Month: September 2020

01 Sep 2020

Amazon brings Twitch’s livestreams to its Amazon Music app

Amazon is leveraging its investment in live-streaming site Twitch to expand its Amazon Music service. The company announced this morning Twitch’s livestreams will now be available in the Amazon Music app on iOS and Android, with the goal of allowing fans and artists to connect amid a pandemic where in-person concerts have been cancelled.

Since the COVID-19 health crisis has shut down live events, online platforms have stepped in to fill the void. Artists are connecting with and streaming to fans through social media and streaming platforms like Twitch, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram Live, and others.

Twitch, in particular, has increasingly catered to musicians and other creatives during the pandemic. The company earlier this year held a benefit, Stream Aid, which featured music, and has hosted a flood of other artists’ live streams in the months since. According to a report by StreamElements, Twitch grew 56% in hours watched in Q2 2020 compared with Q1, passing the 5 billion mark, due to the increase in online entertainment.

By July 2020, the “Music & Performing Arts” category on Twitch had grown 387% year-over-year to 17.6 million hours watched. Twitch has also signed artists Logic and Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda to exclusive Partnership deals, StreamElements noted.

Amazon is not alone in seeing potential in the live events market. Spotify is also developing a virtual events platform, expected to launch soon. And YouTube touts its concert footage and live performances as a reason to sign up for its YouTube Music Premium service.

With the Amazon Music partnership now live, fans will be able to begin interacting with artists across genres who are planning on live streaming to Twitch in the coming days. Some of these streams will be live music while others will be music-related content, like artist interviews or variety shows.

Upcoming livestreams include:

  • The Killers’ Brandon Flowers and Ronnie Vannucci Jr., who will join Amazon Music September 4th at 1PM ET to answer fan questions about their latest album, “Imploding the Mirage”
  • Soul singer and storyteller Nicole Atkins will host a variety series Wednesdays at 7PM ET with performances and interviews with friends and artists including Elle King, Cut Worms and Whitney
  • Amazon Music UK will stream the Heavy Music Awards 2020 live from the HMA’s London offices September 3, 2020 at 8:30pm BST / 3:30pm ET and feature performances from The Hunna, Holding Absence, Heart Of A Coward, Wargasm, Coldbones and HAWXX
  • Capital One City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage Anywhere will stream exclusive digital performances (Tuesday’s at 7PM EST) spanning Latin, World, Hip-Hop, Jazz and more for its weekly concert series.

Artists interested in streaming to the Amazon Music app will have to join Twitch, then connect their Twitch channel through the “Profile & Tools” section in Amazon Music for Artists. Their livesteams will then appear on their artist profile page in the Amazon Music app.

Through Twitch’s partnership with Bandsintown, artists can fast-track to Twitch Affiliate status, giving them access to monetization tools for their livesteams. Fans on Twitch can pay to subscribe to premium channels or leave virtual tips.

Despite the monetization capabilities of today’s livesteaming platforms, they’re not a replacement for live events for most artists, given the average rate for virtual concert ticket sales. According to data from virtual concert platform StageIt, reported by Billboard, fans were paying just $3.75, on average, for a 30-minute livestream in 2011. This has now grown to $16.50. (There are exceptions, like BTS, who pulled in a record $20 million for their virtual show, but this is not the norm.) In most cases, platforms helping helping musical artists weather the pandemic, but do not replace make up for all lost revenues.

01 Sep 2020

Zoom’s Q2 report details some of the most extraordinary growth I’ve ever seen

Many companies have posted the occasional big quarter. These outsized periods may come when a business sells part of itself, or, through some arcane non-cash financial hijinks, it posts impressive numbers that appear prodigious when compared to their regular operating results. (Like when Uber recorded huge profits in its March 31, 2018 quarter.)


