Month: June 2019

Swiftly just raised a $10 million Series A round led by VIA ID, Aster Capital, Renewal Funds and Wind Capital to grow its software-as-a-service business for cities transportation agencies. ly works by helping cities manage their transit systems and identify points in the schedule or route that negatively impact service efficiency and reliability.

Swiftly also offers real-time passenger info that will “predict when the bus will arrive in a way that is much more accurate than the current system,” Swiftly co-founder and CEO Jonny Simkin told TechCrunch. In fact, Simkin says Swiftly is up to 30 percent more accurate than current systems.

“It’s one thing to tell someone their bus is ten minutes delayed but if we can get to the root of the problem, it’s better for the city and stimulates the economy,” he said.

That’s where Swifty’s data platform comes in to gather insights and analyze historical data to rethink route planning and where to place stops. In one city, these insights led the customer to implement processes to change lights to green when a bus is running behind schedule.

Swiftly currently works with over 50 cities and 2,500 transit professionals throughout the country. That comes out to powering more than 1.2 billion passenger trips per year. If you’ve never heard of Swiftly, you’re not alone. And that’s by design.

Swiftly is meant to be a behind-the-scenes software that enables local transportation agencies to better manage their fleets and offerings to their respective riders. Swiftly’s customer is generally either a transit agency, a city or department of transportation.

“They buy our platform because they want to improve the passenger experience, and improve service reliability and efficiency,” Simkin said.

For the passenger, they experience Swiftly when they open up Google Maps and look for transit routes or when they open a city’s specific transit service. One of Swiftly’s customers is the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority in San Jose, Calif. Its CIO Gary Miskell says Swiftly is one of the authority’s early innovation partners.

“With Swiftly’s innovative product development, VTA has been able to improve our real time information accuracy and provide cutting edge data to our planning and operations staff thus improving our transit system performance,” Miskell said in a statement.

With the funding, the plan is to expand to several hundred cities in the U.S. and worldwide.

“Public transit is very important to our communities and cities and it’s something that needs to be more efficient,” Simkin said. “Public transit is this extensive piece of the community and there to serve everyone but often times those tools fall short.”

Unmortgage, the London-based startup that wants to let people buy as little as five percent of a home and rent the rest, has lost its founder and CEO, TechCrunch has learned.

According to a regulatory filing on Companies House, Unmortgage’s Rayhan Rafiq-Omar was terminated as a Director on 4th of May, and has been replaced on the board by Unmortgage co-founder and product lead Josef Wasinski.

However, sources tell me the board room reshuffle is the result of Rafiq-Omar leaving the startup entirely, which is bound to come as a shock to London’s fintech and property tech community. It’s not clear why he has departed, although one source tells me it wasn’t of his own volition.

Rafiq-Omar is named on Companies House as a person of “significant control” of Unmortage, with a share ownership of more than 25% but not more than 50%, and voting rights of more than 25% but not more than 50%. He was also the driving force behind Unmortgage and in conversations I’ve had with the departing CEO over the last few years, I always got the impression he was not only determined to help fix the housing market but also wanted to build a business for the long term.

The company appeared to be off to a decent start, too, having raised a hefty £10 million seed round to funds its operations. Backing the round was fintech venture capital firms Anthemis Exponential Ventures (which lost its own CEO last year amid accusations of inappropriate behaviour), and Augmentum Fintech plc. Separately, Unmortgage had managed to court institutional investment to fund the acquisition of property, which was at the heart of its mortgage alternative model. In other words, there is a lot of money at stake.

Declining to discuss the specific reasons for his departure, Rafiq-Omar gave TechCrunch the following statement:

“Unmortgage is a genuine zero to one story – an innovation that inspired many to join me on a journey to restore hope in homeownership. I’m immensely proud to have created something from nothing over the last four years. But it’s the tough times that truly define us. And those around us.

So if there’s one thing I’d like you to quote me on, if you do write this story, it’s my deepest thanks to my family and friends during this personal and professional set-back. My parents and my wife Sofi have really stepped up to support me emotionally. And a special thanks should also go to [Rentify’s] George Spencer, James Micklethwait and my partners at Allianz Global Investors: Adrian Jones and Irshaad Ahmed. Their friendship at this time has been important to me.”

