Year: 2018

Startups in Brazil, Latin America’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, are no longer solely focused on Brazil as their only frontier to conquer. Based on conversations with founders and in tracking the news, dozens of startups born in Brazil have realized they can compete on a global scale and expand their companies quickly by exporting their business models to other regional markets around the world, including Canada, Colombia, Europe, Japan, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.

Traditionally, many Brazilian startups have been content to focus on growing their revenues and market share on the “Ilha de Santa Cruz” (Island of the True Cross, as Brazil was named by a Portuguese sea-captain in 1500). There is plenty to feast on here with a growing middle class, the citizens’ voracious appetite for social and digital media consumption and a population of nearly 211,000,000. More so than other major entrepreneurial centers, Brazil’s founders are known for bootstrapping early-stage companies and avoiding global expansion, as the capital can be costly and lead to a dilution in shares in their startups.

Yet, as the country that is home to the world’s eighth largest economy slowly pulls out of a long recession with its first annual uptick in GDP last year, increasingly the “Brazilians are coming” to compete in more international markets — and more rapidly than ever before. Entrepreneurial expansion outside the country is on the rise as the startup ecosystem becomes more mature, and against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of global investment coming into Brazil from China, Japan, Europe, Silicon Valley and beyond. Indeed, international investment in LatAm startups has “more than doubled since 2013.”

Another trend that’s providing more Brazilian companies with the capital needed to fuel their global expansion is the “flurry of equity deals” during the first part of 2018, “ahead of the presidential elections in October that are expected to prompt volatility in the markets,” according to Bloomberg Markets. For example, NYSE’s biggest IPO since Snap earlier this year raised nearly $2.3 billion for Brazilian fintech PagSeguro (NYSE:PAGS), a payment processing company similar in business model to Jack Dorsey’s Square. It was the largest IPO of a Brazilian company since 2011.

Brazil’s export of fast-growth startups is on the rise

There has been a growing stream of Brazilian startups that have begun to shift focus to the U.S. during the last two years. Mosyle, founded in 2012 by Alcyr Araujo, is now based in the U.S. and used in more than 4,000 schools to help ensure that kids’ mobile device experiences are fun, safe and educational with more parental and teacher involvement.

Pipefy, which announced $16 million in Series A funding last month and was originally based in Curitiba, Brazil, has recently relocated its global HQ to San Francisco. More than 8,000 companies in 146 countries around the world use its operations-excellence platform today.

Similarly, PSafe, a mobile security, privacy and performance platform company, moved its global headquarters to San Francisco last August and now has more than half of its revenues from the U.S.

A fast-growth Brazilian startup called Gympass, which offers a corporate benefit plan to keep employees fit and healthy, has quietly grown into a global business in less than six years. Born in the country that places second in overall number of gyms, Gympass lets a company’s employees make unlimited visits to a growing network of multiple gyms and pay less than half the normal monthly fee. Last month, the company announced its launch in 12 key markets in the U.S., adding 3,000 new workout facilities to its global network of 30,000. Its corporate partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Metlife, PayPal and P&G.

Belo Horizonte-based Hotmart, a comprehensive platform to sell digital products like e-books, online courses and software that was founded in 2011, has expanded into Europe, including opening new offices in Madrid, Paris and the Netherlands. It’s also expanded into Colombia.

São Paulo-based Movile, a leader in mobile marketplaces with a big dream of making life better for a billion people through mobile apps, has seen tremendous growth since its founding in 1998. It now employs more than 1,500 people and impacts the lives of more than 100 million people around the globe. Its food-delivery market, iFood, is now booming on all continents, and Naspers and the fund Innova Capital invested a new $82 million round last December, with a singular focus on growing iFood’s market share.

Since its foundation, Movile has raised more than $250 million to accomplish more than 20 mergers, acquisitions and investments in startups beyond iFood, including Maplink, PlayKids, Pointer, Rapiddo, SuperPlayer and Sympla, among others.