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And then there’s Zoom, the cloud video comms company that went public in April, 2019. It just turned in a quarter so extraordinary that you might presume it was inflated, or otherwise somehow faux. But what makes Zoom’s Q2 earnings data so damn interesting and impressive is that it appears that the company has managed to just grow more than anyone expected or perhaps thought possible, in less time, while making more money than anticipated.

Re-reading the Zoom results this morning, I can confidently say that I haven’t ever read a more impressive earnings document. Zoom had a strong Q1, but it had a bonkers Q2.

Let’s dig into the numbers to understand what the world’s most impressive COVID-bump looks like.

A monster Q2

At the end of its Q1, Zoom told investors that it expected to generate revenue “between $495.0 million and $500.0 million” in Q2 2020 and “between $1.775 billion and $1.800 billion” for its full fiscal year, which is offset by one month from the calendar year.

Before its Q2 report, investors had expected a bit more, with average estimates for Q2 2020 revenue coming in at $500.5 million. Regarding its fiscal year, analysts expected the company to generate $1.81 billion in revenue.

01 Sep 2020

Fresh off $200M Series D, Gong acquires early stage startup Vayo

Gong announced a $200 million Series D investment just last month, and loaded with fresh cash, the company wasted no time taking advantage. Today, it announced it was buying early stage Isreali sales technology startup Vayo. The companies did not share terms of the deal, but Gong CEO Amit Bendov said the deal closed a couple of weeks ago.

The two companies match up quite well from a tech standpoint. While Gong searches unstructured data like emails and phone call transcripts and finds nuggets of data, Vaya looks at structured data, which is essentially the output of the Gong search process. What’s more, it handles large amounts of data at scale.

“Vayo helps find customer interactions at a large scale to identify trends like customers likely to churn or usage is going up, or your deals are starting to slow down — and they do this for structured data at scale,” Bendov told TechCrunch.

He said this ability to identify trends was really what attracted him to the company, even though it was still at an early stage of development. “It’s a perfect fit for Gong. We take unstructured data —  emails, audio calls video calls — and extract insights. Customers, especially with a large organization, don’t want to see individual interactions but high order insights […] and they’ve developed [a solution] to identify trends on large data volumes for customer interactions,” he said.

Vayo was founded in 2018 and raised $1.7 million in seed capital, according to Crunchbase. Joining forces with Gong gives them an opportunity to develop the technology inside a company that’s growing quickly and is extremely well capitalized having raised over $300 million in the last 18 months.

Avshi Vital, CEO at Vayo, who has joined Gong with his 4-fellow employees, gave a familiar argument for selling the company. “With Gong we found the perfect partner to realize this mission faster and maximize the impact of the technology we built given the scale of their customer base and growth potential,” he said.

The plan is to fold the Vayo tech into the Gong platform, a process that will take 3-6 months, according to Bendov.

01 Sep 2020

Bambuser raises $45M after shifting focus to live video shopping

Bambuser is a name that you may not have heard in a while, but the Stockholm-headquartered company is announcing today that it’s raised $45 million in new funding this year, with $34.5 million of that amount raised during the pandemic.

Bambuser’s history goes back more than a decade (the first TechCrunch coverage appeared in 2008). CEO Maryam Ghahremani told me that the founders’ idea — using smartphones to stream live video journalism — made them “very, very much ahead of their time.”

However, being ahead of your time isn’t always a good thing, and Ghahremani that the company has also struggled with having “too little capital” (although it publicly listed on Nasdaq First North in 2017) and also with turning its technology into a great product and a scalable business model.

So Ghahremani was brought on to change all that two years ago. She told me she soon saw an opportunity in the growth of live video shopping, particularly in China, with potential clients starting to ask whether Bambuser had any products for this. It didn’t at the time, but it quickly shifted focus and launched its first live video shopping products last fall.

“We didn’t plan for the pandemic to hit the world,” Gharemani said. “We started this because we believe that this is going to be the future of retail.”