I’ve reached out to both Anthemis and Augmentum Fintech and will update this post if and when I hear back.

Meanwhile, an Unmortgage spokesperson provided the following statement:

“As Unmortgage enters the next stage of its growth strategy, it has strengthened and restructured its senior team to reflect the needs of the business.

“Hugh Boyle has been appointed as CEO and will be leading Unmortgage day-to-day as it provides a new route to homeownership for the millions of people who are currently locked out of the market. Hugh is the Former International Division CFO and CEO of MBIA UK Insurance, subsidiary of MBIA Inc. He will be supported by Nigel Purves, COO, Conrad Holmboe, CIO and Co-founder Josef Wasinski.

“Having founded the business alongside Josef and Nigel, we look forward to Ray playing a pivotal advisory role as Unmortgage continues its journey to help aspiring homeowners via our innovative gradual homeownership product.”

The rising popularity of omni-channel commerce — selling to customers wherever they happen to be spending time online — has spawned an army of shopping tools and platforms that are giving legacy retail websites and marketplaces a run for their money. Now, one of the faster growing of these is announcing an impressive round of funding to stay on trend and continue building its business.

Depop, a London startup that has built an app for individuals to post and sell (and mainly resell) items to groups of followers by way of its own and third-party social feeds, has closed a Series C round of $62 million led by General Atlantic. Previous investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Balderton Capital, Creandum, Octopus Ventures, TempoCap and Sebastian Siemiatkowski, founder and CEO of Swedish payments company Klarna all also participated.

The funding will be used in a couple of areas. First, to continue building out the startup’s technology — building in more recommendation and image detection algorithms is one focus.

And second, to expand in the US, which CEO Maria Raga said is on its way to being Depop’s biggest market, with 5 million users currently and projections of that going to 15 million in the next three years.

That’s despite strong competition from other peer-to-peer selling platforms like Vinted, Poshmark, and social platforms that have been doubling down on commerce, like Instagram and Pinterest, but on the other hand the opportunity is big: a recent report from ThredUp, another second-hand clothes sales platform, estimated that the total resale market is expected to more than double in value to $51 billion from $24 billion in the next five years, accounting for 10% of the retail market.

Prior to this, Depop had raised just under $40 million. It’s not disclosing its valuation except to say it’s a definitely upround. “I’m extremely happy,” Raga said when I asked her about it this week.

The rise of the bedroom entrepreneur

The funding comes on the heels of strong growth and strong focus for the startup.

If “social shopping”, “selling to groups of followers”, and the “use of social feeds” (or my headline…) didn’t already give it away, Depop is primarily aimed at millennial and Gen Z consumers. The company said that about 90% of its active users are under the age of 26, and in its home market of the UK it’s seen huge traction with one-third of all 16-24 year-olds registered on Depop.

Its rise has dovetailed with some big changes that the fashion industry has undergone, said Raga. “Our mission is to redefine the fashion industry in the same way that Spotify did with music, or Airbnb did with travel accommodation,” she said.

“The fashion world hasn’t really taken notice” of how things have evolved at the consumer end, she continued, citing concerns with sustainability (and specifically the waste in the fashion industry), how trends are set today (no longer dictated by brands but by individuals), and how anything can be sold by anyone, from anywhere, not just from a store in the mall, or by way of a well-known brand name website. “You can now start a fashion business from your bedroom,” she added.

For this generation of bedroom entrepreneurs, social apps are not a choice, but simply the basis and source of all their online engagement. Depop notes that the average daily user opens the app “several times per day” both to browse things, check up on those that they follow, to message contacts and comment on items, and of course to buy and sell. On average, Depop users collectively follow and message each other 85 million times each month.

This rapid uptake and strong usage of the service has driven it to 13 million users, revenue growth of 100% year-on-year for the past few years, and gross merchandise value of more than $500 million since launch. (Depop takes a 10% cut, which would work out to total revenues of about $50 million for the period.)

