Year: 2019

Smartphone numbers are down all over — but things look especially stark in China these days. Tim Cook cited softened demand in the world’s largest smartphone market as a key factor in its lowered guidance, and Apple is far from alone in feeling the pinch. Today, Canalys reported another large drop in the country for 2018.

The firm says that shipments dropped 14 percent in China for the year. That’s the second year in a row shipments have dropped, following more than half-a-decade of impressive growth, rocketing China to the number one spot, ahead of the U.S. All told, 396 million units were shipped last year, marking the lowest level since 2013.

Domestic companies Huawei and Vivo both managed to grow in that time, hitting first and second place. Oppo and Xiaomi slipped a bit, but managed to hold the second and fourth place positions, respectively. Apple, the sole U.S. representative in the top 5, held onto fifth place, but still dropped 13 percent. The rest of the industry, meanwhile, dropped a staggering 60 percent, year over year.

Much of what’s at play here is a familiar story all over. A matured market means upgrade cycles have slowed down, as more users are choosing to hold onto handsets for long. Even more pronounced, however, is a combination of slowed economic growth and lowered purchasing power in the country.

Nvidia can’t stop falling. The company has cut its guidance for its upcoming earnings report. The company expects to generate $2.2 billion instead of $2.7 billion as it had previously announced.

That’s a huge cut of 18.5 percent. Shares are currently trading at $139.60, down 12.83 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $160.15.

Nvidia once again cites the same reasons that have led to its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. Just like many tech companies, Nvidia is affected by demand in China as well as tariffs.

“However, deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, particularly in China, impacted consumer demand for NVIDIA gaming GPUs,” the company wrote in its press release.

This is just part of the story. Nvidia had a great 2017 because the company sold truckloads of GPUs. The company plans to release its earnings report on February 14 for its Q4 of fiscal 2019 that is supposed to end at the end of January.

Comparing Q4 2019 with Q4 2018 is going to be tough because it corresponds exactly to the cryptocurrency boom of the end of 2017. GPUs are quite useful when it comes to mining cryptocurrencies. It led to shortages and price spikes. Nvidia’s performances are going to look weak in comparison.

But Nvidia already knew that. The company says that demand has been lower than expected for high-end GPUs. It sounds like the new Nvidia GeForce RTX lineup isn’t selling as well as expected.

“Sales of certain high-end GPUs using NVIDIA’s new Turing architecture were lower than expected. These products deliver a revolutionary leap in performance and innovation with real-time ray tracing and AI, but some customers may have delayed their purchase while waiting for lower price points and further demonstrations of RTX technology in actual games,” the company says.

In other words, a combination of factors led to today’s revision. Let’s see if the company manages to get back on track when it comes to forecasting in the following quarters.

Parsley Health has just opened up a new, fully redesigned space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, marking the first true Parsley Health Center.

Since launch, the startup has been operating out of clinics in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But TechCrunch got the chance to check out Parsley’s new Fifth Ave location, which marks the company’s first space designed from the ground up as Parsley Health.

Founded by Dr. Robin Berzin, Parsley Health is a healthcare membership, where customers are offered a holistic approach to their health by a team of doctors and health coaches, complete with 24/7 unlimited messaging.

The idea stemmed from the troublesome reality that the average American spends less than 20 minutes a year with their doctor, who more often than not treat symptoms instead of the root problem.

Parsley members spend around four hours/yr with medical professionals, including five doctor visits a year and five health coach visits. Plus, Parsley offers 24/7 communication with your doctor and health coach. The hope is that Parsley doctors can better diagnose and treat their patients’ issues if they have the time to get the full story. Plus, Parsley doctors have the benefit of advanced biomarker testing alongside their focus on functional medicine, where root issues are prioritized for treatment rather than symptoms.

Part of giving the highest quality treatment is creating an open relationship between doctor and patient. That, in many ways, can be influenced by the physical space.

The new Parsley Health Center takes into account the principles of biophilic design. In other words, the space is designed specifically to make people feel healthier and better. The lighting, for example, is built to mimic natural light by using ribbed glass partition systems in the smaller rooms of the space. The space is also full of plants, as being in connection with nature reduces stress and improves mood.