Smart strategy and networking resources boost success

With the advent and growth of SaaS platforms, a fast-emerging global on-demand economy and some entirely original business models, many Brazilian startups are poised for success as they scale from being regional plays to any number of international markets. Typically, when more than a quarter of a startup’s business is coming in from international markets — as was the case with Pipefy and its cloud-based platform — the timing is ripe to land and expand outside a company’s home country.

In choosing international markets, a smart strategy for tech startup founders is to analyze those regions that possess high broadband and mobile-device adoption, readily available payment infrastructures, political stability, level socioeconomic playing fields, fair tax requirements and an easy-to-navigate regulatory environment. One useful rule of thumb to help obtain a basic understanding is to compare the overall internet population by country versus GDP per capita. This exercise will generate a model to prioritize countries with larger numbers of prospects with high levels of disposable income.

Another critical element for optimizing success is a solid understanding of regional differences and key variances across international markets — from cultural nuances to regulatory impacts to diverse approaches to conducting business. Identifying and tapping local network resources early on can make a world of difference.

The maturing startup ecosystem in Brazil has benefited hugely from access to Cubo, the largest entrepreneurial hub in Latin America, and its constant intermingling and exchange of ideas between startup founders, investors, academics and government officials.

In Silicon Valley, BayBrazil has been hugely impactful in connecting and building a tight-knit community of Brazilian and U.S. professionals, founders and scholars living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a global scale, organizations like Endeavor have sparked high-impact entrepreneurship and success around the planet.

The spirit of entrepreneurism in Brazil is as infectious as its natural resources are vast. A recent rise in startups born and bred in Brazil that are being exported to international markets around the globe to further scale and propagate is a trend to be celebrated.

Saúde! (Cheers)

Multiplayer has been one of the huge limitations of early smartphone AR platforms; it’s a tough thing to tackle and relies on a lot of computer vision smarts to match what one user’s phone is seeing with another’s to create a shared virtual space. Google is tackling this problem. Onstage at I/O today, VR exec Nathan Martz announced Cloud Anchors, a tool for matching up users’ AR experiences with each other in real time.

“With Cloud Anchors, we actually allow multiple devices to generate a shared, synchronized understanding of the world so that multiple phones can see and interact with the exact same digital content in the same place at the same time,” Martz said onstage.

Now, what we didn’t see is what this setup process actually looks like and how involved it will be for users to match up with the digital environments. What’s pretty surprising is that it won’t just be Android phones matching up with Cloud Anchors — Google says they’ve built iOS support for the feature, as well.

While Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore are duking it out to become the most technically advanced augmented reality developer’s platform, it seems that for the time being Google has taken a big leap ahead — though WWDC is just a few weeks away and multiplayer AR is an expected announcement. Though ARKit was first to market, after several months in preview, Google launched ARCore in February on 13 different phones, which the company said accounted for about 100 million devices.

Cloud Anchors is available for developers to play with now.

Google Assistant is catching up with – and in some cases, passing – Alexa on a variety of fronts, with a wealth of new features announced today at Google’s I/O developer conference. The company is launching support for digital subscriptions in Actions (Google Assistant’s voice apps), as well as a variety of tools to help developers promote their Actions, and engage their users.

With the new support for digital subscriptions, users can purchase access to premium content through an Android application that then becomes available in a Google Action, the company announced.

Google also debuted a new way for developers to promote their voice app, called Action Links. These are hyperlinks that can be used from anywhere to point users to your voice action.

Google Assistant PM Brad Abrams offered an example of Action Links with the meditation app, Headspace. The app could promote its own accompanying voice app with an Action Link that prompts the user to activate the link in their Google Assistant.

This goes along with today’s newly launched support for better media playback in Actions. Starting today, Actions will support media playback on speakers and Android phones, Google says, giving you access to “more audio experiences like longer meditation sessions, relaxing sounds, clips from your favorite TV shows and news briefings,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Once users are acquired, another new feature called Action Notifications can help them stay engaged, he said.