When we first wrote about Depop back in 2015 (and even prior to that), the startup and app were primarily aiming to provide a way for users to quickly snap pictures of their own clothes and other already-used items to post them for sale, one of a wave of flea-market-inspired apps that were emerging at that time. (It also had an older age group of users, extending into the mid-thirties.)

Fast forward a few years, and Depop’s growth has been boosted by an altogether different trend: the emergence of people who go to great efforts to buy limited editions of collectable, or just currently very hot, items, and then resell them to other enthusiasts. The products might be lightly used, but more commonly never used, and might include limited edition sneakers, expensive t-shirts released in “drops” by brands themselves, or items from one-off capsule collections.

It may have started as a way of decluttering by shifting unused items of your own, but it’s become a more serious endeavor for some. Raga notes that Depop’s top sellers are known to clear $100,000 annually. “It’s a real business for them,” she said.

And Depop still sells other kinds of goods, too. These pressed-flower phone cases, for example, have seen a huge amount of traction on Twitter as well as in the app itself in the last week:

Alongside its own app and content shared from there to other social platforms, Depop extends the omnichannel approach with a selection of physical stores, too, to showcase selected items.

The startup has up to now taken a very light-touch approach to the many complexities that can come with running an e-commerce business — a luxury that’s come to it partly because its sellers and buyers are all individuals, mostly younger individuals, and, leaning on the social aspect, the expectation that people will generally self-police and do right by each other, or less risk getting publicly called out and lose business as a result.

I think that as it continues to grow, some of that informality might need to shift, or at least be complemented with more structure.

In the area of shipping, buyers generally do not seem to expect the same kind of shipping tracking or delivery professionals appearing at their doors. Sellers handle all the shipping themselves, which sometimes means that if the buyer and seller are in the same city, an in-person delivery of an item is not completely unheard of. Raga notes that in the US the company has now at least introduced pre-paid envelopes to help with returns (not so in the UK).

Payments come by way of PayPal, with no other alternatives at the momen. Depop’s 10% cut on transactions is in addition to PayPal’s fees. But having the Klarna founder as a backer could pave the way for other payment methods coming soon.

One area where Depop is trying to get more focused is in how its activities line up with state laws and regulations.

For example, it currently already proactively looks for and takes down posts offering counterfeit or other illicit goods on the platform, but also relies on people or brands reporting these. (Part of the tech investment into image detection will be to help improve the more automated algorithms, to speed up the rate at which illicit items are removed.)

Then there is the issue of tax. If top sellers are clearing $100,000 annually, there are taxes that will need to be paid. Raga said that right now this is handed off to sellers to manage themselves. Depop does send alerts to sellers but it’s still up to the sellers themselves to organise sales tax and other fees of that kind.

“We are very close to our top sellers,” Raga said. “We’re in contact on a daily basis and we inform of what they have to do. But if they don’t, it’s their responsibility.”

While there is a lot more development to come, the core of the product, the approach Depop is taking, and its success so far have been the winning combination to bring on this investment.

“Technology continues to transform the retail landscape around the world and we are incredibly excited to be investing in Depop as it looks to capture the huge opportunity ahead of it,” said Melis Kahya, General Atlantic Head of Consumer for EMEA, in a statement. “In a short space of time the team has developed a truly differentiated platform and globally relevant offering for the next generation of fashion entrepreneurs and consumers. The organic growth generated in recent years is a testament to the impact they are having and we look forward to working with the team to further accelerate the business.”

During Computex last week, Sennheiser gave media a sneak peek at its first wireless gaming headset, the GSP 670, slated to ship starting at the beginning of next month.

The GSP 670 retails for €349 (about $393), significantly pricier then other popular wireless gaming headsets (as well as its wired predecessor, the Sennheiser GSP 600, priced at $249.95). Sennheiser is hoping its features, as well as the company’s reputation for excellent sound quality and comfortable headsets, will convince gamers to take the plunge. (When I tried on a pair at Computex, it delivered on wearability, connection speeds and audio quality, but of course it is hard to tell how headsets will feel and sound after hours of gaming, versus a few minutes of testing).