The company even paid attention to the details of designing a main hallway where the halls that sprawl off of the main corridor are somewhat hidden by overhanging walls. This pattern, of visually implying a mystery waits around the corner, is supposed to provoke a strong pleasure response.

Beyond the design itself, Parsley also took into account the look and feel of the waiting room.

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Rather than a sterile room with old magazines and no light, the Parsley waiting room is more of a communal living room, with plenty of couches and a kitchen, complete with draught kombucha and healthy snacks for purchase.

The hope is that Parsley can use this room for community events around learning how to optimize health across all parts of life, including food, sleep, and behavior.

Doctor’s offices and exam rooms are rethought to ensure a more comfortable relationship between doctor and patient. There are no desks that separate patient from doctor, instead featuring a couch with a small side table to write on.

Observation tables have been redesigned to fit in with the room instead of standing out like a giant piece of ‘medical equipment’. Doctors’ instruments all fit into a small set of drawers off to the side.

Even the lab is built adjacent to a restroom where patients can pass their specimen through a small compartment in the wall instead of walking it through the hallways.

In 2017, Parsley raised $10 million led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Amplo, Trail Mix Ventures, Combine and The Chernin Group. Individual investors such as Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine; Nat Turner, CEO of Flatiron Health; Neil Parikh, co-founder of Casper; and Dave Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, also invested in the round.

Membership to Parsley costs $150/month.

Last year, Europol and its many law enforcement partners took down and seized webstresser.org, one of the most notorious “booter” sites for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which was claimed to have launched millions of attacks.

But the coalition of feds isn’t stopping there. Now, Europol wants to go after its thousands of users.

As part of the collective law enforcement effort from the U.K., U.S., and many European partners in Operation Power Off, Europol obtained a list of its 151,000 registered users. With help from British and Dutch police, “actions are currently underway worldwide to track down the user,” said Europol in a statement Monday.

According to the law enforcement body, more than 250 users of the seized DDoS services will “soon face action for the damage they have caused.

“Size does not matter – all levels of users are under the radar of law enforcement, be it a gamer booting out the competition out of a game, or a high-level hacker carrying out DDoS attacks against commercial targets for financial gain,” the statement read.

DDoS attacks have long plagued the internet as a by-product of faster connection speeds and easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities in the protocols that power the internet. While many use booter and stresser sites for legitimate services — such as to test the resilience of a corporate network from DDoS attacks — many have used them to launch large-scale attacks that can knock networks offline.

When those networks support apps and services are knocked offline, millions can be affected at any one time.

This latest effort comes as several regional law enforcement agencies are intensifying their efforts against booter sites. Late last month, the FBI seized more than a dozen DDoS-for-hire sites, and Romanian police also took action against the administrators of two smaller but significant DDoS platforms.

Earlier this month, Roku announced it would soon begin selling subscriptions to premium video services directly from its own TV and movies hub, The Roku Channel. Today, those subscriptions are going live, allowing Roku users to sign up for channels like EPIX, Showtime, STARZ, and others, then stream them without needing to install the channel’s own app on their Roku device.

Instead, all the content from the add-ons will be found in The Roku Channel section itself, alongside the other free and ad-supported TV shows, movies, news, sports, and entertainment programming already offered. However, the premium channels will have their own area inside The Roku Channel, including a spot on the homepage, as well as their own dedicated tabs, the company earlier said.

In time, Roku hopes to leverage the data from users’ unique blend of subscriptions to better personalize its recommendations.

A number of companies today offer the ability to watch premium programming through add-ons subscriptions, but fewer allow you to do so à la carte – that is, most require you to subscribe to a core TV package first before adding on extras. Amazon’s Prime Video Channels is probably the best known of the à la carte providers, though Sling TV rolled out a selection of premium a la carte channels last year.

Roku doesn’t plan to offer its own “skinny bundle” base package of streaming TV content at this time, the company recently told TechCrunch.

