Month: September 2020

Zwift, a 350-person, Long Beach, Calif.-based online fitness platform that immerses cyclists and runners in 3D generated worlds, just raised a hefty $450 million in funding led by the investment firm KKR in exchange for a minority stake in its business.

Permira and Specialized Bicycle’s venture capital fund, Zone 5 Ventures, also joined the round alongside earlier backers True, Highland Europe, Novator and Causeway Media.

Zwift has now raised $620 million altogether and is valued at north of $1 billion.

Why such a big round? Right now, the company just makes an app, albeit a popular one.

Since its 2015 founding, 2.5 million people have signed up to enter a world that, as Outside magazine once described it, is “part social-media platform, part personal trainer, part computer game.” That particular combination makes Zwift’s app appealing to both recreational riders and pros looking to train no matter the conditions outside.

The company declined to share its active subscriber numbers with us — Zwift charges $15 per month for its service — but it seemingly has a loyal base of users. For example, 117,000 of them competed in a virtual version of the Tour de France that Zwift hosted in July after it was chosen by the official race organizer of the real tour as its partner on the event.

Which leads us back to this giant round and what it will be used for. Today, in order to use the app, Zwift’s biking adherents need to buy their own smart trainers, which can cost anywhere from $300 to $700 and are made by brands like Elite and Wahoo. Meanwhile, runners use Zwift’s app with their own treadmills.

Now, Zwift is jumping headfirst into the hardware business itself. Though a spokesman for the company said it can’t discuss any particulars — “It takes time to develop hardware properly, and COVID has placed increased pressure on production” — it is hoping to bring its first product to market “as soon as possible.”

He added that the hardware will make Zwift a “more immersive and seamless experience for users.”

Either way, the direction isn’t a surprising one for the company, and we don’t say that merely because Specialized participated in this round as a strategic backer. Cofounder and CEO Eric Min has told us in the past that the company hoped to produce its own trainers some day.

Given the runaway success of the in-home fitness company Peloton, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a treadmill follow, or even a different product entirely. Said the Zwift spokesman, “In the future, it’s possible that we could bring in other disciplines or a more gamified experience.” (It will have expert advice in this area if it does, given that Swift just brought aboard Ilkka Paananen, the co-founder and CEO of Finnish gaming company Supercell, as an investor and board member.)

In the meantime, the company tells us not to expect the kind of classes that have proven so successful for Peloton, tempting as it may be to draw parallels.

While Zwift prides itself on users’ ability to organize group rides and runs and workouts, classes, says its spokesman, are “not in the offing.”

Gravity Sketch, the London-based product design and collaboration platform that utilises virtual reality, has raised $3.7 million in funding.

The seed round was led by Kindred Capital, with participation from Point Nine Capital and previous investor Forward Partners. It brings the total amount raised by Gravity Sketch to $5.4 million. In addition, the startup previously received grant funding from InnovationRCA and the James Dyson Foundation.

Founded in 2014 by Oluwaseyi Sosanya, Daniela Paredes and Daniel Thomas, Gravity Sketch wants to change the way physical products are designed, developed, and brought to market. It offers 3D design software for cross-disciplinary teams so that they can “create, collaborate, and review” in a much more frictionless way, including via virtual reality in which collaboration can take place in 3D and real-time. The idea is to help speed up development cycles, especially involving globally-distributed and increasingly remote teams.

“Collaboration is increasingly important as time frames are shortened and consumers request products sooner, with more features, and produced more sustainably,” says Oluwaseyi Sosanya, CEO and co-founder of Gravity Sketch. “There is also a surge in multinational companies growing globally distributed design and engineering teams, who need to stay connected in order to deliver with the same accuracy they once did being in the same location. Small-to-mid-sized design firms who service large companies must also adopt this approach in order to win business — they often gain work from international clients that are unable to meet face to face as frequently as their domestic clients, and are also held to extremely high standards of delivery”.

