Year: 2019

Get ready for a British Trump: The UK will shortly have a new prime minister after the Conservative Party membership overwhelmingly voted to elect Boris Johnson as their new party leader, passing over his sole rival for the post, Jeremy Hunt.

Johnson received 92,135 votes, a full 45,497 more than Hunt.

He replaces Theresa May who announced she would step down in May after failing to achieve backing from parliament for her EU withdrawal deal — the second PM to be topped by Brexit in just under three years.

Whether Johnson can outlast even May’s brief tenure very much remains to be seen.

The former journalist and ex major of London has made a political success story of clowning around in public, cracking often self-depreciating jokes which encourage a perception of joviality and good humor, while simultaneously pressing his personal ambition behind the scenes and ruthlessly gunning for the highest office in the land — which was his motivation for switching to back Brexit in the first place.

The clown mask enables the political manoeuvering, as it were.

How the usual Johnson ‘circus’ will translate into firm policy positions is something of an open question at this stage, though early indications suggest he’s intending an infrastructure spending spree — to feed the popularity contest that has, after all, swept him to power.

Albeit how any such public spending bonanza will be funded is anyone’s guess at this stage. One of his few leadership pledges was an income tax cut for high earners — which would rather shrink the Treasury’s coffers by billions than expand it…

He has also implied he might withhold the UK’s exit payment to the EU — a multi-billion sum that’s intended to cover the country’s existing commitments as it leaves the bloc.

But if you’re simultaneously hoping to ink a trade deal with the very same neighbors you’re denying payment to that would seem a rather self-defeating and short-term strategy, both at home and abroad.

Giving his Conservative leadership acceptance speech this afternoon there was little of policy substance on show from Johnson. In his usual showman style, he preferred to stroke sitting Tory egos with a confection of positive projections and feel-good sentiments — principally about ‘getting brexit done’ (though nothing on how he will actually get it done).

He also dropped a few enthusiastic words vis-a-vis infrastructure, education and broadband — going longest on the latter by claiming that “fantastic full fiber broadband” would be “sprouting in every household”, before falling back on the safe and fuzzy ground of non-specific cheerleading of party and country.

On the surface the fiber broadband pledge looks like a rinse and repeat of an existing government policy — announced in last year’s digital strategy — to put all UK households in reach of fibre to the premise (FTTP) by 2033.

Though the government had not committed to paying the estimated £30BN to fund a full rollout, focusing on regulatory tweaks to encourage the market to cover the majority of the country, targeting public cash at the tricky last fifth.

But penning his regular column in the Telegraph newspaper last month, Johnson dubbed the 2033 target “laughably unambitious“, writing that: “If we want to unite our country and our society, we should commit now to delivering full fibre to every home in the land not in the mid 2030s — but in five years at the outside.”

So a Boris Johnson-led Tory government’s full fibre target is, seemingly, being brought forward to 2025.

If he really intends for the public purse to bankroll universal FTTP within a five year time-scale it would certainly be transformative — with many rural regions still lagging urban Britain’s high speed access to Internet services, as a result of the business case for a rapid upgrade of these digital slow-lanes not stacking up.

Johnson is also right to identify the digital divide as increasingly problematic given the onward march of commercial technology. (And, indeed, increasingly problematic as more government services get pushed online — which risks widening the inequality gap, though he didn’t really dwell on that.)

However there’s no doubt that pressing fast forward on universal FTTP will entail a much larger bill than the government had budgeted for.

Last year’s Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review suggested an additional £3BN to £5BN in public funding would be needed to support commercial investment in the final ~10% of areas that would otherwise be overlooked, per the 2033 timeline. It’s anyone’s guess how much more public money will be needed to accelerate the whole broadband project to meet a universal access goal almost a decade quicker, per Johnson’s plan.

Though, as noted above, a full rollout has been costed at £30BN.