Amazon had previously launched Alexa skill notifications, so this is a bit of catch-up on Google’s part.

Google’s Action Notifications are an opt-in feature users can choose to turn on in order to stay connected with an Action, and learn about new features or get updates when the app has new content.

The notifications will work on your smartphone, too – even if the Android app isn’t installed, as well as on other Assistant devices.

Another new feature enhances Assistant’s Routines, which combine multiple Actions into a single command.

With the new Routine Suggestions, after a user engages with an Action, the developer can prompt the user to add the Action to a Routine with just a couple of taps.

Google highlighted its history in search as a reason why it will excel at  voice app discovery, as well.

“The broader challenge of helping people connect with the right Action is reminiscent of the early days of the web,” said Abrams. “Over the past twenty years, we’ve developed a lot of experience in connecting people with the right information, services and context, and we’re putting that to work in Google Assistant.”

On this front, the company is beginning to map all the ways users can ask for an Action into a taxonomy of user intents, which developers will be able to access via Built-in Intents.

It’s also adding Custom Device Actions for device makers who want to add specific functionality related to the platform Google Assistant runs on. For example, a washing machine with a specific color cycle could use this feature by allowing users to activate that cycle through Assistant.

The new Google Assistant features will launch in the “coming months,” unless otherwise indicated.

 

The big question in the media world today is whether MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson can stanch the bleeding of its cash flows before it becomes insolvent.

In a new filing today with the SEC, Helios informed investors that it had $15.5 million in available cash, with another $27.9 million in accounts receivable from members of MoviePass on longer-term subscriptions. Under accounting rules, those dollars can’t be used to fund current expenses. The company said that it has lost $21.7 million a month between September and April this year.

Investors dumped the stock following the filing, and the stock was down 31% at the close of the equity markets today.

While linear math would seem to indicate that the company is on track for insolvency in a matter of days, the filing and its CEO are maintaining an optimistic line. The company said that following a series of product changes including more verification that a subscriber actually watched a film themselves, it should reduce its cash loss on the service by 35% during the first week of May.

In an interview with TechCrunch, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe struck a positive view on the future of the business. He argued that unlike in the past, where a new app or service would raise venture capital and then invest it in the business, you can just handle capital concerns as you need them. “Today what you do is you raise enough money month by month to fund essentially that negative cash flow,” he said. “We are 100% confident that we have the committed funding to do it.”

In order for the company to avoid insolvency, the company will need to continue to sell its common stock to investors on a regular basis to fund that negative cash flow. The company said that sales of its common stock will need to begin this month in order to fund operations. If the company is unable to do so, “we may be required to reduce the scope of our planned growth or otherwise alter our business model, objectives and operations, which could harm our business, financial condition and operating results,” it wrote in the filing.

Google today said it is rolling out Lighthouse 3.0, an update to its tools that help developers optimize their websites and audit their performance.

The new update is centered around more precise and actionable metrics, such as page load time and the components of the site that might be slowing it down. Google has been working to ensure that websites are able to run quickly and smoothly through products like Google AMP. Getting all those websites running in an optimized fashion can increase engagement across the board, and the new version of lighthouse is designed to drill even further down to what’s happening. Google announced its launch today at Google I/O 2018.

All this is important for Google, too. If Google is going to be the service surfacing up all these websites, getting people in to the best experiences means users will end up expecting that kind of performance. They’ll then come back to Google to get all that information, even if it means going to Google to search for their favorite services that they access through a website.

But if developers are going to figure out where their websites are failing, they might need to test smaller components bit-by-bit to figure out what’s happening. Lighthouse gives developers a way to look for the failing indicators of a website and find out exactly what might be making the experience less than optimal. The more granular the tools, the more information they can use in order to figure out how to improve those websites.

