Year: 2020

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

If you just read the headlines, you’d be excused for thinking that venture capital investment into financial-technology companies is at an all-time high.

Big deals this year like Plaid’s $5.3 billion dollar exit to Visa, Galileo’s $1.2 billion sale to SoFi, along with CreditKarma’s $7.1 billion deal with Intuit made for a tidy start to 2020. But despite the later-stages of fintech-focused startups seeing healthy amounts of liquidity, aggregate venture capital activity in the historically well-funded sector was light in the first quarter of 2020.

According to a new Q1 2020 report covering venture data from CB Insights, VC dollars invested in the sector fell to levels not seen since 2017, while venture deal volume in fintech fell to 2016 levels. There are any number of reasons for this pullback that you can fill in, including COVID-19 and its resulting economic impacts. But what’s even more interesting is where the money and deals did and did not go inside of the various fintech categories.

Indeed, fintech has become so complicated as a startup grouping, it’s nearly as diffuse as discussing “SaaS” companies as a cohort. Of course, fintech is a product focus while SaaS is a business model (there are fintechs that sell SaaS, to be clear), but the general point holds.

Let’s dig into the top-line data to better understand the fintech funding landscape in Q1 (TechCrunch recently spoke to VCs on their expectations for the sector today and in the future). After the high-level stuff, we’ll dig into a few notes concerning sub-sectors of particular interest, including wealth management and insurtech.

Fintech’s Q1 venture scorecard

As the healthcare industry moves to value-based care, physician practices and health networks need to shift the things they bill for. Now it’s about maxing out patient “care” rather than the number of procedures physicians can perform.

In this move to a more high-touch, rapid communication world where doctors need to take (and document) every step to ensure that their patients stay on their medication, come in for their routine check-ups and receive follow ups on their initial visits, a service like Stellar Health which provides a checklist for practitioners looks really attractive to investors.

Indeed, the company is announcing a $10 million investment led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from previous investors Primary Venture Partners.

The two-year-old company did not say in a statement when the round closed, but it has been expanding significantly without the infusion of additional capital. It already is selling services in networks across 11 states. The new money will take the company’s operations to more states around the country and double the size of its team, according to a statement. By the end of 2020, Stellar Health expects to have customers managing care for at least 100,000 patients through its platform, according to a statement. 

“Stellar Health has the potential to transform healthcare by increasing the number of providers who successfully adopt value-based care models,” said Sri Chandrasekar, Partner at Point72 Ventures. “They have developed a sophisticated and intuitive platform to drive VBC in the U.S. and we are excited to help them build on that momentum.”

POCO, a brand that spun out of Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi earlier this year, today launched the POCO F2 Pro smartphone as it kickstarts its new journey as an independent firm.

The POCO F2 Pro, like its two-year-old predecessor Pocophone F1 smartphone, punches above its price class. It features an all-screen 6.67-inch FHD+ AMOLED display (with 2400 × 1080 screen resolution), in-screen fingerprint scanner, support for 5G, quad-core rear camera setup, and a pop-up front camera that quietly tucks away when not in use. It also features a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The smartphone, which comes in two variants: one with 6GB of RAM and 128GB internal storage that is priced at €499 (roughly $540), and the other that features 8GB of RAM and 256GB internal storage that costs €599 (roughly $650). Both the variants run Android 10 and are going on sale globally starting Tuesday through Gearbest and Aliexpress e-commerce sites. The company said it will begin selling the phone on Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, Poco.net, and others in the coming weeks.

The dual-SIM card supported smartphone is powered by Qualcomm’s flagship octa-core Snapdragon 865 processor coupled with Adreno 650GPU. It has what it claims to be the largest vapor chamber to support LiquidCool, a technology that keeps the device cool even when high-end processor intensive operations such as games are being played.

On the camera front, the POCO F2 Pro features a 64MP Sony IMX686 sensor, which serves as the primary camera, with 13MP ultra wide-angle lens, a 5MP macro and one 2MP depth sensor. The pop-up camera, that serves as the selfie sensor, is a 20MP lens.

The POCO F2 Pro, which comes in Neon Blue, Electric Purple, Cyber Grey, Phantom White, houses a 4,700mAh battery with support for fast charging and ships with a 33W charger in the box.

More to follow…

 

 

 

 

 

With a large part of the working world doing jobs from home when possible these days, the focus right now is on how best to recreate the atmosphere of an office virtually, and how to replicate online essential work that used to be done in person. Today, LinkedIn announced a couple of big new feature updates that point to how it’s trying to play a part in both of these: it’s launching a new Polls feature for users to canvas opinions and get feedback; and it’s launching a new “LinkedIn Virtual Events” tool that lets people create and broadcast video events via its platform.