In addition to pressure brought about by faster product cycles and remote working, the product design process itself isn’t always optimum, involving multiple teams with different disciplines and software tools and a jump from 2D to 3D. “When we talk about designing a physical product, we’re imagining this object in 3D,” says Sosanya. “However, for many years we have had to bring out that idea through 2D mediums, or through rough physical models. All physical products start with 2D sketches, which are then painstakingly translated to digital 3D models and then produced through standard manufacturing processes”.

To mitigate this, Gravity Sketch brings the designer into the digital 3D space from the initial sketch phase, which gives them greater control over the initial idea and how it develops. The full design team can then join the same VR space to get a full understanding of the design from the designer’s perspective before investing time and resources.

“The designer can more accurately get all stakeholders on the same page at the ideation phase,” Sosanya explains. “With VR we can leverage the fact that everyone thinks in 3D and offer a solution that sidesteps the 2D visualisation step which is present in every design process, so users can think in 3D and create in 3D. It’s sort of like a Zoom meeting in 3D, helping everyone understand the yet to be materialised product from their own vantage point”.

Furthermore, content created in Gravity Sketch can further the design pipeline, meaning there is no need to create different views of a design or have to create a 3D model in another tool. Gravity Sketch designs can be exported to almost all of the CAD tools on the market with a claimed 100% accuracy.

It seems to be resonating, too, with some of the world’s leading companies, such as Ford, Nissan, and Reebok, using Gravity Sketch, alongside 60 universities and over 50,000 creative professionals worldwide.

Meanwhile, Gravity Sketch says the new funding will enable the company to scale up the platform to become “entirely hardware-agnostic”. It currently works with a range of virtual reality hardware, and is in beta for iPad, mobile, and desktop.

Over 110 million users in China have signed up for 5G plans, announced president of the China Academy for Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a think tank under the telecoms watchdog Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, at an industry event on Wednesday.

That makes China the largest 5G market in terms of user size, the think tank president said. The milestone came in less than a year after China’s top carriers rolled out  5G plans for consumers, and just over a year after the authority began issuing 5G licenses for commercial use.

The number is still a small fraction of the overall subscription. In June, China’s three state-run carriers collectively commanded some 1.6 billion mobile subscribers (suggesting China’s 1.4 billion population owned over one mobile device per capita).

China’s 5G ambition is a multi-pronged effort among the government, network carriers, telecoms equipment makers, device makers, and software developers. Policymakers need to show consumers visible improvement on network speed, and as such the carriers have been aggressively setting up 5G base stations across the country — more than 460,000 towers by July.

China was adding an average of 15,000 new 5G base stations every week, said an official in July. The government has plans to raise that number to 600,000 by the end of 2020, covering all prefectural-level cities nationwide. A clear winner in China’s 5G push is Huawei, which makes both 5G devices and the infrastructure that undergirds the next-gen network.

In the meantime, Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi and their rivals are rushing to launch 5G compatible handsets. China has sold over 93 million units of 5G mobile phones this year so far, according to recent data released by CAICT. 5G phones accounted for 60% of total shipments in August.

China’s rapid shift to 5G is also driving the need for new hardware parts like integrated circuits. The country produced over 100 billion units of ICs during the first half of 2020, representing a 16.4% year-over-year gain, said an industry official in July, adding that much of the demand came from 5G-related projects.

It’s always a pleasure to chat with Homage co-founder and chief executive Gillian Tee because of her nuanced take on how technology can help elderly and other vulnerable people.  According to the United Nations, people 65-years-old and over is the fastest-growing age group worldwide. At the same time, there is also an acute shortage of caregivers in many countries, complicated by high rates of burnout in the profession.

“It’s absolutely one of the most important social topics and global issues,” Tee said during her Disrupt session (the video is embedded at the bottom of this article).

Launched in Singapore four years ago, Homage’s platform uses a matchmaking engine to help families find the best caregivers, while its telehealth platform provides services like online medical consultations and screenings. It has since expanded in Malaysia and yesterday announced a new strategic investment from Infocom, one of the largest healthcare technology companies in Japan. The partnership will enable Homage to accelerate the Asia-Pacific expansion of its caregiving and telehealth platform.