At the same time, she suggested that the pandemic — and the resulting shutdowns and struggles of brick-and-mortar retail — have accelerated the transition, giving Bambuser’s business a big boost. The company’s offering has been used by brands including H&M, Motivi, Moda Operandi, Frame, LUISAVIAROMA and Showfields, and it says that in Q2, net sales were up 669% year-over-year.

Bambuser CEO Maryan Ghahremani

Bambuser CEO Maryan Ghahremani

While e-commerce and social media platforms are expanding their support in this area, Gharemani said brands are turning to Bambuser because they want to offer this live shopping experience while still owning the brand experience, the customer data and the transaction itself.

She also emphasized that Bambuser is focused on being a business-to-business product, rather than a consumer shopping platform.

“We are trying to create not another Instagram or Facebook or marketplace, because we believe other [companies] are already doing that,” she said. “We’re not even interested in going into that battle. What we’re trying to do, what we need to do is help the larger brands.”

Participants in the new funding include Consensus Asset Management, Handelsbanken, Harmony Partners, Lancelot Asset Management, Tenth Avenue Holdings and TIN Fonder.

Among other things, Gharemani said she’d hoped to create a physical presence in the United States earlier this year, but those plans were delayed by the pandemic. Still, she’s now planning to open a New York office this quarter. And in the meantime, the U.S. has already become the company’s largest market.

 

01 Sep 2020

PicnicHealth raises $25 million for its patient health record management service

PicnicHealth, the startup that’s looking to give patients a way to manage their care in one place and pharmaceutical companies access to patient records for real world data, has just raised $25 million in financing to grow its business.

Founded in 2016 by a former international development worker and Crohn’s Disease patient, Noga Leviner, PicnicHealth’s initial pitch was around giving patients the ability to manage and coordinate their own care. It’s something that Leviner, a person with a chronic condition, knows can be complicated.

“Being a patient in the healthcare system in the US sucks,” said Leviner. “You think someone is going to be in charge and then, as it turns out, nobody’s in charge and it’s up to you to keep everybody in the loop.”

The pitch from PicnicHealth is that patients can use the service to collect and manage their medical records and then share their medical history to contribute to research. The data, the company says, is de-identified and then made available to external researchers.

The service is free for patients who are involved in clinical studies, and anyone who isn’t participating in the study pays a fee for the records management service, according to Leviner.

So far, there are tens of thousands of patients using the PicnicHealth platform.

For Felicis Ventures managing director Sundeep Peechu, a new director on the PicnicHealth board following his firm’s lead investment into the company, the opportunity Leviner’s company presents is in putting the patient first when it comes to data management.

“It is probably the first patient data company that has patient consent,” Peechu said. “This is a unique healthcare data company, which is going to the patients and asking for their consent and using that data in an advantageous way.”

Other companies in the data management space for healthcare have focused on making sure that healthcare providers are all looped in to provide coordinated care, but they don’t bring those tools into patient’s hands, according to the company.

Those are businesses like TrueVault and Aptible, who focus on delivering secure information to medical personnel rather than to the patient.

The access that pharmaceutical companies get when they work with PicnicHealth means that they’re able to use deep data sets to create longitudinal studies of patients over time. That allows those companies to look for commonalities between patient cases that they otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

For patients, it means the difference between a potential early diagnosis that may enable physicians to initiate treatment before a disease manifests itself, Peechu said.

To date, PicnicHealth has raised nearly $40 million from investors including YCombinator, Amplify Partners and Felicis Ventures with participation from notable investors in a seed round that included: Social+Captial, Great Oaks, Slow Ventures, YC partner Paul Buchheit, Scott Marlette, Sam Lessin, Joe Greenstein, Rashmi Sinha, Jameson Hsu, Kenny Van Zant, Rishi Kacker, Ramji Srinivasan, Eric Evans and Stanford’s StartX Fund.