“I think where we are today is really focused on these à la carte subscriptions,” said Roku’s vice president of Programming, Rob Holmes. “Ultimately, from a user standpoint, there’s a lot of value in being able to pick and choose exactly what you want to sign up for — without having to sign up for one of these base packages to start with. That’s how we think about it today.”

Once subscribed to one of Roku’s premium selections, customers will only be able to watch the content through The Roku Channel itself. In addition to the revenue split on these add-ons, this benefits Roku because it puts attractive premium content right next to Roku’s ad-supported fare of some 10,000+ free movies and TV episodes. When customers are in search of something to watch next, it will be easy for them to just browse within the section they’re already in.

Plus, Roku says add-ons subscribers won’t even be able to use the premium networks’ own apps at launch, which keeps them further isolated in Roku’s own universe.

In order for customers to watch the premium content outside of Roku devices, like Roku TVs or media players, they’ll need to install the free Roku mobile app or watch on the web. The updated version of the iOS app is arriving today, and the Android update will be available in mid-February, the company says.

The selection of premium networks at launch includes: STARZ, Showtime, EPIX, plus Baeble Music; CollegeHumor’s DROPOUT; CuriosityStream; Fandor Spotlight; FitFusion; The Great Courses Signature Collection; Grokker; Hi-YAH!; Hopster; Lifetime Movie Club; DOX, LOLFlicks, Monsters and Nightmares, Magnolia Selects, and Warriors & Gangsters presented by Magnolia Pictures; MHz Choice; NOGGIN; Shout! Factory TV, Smithsonian Channel Plus; Stingray Karaoke; Tastemade; Viewster Anime; and ZooMoo.

Notably missing from the lineup is HBO, which offers its own over-the-top streaming service, HBO NOW, and has deals with a number of à la carte and streaming TV providers.

Roku says the Premium Subscriptions feature will become available on select Roku devices in the U.S. today. They offer a 30-day trial period if you sign up before March 31, 2019, and are paid for using the payment info you have on file with Roku’s own billing system.

All supported devices should receive the update in the coming weeks, starting with Roku players and then Roku TVs. To see if your device has been updated, look for a new row called “Browse Premium Subscriptions” below the Featured row in The Roku Channel.

 

 

Facebook continues to feel the heat over its role in how people communicate — and more importantly, miscommunicate — globally, so today in Europe it redoubled its efforts to counter critics by rolling out new controls specifically around election misinformation ahead of European Parliament elections this spring.

It unveiled its latest efforts to fight “fake news”, with a new system of controls around the placement of political ads, as well as a new set of human-staffed operations centers in Dublin and Singapore to monitor how localised political news is distributed on the social network — both coming in March. Then, to coincide with the new efforts, it presented its new head of global communications — Nick Clegg, a former politician — in his first public speech since taking office.

The bigger hope for Facebook is that today’s two developments will be viewed as evidence that it is making active efforts to set things aright after a series of moves that have soured people’s opinions of the social network. Facebook continues to see a lot of scrutiny in the region over how it has handled its WhatsApp acquisition, its role in the Brexit referendum, larger privacy violations and more, and as it continues to grow, the concern for Facebook is that it could start to see regulatory actions that could curtail growth longer term.

The political ad checks that Facebook announced today will see the company launch tools to improve transparency around political ads. Those buying ads will see more scrutiny about their backgrounds, to make sure they are authorized to purchase ads.

Then for every ad that does get placed, users can click on them to find out more about the company or organization making the posting, including about the budget and demographics about the reach of the ad. All of this will be kept in a library that will also be searchable by the public for up to seven years after an ad runs.

These tools will also be rolled out in other markets like Ukraine, Israel and India ahead of their national elections, and it comes alongside other policies that Facebook has put in place over recent weeks: for example, in Nigeria it’s forbidding election advertising to be purchased by foreign entities.