Before launching Homage, Tee was co-founder of New York-based Rocketrip. A ticket-booking platform created to reduce work travel-related costs for companies, Rocketrip attracted investors like Google Ventures, Y Combinator and Bessemer Ventures and raised more than $30 million. But in 2016, Tee decided to return to Singapore, her home country, after living abroad for about 15 years. In her Disrupt session, Tee said this was partly to be closer to her mother, and because she felt that her startup experience could also be applied to Southeast Asia.

Tee knew that she wanted to launch another company, but she didn’t decide to tackle the caregiving space immediately. That idea materialized when several of her close relatives were diagnosed chronic conditions that needed specialized care.

“We didn’t know how to cope or how even to start thinking what was required, and that was when I realized, wow, I needed to get myself schooled in many ways,” Tee said.

Many families around the world are dealing with the same challenges as their populations age and social dynamics shift so family members who traditionally would have been carers for relatives are unable to do so because they have moved away or need to work.

Families often rely on word-of-mouth or agencies to find caregivers, a complicated, time-intensive and emotionally difficult process. Homage uses matching algorithms to make it easier. One of the most unique things about the platform is how much detail it goes into. Providers are not only screened based on their certifications and the kind of care they provide (for example, long-term care, respite care, physical therapy or rehabilitation), but specific skills.

For example, many patients need mobility assistance, so Homage assesses what kind of transfers they are able to safely perform. Then its matching technology decides which caregivers are best suited for a patient. By making the process more efficient, Homage also lowers costs, making its services accessible to more people while increasing pay rates for providers.

This taps into another one of Homage’s goals: expanding the caregiving pool in its markets and retaining talent. Other ways it addresses the issues is by placing caregivers on its platform into the right jobs, organizing continuing education programs and making sure they are not over-scheduled and have flexibility. For example, some caregivers on the platform have long-term contracts, while others work with Homage clients only a few days a week.

A holistic approach to “age-tech”

In June, Homage launched its telehealth service. Called Homage Health, the platform has been in development for a while, but its launch was accelerated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote consultations fit into the “high-touch,” or in-person, care side of the company’s business because many patients need regular screenings or consultations with doctors and specialists. For patients who have limited mobility or are immunocompromised, this makes it easier for them to fit routine visits into their schedules.

Hardware, including wearable sensors, also show promise to identify any potential health issues, like heart conditions, before they require acute care, but one challenge is making them easy for patients to integrate into their daily routines or remember to wear, Tee said.

Overall, Homage’s mission is to create a holistic platform that covers many caregiving needs. Its new partnership with strategic investor Infocom will help bring that forward because the company, which Tee said Homage has been talking to for several years, works with about 13,000 facilities in Japan, including senior residences and hospitals. Infocom develops software for a wide range of verticals, including drug, hospital and medical record management, and medical imaging.

Infocom also runs its own caregiving platform, and its partnership with Homage will enable the two companies to collaborate and reach more patients. Japan has one of the largest populations of elderly people in the world. Tee said at minimum, half a million caregivers need to be mobilized within the next five to ten years in Japan in order to meet demand.

“We need to start building infrastructure to enable people to be able to access the kind of care services that they need, and so we really align in terms of that mission with Infocom,” said Tee. “They also have a platform that engages caregivers to apply for jobs in Japan and they see the Homage model as being particularly applicable because it’s curated as well.”

Crista Galli Ventures, an early-stage healthtech fund in Europe, is officially launching today. The firm offers “patient capital” — with only a single LP (the Danish family office IPQ Capital) — and promises to provide portfolio companies with deep healthcare expertise and the extra runway needed to get over regulatory and efficacy hurdles and to the next stage.

Companies already backed by Crista Galli Ventures (CGV) include Skin Analytics, which is using AI to improve diagnosis of skin cancer; Quibim, which is applying AI to the field of radiomics; and Ampersand Health, which is developing digital therapies for patients with inflammatory conditions such as Crohns disease, to name just three out of fifteen.

