Plex has added a new content partner for its soon-to-launch ad-supported video service. The company announced this morning its service will now also include movies from Lionsgate, which will join Plex’s existing partner Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, in helping to fill out the forthcoming video-on-demand library.
However, unlike with Warner Bros., whose videos will be limited to U.S. viewers, the deal with Lionsgate is for worldwide streaming. (There may be a few titles with geo-restrictions, Plex noted.)
“Lionsgate is one of the biggest names in the business and we know our millions of users will enjoy free access to their library of movies,” said Keith Valory, CEO of Plex, in a statement. “Plex caters to the most passionate and discerning media lovers all over the world, so it is important for us to be able to bring great content like this together in one beautiful app for all of our users across the globe.”
TechCrunch first reported on Plex’s plans to enter the ad-supported movies market back in January. The company described a strategy that is similar to Roku’s — that is, instead of just facilitating streaming through its platform, it will actually broker deals that bring a selection of free content directly to its users. It can then tap into the ad revenue that’s generated to boost its bottom line as Roku does with The Roku Channel.
Though Plex began as a media organizer, it has, in recent years, expanded to focus on becoming a one-stop-shop for all your media needs. This includes streaming and recording from live TV, streaming music by way of a TIDAL partnership, plus access to podcasts, news and web series.
Plex now has 20 million users, and while it doesn’t detail its subscriber numbers, it has achieved profitability.
That said, the one media organization challenge it hasn’t yet solved is helping users search for, discover, and track the shows and movies they want to watch outside of live TV or its ad-supported streams. Plex did once say it’s looking into paid subscriptions further down the road, as it’s a natural next step beyond the ad-supported streaming deals.
Plex says its video-on-demand library will launch later this year.
Nothing can get built without talented people with the right skillsets, which is why startups hitting their growth phases have to go from hiring a smattering of employees to building systems that can hire dozens to hundreds of people per year. How can startups double and triple headcount year after year in a sustainable way, all while not losing the culture that made them what they are in the first place?
We’ve got an incredible discussion lined up on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this year that answers that prompt from some of the most knowledgeable people in the business.
First, we have Harj Taggar of Triplebyte, a platform designed to accelerate the hiring of quality and vetted engineers for tech startups. Taggar was the first partner to join Y Combinator, where he spent five years helping some of the most successful startups in the world grow from humble origins to debuting at the New York Stock Exchange. Taggar brings a wealth of experience of observing high-growth companies hire, and also brings significant expertise from Triplebyte on what works and what doesn’t at scale for startup hiring.
Next, we have Liz Wessel, CEO and co-founder of WayUp, a platform for student professionals to connect with new jobs and opportunities that has raised more than $27 million in venture capital from Trinity and General Catalyst. Wessel brings a deep operational background to the discussion, not just hiring dozens of people for her own startup, but also seeing how hiring operates horizontally across industries and sectors through her employment platform.
Finally, we have Scott Cutler, CEO and co-founder of StockX, an ecommerce platform for buying and selling sneakers as well as streetwear, handbags and more. StockX has raised $160 million across several rounds of venture capital, and has hundreds of employees. Before he founded StockX, Cutler was head of the Americas for eBay and president of StubHub. He brings both a large tech and a rapidly-growing startup perspective to the discussion.
Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.
Walmart is partnering with Capital One to launch a new credit card program, which rolls on September 24, and includes both co-branded and private-label cards. The former, the Capital One Walmart Mastercard, includes 5% back on purchases made on Walmart.com or paid for in-store using Walmart Pay (the latter for the first 12 months.) The private label card, the Walmart Rewards Card, will offer those same perks, but is limited to being used only in Walmart stores and on Walmart.com.
After the 12-month introductory period, the co-branded Mastercard will drop to 2% on Walmart purchases in stores, instead of 5%. However, it will continue to offer 5% on Walmart.com purchases, including Walmart Grocery.