Facebook is undergoing one of the biggest executive reshuffles in its history, the company announced internally today, Recode reports. Mark Zuckerberg is still the king of the castle, but everything below him is taking a different shape as WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook’s Core app get new leaders.

Facebook has confirmed these changes to TechCrunch.

The company has been reorganized into three main groups: “Family of Apps,” which encompasses Instagram, Facebook’s core app, Messenger and WhatsApp; “New Platforms and Infrastructure,” which cover AI, AR/VR, blockchain and engineering teams; and “Central Product Services,” which will handle ads, analytics and product management teams.

The biggest moves?

• Exec Chris Cox appears to be taking the biggest power move here as he will lead the new Family of Apps group.
• David Marcus will notably be stepping down from his role as head of Messenger to lead an exploratory blockchain group under CTO Mike Schroepfer with Instagram’s Kevin Weil.
• Chris Daniels of Facebook’s Internet.org will be taking over WhatsApp after CEO Jan Koum announced he was leaving last week.

Interestingly, it doesn’t seem as if anyone is actually leaving, rather the positions are just being moved around elaborately to shift responsibility and give more management power to some emerging leaders at the company while getting some seasoned veterans at the company to tackle more emerging technologies.

The announcement comes after a prolonged period of controversy surrounding user privacy issues at the company. The company held its F8 developer conference last week where Zuckerberg and other executives repeatedly addressed the need to embrace a Facebook’s “broader responsibility.”

Gamalon wants to change the game when it comes to understanding text-based customer communications. Instead of using neural networks to learn about a vast corpus of information, the startup takes a different approach, putting the text in a database and building decision trees to very rapidly train the data to arrive at the required information. Today, it announced a $20 million Series A investment led by Intel Capital.

Other participants in the round included .406 Ventures and Omidyar Technology Ventures along with existing investors Boston Seed Capital, Felicis Ventures and Rivas Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised by the company since inception in 2013 to $32 million including backing from DARPA in earlier rounds.

Gamalon CEO Ben Vigoda says they developed a new approach to analyzing customer interactions because the state of the art in AI and machine learning was too much of a black box.

His company wants to change that by making the whole process much more interactive. To that end Gamalon also released a new tool called Idea Studio, a product that can automatically build learning trees to help users arrive at answers extremely fast or allow a business analyst or data scientists to simply enter a series of queries and build a decision tree on the fly based on the text. With neural networks, Vigoda says, the user has no control over the end result, but with Idea Studio you can edit the trees and refine the results immediately.

The product still needs a way to review all of the text-based content, of course, but instead of having humans categorize it all manually, with Gamalon you import your data into a database, do analytics on it and then make it available for rapid categorization and response.

This could have multiple utilities, whether for customer service agents to find answers very quickly or customers to interact with bots and find answers much faster. Analysts could use it to locate answers to business issues, and it’s sophisticated enough for data scientists to build machine learning projects based on a large corpus of data.

Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation says they like how Gamalon puts machine learning into hands of many different employees around the customer information use case. “We want enterprises of all levels of AI capability to take full advantage of this growing volume and complexity of data. Gamalon’s unique approach can help users better understand billions of customer communications, customize individual responses, and take action to better serve those customers,” Rao explained in a statement.

The company is based in Cambridge, MA and has 23 employees. They have six large customers including Avaya.

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the computer processor giant, is today announcing $72 million in funding for the 12 newest startups to enter its portfolio, bringing the total invested so far this year to $115 million. Announced at the company’s global summit currently underway in southern California, investments in this latest tranche cover artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud services, and silicon. A detailed list is below.

Other notable news from the event included a new deal between the NBA and Intel Capital to work on more collaborations in delivering sports content, an area where Intel has already been working for years; and the news that Intel has now invested $125 million in startups headed by minorities, women and other under-represented groups as part of its Diversity Initiative. The mark was reached 2.5 years ahead of schedule, it said.