Led by consultant radiologist Dr. Fiona Pathiraja, and with offices in London and Copenhagen, CGV operates as an “evergreen” fund, meaning it doesn’t follow traditional five-year VC fundraising cycles. Initially, the VC firm has $65 million in deployable — so called — patient capital.

“We like to invest across the broad areas of deep tech, digital health and personalised healthcare,” Pathiraja tells TechCrunch. “We prefer technology solutions that make the lives of patients easier and better and, in some cases, that help support people’s health before they become patients. Part of our remit is also for tech solutions within the healthcare industry that improve efficiency and productivity of providers”.

Alongside the main fund, CGV is also unveiling Crista Galli LABS, which, in part, aims to greater diversity in healthtech by backing founders from underrepresented backgrounds at the pre-seed stage. In addition to pre-seed investment, startups accepted into the program have access to mentoring and coaching from the CGV team.

“When I was in hospital, there were people from all backgrounds there and this was the norm… [but] this really wasn’t my experience when I started investing,” explains Pathiraja. “I am struck by how homogenous both founder teams and investment teams can be. Whilst our core investment focus is seed and Series A, Crista Galli LABS invests smaller ticket sizes in outstanding pre-seed founders and ensures that at least 50% of these are from under-represented backgrounds. This means those who are female, BAME, LGBT to start with”.

Twitter has flagged a post from Indian politician T. Raja Singh for violating its policy days after TechCrunch asked the social giant about the three-year-old questionable tweet.

In a video tweet, Singh urged India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and others citizens in the country to move Rohingya Muslim immigrants, including those “who supported terrorism,” out of the nation as he feared that they would become a “headache for the nation” in the future. “#Deport RohingyaMuslims,” he tweeted.

Singh, who belongs to India’s ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party and has made hateful speeches in public appearances in the past, also urged his followers to make his tweet “viral” on the platform so that every “Hindu and [other] Indians” see it. He did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s a similar message that Singh had also posted on Facebook, which ultimately led the Menlo Park-headquartered firm to permanently ban him from the platform.

Facebook has received some of the harshest backlash it has seen to date in the country in part for its initial inaction on Singh’s posts. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a top Facebook executive in India had decided to not take action on Singh’s posts as she feared it could hurt the company’s business prospects in the country.

In a statement to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson said that Singh’s tweet was “actioned” for violating its hateful conduct policy.

“Twitter has zero-tolerance policies in place to address threats of violence, abuse and harassment, and hateful conduct. If we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action,” the spokesperson added.

A September 13 tweet, which Singh has retweeted from his account, shows a warning message from Twitter that says his account was locked for the aforementioned tweet. Singh has posted several tweets since September 13, suggesting the matter has been resolved. The aforementioned tweet still shows it is in violation of Twitter rules.

The slow reactions from Twitter and Facebook, both of which count India as an important market, illustrates lapses in their content moderation efforts in the world’s second largest market.

Twitter, which had about 70 million monthly active users on its official app in India last month (according to mobile insights firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch), has been particularly slow — or unresponsive — in the country in taking actions despite reports from users.

In January, India’s ruling party was accused of running a deceptive Twitter campaign to gain support for a controversial law — nothing new for Twitter in India — but the company never responded to questions. A month before that, snowfall in Kashmir, a highly sensitive region that hasn’t had internet connection for months, began trending on Twitter in the U.S. It mysteriously disappeared after many journalists questioned how it made it to the list.

A Twitter spokesperson in India pointed TechCrunch to an FAQ article at the time that explained how Trending Topics work. Nothing in the FAQ article addressed the question.

Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston, appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt today, said that COVID has accelerated a shift to distributed work that we have been talking about for some time, and these new ways of working will not simply go away when the pandemic is over.