It also offers 2% back on restaurants and travel and 1% back everywhere else. The card doesn’t include any annual fee or foreign transaction feeds, and its rewards can be used any time, Walmart says.
Customers can apply for the new card via Walmart’s website or app, or through CapitalOne.com. The application itself can be filled out using a mobile device and, once approved, customers gain access to the card immediately. They can also load the card into Walmart Pay or into the Walmart app before the physical card arrives in the mail — similar to how Apple’s new Apple Card works.
Through Capital One, customers will receive purchase notifications, security alerts, 0% fraud liability, and the ability to lock/unlock a lost or stolen card from the Capital One app.
The new Walmart store card, meanwhile, also offers 5% back on purchases on Walmart.com, in Walmart app, and on Walmart Pay in-store purchases during the introductory period. It then offers 2% back on Walmart purchases afterward. It also earns 2% back at Walmart Fuel Stations.
Current Walmart cardholders will be converted to the Capital One Walmart Rewards Mastercard or the Walmart Rewards Card, starting October 11, with physical cards arriving in November. They’ll also earn 5% back through Walmart Pay through October 14, 2020.
Walmart’s prior card, from Synchrony Bank, offered smaller rewards, noted Sara Rathner, credit cards expert at NerdWallet, in a statement published this morning.
“The Capital One Walmart Rewards Mastercard is definitely helping to cement 5% back as the gold standard among retail cards. We already see this rewards rate with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa card and the Target REDcard. The previous Walmart card issued by Synchrony Bank only offered 3% back on Walmart.com and a paltry 1% back in-store, so the new card is a huge step up,” she said.
Credit card partnerships are an area of importance to major retailers, including Walmart’s chief rival, Amazon. Its credit card program includes a variety of options, including store cards, travel cards, prepaid cards, no annual fee cards, reward points cards and more. And of course both retailers today are, to some extent, challenged by Apple, which just entered the credit card space, too.
Branded store cards not only help to increase customer loyalty, they also drive more purchases, reduce credit card processing fees, create additional profit in the form of interest, and generate records of customer purchases that can be used for targeted advertising.
“As our company has evolved to serve customers shopping in stores, online, and on the Walmart apps, we also recognized the need to fully digitally enable the cardholder experience,” said Daniel Eckert, senior vice president, Walmart services and digital acceleration, in a statement. “That’s why we’ve worked with Capital One to make it possible for cardholders to manage essentially every interaction with the program right from the palm of their hands,” he said.
As expectations from seed investors intensify, a new stage of investment has established itself earlier in the venture-backed company life cycle.
Known as “pre-seed” investing, one of the first legitimate outfits to double down on the stage has refueled, closing its second fund on $77 million.
Afore Capital’s sophomore fund is likely the largest pool of venture capital yet to focus exclusively on pre-seed companies, or pre-product businesses seeking their first bout of institutional capital. In many cases, a pre-seed startup may even be “pre-idea,” yet to fully incorporate.
Afore invests between $500,000 and $1 million in nascent startups. As it kicks off its second fund, founding partners Anamitra Banerji and Gaurav Jain tell TechCrunch they plan to lead all of their investments.
We have the opportunity to build a firm that defines a category. - Afore founding partner Anamitra Banerji
Standouts in Afore’s existing portfolio include the no-fee credit card company Petal — which has raised roughly $50 million to date — mobile executive coaching business BetterUp, childcare information platform Winnie and Modern Health, a B2B mental wellness platform.
Afore portfolio companies have raised more than $360 million in follow-on funding, with an aggregate market cap of $1.5 billion, Jain, the founding product manager at Android Nexus and former principal at Founder Collective, tells TechCrunch. “These are high-quality teams with high-quality projects and ideas.”
Jain and Banerji — a founding product manager at Twitter and former partner at Foundation Capital — began raising capital for Afore’s $47 million debut fund in 2016. Since then, the landscape for seed investing has shifted. Early-stage investors have begun funneling larger sums of capital to standout teams at the seed, while billion-dollar venture capital funds set aside capital for serial entrepreneurs working on their next big idea. As a result, deal sizes have swelled and deal count has shrunk simultaneously.