Assuming that ceiling wouldn’t need to be raised as a result of increased deployment velocity, the cost of Johnson’s faster fiber ambition could therefore scale spending on this particular infrastructure project 6x more than current government plans. Hence the pressing question of where the public funds will come from?

How much the Johnson push for ‘rural first’ fibre might cost UK consumers is another matter.

He talks in his newspaper column about “stimulating the private sector to get it done”. And if that stimulation includes government agreeing to industry demands to lengthen or even hyper-extend market review periods in order to encourage the private sector to get digging and fast, then it could result in UK consumers being on the hook twice: First by shelling out to lay the fiber in the first place, and then getting price-gouged to use the fibre-powered Internet services they’ve helped pay for.

Of course ‘fiber for all’ makes a great soundbite for PM Johnson to make a play for hearts and minds.

But, as with everything soon set to cross his desk, the devil is in the detail. And, well, clowns aren’t renowned for their grasp of those kinds of things.

Arrcus has a bold notion to try and take on the biggest names in networking by building a better networking management system. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Existing investors General Catalyst and Clear Ventures also participated. The company previously raised a seed and Series A totaling $19 million, bringing the total raised to date to $49 million, according to numbers provided by the company.

Founder and CEO Devesh Garg says the company wanted to create a product that would transform the networking industry, which has traditionally been controlled by a few companies. “The idea basically is to give you the best-in-class [networking] software with the most flexible consumption model at the lowest overall total cost of ownership. So you really as an end customer have the choice to choose best-in-class solutions,” Garg told TechCrunch.

This involves building a networking operating system called ArcOS to run the networking environment. For now, that means working with manufacturers of white box solutions and offering some combination of hardware and software, depending on what the customer requires. Garg says that players at the top of the market like Cisco, Arista and Juniper tend to keep their technical specifications to themselves, making it impossible to integrate ArcOS with those companies at this time, but he sees room for a company like Arrcus.

“Fundamentally, this is a very large marketplace that’s controlled by two or three incumbents, And when you have lack of competition you get all of the traditional bad behavior that comes along with that including muted innovation, rigidity in terms of the solutions that are provided, and these legacy procurement models, where there’s not much flexibility with artificially high pricing,” he explained.

The company hopes to fundamentally change the current system with its solutions, taking advantage of unbranded hardware which offers a similar experience, but can run the Arrcus software. “Think of them as white box manufacturers of switches and routers. Oftentimes, they come from Taiwan, where they’re unbranded, but it’s effectively the same components that are used in the same systems that are used by the [incumbents],” he said.

The approach seems to be working as the company has grown to 50 employees since it launched in 2016. Garg says that expects to double that number in the next 6-9 months with the new funding. Currently the company has double-digit paying customers and over 20 in various stages of proofs of concepts, he said.

After years — decades even — of promises, the robotics industry is finally beginning to realize its potential. Nowhere is this phenomenon clearer than in the world of warehouse automation. Freedom Robotics, a new Bay Area-based startup, came out of stealth this week with plans to help ease the barrier of entry for companies to control and monitor large and small scale robotics fleets alike.

Today, the company announced that it has raised a sizable $6.6 million seed round led by Initialized Capital. The round also finds a handful of high profile investors joining, including, notably, Toyota AI Ventures and Pagerduty founder Andrew Miklas. They join founders of Twitch, Lookout Mobile Security and Xobni.

Freedom’s offering is designed for out-of-the-box operation, with businesses able to customize the offering using its API. The offering minimizes the technical expertise require to implement its offering, promising that users can get started, “with just one line of code.”

Co-founder and CEO Josh Wilson tells TechCrunch Freedom Robotics was founded to help companies get their robots to market, adding he sees the company as an AWS-type product for robotics. Freedom Robotics is targeting robotic teams within large companies and likewise, with small companies building robotic solutions. Instead of building the infrastructure around robotic products, Freedom Robotics offers a simple, turn-key solution that addresses items most robotic teams face.