01 Sep 2020

Now providing healthcare access to nearly 1.5 million kids, Hazel Health raises $33.5 million

Hazel Health was founded five years ago to provide telemedicine services to children in public schools. Launched by a former Apple software engineer and serial entrepreneur, Nick Woods, and named after one of Woods’ children, Hazel Health has grown to work with school districts responsible for 1.5 million children, and has raised $33.5 million to expand its footprint even further across the United States.

The company’s services are even more sorely needed as children are forced into distance learning classrooms by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Denied the network of services that in-person schooling provides for basic healthcare and nutrition, remote services like Hazel Health become, in some cases the only window into children’s health that some communities have.

When the first lockdown orders came through, the company began working with school districts to develop remote telemedicine services distributed via applications to continue serving the children it provided basic telemedicine services for.

So far, ninety percent of eligible families have enrolled in the company’s telemedicine program and 70 percent have engaged with the company’s services. These numbers are even more significant when viewed through the lens of the nearly forty percent of the company’s users who indicate they don’t have a primary care physician.

“We built this incredibly powerful model that partnered with schools and brought access to healthcare to families,” said Hazel chief executive, Josh Golomb. “At the schools we had an iPad on a stand. You hit a button and in a few minutes you would be talking to a doctor.”

Hazel Health executive team, from left: Dr. Rob Darzynkiewicz (Chief Medical Officer), Nick Woods (Chief Tech Officer, cofounder), Raquel Antunez (VP Education Markets, cofounder), and Josh Golomb (CEO). Image Credit: Hazel Health

After the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S., the company’s Hazel at Home service continues to provide care to kids.

“As soon as covid happened there was a lot of recognition by districts that we have to have a solution around student health and wellness,” said Golomb. “Pre-COVID we went from 300,000 in our network of districts to now, when we just passed 1.5 million. [The] rate of engagement went down but our overall expansion has increased dramatically.”

With those kinds of numbers it was no wonder that Owl Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures came in to back the company. Additional financing came from Uprising, the UCSF Foundation Investment Company and Centene Corp.

And the demand just keeps increasing, according to Golomb.

“Our pipeline has exploded,” he said. “A lot of the states have made expansion for telehealth and increasing access a priority. We were going to have eight or nine states that we were going to prioritize.. That’s priority number one… another big chunk is really making sure that we can invest in expanding the product to support that volume of states and finding ways to support our families and district partners.”

01 Sep 2020

Founded by an Impossible Foods, and Google data scientist, Climax Foods raises $7.5 million to tackle the cheesiest market

Oliver Zahn began his professional career studying the stars. The founder of Climax Foods, a startup that’s using data science to replace animal proteins with plant-based substitutes, spent years at the University of California at Berkeley with his eyes fixed firmly toward the heavens before taking up with Pat Brown and Impossible Foods as the company’s leading data scientist.

That experience focused Zahn on more terrestrial concerns and undoubtedly led the founder down the path to launching Climax Foods.

Now with $7.5 million in financing from investors including At One Ventures, founded by the GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi, along with Manta Ray Ventures, S2G Ventures, Valor Siren Ventures, Prelude Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Index Ventures, Luminous Ventures, Canaccord Genuity Group, Carrot Capital and Global Founders Capital, Zahn is ready to take on the future of food.

The pitch to investors is similar to the one that Josh Tetrick made at Just Food (the company formerly known as Hampton Creek). It’s elegant in its simplicity — scan the natural world for proteins that have the same or better characteristics than those that are currently made by animals and make products with them.

By looking at what makes animal products so delicious, the company will find their plant-based analogs and start producing.

As with most things that depend on data science, the taxonomy is the key. So Climax Foods is building machine learning algorithms that will process and cross-reference molecular structures to find the best fit. It’s starting with cheese.

While, the replacing the humble wheel of cheese may not seem like a worthy adversary for an astrophysicist, companies have already raised hundreds of millions to defeat the big dairy industry.

