Year: 2020

New rules for online political advertising will be put forward by European Union lawmakers next year, with the aim of boosting transparency around sponsored political content.

The Commission said today that it wants citizens, civil society and responsible authorities to be able to clearly see the source and purpose of political advertising they’re exposed to online.

“We are convinced that people must know why they are seeing an ad, who paid for it, how much, what microtargeting criteria were used,” said commissioner Vera Jourova, speaking during a press briefing at the unveiling of a Democratic Action Plan.

“New technologies should be tools for emancipation — not for manipulation,” she added.

In the plan, the Commission says the forthcoming political ads transparency proposal will “target the sponsors of paid content and production/distribution channels, including online platforms, advertisers and political consultancies, clarifying their respective responsibilities and providing legal certainty”.

“The initiative will determine which actors and what type of sponsored content fall within the scope of enhanced transparency requirements. It will support accountability and enable monitoring and enforcement of relevant rules, audits and access to non-personal data, and facilitate due diligence,” it adds.

It wants the new rules in place sufficiently ahead of the May 2024 European Parliament elections — with the values and transparency commissioner confirming the legislative initiative is planned for Q3 2021.

Democracy Action Plan

The step is being taken as part of the wider Democracy Action Plan containing a package of measures intended to bolster free and fair elections across the EU, strengthen media pluralism and boost media literacy over the next four years of the Commission’s mandate.

It’s the Commission’s response to rising concerns that election rules have not kept pace with digital developments, including the spread of online disinformation — creating vulnerabilities for democratic values and public trust.

The worry is that long-standing processes are being outgunned by powerful digital advertising tools, operating non-transparently and fatted up on masses of big personal data.

“The rapid growth of online campaigning and online platforms has… opened up new vulnerabilities and made it more difficult to maintain the integrity of elections, ensure a free and plural media, and protect the democratic process from disinformation and other manipulation,” the Commission writes in the plan, noting too that digitalisation has also helped dark money flow unaccountably into the coffers of political actors.

Other issues of concern it highlights include “cyber attacks targeting election infrastructure; journalists facing online harassment and hate speech; coordinated disinformation campaigns spreading false and polarising messages rapidly through social media; and the amplifying role played by the use of opaque algorithms controlled by widely used communication platforms”.

During today’s press briefing Jourova said she doesn’t want European elections to be “a competition of dirty methods”, adding: “We saw enough with the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the Brexit referendum.”

However the Commission is not going as far as proposing a ban on political microtargeting — at least not yet.

In the near term its focus will be on limiting use in a political context — such as limiting the targeting criteria that can be used. (Aka: “Promoting political ideas is not the same as promoting products,” as Jourova put it.)

The Commission writes that it will look at “further restricting micro-targeting and psychological profiling in the political context”.

“Certain specific obligations could be proportionately imposed on online intermediaries, advertising service providers and other actors, depending on their scale and impact (such as for labelling, record-keeping, disclosure requirements, transparency of price paid, and targeting and amplification criteria),” it suggests. “Further provisions could provide for specific engagement with supervisory authorities, and to enable co-regulatory codes and professional standards.”

The plan acknowledges that microtargeting and behavioral advertising makes it harder to hold political actors to account — and that such tools and techniques can be “misused to direct divisive and polarising narratives”.

It goes on to note that the personal data of citizens which powers such manipulative microtargeting may also have been “improperly obtained”.

This is a key acknowledgement that plenty is rotten in the current state of adtech — as European privacy and legal experts have warned for years. Most recently warning that EU data protection rules that were updated in 2018 are simply not being enforced in this area.

The UK’s ICO, for example, is facing legal action over regulatory inaction against unlawful adtech. (Ironically enough, back in 2018, its commissioner produced a report warning democracy is being disrupted by shady exploitation of personal data combined with social media platforms’ ad-targeting techniques.)

The Commission has picked up on these concerns. Yet its strategy for fixing them is less clear.