“Pre-seed has replaced seed in the venture ecosystem,” Banerji tells TechCrunch. “We saw this early as a result of both of us having been at funds. We knew that this was going to be a massive category just like seed was before it. Now we think it’s clearly here to stay and we have the opportunity to build a firm that defines a category.”
Since launching the firm, the pair explain they’ve noticed more and more founders explicitly stating that they are in the market for a pre-seed round, a statement you wouldn’t have heard as recently as two years ago.
This is a result of Afore’s efforts to legitimize the stage through investments and programming, including its annual Pre-Seed Summit. Though Afore is certainly not the only VC fund focused on the earliest stage of startup investing — other firms deploying capital at the stage include Hustle Fund, which closed an $11.8 million debut fund last year, plus the $20 million immigrant-focused pre-seed fund Unshackled Ventures and the predominant seed and pre-seed stage firm Precursor Ventures, which announced a $31 million second fund earlier this year.
In the past year alone, more than $200 million has been dedicated to the pre-seed stage, with at least nine new funds launching to nurture early-stage startups.
More and more firms are setting up shop at the pre-seed stage as competition at the seed stage reaches new heights. As we’ve previously reported, monster funds are becoming increasingly active at the seed stage, muscling seed funds out of top deals with less dilutive offers. While the pre-seed stage, for the most part, remains protected from competition at the later stage, these firms still have to compete.
“Nobody wants to lose sight of a deal, so they are willing to toss small amounts of capital very early behind interesting founders,” Jain said. “But frankly, we aren’t sure if it’s good for a company to raise that much capital that early in their life cycle.”
Working with a fund that isn’t passionate about what you are building or familiar with the plights of the stage of your business is terrible for founders, adds Jain. Pairing with a focused fund like Afore, on the other hand, allows for “incentive alignment.”
Afore invests across all industries, preferring to back startups in categories “before they are categories.”
“What we are looking for is deep authenticity and passion around the product they are building,” says Banerji. “Ideas on their own aren’t enough. Founder resumes on their own aren’t enough. While we do care about all of those aspects, we get crazy about their clarity of thought in the short term.”
“We don’t take the point of view of ‘here is some money, it’s OK to lose it,’ ” he adds. “For us to invest, the founder must be all in. And we generally don’t invest in celebrity founders; we are going after the underdog founder.”
North’s Focals smart glasses are the first in the category to even approach mainstream appeal, but to date, the only way to get a pair has been to go into a physical North showroom and get a custom fitting, and then return once they’re ready for a pick-up and final adjustment. Now, North has released its Showroom app, which makes Focals available across the U.S. and Canada without an in-person appointment.
This approach reduces considerable friction, and it’s able to do so thanks to technology available on board the iPhone X or later – essentially the same tech that makes Face ID possible. People can go through the sizing and fitting process using these later model iPhones (and you can borrow a friend’s if you’re on Android or an older iOS device) and then North takes those measurements and can produce either prescription or non-prescription Focals, shipped directly to your door after a few weeks.
The Showroom app also includes an AR-powered virtual try-on feature for making sure you like the look of the frames, and for picking out your favorite color. Once the Focals show up at your door, the final fitting process is also something you can do at home, guided by the app’s directions for getting the fit just right.
Should you still want to hit an actual physical showroom, North’s still going to be operating its Brooklyn and Toronto storefronts, and will be operating pop-ups across North America as well.
Focals began shipping earlier this year, bringing practical smart notification, guidance and other software experiences to your field of view via a tiny projector and in-lens transparent display. North, which previously existed as Thalmic Labs and created the Myo gesture control armband, recognized that they were building control devices optimized for exactly this kind of application, but also found that no one was yet getting wearable tech like smart glasses right. Last year, Thalmic Labs pivoted to become North and focus on Focals as a result.