Despite the freedom afforded by wireless, many gamers stick with wired headsets to avoid reductions in sound quality and connection speeds or having to worry about battery levels, issues that Sennheiser addresses with the GSP 670’s features. Like other wireless headsets, the GSP 670 needs to be connected to a wireless dongle. Each one comes with a GSA 70 compact USB dongle with proprietary technology that Sennheiser developed to ensure a low-latency connection it promises transmits sounds with “near-zero delay.” The USB is compatible with PCs and the Sony Playstation 4. The GSP 670 also has Bluetooth, so users can pair it with their smartphones and tablets as well.

The GSP 670’s microphone is noise-cancelling and can be muted by raising the boom arm. The headset has two volume wheels to allow users to control chat audio and game audio separately. Gamers can also adjust the audio on the GSP 670 with Sennheiser’s Gaming Suite for Windows, a software tool that lets users switch between audio presets or customize sound levels, and also includes surround sound modes and an equalizer.

In terms of battery, Sennheiser claims the GSP 670’s quick-charging battery can run for two hours after a seven minute charge. When fully charged, it says the battery can last for up to 20 hours on Bluetooth and 16 hours when connected via the GSA 70 dongle. The headset has automatic shutdown to save power.

The GSP 670 is currently available for pre-order on Sennheiser’s website and will ship beginning on July 1.

FoodShot Global, a prize platform devoted to transforming the world’s food and agriculture industries, has awarded the first round of prizes for its Innovating Soil 3.0 competition. 

Trace Genomics, a startup developing an analytics service for soil health to optimize the use of farmland, has received an undisclosed investment from FoodShot’s investment partner, S2G Ventures.

While additional awards of $250,000 were given to Keith Paustian, to speed up the global adaptation of his COMET tool systems, which provide farmers with metrics and information on regenerative farming; and Gerlinde De Deyn, for her work studying biodiversity over time. 

A $35,000 award was given to Dorn Cox to support the development of his open . source data project that will look to catalog knowledge around agriculture techniques and distribute that information freely to a global community of farmers. 

“I founded FoodShot Global envisioning a new way to harness the power of innovation, capital, and the collaborative spirit of the world’s leading stakeholders to effect change,” said FoodShot Global Founder and Chairman Victor Friedberg. “We chose to start with soil because any future that imagines 10 billion people eating healthy and sustainably with equal access will require healthy soil. The three people we announced today are all groundbreakers whose inspired work lays the foundation for the next generation of solutions to the urgency we now face as a civilization. I couldn’t be more impressed and inspired by these inaugural FoodShot Global award winners and look forward to sharing what they’re doing with a larger audience.”

 

Earlier this year, Amazon announced its Scout sidewalk delivery robot. At the time, details were sparse, except for the fact that the company had started to make deliveries in a neighborhood in Washington State. Today, at Amazon’s re:Mars conference, I sat down with Sean Scott, the VP in charge of Scout, to talk about how his team built the robot, how it finds its way around and what its future looks like.

These relatively small blue robots could be roaming a sidewalk near you soon, though as of now, Amazon isn’t quite ready to talk about when and where it will expand its network from its single neighborhood to other areas.

“For the last decade, we’ve invested billions of dollars in cargo planes and delivery vans, fulfillment center robots, and last holiday period, we shipped over a billion products with Prime free shipping,” Scott told me. “So it’s my job as VP of Amazon Scout to bring another new, innovative, safe and sustainable solution to this delivery network to help us really grow quickly and efficiently to meet customer demand.”

Currently, in Amazon’s trial, the robots are always accompanied by human assistants. Those assistants — and they probably look a bit like robot dog walkers as they trot through the neighborhood — are currently the ones who are taking the packages out of the robot when they arrive at their destination and put it on the customers’ doorsteps. For now, that also means the customers don’t have to be home, though chances are they will have to be once this project rolls out to more users.

As of now, when it’s ready to make deliveries, Amazon drives a large van to the neighborhood and the Scout robots leave from there and return when they are done. Scott wouldn’t say how far the robots can travel, but it seems reasonable to assume that they could easily go for a mile or two.

As we learned earlier this year, Amazon did make a small acquisition to kickstart the program but it’s worth stressing that it now does virtually all of the work in house, including building and assembling the robots and writing the software for it.