“There is a clear need for more transparency in political advertising and communication, and the commercial activities surrounding. Stronger enforcement and compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules is of utmost importance,” it writes — reinforcing a finding this summer, in its two-year GDPR review, when it acknowledged that the regulation’s impact has been impeded by a lack of uniformly vigorous enforcement.

The high level message from the Commission now is that ‘GDPR enforcement is vital for democracy.

But it’s national data supervisors which are responsibility for enforcement. So unless that enforcement gap can be closed it’s not clear how the Commission’s action plan can fully deliver the hoped for democratic resilience. Media literacy is a worthy goal but a long slow road vs the real-time potency of big-data fuelled adtech tools.

 

“On the Cambridge Analytica case I referred to it because we do not want the method when the political marketing uses the privileged availability or possession of the private data of people [without their consent],” said Jourova during a Q&A with press, acknowledging the weakness of GDPR enforcement.

“[After the scandal] we said that we are relieved that after GDPR came into force we are protected against this kind of practice — that people have to give consent and be aware of that — but we see that it might be a weak measure only to rely on consent or leave it for the citizens to give consent.”

Jourova described the Cambridge Analytica scandal as “an eye-opening moment for all of us”.

“Enforcement of privacy rules is not sufficient — that’s why we are coming in the European Democracy Action Plan with the vision for the next year to come with the rules for political advertising, where we are seriously considering to limit the microtargeting as a method which is used for the promotion of political powers, political parties or political individuals,” she added.

The Commission says its legislative proposal on the transparency of political content will complement broader rules on online advertising that will be set out in the Digital Services Act (DSA) package — due to be presented later this month (setting out a suite of responsibilities for platforms). So the full detail of how it proposes to regulate online advertising also remains to be seen.

Tougher measures to tackle disinformation

Another major focus for the Democracy Action Plan is tackling the spread of online disinformation.

There are now clear-cut risks in the public health sphere as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, with concerns that disinformation could undermine COVID-19 vaccination programs. And EU lawmakers’ concerns over the issue look to have been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

On disinformation, the Commission says it be overhauling its current (self-regulatory) approach to tackling online disinformation — aka the Code of Practice on disinformation, launched in 2018 with a handful of tech industry signatories — with platform giants set to face increased pressure from Brussels to identify and prevent co-ordinated manipulation via a planned upgrade to a co-regulatory framework of “obligations and accountability”, as it puts it.

There will clearly also be interplay with the DSA — given it will be setting horizontal accountability rules for platforms. But the beefed up disinformation code is intended to side alongside that and also plug the gap until the DSA comes into force (not likely for years, following usual EU process).

“We will not regulate on removal of disputed content,” Jourova emphasized on the plans for beefing up the disinformation code.

“We do not want to create a ministry of truth. Freedom of speech is essential and I will not support any solution that undermines it. But we also cannot have our societies manipulated if there are organized structures aimed at sewing mistrust, undermining democratic stability and so we would be naive to let this happen. And we need to respond with resolve.”

“The worrying disinformation trend, as well all know, is on COVID-19 vaccines,” she added. “We need to support the vaccine strategy by an efficient fight against disinformation.”

Asked how the Commission will ensure platforms take the required actions under the new code, Jourova suggested the DSA is likely to leave it to Member States to decide which authorities will be responsible for enforcing future platform accountability rules.

The DSA will focus on the issue of “increased accountability and obligations to adopt risk mitigating measures”, said also said, saying the disinformation code (or a similar arrangement) will be classed as a risk mitigating measure — encouraging platforms and other actors to get on board.

“We are already intensively cooperating with the big platforms,” she added, responding to a question about whether the Commission had left it to late to tackle the threat posed by COVID-19 vaccine disinformation. “We are not going to wait for the upgraded code of practice because we already have a very clear agreement with the platforms that they will continue doing what they have already started doing in summer or in spring.”

Platforms are already promoting fact-based, authoritative health information to counter COVID-19 disinformation, she added.