Since launching its smart glasses to consumers, it’s been iterating the software to consistently add new features, and making them more accessible to customers. An early price drop significantly lessened sticker shock, and now removing the requirement to actually visit a location in person to both order and collect the glasses should help expand their customer base further still.
Julo, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Indonesia, said on Wednesday it has extended its $5 million Series A raise to $15 million as it looks to scale its business in the key Southeast Asian market.
The $10 million Series A2 round for the Jakarta-headquartered startup was led by Quona Capital, with Skystar, East Ventures, Provident, Gobi Partners, and Convergence participating in it. The two-year-old startup, which has raised about $16 million to date, is now closing the round, Adrianus Hitijahubessy, co-founder and CEO of Julo, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Through its eponymous Android app, Julo provides loans of about $300 to users at aggressively competitive rate of 3-5% per month — one of its key differentiating factors. Julo has managed to keep its interest rate low because its credit scoring system is more efficient than those of its rivals, claimed Hitijahubessy, who has amassed more than a decade of experience in credit scoring system using alternative data from his previous stints.
“There are lots of players in this market. Not just Indonesia, but globally. But it comes down to who actually knows what they are doing. The bar is becoming higher and it is increasingly becoming difficult for digital lending companies to just launch an app and charge high interest rate,” he said.
Julo works with banks and individuals to finance loans to customers. It says it has disbursed about $50 million to date.
Hitijahubessy said Julo will use the fresh capital to expand the team and enhance its credit score system. The startup intends to focus on growing its business in Indonesia itself.
In a statement, Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and partner of Quona Capital, said, “a significant majority of JULO’s loans are used for productive purposes that can enhance the economic well-being of families and small businesses — driving financial inclusion in Indonesia, which is a cornerstone of Quona’s focus.”
Digital lending is becoming an increasingly crowded space in South Asian markets. In India, for instance, a growing number of digital mobile wallets including Paytm and MobiKwik have recently started to offer credits to customers.
Tableau was acquired by Salesforce earlier this year for $15.7 billion, but long before that, the company had been working on its Fall update, and today it announced several new tools including a new feature called ‘Explain Data’ that uses AI to get to insight quickly.
“What Explain Data does is it moves users from understanding what happened to why it might have happened by automatically uncovering and explaining what’s going on in your data. So what we’ve done is we’ve embedded a sophisticated statistical engine in Tableau, that when launched automatically analyzes all the data on behalf of the user, and brings up possible explanations of the most relevant factors that are driving a particular data point,” Tableau chief product officer, Francois Ajenstat explained.
He added that what this really means is that it saves users time by automatically doing the analysis for them, and It should help them do better analysis by removing biases and helping them dive deep into the data in an automated fashion.
Image: Tableau
Ajenstat says this is a major improvement in that previously users would have do all of this work manually. “So a human would have to go through every possible combination, and people would find incredible insights, but it was manually driven. Now with this engine, they are able to essentially drive automation to find those insights automatically for the users,” he said.
He says this has two major advantages. First of all, because it’s AI-driven it can deliver meaningful insight much faster, but it also it gives a more of a rigorous perspective of the data.
In addition, the company announced a new Catalog feature, which provides data bread crumbs with the source of the data, so users can know where the data came from, and whether it’s relevant or trustworthy.
Finally, the company announced a new server management tool that helps companies with broad Tableau deployment across a large organization to manage those deployments in a more centralized way.
All of these features are available starting today for Tableau customers.
Robin Healthcare, a new startup founded by serial entrepreneurs Noah Auerhahn and Emilio Galan, is hoping to harness the power of personal assistants to make the business of healthcare easier for the physicians who practice it
The company’s technology, which works much the same way as a Google Home or Amazon Alexa or Echo, is placed in hospital rooms and transcribes and formats doctor interactions with patients to reduce paperwork and streamline the behind-the-scenes part of the process that can drive doctors to the point of distraction, the company’s co-founder said.