“We are at a pivotal time where industrialization enabled explosive population growth and consumption of animal products. Today, more than 90% of all mammalian animals and more than 70% of all birds on the planet exist for the sole purpose of metabolizing plants and being turned into food,” said Zahn in a statement. “This industry is complex and wasteful, creating as much climate change as all modes of transportation combined, and using more than a third of the earth’s water and usable land. By speeding up food science innovation, Climax Foods is able to convert plants into equally craveable foods without the environmental impact.”

Joining Zahn on this quest to conquer the cheese industrial complex and its milk-made monstrousness are a few seasoned industry veterans including co-founder, Caroline Love, the company’s chief operating officer and former sales and operations executive from JUST foods, and Pavel Aronov, a Stanford-educated chemist who previously worked at the chemicals giant thermo-Fisher.

“Climax Foods is tackling the same opportunity to change the market and the food system, but they are doing it with an entirely novel technological approach. They are using data science to produce a new category of foods that will not merely compete with, but out-compete, animal products in terms of taste, nutritional density, and price,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, one of the largest investors in the plant protein space and Chief Investment Officer of S2G Ventures. “The machine intelligence approach Climax Foods is pioneering is critical for harnessing the vast number of ways raw ingredients and natural processes can be used to create the ultimate digital recipes.”

Krishnan would know. He’s an investor in Beyond Meat, the most successful public offering of a plant-based protein replacement company.

01 Sep 2020

LA-based The Skills is launching a MasterClass for athletes featuring Michael Phelps, Maria Sharapova and more

A new Los Angeles startup is betting that enough consumers are interested in paying between $69 and $149 per year to receive lessons in life and sports from celebrity athletes like Maria Sharapova and Shaun White to make a billion-dollar business.

That’s the gamble that Maveron, Global Founders Capital, and 8VC are taking on The Skills, which launches today.

Founded by E. Omer Atesman, a former renewable energy entrepreneur whose last company Clean Energy Experts was acquired by SunRun for an undisclosed amount, The Skills aims to bring coaching lessons from life and sports to subscribers in a MasterClass style format.

With a roster that includes Sharapova, White, the volleyball star, Kerri Walsh Jennings; All-Pro football player Larry Fitzgerald; and Michael Phelps, the former competitive swimmer who won 28 medals in his Olympic Games competition; The Skills has managed to ink athletes that were among the or at the top of the competitive field in their respective sports.

The idea that consumers are willing to pay for aphorisms, homilies, and expert advice from the best practitioners of a particular craft propelled MasterClass to an $800 million valuation earlier this year, so The Skills’ pitch is not without precedent.

“There is so much research into the value of sports participation at an individual level. Sports is linked to improved mental health, enhanced social skills, better physical health and success in other aspects of life,” said Omer Atesman, founder and chief executive officer of The Skills, in a statement. “We launched The Skills because millions of people around the world want to learn from superstar athletes, but access is often limited to rare, offline opportunities. We want to share our athletes and their knowledge and skills they’ve learned from life experiences both on and off the field.”

The company’s course catalog contains over 20 sessions ranging in length from roughly two to five minutes and combines observations on life skills with lessons on technique. The more universal (or generic) advice covered by the sessions will include building confidence, leadership, mental preparation and self care, according to a statement from the company.

01 Sep 2020

Sarcos raises $40 million to bring its Guardian XO exoskeleton to market

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven a significant catalyst for robotics investments, as companies look to invest in automation. Utah-based Sarcos Robotics bucks the trend a bit, however, as the purveyor of a technology designed to augment an existing human workforce, rather than replacing a significant chunk through automation.

Today the robotic exoskeleton creator announced a $40 million Series C raise, led by Rotor Capital, with a number of existing investors plunking down additional funding. The oversubscribed round joins $56.1 million already raised by the company, which was spun out of the massive defense contractor Raytheon back in 2015.