Despite now being owned by Microsoft, interestingly it doesn’t seem that the Virtual Events service taps into Teams or Skype, Microsoft’s two other big video products that it has been pushing hard at a time when use of video streaming for work, education and play is going through the roof.

The polls feature — you can see an example of one in the picture below, or respond to that specific poll here — is a quick-fire and low-bar way of asking a question and encouraging engagement: LinkedIn says that a poll takes only about 30 seconds to put together, and responding doesn’t require thinking of something to write, but gives the respondent more of a ‘voice’ than he or she would get just by providing a “like” or other reaction.

But as with some of the other social features that LinkedIn has implemented over the years, its timing has not been quite right. With polls, you might say it’s been frustratingly late… or you might say it left the party too early.

The feature was first spotted by developer and app digger Jane Manchun Wong a couple of weeks ago, but it comes years after Twitter and Facebook have had polls in place on their platforms. I’d say it’s taken LinkedIn years to catch up, but actually it had polls in place years ago, yet chose to sunset the feature, back in 2014.

You could argue that LinkedIn miscalled the direction that social would go with engagement, or that it took too long to resuscitate the experience, or that the novelty of the concept that now worn off. Or you might say that LinkedIn has picked just the right time to bring it back, at a time when people are spending more time online than ever and are looking for more ways of varying the experience and interacting.

Two important distinctions as you can see above, however, are that you are polling a very specific audience of people in your professional circle, and those people can both respond to the poll but also include comments and reactions. Both of these set the feature as it works on LinkedIn apart from the others and should give it some… engagement.

The polls feature is getting rolled out (again) starting today.

The LinkedIn Virtual Events feature, meanwhile, falls into a similar placement as polls: it’s a way of getting people to engage more on LinkedIn, it taps into trends that are huge outside of the platform — in this case, videoconferencing — and it’s something that is coming surprisingly late to LinkedIn, given its existing product assets.

But is also potentially going to prove very popular because it’s filling a very specific need.

LinkedIn Virtual Events is a merger of two products that LinkedIn launched last year, a live video broadcasting tool called LinkedIn Live, and its efforts to foster a sideline in offline, in person networking with LinkedIn Events. The idea here is that while physical events have been put on pause in the current climate — many cities have made group activities illegal in an attempt to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus — you can continue to use LinkedIn Events to plan them, but now carry them out over the Live platform. 

Given how huge the conferencing industry has become, I am guessing that we will be seeing a lot of attempts at recreating something of those events in a virtual, online context. LinkedIn’s take on the challenge — via Virtual Events — could therefore become a strong contender to host these.

When LinkedIn first launched Events I did ask the company whether it planned to expand them online using live, and indeed that did seem to be the plan. LinkedIn now says that it “accelerated” its product roadmap — unsurprising, given the current market — to merge the two products for targeted audiences.

That’s why we accelerated our product roadmap to bring you a tighter integration between LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live, turning these two products into a new virtual events solution that enables you to stay connected to your communities and meet your customers wherever they are. This new offering is designed to help you strengthen relationships with more targeted audiences.

This is not a simple integration, I should point out: LinkedIn is working with third-party broadcasting partners — the initial list includes Restream, Wirecast, Streamyard and Socialive — to raise the level of production quality, which will be essential especially if you are asking people to pay for events, and if you have any hope of replicating some of the networking other features that are cornerstones of conferencing and other in-person events.

It’s also building on what has been a successful product so far for LinkedIn: the company says that Live has 23X more comments per post and 6X more reactions per post than simple native video.

UpKeep, a mobile-first platform for maintenance and operations collaboration, has today announced the close of a $36 million Series B financing round. The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, Battery Ventures, Y Combinator, Mucker Capital and Fundersclub.

UpKeep was founded by Ryan Chan. Chan worked at Trisep Corporation, a chemical manufacturing company, before founding UpKeep and saw first-hand how plant maintenance was handled. Despite the fact that the plant had purchased software for facilities maintenance and operations, most of the data was written down on pen and paper before being input into the system because that software was desktop only.

The idea for UpKeep was born.

UpKeep meets maintenance workers where they are, which could be just about anywhere.

With any maintenance job, from changing a lightbulb in an office building to repairing a complicated piece of machinery on the floor of a manufacturing plant, there are usually three parties involved: the requester, the facilities manager, and the technician.

Before UpKeep, the requester would either send an email to the facilities manager or perhaps use some other software to let them know of the problem. The facilities manager would prioritize the various requests of the day and send out technicians to resolve them.