The range of categories of the startups that Intel is investing in is a mark of how the company continues to back ideas that it views as central to its future business — and specifically where it hopes its processors will play a central role, such as AI, IoT and cloud. Investing in silicon startups, meanwhile, is a sign of how Intel is also focusing on businesses that are working in an area that’s close to the company’s own DNA.

It’s hasn’t been a completely smooth road. Intel became a huge presence in the world of IT and early rise of desktop and laptop computers many years ago with its advances in PC processors, but its fortunes changed with the shift to mobile, which saw the emergence of a new wave of chip companies and designs for smaller and faster devices. Mobile is area that Intel itself acknowledged it largely missed out.

Later years have seen still other issues hit the company. For example, the Spectre security flaw (fixes for which are still being rolled out). And some of the business lines where Intel was hoping to make a mark have not panned out as it hoped they would. Just last month, Intel shut down development of its Vaunt smart glasses and reportedly the entirety of its new devices group.

The investments that Intel Capital makes, in contrast, are a fresher and more optimistic aspect of the company’s operations: they represent hopes and possibilities that still have everything to play for. And given that, on balance, things like AI and cloud services still have a long way to go before being truly ubiquitous, there remains a lot of opportunity for Intel.

“These innovative companies reflect Intel’s strategic focus as a data leader,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement. “They’re helping shape the future of artificial intelligence, the future of the cloud and the Internet of Things, and the future of silicon. These are critical areas of technology as the world becomes increasingly connected and smart.”

Intel Capital since 1991 has put $12.3 billion into 1,530 companies covering everything from autonomous driving to virtual reality and e-commerce and says that more than 660 of these startups have gone public or been acquired. Intel has organised its investment announcements thematically before: last October, it announced $60 million in 15 big data startups.

Here’s a rundown of the investments getting announced today. Unless otherwise noted, the startups are based around Silicon Valley:

Avaamo is a deep learning startup that builds conversational interfaces based on neural networks to address problems in enterprises — part of the wave of startups that are focusing on non-consumer conversational AI solutions.

Fictiv has built a “virtual manufacturing platform” to design, develop and deliver physical products, linking companies that want to build products with manufacturers who can help them. This is a problem that has foxed many a startup (notable failures have included Factorli out of Las Vegas), and it will be interesting to see if newer advances will make the challenges here surmoutable.

Gamalon from Cambridge, MA, says it has built a machine learning platform to “teaches computers actual ideas.” Its so-called Idea Learning technology is able to order free-form data like chat transcripts and surveys into something that a computer can read, making the data more actionable. More from Ron here.

Reconova out of Xiamen, China is focusing on problems in visual perception in areas like retail, smart home and intelligent security.

Syntiant is an Irvine, CA-based AI semiconductor company that is working on ways of placing neural decision making on chips themselves to speed up processing and reduce battery consumption — a key challenge as computing devices move more information to the cloud and keep getting smaller. Target devices include mobile phones, wearable devices, smart sensors and drones.

Alauda out of China is a container-based cloud services provider focusing on enterprise platform-as-a-service solutions. “Alauda serves organizations undergoing digital transformation across a number of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, aviation, energy and automotive,” Intel said.

CloudGenix is a software-defined wide-area network startup, addressing an important area as more businesses take their networks and data into the cloud and look for cost savings. Intel says its customers use its broadband solutions to run unified communications and data center applications to remote offices, cutting costs by 70 percent and seeing big speed and reliability improvements.

Espressif Systems, also based in China, is a fabless semiconductor company, with its system-on-a-chip focused on IoT solutions.

VenueNext is a “smart venue” platform to deliver various services to visitors’ smartphones, providing analytics and more to the facility providing the services. Hospitals, sports stadiums and others are among its customers.