“For Scout we’re actually owning the entire development from the industrial design to the actual hardware, mechanical, electrical, the software, the systems, manufacturing and operations,” said Scott. “That really helps us control everything we’re doing.” Having that end-to-end control enables the team to iterate significantly faster.

The team even built a rig to test the Scout’s wheels and in the process, learned that the wheels’ material was actually too soft to survive the rigors of daily sidewalk driving for long.

Inside its labs, the team also built a sidewalk environment for real-world testing, but as is so often the case these days, the team did most of the machine learning training in a simulation. Indeed, since there are basically no maps for navigating sidewalks, the team has to build its own maps of every neighborhood it goes into and it then uses this highly detailed map in its simulation.

That’s important, Scott noted, because simply using a game engine with repeating textures just wouldn’t be good enough to train the algorithms that keep the robot on track. To do that, you need real-world textures, for example.

“We thought about building a synthetic world, but it turns out building a synthetic world is much harder than copying the real world,” Scott said. “So we decided to copy the real world.” He showed me a video of the simulated robot moving through the simulation, using a map that looks a bit like a highly zoomed-in Google Maps 3D view. Not perfect, but perfectly reasonable, down to the gutters on the street and the small bumps where two concrete plates on the sidewalk line up.

This simulation allows Amazon to make thousands of simulated deliveries before the team ever goes out to test the robot on the street. In the demo I saw, the robot had no issues navigating around obstacles, pausing for crossing cats and getting to his destination. That’s possible thanks to a combination of detailed maps and high-resolution imagery of its surroundings, combined with GPS data (when available) and cutting-edge machine-learning techniques.

Once it is out and about, though, the robot will have to face the elements. It’s watertight, something you’d expect from a company that is based in Seattle, and it’s got sensors all around to ensure it can both find its way on sidewalks that are often littered with obstacles (think trash day) and full of curious cats and dogs. Around the robot is an array of cameras and ultrasonic sensors, all of which are then evaluated by a set of machine learning algorithms that help it plot its path.

“We jokingly refer to the sidewalk as the Wild West,” said Scott. “Every sidewalk is a snowflake and every neighborhood is a collection of snowflakes.”

At times, the robot also has to deviate from the sidewalk, simply because it is blocked. In those cases, it will opt for driving on the street. That’s something local laws in many states now allow for, though Scott tells me that the team only considers it when it’s a street where a pedestrian would also feel comfortable. “If you feel safe walking on that road, that’s where we want to be. We want to be viewed as a pedestrian and treated as a pedestrian,” he said. And that’s how the law in Washington State looks at these robots, which, for example, mean that they have to be given the right of way.

Scott also noted that the team designed the robot so it would be visible when necessary, with blinking lights when it crosses a street, for example, but also a bit boring, so that it would blend into the environment. “We really want this to blend into the background and be part of the environment and not be this loud and obnoxious thing that’s always rolling through the neighborhood,” said Scott. So it has the bright blue Amazon Prime color on top to be seen, but is otherwise relatively bland and without any anthropomorphic features. It’s just your average neighborhood delivery robot, in other terms.

As it moves along, it makes very deliberate movements, which Scott believes will make people feel more comfortable around it. Unlikely a drone, there’s no major risk when any parts of the robot break during a mission. Somebody can simply come and pick it up. Still, the team says it did design the robot with safety at the front and center of its process.

One thing that’s currently not clear — and that Amazon didn’t want to talk about yet — is how it will solve the actual handover of the package. Right now, the assistant handles this part, but in Amazon’s photos, the customer walks up to the robot and takes the package out of it. That’s a reasonable scenario, I think. In the long run, Amazon could also outfit the robot with multiple compartments to make multiple deliveries in one go. Right now, the Scout can only handle a single package.

One advantage of the robot has over human delivery people is that if you’re not home, it can just wait for a while, Scott said. So it’s conceivable that you’ll come home one day and there’s a Scout, standing patiently in front of your door, waiting to deliver your latest impulse order. Until then, it’ll likely be a while, though. Amazon won’t commit to any timetable or wider rollout.