Technicians have to log plenty of information when they’re out on the job, but this usually involved writing this info down on paper and then returning to a desk to input the data into the system.

With UpKeep, the requester can use the app itself to notify the facilities manager of problems, or send an email that flows directly into the UpKeep system. Facilities managers use UpKeep to prioritize and assign issues to their team of technicians, who then receive the work orders right on UpKeep.

Instead of logging information on paper, these technicians can take pictures of the problem and note the parts they need or other details of the job right in the app. No duplication of effort.

UpKeep operates on a freemium model, allowing technicians to manage their own work for free. Collaborative use of the product across an organization costs on a per user on both an annual or monthly basis. The company offers various tiers, from a Starter Plan ($35/month/user) to an Enterprise Plan ($180/month/user).

Higher tier plans offer more in-depth reporting and analysis around the work that gets done. Chan explained that these reports are not necessarily about tracking people, though.

“Yes, we track technicians and it’s a tool to manage work done by people,” said Chan. “But a manufacturing facility really cares much more about the equipment. They can use UpKeep to manage things like how many hours of downtime a piece of equipment has, etc. It’s more targeted toward the actual asset and the equipment versus the person completing their work.”

[gallery ids="1987338,1987340"]

Chan said that around 80 percent of the company’s 400,000 users are on the free version of the app. Some brands on the app include Unilever, Siemens, DHL, McDonald’s, and Jet.com. Chan said UpKeep saw a 206 percent increase in revenue in 2019.

Important to the company’s future, UpKeep is working with OSHA and a group called SQF (Safe Quality Food) to offer templates around best practices during the pandemic. Now, maintenance workers and facilities staffs have a whole new checklist around sanitation and safety that many businesses are just getting up to speed on. UpKeep is working to make these new practices easier to adopt by providing those checklists directly to facilities managers.

This latest funding round brings UpKeep’s total funding to $48.8 million.

Arch Rao closed the $10.1 million financing round for Span, his company pitching homeowners on an upgrade to the fuse box, in the middle of February.

The company had already seen what was happening in China and had a sense of how tough things could be, but was undeterred by the bad news and its potential implications for fundraising or its business.

“I don’t think that the COVID situation was particularly negative,” for the Span business, said Rao. Indeed, Rao said things are already beginning to recover. “With the shelter in place being partially lifted [and] with solar and storage installation having been deemed essential… the large installers like SunRun saw their online sales had increased,” Rao said. “The limitation of this pandemic has been a shift of about a quarter for our upward slope to take effect.”

The forced downtime actually helped the company, said Rao, which worked on new product development and readied itself for what could be a busy season of sales. The pressures that are pushing customers to adopt solar and energy storage technologies — especially in states like California — haven’t gone away.

The state looks prepped for another bad season of wildfires and the stress of power outages and rolling blackouts could again drive owners to invest in off-grid power generation and storage, he said.

But Rao sees Span as far more than just a smart fuse box. Sitting at the intersection of the utility energy grid and the home electrical network gives Span’s device a unique vantage point from which to monitor and manage devices in the home and energy coming to or from it.

And he’s gotten some unique, expert validation of his vision in the form of an investment from Matt Rogers, one of the founders of Nest, which was the first billion dollar company to try and tackle home energy use and efficiency.

Through his investment firm, Incite Ventures, Rogers participated in the latest round for Span. 

 “We founded Nest to reinvent the largest energy user at home, the thermostat. We replaced an ugly household device with something that invited interaction and saved energy,” Rogers said in a statement. “Span has the potential to solve that for every load in the home. That’s why I’ve come on board as an investor to Span and an advisor to Arch.”

 Rao’s vision for Span is just as expansive as the original idea that brought Nest to the world. 

“Think of our software stack being very similar to an android device,” said Rao. “We have first party apps that Span is deploying and will offer an up our [sotware development kit] that third party vendors will use.”

A user can download the app and select the circuits or loads that they would want to allow an outside vendor to control in exchange for some kind of economic benefit, according to Rao.

“We’re trying to bring what the mobile industry has done for the last decade is an analogous model to what we want to bring in to the digital energy space,” Rao said. Given that the panel sits in a home for roughly thirty years, there’s an opportunity to lock customers in to the Span platform in a way that mobile phones never could.

Some partnerships — like the one Span has signed with battery supplier LG (a company that also makes appliances) gives an idea of the breadth of Rao’s vision.

“LG is a home appliance manufacturer and the road map is for us to tie into other home appliances as well,” said Rao. “You can extrapolate from that to the world of home appliances.”