“When you think more broadly about the effects of the shift to distributed work, it will be felt well beyond when we go back to the office. So we’ve gone through a one way door. This is maybe one of the biggest changes to knowledge work since that term was invented in 1959,” Houston told TechCrunch Editor-In-Chief Matthew Panzarino.

That change has prompted Dropbox to completely rethink the product set over the last six months, as the company has watched the way people work change in such a dramatic way. He said even though Dropbox is a cloud service, no SaaS tool in his view was purpose-built for this new way of working and we have to reevaluate what work means in this new context.

“Back in March we started thinking about this, and how [the rapid shift to distributed work] just kind of happened. It wasn’t really designed. What if you did design it? How would you design this experience to be really great? And so starting in March we reoriented our whole product roadmap around distributed work,” he said.

He also broadly hinted that the fruits of that redesign are coming down the pike. “We’ll have a lot more to share about our upcoming launches in the future,” he said.

Houston said that his company has adjusted well to working from home, but when they had to shut down the office, he was in the same boat as every other CEO when it came to running his company during a pandemic. Nobody had a blueprint on what to do.

“When it first happened, I mean there’s no playbook for running a company during a global pandemic so you have to start with making sure you’re taking care of your customers, taking care of your employees, I mean there’s so many people whose lives have been turned upside down in so many ways,” he said.

But as he checked in on the customers, he saw them asking for new workflows and ways of working, and he recognized there could be an opportunity to design tools to meet these needs.

“I mean this transition was about as abrupt and dramatic and unplanned as you can possibly imagine, and being able to kind of shape it and be intentional is a huge opportunity,” Houston said.

Houston debuted Dropbox in 2008 at the precursor to TechCrunch Disrupt, then called the TechCrunch 50. He mentioned that the Wi-Fi went out during his demo, proving the hazards of live demos, but offered words of encouragement to this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participants.

Although his is a public company on a $1.8 billion run rate, he went through all the stages of a startup, getting funding and eventually going public, and even today as a mature public company, Dropbox still evolving and changing as it adapts to changing requirements in the marketplace.

Apple unveils new hardware and new subscriptions, Spotify adds virtual event listings and Opendoor is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for September 15, 2020.

The big story: Apple announces new iPads and Apple Watches

Apple had a big hardware event today. And while you should check out our full roundup if you want to see all the announcements, I’ll do my best to cover the big ones in a couple of paragraphs.

First up: The new Apple Watch Series 6, priced at $399, with Apple’s S6 silicon chip and a blood oxygen sensor. The company is also expanding the Watch lineup with a more affordable Apple Watch SE, which will cost $279.

Plus, there’s a new iPad Air with Touch ID built into the power button, the previously rumored Apple One subscription bundle (which starts at $14.99 per month), a new fitness subscription and a September 16 launch date for iOS 14 — in other words, tomorrow!

The tech giants

Spotify adds virtual event listings to its app — TechCrunch previously detailed Spotify’s plans in this area, but today the company made the news official.

Twitter debuts US election hub to help people navigate voting in 2020 — That tab will serve as Twitter’s central source for hand-picked election news in English and Spanish, debate live streams, state-specific resources and candidate information.

Waze gets smarter with trip suggestions, lane guidance, traffic notifications and more — Among the changes, Waze is gaining personalized recommendations based on a user’s trip history.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Opendoor to go public by way of Chamath Palihapitiya SPAC — The transaction comes during a wave of market interest in special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, often called blank-check companies.

Kleiner prints gold with Desktop Metal, netting a roughly 10x return — Yes, the startup’s technology is designed to “print metal.”

The Chainsmokers just closed their debut venture fund, Mantis, with $35 million — The musical duo has some major-league backers for their fund, including Mark Cuban, Keith Rabois, Jim Coulter and Ron Conway.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

If you care about remote employees, start tracking their performance — Remote work has been thrust upon us, but are business leaders ready for it?

What’s ahead in IPO land for JFrog, Snowflake, Sumo Logic and Unity — Alex Wilhelm reminds us that some losses are very bad and others are pretty OK.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

CBS All Access to rebrand to Paramount+, expand internationally in 2021 — The name change is designed to better reflect the expanded content lineup that has joined the service following the Viacom-CBS merger in 2019.