“In 20 years 50% of all jobs worldwide, which represents $2.2 Trillion in wages within the US alone, will be replaced by robotics and automation,” the company notes in its announcement. “Our Funding round enables us to build the team and technology that will be the core infrastructure to power the next generation of robotics companies.”

Interested parties can sign up for early access on Freedom’s site.

Mumbai-based Haptik, which operates a conversational AI platform, has already won several high profile clients in India. Now the five-year-old firm, with newly found significant capital in the bank, is attempting to replicate its success in international markets.

On Tuesday, Haptik announced it has acquired Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup that develops chatbots, to serve customers in North America. The acquisition is part of Haptik’s broader strategy to both expand its technology expertise and team and business overseas, Aakrit Vaish, cofounder and CEO of Haptik, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Founded in 2017, Convrg has made a name for itself by developing several popular chatbots and voice products. Its clients today include Reddit, The GRAMMYs, Aveda, Shopify, Sephora, and Proactiv. The startup had raised only a “small seed round” prior to today’s announcement, Vaish said, declining to reveal any financial details.

Convrg recently hired Timothy Carey, an industry veteran, who now serves as Haptik’s General Manager for the region. Convrg’s cofounders — Audrey Wu, Liz Snower and Amit Gupta — will report to Carey, who until recently held a similar position at IPSoft, another AI-driven firm.

Haptik, which sold majority stake to telecom operator Reliance Jio in a $100 million deal earlier this year, currently offers a chatbot platform. Many players including Coca Cola, Oyo, Samsung, Tata Group, and KFC use Haptik’s chatbots in their customer support services.

The firm has about 90% of its clients in India today, something it intends to change in the coming quarters. “60% of all software is bought in the U.S., so for us that market is critically important,” he said.

“We have done some business in the U.S. in the past, but now we really want to focus on expanding there,” he said. “For that, we need team and dedicated operation there. You can’t expand in the U.S. sitting in India, or on a plane.”

Vaish is already in talks with a handful of other startups and is open to more acquisitions, he said.

Other than that, the firm is currently exploring and developing voice bots as it expands its offerings. Voice bots would help it find more clients, such as those who handle customer services through phones, for instance.

When asked about what he thinks of major giants such as Google and Amazon also expanding into these fields, Vaish said these companies are largely making solutions for users — and not businesses. Besides, the chatbot space is so nascent currently that any effort from any giant helps educate the market, he said.

Since co-founding Heap, CEO Matin Movassate has been saying that he wants to take on the analytics incumbents. Today, he’s got more money to fund that challenge, with the announcement that Heap has raised $55 million in Series C funding.

Movassate (pictured above) previously worked as a product manager at Facebook, and I interviewed him after the startup’s Series B, he recalled the circuitous process normally required to collect and analyze user data. In contrast, Heap automatically collects data on user activity — the goal is to capture literally everything — and makes it available in a self-serve way, with no additional code required to answer new queries.

The company says it now has more than 6,000 customers, including Twilio, AppNexus, Harry’s, WeWork and Microsoft.

With this new funding, Heap has raised a total of $95.2 million. The plan is to fund international growth, as well to expand the product, engineering and go-to-market teams.

The Series C was led by NewView Capital, with participation from new DTCP, Maverick Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Alliance Bernstein Private Credit Investors and Sharespost) and existing investors (NEA, Menlo Ventures, Initialized Capital, and Pear VC). NewView founder and managing partner Ravi Viswanathan is joining the startup’s board of directors.

“Heap offers an innovative approach to automating a company’s analytics, enabling a variety of teams within an organization to obtain the data they need to make educated and, ultimately, smarter decisions,” Viswanathan said in a statement. “We are excited to team up with Heap, as they continue to develop their cutting edge software, expand their analytics automation offerings and help serve their growing numbers of customers.”

Congress has begun investigations into the power wielded by tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google – from their effect on the news media, to their impact on retail markets, to their handling of data. Unusual for these divided times, the concerns are bipartisan, with members of both parties suggesting that new legislation and regulation may be needed.