Eight Inc, the design firm best known for conceptualizing the Apple Store and the now-iconic giant glass cube on 5th Ave in New York, has proposed to restore Notre-Dame’s sadly destroyed roof and spire — with a giant glass roof and spire. I don’t think the French will go for it.

The idea is to recreate the top of the building entirely out of structural glass, which is stronger than normal glass and thus could support itself without any internal framework.

It’s hard to know what to make of the proposal. It seems to me so inappropriate that it borders on parody. Leaving aside the practical concerns of keeping the glass clean and replacing any portion that’s cracked or something, the very idea of capping a gothic cathedral made almost entirely of stone with a giant sunroof seems like the exact opposite of what the church’s creators would have wanted.

[gallery ids="1838599,1838597,1838598,1838600"]

Tim Kobe, founder of Eight, disagrees.

“I believe this definitive example of French gothic architecture requires a deep respect and appreciation of the history and intent of the original design,” he told Dezeen. “It should not be about the ego of a new architectural expression but a solution to honor this historic structure.”

I find that statement, especially the part about ego of new architectural expression, a little difficult to swallow when the proposal is to rebuild a nearly thousand-year-old cathedral in the style of an Apple Store.

He called the glass roof and spire “spiritual and luminous,” saying they evoked “the impermanence of architecture and the impermanence of life.”

That seems an odd thing to strive for. I’m not a religious person, but I as I understand it the entire idea of a cathedral is to create a permanent, solid representation of the very permanent presence of God and His everlasting kingdom of heaven. Life is fleeting, sure, but giant stone cathedrals that have outlasted empires seem a poor mascot for that fact.

Of course, it must be said that this wouldn’t be the only garish glass structure in the city that traditionalists would hate: The pyramid at the Louvre has attracted great ire for many years now. And it’s much smaller.

The French Senate (and many others) have expressed that they would like the cathedral to be restored to as close to its original state as possible — preferably with something better than centuries-old dry tinder holding up the roof. But President Macron has called for something more than simple reconstruction, and Prime Minister Philippe backs him, especially concerning the spire, which was a relatively late addition and as such isn’t quite as historic as the rest.

A design competition is to be held to create a new spire “adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era,” which certainly could mean many things and inspire many interesting ideas. Here’s hoping they’re a little better than this one.

When I first watched the new Netflix Original film “I Am Mother,” I assumed that the robotic Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne) was a CG creation. How else could you create a robot that looked so inhuman, and that that could also run around the film’s post-apocalyptic environments so gracefully?

But in a bonus interview for the Original Content podcast, director Grant Sputore estimated that 99 percent of the shots of Mother are completely practical, consisting of nothing more than a person wearing “a fancy bit of costume.”

“It’s both a budgetary thing, because we knew how we were planning to make the film — but also, we’re children of ‘80s and ‘90s cinema,” Sputore said. “So we worship at the altar of ‘Robocop’ and ‘Predator’ and the first ‘Terminator’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ and all of Stan Winston’s work, which is most of those movies … It’s for our own satisfaction, as much as anything.”

The film focuses on the relationship between Mother and her adopted human daughter (Clara Rugaard), who has been completely isolated from the outside world — until the arrival of a mysterious stranger played by Hilary Swank prompts Daughter to question everything she’s been told.

When I asked how Sputore wanted to distinguish “I Am Mother” from all the previous movies about robots, he said there are fewer than you think:

All the films that you think are about robots are largely about androids. So like ‘Blade Runner,’ for instance, is a seminal contribution to the sci-fi genre and many people would say that it’s about robots, but really it’s about androids. Which sounds like semantics, but it’s significant [from] two different points of view, One: Android movies tend to focus on the question of, do androids have feelings? ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ Are they like us? Where do you draw the line between robots and humans? I feel like that question has been done … and our film is not about that at all.

Plus, of course, android movies are usually cheaper to make, because you can just use a human actor.

Sputore said he was less interested in the dividing line between humans and androids, and more in the relationship between humans and robots.

While he’s clearly spent a lot of time watching classic science fiction films, he said Mother was actually based on a real machine, namely the Atlas robot created by Boston Dynamics. And where an ’80s movie like “Terminator” might use killer robots as a way to address fears around the emergence of computers and automation, Sputore suggested that our relationship with robots has become a much more real, and much more pressing, issue.