While these are important moves, they are also coming at the same time that Facebook is become more oblique to other kinds of scrutiny. The company has been reportedly cutting off some of the tools that have been built to monitor how advertising works on the platform. These tools have seen their functionality reduced as part of Facebook’s bigger effort to cut off data access to third-parties — a consequence of Facebook’s reaction to Cambridge Analytica and how it and others exploited third-party access to suck up user information — but groups that have been affected claim that their advertising analytics provided more information than Facebook’s new political ad monitoring tools provide.

In addition to this, Facebook is expanding its approach to localising its response in the form of election security operations centers, or war rooms as they’re being called by some (including us). The first of these was established around the time of elections in Brazil last year, based out of Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, and it carried on work in the US Midterm elections.

Now Facebook is localising the concept and establishing two new centers in Dublin and Singapore, to “allow our global teams to better work across regions in the run-up to elections.” The aim of these is to track fake news, hate speech and voter suppression, and the idea will be to assemble teams that will work with other groups at the company in areas like threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, community operations and legal.

Potentially meant to bolster the release of the news about the new election measures, Clegg’s appearance in Brussels — at a Facebook-sponsored event — unfortunately wasn’t very strong, underpinned as it was by fairly predictable pronouncements.

Clegg defended Facebook against criticism that it should be subject to the same scrutiny and responsibility as the media: “It’s raucous and unpredictable,” he said of Facebook. He did acknowledge Facebook’s shortcomings and said it’s now in a period of change. (Clegg’s known far and wide for his earnest apologies.)

He also defended the company against any negative readings of its intention to unify the back ends of its various messaging apps — while essentially confirming the the company’s desire to do so in the process.

“It’s much more simple than the heated language suggests,” he said. “What Zuckerberg says that is people are increasingly using different apps and it’s a simple view that over time, people will want to send messages from one to the other. That’s it!” See, nothing to worry about, right?

There may be some positive benefits, such as all apps taking on the encryption that is currently only a part of WhatsApp. However, it remains to be seen how linking up apps that have been built differently would work, and what other tradeoffs we will see in exchange for being able to send an Instagram snap to our WhatsApp contact a little quicker.

Asked if he was worried about being a “Brexit enabler”, Clegg curtly answered no and moved along.

Asked which technology was most worrisome for him in the future, and he named deep fakes. “We’re doing work to figure out what our defenses are against this, but that is a very worrying fact where reality and fiction bleed into each other,” he said. That could also be said about Facebook and its approach overall.

Are more Theranos -style scandals looming for investors in healthcare startups?

A team of researchers associated with the Meta Research Innovation Center at Stanford thinks so. They’ve  published a paper warning investors in life sciences startups that a systemic lack of transparency exists in their portfolio companies — creating the possibility for more multi-billion dollar implosions and scandals like the one that toppled Theranos and its charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

Indeed, one of the study’s authors, Dr. John Ioannidis, the co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and director of the University’s PhD program in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, was  among the first people to identify the risks associated with Theranos and its “stealth research”.

Now Dr. Ioannidis and his co-authors, Ioana A. Cristea and Eli M. Cahan have published a study surveying the publicly available research from the largest privately held companies in the healthcare space, and found them lacking. 

Most of the highest valued startups in healthcare have not published any significant scientific literature, the study found. Nearly half of the publications from companies worth over $1 billion came from only two startups — 23andMe and Adaptive Biotechnologies, according to the paper.

“Many years ago I was the first person to say that Theranos had a problem,” says Ioannidis. “The problem that I had then was that Theranos did not have any peer-reviewed evidence to show.”

In an interview and in their paper, Ioannidis and Cahan warn that investors have overlooked systemic problems created by the lack of transparency among healthcare startups by

They write:

“It would be tempting to dismiss the Theranos case as just one rotten apple. However, we worry that the focus on fraud puts aside a more fundamental concern. Fraud is making waves in the news, but stealth research may have a more detrimental impact.”

According to the study’s findings, more than half of the healthcare startups that are worth more than $1 billion have published no highly cited papers at all. For companies that were acquired or are publicly traded that number is around 40%.