Investors in the $10.1 million round for the company were led by ArcTern Ventures and joined by new backers Capricorn Investment Group, Incite Ventures. Previous financiers in the company included Wireframe Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Energy Foundry, Hardware Club, 1/0 Capital, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, and some of those firms returned for the new funding, the company said.

Driving their interest was the company’s position at the intersection between the grid and the home — and its attendant ability to monitor and control onside generation, storage and the majority of a consumer’s energy loads.  

The company is focusing its initial sales efforts on the markets of Hawaii and California where strong government incentives can help to subsidize costs and drive demand, the company said.

In addition to the new investment round, Mary Powell, former chief executive of Vermont utility Green Mountain Power will join Span’s board as an independent member. Powell and Rao have a relationship that dates back to the startup executive’s work with Tesla. 

“She set an example of what a customer-focused utility could look like, bringing the Tesla Powerwall to thousands of customers in the state of Vermont,” said Rao. “I’m excited to work with her again as we bring our panel to market.”

Krishna Rangasayeem, founder and CEO, at SiMa.ai, has 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. He decided to put that experience to work in a startup and launched SiMa.ai last year with the goal of building an ultra low-power software and chip solution for machine learning at the edge.

Today he announced a $30 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital with help from Amplify Partners, Wing Venture Capital and +ND Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $40 million, according to the company.

Rangasayeem says in his years as a chip executive he saw a gap in the machine learning market for embedded devices running at the edge and he decided to start the company to solve that issue.

“While the majority of the market was serviced by traditional computing, machine learning was beginning to make an impact and it was really amazing. I wanted to build a company that would bring machine learning at significant scale to help the problems with embedded markets,” he told TechCrunch.

The company is trying to focus on efficiency, which it says will make the solution more environmentally friendly by using less power. “Our solution can scale high performance at the lowest power efficiency, and that translates to the highest frames per second per watt. We have built out an architecture and a software solution that is at a minimum 30x better than anybody else on the frames per second,” he. explained.

He added that achieving that efficiency required them to build a chip from scratch because there isn’t a solution available off the shelf today that could achieve that.

So far the company has attracted 20 early design partners, who are testing what they’ve built. He hopes to have the chip designed and the software solution in Beta in the Q4 timeframe this year, and is shooting for chip production by Q2 in 2021.

He recognizes that it’s hard to raise this kind of money in the current environment and he’s grateful to the investors, and the design partners who believe in his vision. The timing could actually work in the company’s favor because it can hunker down and build product while navigating through the current economic malaise.

Perhaps by 2021 when the product is in production, the market and the economy will be in better shape and the company will be ready to deliver.

Sketchfab is enabling multiplayer mode today with a new Sketchfab for Teams feature. The startup lets you share 3D models with other people in your company so that they can view, edit and download models. It could be particularly useful for companies working on augmented reality products, video games or even e-commerce websites with 3D configurators or visualizations.

Sketchfab has been working for years on a 3D model viewer for web browsers. It now works really well on both desktop and mobile. You can also import and export 3D models in many different file formats in order to reuse them in your favorite tool or engine — Sketchfab can convert files for you. That’s why 3D artists have been using the platform to share their work but also to sell 3D models, just like on a stock photography site.

The new team feature is essentially a sort of Google Drive specifically tailored for 3D — instead of opening spreadsheets and documents, you open 3D models. For instance, people working in marketing or communications could use 3D models to showcase products.

Even if your company uses a cloud storage system, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, to share files across the organization, people who are not 3D designers don’t necessarily want to use Blender to check if it’s the right file. Combining a shared drive with Sketchfab’s viewing and sharing tools becomes a compelling use case.

Like traditional cloud storage systems, you can manage permissions on a file-by-file basis. For instance, you could allow someone in your company to edit a 3D model while the rest of the team can only view the item. It works pretty much like the sharing menu in Google Docs.

You can also use Sketchfab for Teams with external collaborators. You can invite contractors to upload 3D models to your Sketchfab account or, if you’re a 3D designer, you can share 3D assets with a client to let them review your work. And if you want to share your 3D assets publicly, you can embed models on your website or use it in a 3D configurator.

The other advantage of switching to Sketchfab for Teams is that you get a central repository for all your 3D files. You can search, filter your assets by polycount, format and size, inspect 3D models in your browser and convert assets to multiple file formats.

Sketchfab recently launched another feature that could become quite popular on e-commerce website. The company added an AR button in its viewer, which lets you use your iPhone or Android phone to view a 3D object at scale through your camera before buying it.