“It’s a little more scary when people start losing their jobs to smart machines,” he said.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Homeland Security has given the maximum severity score for a vulnerability in a popular smart building automation system.

Optergy’s Proton allows building owners and managers to remotely monitor energy consumption and manage who can access the premises. The box is web-connected, and connects to other devices — like air conditioning and heating — in the building for real-time monitoring through a web interface.

CISA, the government’s dedicated cybersecurity unit, said the device had serious vulnerabilities.

An advisory said an attacker could gain “full system access” through an “undocumented backdoor script.” This, the advisory said, could allow the attacker to run commands on a vulnerable device with the highest privileges. Backdoors typically grant hidden or undocumented access to a system, and can be used for tech support to remotely login and troubleshoot issues. But if found by an attacker, backdoors can also be used maliciously.

The vulnerability required a “low level” of skill to remotely exploit, and was rated 10.0, the highest score on the industry standard common vulnerability scoring system.

The advisory noted several other bugs, one of which was rated with a score of 9.9.

Although 10.0 scores are not unheard of, they are not common in everyday technology. 10.0 scores rely on vulnerabilities that can have a significant impact on the system’s integrity and availability, or put data on the affected system at high risk of damage or theft.

Gjoko Krstic, a security researcher at Applied Risk who reported the vulnerabilities to Optergy, told TechCrunch that the bug was “very, very bad” and “easy to exploit.” According to Krstic, there are 50 buildings vulnerable at the time of writing. His findings were presented last month in Amsterdam at Hack In The Box, a security conference, as part of wider issues with four other vendors — including Opertgy.

By exploiting the vulnerability, it’s possible to “shut down a building with one click,” he said at his talk.

Optergy president Steve Guzelimian said the company fixed the issues but wouldn’t confirm how many devices were affected. The company says it serves more than 1,800 facilities.

“We fix everything brought to our attention as well as do our own regular testing,” he said.

Ticketmaster’s dominance has led to ridiculous service fees, scalpers galore, and exclusive contracts that exploit venues and artists. The moronic approval of venue operator and artist management giant Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010 produced an anti-competitive juggernaut. It pressures venues to sign ticketing contracts under veiled threat that artists would otherwise be routed to different concert halls. Now it’s become difficult for venues, artists, and fans to avoid Ticketmaster, which charges fees as high as 50% that many see as a ripoff.

But The Ticket Fairy wants to wrestle control of venues away from Ticketmaster while giving fans ways to earn tickets for referring their friends. The startup is doing that by offering the most technologically advanced ticketing platform that not only handle sales and checkins, but acts as a full-stack Salesforce for concerts that can analyze buyers and run ad campaigns while thwarting scalpers. Co-founder Ritesh Patel says The Ticket Fairy has increased revenue for event organizers by 15% to 25% during its private beta focused on dance music festivals.

Now after 850,000 tickets sold, it’s officially launching its ticketing suite and actively poaching venues from EventBrite as it moves deeper into esports and conventions. With a little more scale, it will be ready to challenge Ticketmaster for lucrative clients.

Ritesh’s combination of product and engineering skills, rapid progress, and charismatic passion for live events after throwing 400 of his own has attracted an impressive cadre of angel investors. They’ve delivered a $2.5 million seed round for Ticket Fairy adding to its $485,000 pre-seed from angels like Twitch/Atrium founder Justin Kan, Twitch COO Kevin Lin, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. The new round includes YouTube founder Steve Chen, former Kleiner Perkins partner and Mark’s sister Arielle Zuckerberg, and funds like 500 Startups, ex-Uber angels Fantastic Ventures, G2 Ventures, Tempo Ventures, and WeFunder. It’s also scored music industry angels like Serato DJ hardware CEO AJ Bertenshaw, Spotify’s head of label licensing Niklas Lundberg, and celebrity lawer Ken Hertz who reps Will Smith and Gwen Stefani.