A number of big challenges are hurting consumers, including “serious breaches of privacy” and “loss of control of data,” Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, told CNBC.

This discussion of what Cicilline has called a “monopoly moment” is healthy and overdue. However, while Congress examines whether we should trust the tech titans with so much of our data and other assets, it would be great to see more urgency on another question: Can we trust the government itself with our data?

Federal and state government databases hold a treasure trove of sensitive, personal information that is used to collect taxes, administer benefits, register vehicles, or run elections. Not to mention the 434.2 million phone records on Americans that the National Security Agency collected last year, according to a government report.

Hackers, naturally, know that government sites are a rich target, and some of the largest cybersecurity breaches of recent years have taken place in the public sector.

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 24: A Department of Justice employee put up a poster of the seven indicted hackers prior to a news conference for announcing a law enforcement action March 24, 2016 in Washington, DC. A grand jury in the Southern District of New York has indicted seven Iranian who were employed by two Iran-based computer companies that performed work on behalf of the Iranian Government, on computer hacking charges related to their involvement in an extensive campaign of over 176 days of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In two separate incidents in June 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management discovered that attackers had stolen the Social Security numbers and other confidential information of 25.7 million current and former federal employees and contractors. The hackers’ haul even included 5.6 million fingerprints of job applicants who has undergone background investigations.

In 2016, the IRS said that 700,000 Social Security numbers were taken in a hack the year before.

In 2018, a “SamSam” ransomware attack shut down the city of Atlanta’s online systems, forcing the cancellation of court proceedings and preventing the collection of water bills and traffic fines. Last month, a ransomware assault has affected services in Baltimore and cost the city at least $18.2 million in lost or delayed revenue and direct restoration costs.

And then there are the foreign attempts to interfere with elections. U.S. officials have testified that Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21 states in 2016, though no actual votes are believed to have been affected.

Since free and fair elections are a core tenet of our democracy, voter registration pages and election systems are the most sensitive areas of state and municipal web infrastructure. Election databases also contain personally identifiable information such as names, ages, and addresses. As my company’s experience with various state governments show, these systems are constantly under attack.

In fact, we’ve seen up to two-thirds of state election agencies’ website traffic consist of malicious bots searching for data to steal or scrape. Even more disturbingly, we have also seen spikes in automated traffic attacking the websites as registration deadlines approach. These spikes slow down the performance of back-end databases, compromising the agencies’ overall ability to effectively conduct elections.

This evidence shows that the existential threat to government data is every bit as important as the security and privacy concerns driving the congressional investigation of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. But is enough being done?

Voting booths in polling place. Image courtesy Getty Images

More than three years after the devastating attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, a report by the General Accounting Office in November found that the agency had not implemented 29 of the 80 recommendations the government’s in-house auditor had made to shore up its cyber defenses.

In Atlanta, an audit determined that leading up to the ransomware attack, the city had ignored repeated warnings about flaws in its security posture, including a failure to address 1,500 to 2,000 severe vulnerabilities that the city’s Information Management and the Office of Information Security had identified.

Where control of data is concerned, it’s vital that the federal and state governments look themselves in the mirror just as hard as Congress is now assessing the tech giants. A few specific recommendations:

• Government agencies at all levels should conduct an exhaustive review of their cyber security capabilities and hold leaders personally responsible for ensuring they are up to snuff for constantly evolving threats.

• Beyond investigating the practices of a few companies, Congress also should focus energy on a long-overdue update of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 33-year-old law that makes it unlawful to break into a computer to access or alter information and, astoundingly, still serves as a legal guidepost in today’s new landscape of bots, malware, ransomware and other malicious attacks.

• The Trump administration should make sure to follow through with its May 2 executive order on cyber defense that promised to “grow the cybersecurity capability of the United States Government, increase integration of the federal cybersecurity workforce, and strengthen the skills of federal information technology and cybersecurity practitioners.” It also called for a “cybersecurity rotational assignment program” within the federal government that “will serve as a mechanism for knowledge transfer and a development program for cybersecurity practitioners.”