“As for the vaccination I already alerted Google and Facebook that we want to intensify this work. That we are planning and already working on the communications strategy to promote vaccination as the reliable — maybe the only reliable — method to get rid of COVID-19,” she also said, adding that this work is “in full swing”.

But Jourova emphasized that the incoming upgrade to the code of practice will bring more requirements — including around algorithmic accountability.

“We need to know better how platforms prioritize who sees what and why?” she said. “Also there must be clear rules how researchers can update relevant data. Also the measures to reduce monetization of disinformation. Fourth, I want to see better standards on cooperation with fact-checkers. Right now the picture is very mixed and we want to see a more systematic approach to that.”

The code must also include “clearer and better” ways to deal with manipulation related to the use of bots and fake accounts, she added.

The new code of practice on disinformation is expected to be finalized after the new year.

Current signatories include TikTok, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Mozilla.

ANYbotics, the creators of ANYmal, a four-legged autonomous robot platform intended for a variety of industrial uses, has raised a $22.3M Swiss Franc (~$20M) round A to continue developing and scaling the business. With similar robots just beginning to break into the mainstream, the market seems ready to take off.

The company spun out of ETH Zurich in 2016, at which point the robot was already well into development. ANYmal is superficially similar to Spot, the familiar quadrupedal robot from Boston Dynamics, but the comparison mustn’t be taken too far. A four-legged robot is a natural form for navigating and interacting with environments build for humans.

ANYbotics is on the third generation of the robot, which has progressively integrated computing units and sensors of increasing sophistication.

“Our current ANYmal C model features three built-in high-end Intel i7 computers that power the robot and customer-applications such as automated inspection tasks,” explained co-founder and CEO Péter Fankhauser in an email to TechCrunch. “The availability of smaller and more performant sensors, propelled by AR/VR and autonomous driving applications, has enabled us to equip the latest ANYmal model with 360-degree situational awareness and long-range scanning capabilities. Where commercially available components are not satisfactory, we invest in our proprietary technologies, which have resulted in core components such as custom motors, docking stations, and inspection payload units.”

The most obvious application for robots like ANYmal is inspection of facilities that would normally involve a human. If a robot can traverse the same paths, climb stairs, open doors and so on, it can do so more frequently and regularly than its human counterparts, who tire and take breaks. It can also monitor and relay its surroundings in detail, using lidar and RGB cameras, among other tools. Humans can then perform the more difficult (and human) work of integrating that information and making decisions based on it. An ANYmal at a factory, power plant, or datacenter could save costs and shoe leather.

Of course, that’s no use if the bot is fragile; fortunately, that’s not the case.

“In terms of mobility, we have focused on what matters most to our industrial customers: Operational reliability and robustness to harsh environmental conditions,” Fankhauser said. “For example, we design and test ANYmal for day and night usage in indoor and outdoor locations, including offshore platforms with salty air and large temperature ranges. It’s less about agility in these environments but more about reliably and safely performing the tasks multiple times a day over many months without human intervention.”

Swisscom Ventures leads the round, and partner Alexander Schläpfer said that good roots (ETHZ is of course highly respected) and good results from early commercial partnerships more than justified their investment.

“Over ten years ago, some of our co-founders developed their first walking robots during their studies at ETH Zurich,” said Fankhauser. “Today, the industries are ready to adopt this technology, and we are deploying our robots to our early customers.”

Digital health startup Everlywell has raised a $175 million Series D funding round, following relatively fast on the heels of a $25 million Series C round it closed in February of this year. The Series D included a host of new investors, including BlackRock, The Chernin Group (TCG), Foresite Capital, Greenspring Associates, Morningside Ventures and Portfolio, along with existing investors including Highland Capital Partners, which led the Series C round. The startup has now raised over $250 million to date.

Everlywell, which launched to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 as a participant in Startup Battlefield, specializes in home health care, and specifically on home health care tests supported by their digital platform for providing customers with their results and helping them understand the diagnostics, and how to seek the right follow-on care and expert medical advice.