“The purpose of starting The Ticket Fairy was not to be another EventBrite, but to reduce the risk of the person running the event so they can be profitable. We’re not just another shopping cart” Patel says. The Ticket Fairy charges a comparable rate to EventBrite’s $1.59 + 3.5% per ticket plus payment processing that brings it closer to 6%, but Patel insists it offers far stronger functionality.

Constantly clad in his golden disco hoodie over a Ticket Fairy t-shirt, Patel lives his product, spending late nights dancing and taking feedback at the events his clients host. He’s been a savior of SXSW the past two years, injecting the aging festival that shuts down at 2am with multi-night after-hours raves. Featuring top DJs like Pretty Lights in creative locations cab drivers don’t believe are real, The Ticket Fairy’s parties have won the hearts of music industry folks.

Now the Y Combinator startup hopes its ticketing platform will do the same thanks to a slew of savvy features:

Earn A Ticket – The Ticket Fairy supercharges word of mouth marketing with a referral system that lets fans get a rebate or full-free ticket if they get enough friends to buy a ticket. 30% of ticket buyers are now sharing a Ticket Fairy referral link, and Patel says the return on investment is $30 in revenue for each $1 paid out in rewards, with 10% to 25% of all ticket sales coming from referrals. A public leaderboard further encourages referrals, with those at the top eligible for backstage passes, free merch, and bar tabs. And to prevent mass spamming, only buyers, partners, and street teamers get a referral code.

Creative Payment Options – The startup offers “FreeFund” tickets for free events that otherwise see huge no-show rates. Users pay a small deposit that’s refunded when they scan their ticket for entry, discouraging RSVPs from those who won’t come. Buyers can also pay on layaway with Affirm or LayBuy and then earn a ticket before their debt is due.

Anti-Scalping – The Ticket Fairy offers identity-locked tickets that must be presented with the buyer’s ID on arrival, which means customers can’t scalp them. Instead, the startup offers a waitlist for sold out events, and buyers can sell their tickets back to the company which then redistributes them at face value with a new QR code to a specific friend or whoever’s at the top of the waitlist. Patel says client SunAndBass Festival hasn’t had a scalped ticket in five years of working with the ticketer.

Clever Analytics – Never wasting an opportunity, The Ticket Fairy lets events collect contact info and demand before ticket sales start with its pre-registration system. It can ceate multiple variants of ticketing sites designed for different demographics like rock vs dance fans for a festival, track sales and demographics in real-time, and relay instant stats about checkins at the door. Integration of email managers like MailChimp and sales pixels like Facebook plus the ability to instantly retarget people who abandoned their shopping via Facebook Custom Audience ads makes marketing easier. And all the metrics, budgets, and expenses are automatically organized into financial reports to eliminate spreadsheet busywork.

Still, the biggest barrier to adoption remains the long exclusive contracts Ticketmaster and other giants like AEG coerce venues into in the US. Abroad, venues typically work with multiple ticket promoters who sell from the same pool, which is why 80% of The Ticket Fairy’s business is international right now. In the US, ticketing is often handled by a single company except for the 8% of tickets artists can sell however they want. That’s why The Ticket Fairy has focused on signing up non-traditional venues for festivals, trade convention halls, newly built esports arenas, as well as concert halls.

“Coming from the event promotion background, we understand the risk event organizers take in creating these experiences” The Ticket Fairy’s co-founder and Ritesh’s brother Jigar Patel explains. “The odds of breaking even are poor and many are unable to overcome those challenges, but it is sheer passion that keeps them going in the face of financial uncertainty and multi-year losses.” As competitors’ contracts expire, The Ticket Fairy hopes to swoop in by dangling its sales-boosting tech. “We get locked out of certain things because people are locked in a contract, not because they don’t want to use our system.”

The live music industry can brutal, though. Events can have slim margins, organizers are loathe to change their process, it’s a sales heavy process convincing them to try new software. But while record business has been redefined by streaming, ticketing looks a lot like it did a decade ago. That makes it ripe for disruption.

“The events industry is more important than ever, with artists making the bulk of their income from touring instead of record sales, and demand from fans for live experiences is increasing at a global level” Jigar concludes. “When events go out of business, everybody loses, including artists and fans. Everything we do at The Ticket Fairy has that firmly in mind – we are here to keep the ecosystem alive.”