“I had a background doing claims data work in healthcare was at UCSF and finishing my clinical training,” says Galan. “And I was hearing lots of doctors telling me not to practice.”
The problem, says Galan, was the overabundance of paperwork. After school Galan doubled down on his work in claims and billing launching a company called HonestHealth where he worked with institutions and companies . like The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Consumer Reports, and the New York State Department of Health to analyze health care claims data and develop consumer applications.
The two men saw the wave of smart devices coming and figured there must be a way to use the technology to build a fully billable clinical report from monitoring the conversations with patients.
The company currently has dozens of its smart devices installed in hospitals around the country including a large surgical practice in Tennessee, the Campbell Clinic; Duke University Medical Center’s Private Diagnostic Clinic; the University of California San Francisco Medical Center; and Webster Orthopedics in Northern California.
Robin integrates with the major electronic health records companies, Epic and Cerner, through third party integrations that are designed to make it easier to input data automatically as doctors are assessing a patient’s condition and delivering treatments.
“Part of why Robin exists is to avoid technology interrupting care,” says Auerhahn. “Having fewer interactions with EMR is a good way to do that.”
Robin’s service is human-assisted natural language processing to make sure that the data is input correctly.
The company’s early vision has been enough to attract investors like Norwest Venture Partners, which led the company’s $11.5 million Series A round.
In all, Robin Healthcare has raised $15 million in financing. The company’s other investors include Social Leverage, the early stage investment firm founded by Howard Lindzon.
PlayVS, the platform that allows high school students to compete on varsity esports teams through their school, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series C led by existing investor NEA. Battery Ventures, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain of 01 Advisors, Sapphire Sport, Michael Zeisser, Dennis Phelps of IVP and cofounder of CAA Michael Ovitz.
This brings the startup’s total funding to $96 million, the vast majority of which was raised in the last 13 months.
PlayVS launched in April of 2018 under founder and CEO Delane Parnell, who believes that the opportunity of esports is fundamentally broken without high school leagues. Through an exclusive partnership with the NFHS (the NCAA of high schools), PlayVS allows schools across the country to create esports teams and participate in leagues with their neighboring schools, just like any other varsity sport.
PlayVS also partners with the game publishers, which allows the platform to pull in stats and track players performance across every game directly from the PlayVS website.
The startup charges either the player, parent/guardian or school $64 per player to participate in ‘Seasons’, PlayVS’s first product. It was launched in October of 2018 in five states and expanded to eight states this spring.
Since launch, 13,000 schools have joined the waitlist to get a varsity esports team through PlayVS, which represents 68 percent of the country. PlayVS says that just over 14,000 high schools in the United States have a football program, marking the idea of varsity esports as a relatively popular one.
With the upcoming fall Season for 2019, all 50 states will have access to the PlayVS platform, with 15 states competing for an actual State Championship in partnership with their state association. These states include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington D.C.
States that have not gotten an endorsement from their state association will still compete regionally for a PlayVS championship. PlayVS supports League of Legends, Rocket League and SMITE with plans to support other games in the future.
Not only does PlayVS offer high school students the chance to play organized esports, but it also gives colleges and esports orgs a recruitment tool to scope and scoop young talent.
But what about that funding? Well, Parnell says that the new round gives the company a war chest to not only hire aggressively — the company has gone from 18 to 41 employees in the last year — but also to consider mergers and acquisitions as a means of growth.
Perhaps most importantly, the company will use the funding to explore products outside of high school, with eyes squarely focused on the collegiate market. With esports still in its infancy, there is a huge opportunity to provide the infrastructure of these leagues early on, and PlayVS is looking to capture that.
It’s still early days for quantum computing, but we’re nonetheless seeing an interesting group of startups emerging that are helping the world take advantage of the new technology now. Aliro Technologies, a Harvard startup that has built a platform for developers to code more easily for quantum environments — “write once, run anywhere” is one of the startup’s mottos — is today coming out of stealth and announcing its first funding of $2.7 million to get it off the ground.
