historically black colleges and universities, foundations, endowments and health-related institutions. When a company has a successful exit, “who does the funding go to in the end?,” Bansal asked. “We want it to go to causes that we care about. We want to give it to those who don’t usually participate in the Silicon Valley wealth creation.”

The two co-founders also stressed they are looking for unusual funders, too. “We really encourage and welcome unusual backgrounds, histories, mindsets, ideas, people,” Bansal said.

So far, the fund has made four investments (two in the enterprise space, one consumer marketplace play, and one company in the crypto space). They are still at a very early stage and it looks like they aren’t quite ready for the limelight yet.