Watch the first official trailer for The Mandalorian Season 2, premiering October 30 on Disney+ — Baby Yoda time!

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Freelance marketplace Fiverr launched a new service today designed to help teams at larger companies manage their work with freelancers.

CEO Micha Kaufman told me via email that Fiverr had already begun working with larger clients, but that Fiverr Business is better-designed to meet their needs.

“Organizations require tools to manage their team accounts, defining projects, assigning budgets, tracking progress and collaborating internally,” Kaufman wrote. “Fiverr Business provides all of that and much more, including exclusive access to Fiverr’s personal executive assistants which are always available to Fiverr Business customers to help with administrative account tasks, general project management, talent matching, and more.”

He also suggested that with the pandemic forcing companies to adopt remote work and placing pressure on their bottom lines, many of them are increasingly turning to freelancers, and he claimed, “2020 marks the beginning of a decade where businesses will invest and learn how to truly integrate freelancers into their workflows.”

Fiverr Group Product Manager Meidad Hinkis walked me through the new service, showing me how users can create projects, assign team members and set freelance budgets, then actually hire freelancers, as well as offering internal and external feedback on the work that comes in.

He also noted there’s a special pool of curated freelancers available through Fiverr Business, and like Kaufman, emphasized that customers will also have access to assistants to help them find freelancers and manage projects. (On the freelancer side, payments and the rest of the experience should be pretty similar.)

On top of the freelancer fees, Fiverr Business will cost $149 per year for teams of up to 50 users, and Hinkis said the company is offering the first year for free.

“We so believe in product and the direction that we want people to get real value before they decide,” he said.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Messenger introduced new rules around message forwarding to limit the spread of misinformation on its platform. Speaking today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, Facebook Messenger VP Stan Chudnovsky offered more detail about how Facebook views its role in fighting the spread of misinformation and other harmful content across its messaging platform, while still balancing the idea that Messenger is meant to be a platform for private and, at times, encrypted conversations (aka “secret” messages).

Chudnovsky explained that Facebook’s goal is to make Messenger feel like the digital equivalent of having a private conversation between friends and family in the living room. But the company also acknowledged that with the rise of digital tools and new mediums, there are things that Facebook needs to be cognizant of, when it comes to how those tools can be abused.

“Messenger is obviously a private means of communicating. And we want to make sure it is private. This is a very important priority for us,” Chudnovsky started. But when users began forwarding messages at scale, Messenger is then no longer about having a private conversation. It becomes a tool for one-to-many information sharing, he explained.

“This is…more like a public broadcast,” he said.

Facebook had first announced last year that it was “adding friction” to message forwarding for Messenger users in Sri Lanka, so people could only share a particular message a certain number of times. The limit was set to five people or groups at the time. Those same rules have now expanded across the Messenger platform, with the same forwarding limit of five people or groups.

The new limits, the exec continued, aim to stop this spamming behavior. “Certain pieces of information cannot be forwarded too many times…that’s something that we think is really going to help in stopping the spread of the misinformation, especially in the times that we are in right now,” he added.

Chudnovsky also noted that because of how Messenger is connected to Facebook, when false information gets flagged by Facebook’s partnered fact checkers, that same warning about the information’s inaccuracy can then be inserted into any Messenger conversations, to warn users who may have been sent the misleading or otherwise harmful content.

“That doesn’t violate privacy at all because it all comes through the same big pipelines,” he pointed out.’

Facebook’s website that details how its fact-checking program works doesn’t yet include a mention of Messenger, only Facebook and Instagram.

One thing Facebook won’t consider is putting an end to link-sharing entirely, Chudnovsky said.

“I think those things are core to the internet,” Chudnovsky said of link-sharing and forwarding. “[Completely banning] the ability for people to exchange information on the internet defeats the purpose of [the] internet itself,” he said.