The seed round is being led Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation also from Crosslink Ventures and Samsung NEXT’s Q Fund, a fund the corporate investor launched last year dedicated specifically to emerging areas like quantum computing and AI.
Aliro is wading into the market at a key moment in the development of quantum computing.
While vendors continue to build new quantum hardware to be able to tackle the kinds of complex calculations that cannot be handled by current binary-based machines, for example around medicine discovery, or multi-variabled forecasting — just today IBM announced plans for a 53-qubit device — even so, it’s widely acknowledged that the computers that have been built so far face a number of critical problems that will hamper wide adoption.
The interesting development of recent times is the emergence of startups that are tackling these specific critical problems, dovetailing that progress with that of building the hardware itself. Take the fact that quantum machines so far have been too prone to error when used for extended amounts of time: last week, I wrote about a startup called Q-CTRL that has built firmware that sits on top of the machines to identify when errors are creeping in and provide fixes to stave off crashes.
The specific area that Aliro is addressing is the fact that quantum hardware is still very fragmented: each machine has its own proprietary language and operating techniques and sometimes even purpose for which it’s been optimised. It’s a landscape that is challenging for specialists to engage in, let alone the wider world of developers.
“We’re at the early stage of the hardware, where quantum computers have no standardisation, even those based on same technology have different qubits (the basic building block of quantum activity) and connectivity. It’s like digital computing in 1940s,” said CEO and chairman Jim Ricotta. (The company is co-founded by Harvard computational materials science professor Prineha Narang along with Michael Cubeddu and Will Finegan, who are actually still undergraduate students at the university.)
“Because it’s a different style of computing, software developers are not used to quantum circuits,” and engaging with them is “not the same as using procedural languages. There is a steep on-ramp from high-performance classical computing to quantum computing.”
While Aliro is coming out of stealth, it appears that the company is not being specific with details about how its platform actually works. But the basic idea is that Aliro’s platform will essentially be an engine that will let developers work in the languages that they know, and identify problems that they would like to solve; it will then assess the code and provide a channel for how to optimise that code and put it into quantum-ready language, and suggest the best machine to process the task.
The development points to an interesting way that we may well see quantum computing develop, at least in its early stages. Today, we have a handful of companies building and working on quantum computers, but there is still a question mark over whether these kinds of machines will ever be widely deployed, or if — like cloud computing — they will exist among a smaller amount of providers who will provide access to them on-demand, SaaS-style. Such a model would seem to fit with how much computing is sold today in the form of instances, and would open the door to large cloud names like Amazon, Google and Microsoft playing a big role in how this would be disseminated.
Such questions are still theoretical, of course, given some of the underlying problems that have yet to be fixed, but the march of progress seems inevitable, with forecasts predicting that quantum computing is likely to be a $2.2 billion industry by 2025, and if this is a route that is taken, the middlemen like Aliro could play an important role.
“I have been working with the Aliro team for the past year and could not be more excited about the opportunity to help them build a foundational company in Quantum Computing software, “ said David Aronoff, General Partner at Flybridge, in a statement. “Their innovative approach and unique combination of leading Quantum researchers and a world-class proven executive team, make Aliro a formidable player in this exciting new sector.
“At Samsung NEXT we are focused on what the world will look like in the future, helping to make that a reality,” said Ajay Singh, Samsung NEXT’s Q Fund, in a statement. “We were drawn to Prineha and her team by their impressive backgrounds and extent of research into quantum computing. We believe that Aliro’s unique software products will revolutionize the entire category, by speeding up the inflection point where quantum becomes as accessible as classical computing. This could have implications on anything from drug discovery, materials development or chemistry. Aliro’s ability to map quantum circuits to heterogeneous hardware in an efficient way will be truly transformative and we’re thrilled to be on this journey with them.”