Thanks to recent iOS and Android updates, you don’t need to install an app. It leverages the USDZ and glTF file formats that are natively supported by iOS and Android, respectively.

The company is launching Sketchfab for Teams with clients paying for the Enterprise plan. Eventually, the startup plans to roll it out to customers with a more limited feature set (Premium and Business customers).

One of the approaches therapeutics companies are taking to developing vaccines for COVID-19 relies on what’s called an mRNA (messenger RNA, which essentially provides cells with protein production instructions) vaccine, a relatively novel method that hasn’t yet resulted in a vaccine approved for human use (though approved mRNA vaccines do exist for veterinary treatment). Making mRNA is a fairly specialized affair, and one biotech startup that focuses on its production has raised $17 million in special purpose funding to ramp up its manufacturing capacity.

Boston-based GreenLight Biosciences raided the additional funding from a combination of new and existing investors, including Flu Lab, Xeraya Capital, and Board Capital, and will use the new funds to both expand its mRNA production capacity in order to support the creation of “billions of doses” of potential COVID-19 vaccines for use in trials and eventual deployment, should any candidates prove effective.

Meanwhile, GreenLight is also developing several different versions of its own mRNA-based vaccine candidates to potentially prevent individuals from contracting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to the COVID-19 infection. Some of the funding will also go towards its work in this area.

Various companies have spun up mRNA vaccine candidate development, and some have already entered into clinical trials, in response to the current global COVID-19 pandemic. These mRNA vaccines essentially work by providing a set of specific instructions to a person’s cells to produce proteins that are capable of blocking a virus, preventing it from getting a foothold in the body. It’s a different approach from traditional vaccine development, which involves using either deactivated, or small doses of activated actual virus to trigger an immune response in individuals.

mRNA vaccines have that advantage of being relatively safe because they contain no actual virus, with shorter pre-clinical development times as well, meaning the whole cycle from development to testing and deployment is shortened. That’s made them a popular area of focus and investment specifically to handle outbreaks and pandemics, but as mentioned, thus far none has been fully developed and approved for human treatemen.

This investment is a bet that mRNA vaccines not only prove effective in humans, but that they become a valuable and ongoing resource in curbing not only this pandemic, but other viral threats, including the existing standard influenza and others.

Dolby Laboratories, the San Francisco-based company best known for its various audio and video processing tools, today announced the launch of Dolby.io, its first self-service platform for software developers who want to bring some of Dolby’s capabilities to their own applications. Currently, Dolby.io’s lineup includes two sets of APIs, one for quickly analyzing and improving the sound of an existing audio file, and another for bringing new audio capabilities to interactive experiences. Over time, the company plans to add additional capabilities to this service.

Traditionally, hardware and software developers who wanted to work with Dolby had to go through a rather complicated and manual process. This new platform, however, will look and feel like any other API -centric developer service, with free trials and per-usage billing.

“Dolby didn’t have a way for developers, in this case, or customers to interact directly with them,” said Aaron Liao, Dolby’s VP of developer relations who recently joined the company after a stint as AWS’s head of worldwide developer marketing. “If you go to a Dolby website right now, you don’t see a sign-up page. Traditionally, customers interact with Dolby through a series of licensing discussions and things like that. So we are effectively introducing a new way for developers to interact with Dolby. One where it’s self-serve — one where, if you don’t want to talk to a person, you don’t have to.”

As for the actual APIs, the media files API will allow developers to either analyze or enhance their existing audio files. Through the analysis API, you’ll get data about the loudness levels of the track, sibilance, equalization — all in a standard JSON file. The more interesting service, though, is surely the enhance API, which brings together a lot of Dolby’s existing know-how around improving audio and making it accessible to any developer.

“You can give us a media file and we will do our best to clean it up for you and make it sound better for you,” said Liao. That means the API can reduce background noise for podcast recordings, for example, or equalize the volume levels of different speakers.

As for the interactivity APIs, Liao noted that it uses WebRTC so you can do multicast and video interactions in your apps, for example.

Dolby started working with a few partners on testing this service in the last few months, including telehealth physical therapy company Physitrack. “It’s never just about technology, it’s how you interact with it,” said Henrik Molin, the CEO & co-founder of Physitrack. “With Dolby.io, our telehealth platform provides healthcare customers the ability to communicate with patients while presenting and overlaying vital treatment tools and materials for physical rehabilitation, all while delivering millions of crystal-clear call minutes each week.”

The company is also working with former Disrupt Battlefield contestant SpokenLayer, which is using these new APIs to provide a more consistent audio experience for its customers.