Lyncean Technologies is nearly 18 years old (founded in 2001) and has been working on something called Compact Light Source (CLS), which Intel describes as a miniature synchrotron X-ray source, which can be used for either extremely detailed large X-rays or very microscopic ones. This has both medical and security applications, making it a very timely business.

Movellus “develops semiconductor technologies that enable digital tools to automatically create and implement functionality previously achievable only with custom analog design.” Its main focus is creating more efficient approaches to designing analog circuits for systems on chips, needed for AI and other applications.

SiFive makes “market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture,” founded by the inventors of RISC-V and led by a team of industry veterans.

Instant Apps for Android have been one of Google’s most interesting technologies for mobile developers. In their earliest incarnation, Instant Apps were mostly useful for developers of relatively straightforward apps. Earlier this year, Google launched its beta of Instant Apps for games, too, which allows players to get a sense of the gameplay before actually installing the full game. Until now, this was only available to a small number of game developers, but starting today, all game developers will be able to build instant apps and showcase them in the Google Play store and anywhere else a user can tap on a link.

In today’s announcement, Google also notes that it has started testing Google Play Instant compatibility with AdWords, so that developers can direct users directly to their game after they tap on an ad. It’s unclear when exactly Google plans to roll out support for these ads, though.

The showcase app for today’s launch is Candy Crush Saga, an app that probably doesn’t need the extra promotion, thanks to its more than 500 million installs on Android already.

Regular Instant Apps have to be less than 2 MB in size. That obviously isn’t a realistic restriction for games, which have far more graphical assets, for example, to fit within this limit. So for games, Google went with a 10 MB limit and, based on what I’ve seen from some of the apps that were already in the Google Play store, those apps still load extremely fast (and to put that 10 MB limit into perspective, it’s worth remembering that many a website weigh in at significantly more than that).

Since 2014, Material Design has been Google’s design language for its apps. Now, the company is greatly expanding its services around its design system by offering a set of new tools around theming and working on design iterations, as well as new open-source components that developers can implement into their own apps. In addition to these, Google is making Material Gallery, the same tool it uses to help its designers to collaborate on designs, available to everybody.

All of these new features are now available at the redesigned Material.io site.

Google isn’t making any major changes to the overall design language, but it is making it easier for developers to adapt Material Design to their own projects, and two of today’s launches focus solely on this. The first is Material Theming, that is, the ability to make a small change to say the color or typography and have that applied across the theme.

“Theming lets anyone consistently and systematically express their unique style across a product,” the team explains. “When you make just a few decisions about color and typography, for example, it’s simple to apply the direction throughout the environment.”

Google itself is already using this system and notes that any company can now easily tweak the system to its own brand guidelines.

Tweaking these designs still takes a good bit of work, so the second new feature — the Material Theme Editor — now makes it far easier to try out new designs. It gives developers a control panel that makes it easy to apply global style changes to color, typography and shape.

One nifty feature here is that the Editor will allow you to export your own Material theme based on your designs. While the tweaks that you can apply are still a bit limited, Google says that it’ll add more customization options over time.

Right now, the Editor only works with the popular Sketch design app and you can start using it by downloading the Material plugin for Sketch.

In addition to the work on theming components, Google also launched new Icon sets for Material Design today. These new icon themes can be customized, as well, and are available in baseline, round, two-tone, sharp and outlined variations.

And while theming is the highlight of this release, Google also today announced that it’s working on a number of new Material Components, that is, a set of pre-built design components. These will launch later this year.

The real highlight of the release may be Material Gallery, though. “Now anyone can use Material Gallery to review and comment on design iterations,” the Material Design team writes today. It’s the same tool that Google designers have used for years to collaborate on designs in-house, and now it’s out of beta and open to all.” The Gallery tool lets designers comment on their colleagues’ designs, no matter whether that’s an image or a video frame.

Google notes that the Gallery isn’t just for sharing and collaborating on designs but that it will also allow developers to take those designs and bring them into the Theme Editor.