Founded in the early 1980s, Sacros has also been a significant recipient of DARPA grants over the years. Back in January at CES, Delta announced that it would be partnering with Sarcos to outfit its ground crew with exoskeletons designed to help them lift up to 200 pounds without fatigue.

Sarcos says this round will go toward bringing its Guardian XO into full commercial production. The battery-powered system is scheduled for release at some point next year. The company has already opened the suit up to pre-orders. Sarcos is one of a number of companies producing exoskeletons for industrial use, a list that also includes Rewalk, Ekso, SuitX and automotive makers like Honda.

Image Credits: Sarcos Robotics 

As noted in the release, ABI research is projecting the market for these devices to exceed $11.5 billion over the next decade.

01 Sep 2020

Dialpad acquires video conferencing service Highfive

VoIP provider Dialpad, the company behind the popular video conferencing service UberConference, today announced that it has acquired Highfive, a well-funded video conferencing startup that focuses on providing businesses with conference room solutions. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price, but Highfive raised $77.4 million from the likes of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Dimension Data ahead of today’s acquisition.

Led by its CEO Craig Walker, who previously sold GrandCentral to Google and then built Google Voice, Dialpad is clearly aiming to double down on video. While UberConference does have built-in video conferencing features already, the service is mostly known for its calling features. In addition to its conference call solutions and VoiP platform for business users, Dialpad also offers a contact center solution.

“When we did UberConference eight years ago, we were like, ‘look, 80% of, of conferences are just people on the phone. So let’s make phone, audio conferencing better,” Walker said. “And then, obviously, over time time that started changing and then COVID totally accelerated it. So with that accelerating, we realized we really want to double down on video — and not with a mindset of ‘hey, video as a standalone thing is going to be a big investment,’ but video, as part of business communications, has to be excellent and has to be part of a Unified-Communications-as-a Service (UCaaS) system.”

Image Credits: Highfive

Highfive, which was incidentally also launched by a group of ex-Google engineers, always focused exclusively on video. Both companies, Walker noted, were also born in the cloud, but served somewhat different customers until now.

“What’s truly exciting about this combination is the joint heritage — both companies are truly born in the cloud, running on hyperscale, global infrastructures,” Highfive CEO Joe Manuele told me. “Dialpad‘s conferencing, UCaaS and CCaaS offerings were only ever built on public cloud infrastructures, as was Highfive’s. While video is an important part of Diaplpad’s current portfolio, we bring the ability to connect rooms, interop with other video services with our Meeting Connector technology and legacy device support with our Room Connector. Beyond the product fit, the shared industry vision that you can meet all of your communications needs over a hyperscale public cloud environment is what I’m personally most excited about.”

Manuele noted that the company’s board had considered other options, including a new round of fundraising, but in the end, the company decided that video conferencing services now essentially have become part of the larger UCaaS stack.

Image Credits: Dialpad

“While we have developed a scalable, born in the cloud video solution set, it was becoming harder to compete with competitors who were offering inferior ‘free’ video services as part of a UCaaS stack,” he said. “Even the industry leader Zoom had to move to IP Telephony and we see that trend to be irrefutable.”

That’s a thesis Dialpad’s Walker obviously agrees with. “Whether I’m on a phone call, whether it’s my business phone system, or I need to do a video call, or I need to do a conference call, or if I need to go screenshare — if I need to do any of these things, it should all just kind of be one [tool],” he said.

One area Highfive really exceeded in was making its service work seamlessly. It did that by tightly integrating its hardware and software stack, but also by reimagining some of the overall user experience around its room systems.

Walker admitted that nobody is really using room systems right now, but he believes that as people go back to their offices over time, video and remote meetings will potentially become even more important as most companies will adopt some kind of hybrid model for their employees.

He believes this acquisition will also give Dialpad a strong position in the overall market and that this allows Dialpad to offer a complete solution to its customers.

Highfive’s brand may ultimately go away, but customers who have already bought into the company’s systems won’t see any interruptions in their service.