In all, healthcare startups that are currently valued at over $1 billion published 425 Pubmed papers. And of those papers only 34 (8%, including 2 reviews) were highly cited. For companies with valuations of over $1 billion who had been acquired or are publicly traded on stock exchanges, the researchers counted 413 papers, of which 47 (11%, including 9 reviews) were highly-cited.

Digging deeper into some of the companies which had high valuations but little or no published research revealed scores of operational and technological issues for the researchers.

For instance, StemCentrx, which was bought for $10.2 billion in 2016 by AbbVie, had published 16 papers — and only one highly-cited paper. Since the acquisition, the Food and Drug Administration had imposed a delay on the readout of the company’s phase II trial for its Rova T targeted antibody drug for cancer treatment. In December a Phase III trial for Rova T as a second-line treatment for patients with advanced small cell lung cancer was halted, because the treatment wasn’t working, according to a report in Targeted Oncology. 

Acerta Pharma, another healthcare focused startup focused on cancer treatments was bought by AstraZeneca for $7.3 billion. That company published nine articles and had one highly-cited paper for a very early study of a potential treatment for relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Acerta received accelerated approval for a drug called acalabrutinib, which treats a rare form of lymphoma called mantle cell lymphoma. Two years ago, AstraZeneca had to retract data and admit that Acerta falsified preclinical data for its drug.

Then there’s Intarcia, the developer of a device for diabetes treatment that’s worth $5.5 billion. That company had its device rejected by the FDA and was forced to lay off staff and halt a couple of later stage trials. It had only published six papers — none of them very highly cited.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded that highly valued healthcare startups don’t contribute to published research and that the valuation of these companies by investors is divorced from any externally validated data.

For the researchers (and for investors) this should presents a problem.

“Many unicorns may be overvalued [21] and subject to unrealistic scientific expectations,” the study’s authors write. And they reject the argument that simply applying for — and receiving — patents is enough to prove that a technology in the healthcare space has been thoroughly vetted. “[Patents] do not offer the same level of documentation as peer-reviewed articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents [1], but these were unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence,” the researchers wrote. 

Even if companies want to protect their technology, there are still ways for them to be more transparent about the results or benefits of their technology. The authors acknowledge that publishing isn’t the primary mission of startups. They can, however publish a few high-value articles, secure their technology through patents and then work with researchers, universities or hospitals to validate the technology and have those organizations publish results of the tests, the authors argue.

As the authors conclude:

Start-ups are key purveyors of innovation and disruption. Consequently, holding them to a minimal standard of evaluation from the scientific community is crucial. Participation in peer review, with all its limitations, is the best way we have to uphold this standard. We are not arguing that start-ups should divert excessive resources to having peer-reviewed papers. However, when their products are destined to affect patient health, they should neither be solely doing marketing. Confidential data sharing with potential investors or regulators cannot replace more open scrutiny by the scientific community.

 

Subscription ebook and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers.

It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books.

The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Scribd started out as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription ebook business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised the company’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.”

“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio. We have continued to calibrate our catalog offer in line with the evolution of Scribd’s platform and customer base. And we continue to be pleasantly surprised by the depth of exposure that the platform provides to our backlist.”

The adjustments that Restivo-Alessi is alluding to include Scribd’s pricing model — it initially offered subscribers unlimited access to its library, then capped them at three ebooks and one audiobook per month, then went back to a modified version of its unlimited plan last year. (Apparently the most voracious readers and listeners might still encounter a cap.)

Asked whether we can expect the Scribd offering to continue changing, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said, “I don’t think there will be any big changes. We’re always optimizing … We’re constantly improving the way we find the right balance for readers and for publishers.”

Adler credited audiobooks as a key ingredient to the service’s growth, with engagement growing 100 percent year over year.  Surprisingly, he also said Scribd’s old document-sharing business continues to be crucial, because it helps the service attracts between 100 million and 200 million visitors each month (mostly from search engines), who can then be converted into paying subscribers.

“That’s kind of the key thing we’ve figured out,” Adler said. “We use the [user generated content] to attract users and use premium content to retain them.”

Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

Investors include Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Keith Rabois on the Scribd board. In an emailed statement, Rabois said, “Scribd has one of the largest libraries of content in the world — which reaches millions of readers every month, giving the company exceptional data and the unique ability to help readers discover content uniquely suited to them. Scribd hitting one million subscribers is just the beginning of Scribd transforming how we choose what books to read and how we read them.”

And now that Scribd has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone, Adler said he’s already thinking about how it can get to 10 million. His plans include further international expansion in markets like Latin America, Europe and India (apparently half of Scribd’s subscriber base is already outside the United States), working with publishers and authors to create original content, and continuing to add new formats.

“We started out by offering documents, then ebooks, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” he said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”

Dropbox announced today that it has purchased HelloSign, a company that provides lightweight document workflow and eSignature services. The company paid a hefty $230 million for the privilege.

Dropbox’s SVP of engineering, Quentin Clark, sees this as more than simply bolting on electronic signature functionality to the Dropbox solution. For him, the workflow capabilities that HelloSign added in 2017 were really key to the purchase.

“What is unique about HelloSign is that the investment they’ve made in APIs and the workflow products is really so aligned with our long term direction,” Clark told TechCrunch. “It’s not just a thing to do one more activity with Dropbox, it’s really going to help us pursue that broader vision,” he added. That vision involves extending the storage capabilities that is as the core of the Dropbox solution

This can also been seen in the context of the Extension capability that Dropbox added last year. HelloSign was actually one of the companies involved at launch. While Clark say the company will continue to encourage companies to extend the Dropbox solution, today’s acquisition gives it a capability of its own that doesn’t require a partnership.

HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla says being part of Dropbox gives HelloSign access to resources of a much larger public company, which should allow it to reach a broader market than it could on its own. “We share a design philosophy based on building the best experience for end-users, fueling our efficient business models and sales strategies. Together with Dropbox, we can bring more seamless document workflows to even more customers and dramatically accelerate our impact,”  Walla said in a blog post announcing the deal.

Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign, who previous held stints at Box and EMC Documentum, said the company will remain an independent entity. That means it will continue to operate with its current management structure and Clark indicated that all of the employees will be offered employment at Dropbox as part of the deal.

When you consider that HelloSign, a Bay area startup that launched in 2011, raised just $16 million, it appears to be a impressive return for investors.

This is a developing story. More to come.

Contentsquare, the cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has raised $60 million in further funding.

Leading the Series C round is global investment company Eurazeo. It adds to $42 million in Series B funding raised around a year ago, and includes participation from existing investors Canaan, Highland Europe, and H14.

Described as a “fully automated digital experience insights platform,” ContentSquare’s SaaS analyses customer behavior through the tracking of “billions of digital touch and mouse movements” to provide brands with insights into how to increase engagement, reduce operational costs and maximise conversion rates.

In other words, Contentsquare claims it can tell a company why conversion rates are low and, most importantly, what can be done to improve them. This can include making changes to specific page or content elements, or a combination of the two.

Related to this, Contentsquare has developed an AI engine to analyse behavioural data and offer automatic insights. In addition, the “ AutoZone” feature replaces content tagging and tag configuration with automatic element identification. This means that Contentsquare automatically recognises different page or app elements and can therefore track changes more easily to feed into the aforementioned AI engine.

More recently, the company has released two new solutions for customers: CS Live and AI Alerts, which deliver customer experience information in real-time. CS Live provides Contentsquare’s clients with a way to immediately identify consumer metrics on their websites without the need for a dashboard. AI Alerts, Contentsquare’s newest monitoring system, enables businesses to “detect and react to improve customer engagement without manual effort”.

To that end, Contentsquare is used by digital, content, product, analytics, acquisition, IT and UX teams inside numerous companies. Its customers include Walmart, Samsung, Sephora, Tiffany, LVMH, AccorHotels, Goldman Sachs, Avis, GoPro, Ikea, Nissan, and others.

Meanwhile, Contentsquare says the new capital will help Contentsquare increase research and development focused on AI and predictive analytics. It will also be deployed for further expansion across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Middle-East.