An important discussion is happening on Capitol Hill about the influence of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google in our lives and society. It would be hypocritical, however, to lose sight of how much of our data sits in government computer systems and that it also faces serious threat.

Facebook’s messaging app for under 13s, Messenger Kids — which launched two years ago pledging a “private” chat space for kids to talk with contacts specifically approved by their parents — has run into an embarrassing safety issue.

The Verge obtained messages sent by Facebook to an unknown number of parents of users of the app informing them the company had found what it couches as “a technical error” which allowed a friend of a child to create a group chat with them in the app which invited one or more of the second child’s parent-approved friends — i.e. without those secondary contacts having been approved by the parent of the first child.

Facebook did not make a public disclosure of the safety issue. We’ve reached out to the company with questions.

It earlier confirmed the bug to the Verge, telling it: “We recently notified some parents of Messenger Kids account users about a technical error that we detected affecting a small number of group chats. We turned off the affected chats and provided parents with additional resources on Messenger Kids and online safety.”

The issue appears to have arisen as a result of how Messenger Kids’ permissions are applied in group chat scenarios — where the multi-user chats apparently override the system of required parental approval for contacts who kids are chatting with one on one.

But given the app’s support for group messaging it’s pretty incredible that Facebook engineers failed to robustly enforce an additional layer of checks for friends of friends to avoid unapproved users (who could include adults) from being able to connect and chat with children.

The Verge reports that “thousands” of children were left in chats with unauthorized users as a result of the flaw.

Despite its long history of playing fast and loose with user privacy, at the launch of Messenger Kids in 2017 the then head of Facebook Messenger, David Marcus, was quick to throw shade at other apps kids might use to chat — saying: “In other apps, they can contact anyone they want or be contacted by anyone.”

Turns out Facebook’s Messenger Kids has also allowed unapproved users into chatrooms it claimed as safe spaces for kids, saying too that it had developed the app in “lockstep” with the FTC.

We’ve reached out to the FTC to ask if it will be investigating the safety breach.

Friends’ data has been something of a recurring privacy blackhole for Facebook — enabling, for example, the misuse of millions of users’ personal information without their knowledge or consent as a result of the expansive permissions Facebook wrapped around it, when the now defunct political data company, Cambridge Analytica, paid a developer to harvest Facebook data to build psychographic profiles of US voters.

The company is reportedly on the verge of being issued with a $5BN penalty by the FTC related to an investigation of whether it breached earlier privacy commitments made to the regulator.

Various data protection laws govern apps that process children’s data, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa) in the US and the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. But while there are potential privacy issues here with the Messenger Kids flaw, given children’s data may have been shared with unauthorized third parties as a result of the “error”, the main issue of concern for parents is likely the safety risk of their children being exposed to people they have not authorized in an unsupervised video chat environment.

On that issue current laws have less of a support framework to offer.

Although — in Europe — rising concern about a range of risks and harms kids can face when going online has led the UK government to seek to regulate the area.

recently published white paper sets out its plan to regulate a broad range of online harms, including proposing a mandatory duty of care on platforms to take reasonable steps to protect users from a range of harms, such as child sexual exploitation.

Customer reviews play a key role in helping people decide what to buy on consumer-focused marketplaces like Amazon or app stores, and the same tendency exists in the B2B world, where nearly half a trillion dollars is spent annually on software and IT purchases. TrustRadius, one of the startups capitalising on the latter trend with total feedback sessions today standing at close to 190,000 reviews, has now picked up a Series C of $12.5 million led by Next Coast Ventures with existing investors Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures also participating.

The funding, which brings the total raised by TrustRadius to $25 million (modest compared to some of its competitors) will be used to build more partnerships and use cases for its reviews, as well as continue expanding that total number of users providing feedback.

In addition to its main site — which goes up against a huge number of other online software comparison services like TrustPilot, G2 Crowd, Owler, and many others — TrustRadius is already working with vendors like LogMeIn, Tibco and more (including a number of huge IT companies that have asked not to be named).

TrustRadius mainly works with them on two tracks: to source a wider range of reviews from their existing customer bases to improve their profiles on the site; and then to help them use those reviews in their own marketing materials. Partnerships like these form the core of TrustRadius’s business model: people posting reviews or using the site to read them access it for free.

Vinay Bhagat, founder and CEO of TrustRadius, believes that his company’s mission — to help IT decision makers vet software by tapping into feedback from other IT buyers — has found particular relevance in the current market.

“I think that gravity is on our side,” he said in an interview. “If you think about how the tech industry is evolving and getting things done, IT decisions are getting decentralized and moving out of the CIO’s office. Millennials are ageing into positions of authority, and it means that the way people had previously bought software — by way of salespeople or on the basis of analyst reports — are changing. There is pent-up demand to hear the roar of peers and that’s where we come in.”

User-generated reviews have come under a lot of criticism in recent times. Regulators have been going after companies for not being vigilant enough about policing their platforms for “fake” reviews, either planted to big up a product, or by rivals to knock it down, or coming from people who are being paid to put in a good word. The argument has been that the marketplaces hosting those reviews are still bringing in eyeballs and product conversions based on that feedback, so they are less concerned with the corruption even if it longer term can likely sour consumers on the trustworthiness of the whole platform.

That belief is not wholly true, of course: Amazon for one has recently been making a huge effort to improve trust, by going after dodgy reviewers and setting up systems to halt the trafficking of counterfeit goods.

And Bhagat argued to me that it doesn’t hold for TrustRadius, either. The company has a focused enough mandate — B2B software purchasing — within a crowded enough field, that losing trust by posting blindly positive reviews would get it nowhere fast.

At the same time, he noted that the company has held a firm line with its customers on making sure that the “truth” about a product is made clear even if it’s not completely rosy, in the hopes that they can use that to work on improvements, and also provide more balanced feed back at the least from existing customers in order to give a more complete picture. (It also, like other reviews sites, makes people who provide feedback do so using professional credentials like work emails and LinkedIn profiles.)

That line has so far carried it into relationships with a number of software companies, which are using reviews as a complement to their own sales teams, and the papers and analysis published by analysts like Gartner and Ovum and Forester, to reach people who are weighing up different options for their IT solutions.

“TrustRadius has become an integral part of today’s economic cycle”, said Bill Wagner, CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “Software buyers today need detailed reviews to make sure that the product works for a business professional like themselves. TrustRadius provides that in a transparent way, so buyers can make confident decisions, even about enterprise-grade software.”

The recent swing in the digital world towards data protection and people getting increasingly aware of how their own personal details are used in ways they never intended, has presented an interesting challenge for the world of online services. Most of us don’t like getting marketing and will generally opt out of any “yes, I consent to getting updates from XYZ and its partners!” boxes — if we happen to spot them amid the dark patterning of the net.

TrustRadius and companies like it have an opportunity through that, though: by targeting IT buyers who have to make complicated purchasing decisions and most likely more than one, and in a way that ensures each purchase works with the rest of an existing tech stack, they represent one of the rare cases of where a user might actually want to hear more.

Indeed, one of the company’s plans longer term is to continue developing how it can work with its users through that IT lifecycle by providing suggestions of software based on previous software purchases and also what that user’s feedback has been around a past purchase.

“From day one we have been deal with complex purchasing decisions,” Bhagat said. “Buying technology that will be used to run your business is not the same as buying an app that you use casually. It can be make or break for your company.”

Jukedeck, a pioneering AI startup out of the UK which could interpret video and automatically set music to it, has reportedly been acquired by hot social media startup TikTok. Jukedeck was previously a TechCrunch London 2015 Battlefield winner.

Jukedeck had raised £2.5M, largely from Cambridge Innovation Capital, but also included investors Parkwalk Advisors, Backed VC and Playfair Capital who were the most recent investors.

Founder and CEO Ed Newton-Rex changed his LinkedIn profile recently to say he was now working for TikTok’s parent company Bytedance as director of its AI Lab since April this year, according to industry news outlet Musically.

Newton-Rex famously rapped his pitch:

We have reached out to Newton-Rex for confirmation, however, several of his colleagues have also now updated their LinkedIn profiles to reveal that they also all now work for Bytedance.

This includes David Trevelyan and Pierre Chanquion (previously senior software engineers, music production R&D at Jukedeck; now senior software engineers at Bytedance’s AI Lab); Katerina Kosta and Gabriele Medeot (formerly machine learning researchers at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researchers at Bytedance); and Marco Selvi (formerly senior software engineer and machine learning researcher at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researcher at Bytedance).

Jukedeck’s site is now offline and its homepage replaced by a message saying “We can’t tell you more just yet, but we’re looking forward to continuing to fuel creativity using musical AI!” – indicating that Jukedeck’s technology for adding music to videos is likely to be used by Bytedance inside TikTok.

Newton-Rex has often talked about putting the power of music composition into the hands of the masses, and TikTok clearly has scale.

The social music app has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower.

Genie AI, a legal tech startup and Entrepreneur First alumni, has raised £2 million in funding. The round is a combination of equity and a U.K. government grant, and will be used to continue development of the company’s “intelligent” contract editor for law firms and an upcoming product targeting GDPR compliance.

Leading the £1.2 million equity investment is Connect Ventures, with participation from a number of angel investors, including former President of the Supreme Court Lord Neuberger and Professor Jun Wang at UCL. The £800,000 grant was awarded by UK Research and Innovation.

“Lawyers always tell us ‘I know I’ve done something like that before,’ but in large firms it’s a real pain to dig past drafting out of emails, document management systems and the minds of senior lawyers,” says Genie AI co-founder and CEO Rafie Faruq. “SuperDrafter solves this by automatically curating relevant knowledge from around the firm, and recommending clauses to lawyers as they draft, in real time”.

The broader idea is that SuperDrafter can enable lawyers to benefit from the “collective intelligence” — both past and present — of an entire law firm. It does this by machine reading thousands of documents confidentially and then analyses variations of the same clause to deuce market standards and allow lawyers to negotiate the best deal for their clients.

In addition, Genie AI claims that SuperDrafter does not require a human to tag or train the required data. Instead, the algorithm “learns by itself”.

“When drafting documents, lawyers typically start from a template, a document from a negotiating party, or an “automated” first draft using a questionnaire. Next, in order to tailor or negotiate the contract as it goes back and forth, lawyers typically have to search for past wording or tweak certain clauses and there are always thousands of variations of the same clause,” explains Faruq.

“[Using SuperDrafter], lawyers can now do this in one click, by simply loading in a document and viewing recommended clauses for each part of the contract. This gives lawyers the collective intelligence of the firm at their fingertips”.

The upshot, says Faruq, is that Genie AI’s solution makes contract drafting not just significantly faster but also much more robust. “More interestingly, our clients are increasingly using SuperDrafter not just for efficiency, but to win the best deal in every matter,” he adds. “Contracts specify commercial relationships, and we can get you the best terms, predicted from hundreds of thousands of past examples”.

The intelligent contract editor is being piloted with law firms Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons and Withers, where it is being used to draw up lengthy contracts within banking and finance. “We believe the complexity lends itself to AI-assisted drafting, where machines can augment lawyers with the collective intelligence of millions of past examples,” says Faruq.

Meanwhile, Genie AI is already working on a second product. Dubbed “Anonymiser”, the software can be used SuperDrafter or standalone and with will automatically redact confidential information from contracts so than companies can comply with GDPR regulation and preserve client confidentiality.