Earlier this year, Everlywell launched an at-home COVID-19 test collection kit – the first of this type of test to receive an emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its use that allowed cooperation with multiple lab service providers over time. The COVID-19 test kit joins its many other offerings, which include tests for thyroid hormone levels, food and allergen sensitivity, women’s health and fertility, vitamin D deficiency and more. I spoke to Everlywell CEO and founder Julia Cheek about the raise, and she acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic was definitely behind the decision to raise such a large amount so quickly again after the close of the Series C, since the company saw a sharp increase in demand coming out of the coronavirus crisis – not only for its COVID-19 test kit, but for at-home digital health care options in general.

“We obviously have a very successful COVID-19 test,” she said. “But we’ve also seen three-fourths of our test menu just explode at well over 100% year-over-year growth, and several of our tests are at 4x or 5x growth. That is really representative of this shift in consumer health behavior that will continue in a big way in many different verticals that include testing, and making things more convenient, digitally-enabled, and in the home.”

Like other companies built on solving for a shift to more remote and virtual care options, Cheek said that Everlywell had already anticipated this kind of consumer demand – but COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the pace of change, which is why the startup put together this round, at this size, this quickly (she says they started the process of putting together the Series D just in September).

“We’ve been talking about the digital health movement, and the consumer-directed movement probably for a decade now,” she told me. “I do believe that this will be the watershed moment, unfortunately. But hopefully, we will come out on the other side of the pandemic and say, ‘There are some good things that happened broadly for healthcare.’ That is the hope of what we lean into everyday, and  fundamentally, why we went out and raised this amount of capital in this tremendous growth year.”

Everlywell has also expanded availability of its products this year, with distribution in over 10,000 retail locations across Target, Walgreens, CVS and Kroger stores across the U.S. The company also landed a number of new partnerships on the diagnostic lab and insurance payer side, as well as with major employers – a key customer group since employers shoulder the largest share of healthcare spending in the U.S. due to employee benefit plans. Cheek says that despite their commercial and enterprise customer wins, the focus remains squarely on consumer satisfaction, which is what distinguishes their offering.

“Our COVID-19 test is 75% new people buying our product, and it has an NPS [net promoter score] of 75,” she said. “And then it’s the most highly-referred product, and also one of our top tests where people buy other tests. Experience matters here – we know that if someone is a promoter of Everlywell, if they rate us a nine or a 10, on NPS, they are five times more likely to purchase again on the platform.”

That’s not new for Everlywell, according to Cheek – customers have always had a high degree of satisfaction with the company’s products. But what is new is the expanded reach, and the realization among many Americans that virtual care and at-home options are available, and are effective.

“What you have is this lightbulb moment for Americans in a new way that care can be delivered where then they definitely don’t want to go back,” she said. “It’s not just for Everlywell. This is all of these verticals, that have really shifted consumer behavior around healthcare in the home, and I think that will be somewhat permanent. That is the main driver here, and is what we’re seeing, and it’s why Everlywell has resonated so well with so many Americans.”

Realizing that modern, complex businesses can no longer be adequately managed using spreadsheet-style programs, the founders of Pigment decided there had to be a better solution. Their business forecasting platform has now raised a substantial Series A of $25.9 million, led by Blossom Capital. Also participating was New York-based FirstMark Capital and Frst, as well as angel investors including Paul Melchiorre, former CEO of business planning giant Anaplan, and David Clarke, the ex-CTO of Workday, another business planning incumbent.

Those last two investors are significant because Paris-based Pigment competes with both Anaplan and Workday. Also of note is the fact that another planning product, Adaptive Insights, was sold to Workday for $1.6bn.

Pigment has so far secured large-scale enterprise and pre-IPO start-up clients for its beta product, including a major European bank – although it declines to name any of its clients so far.

Pigment says it aims to overhaul the painful experience of using error-prone spreadsheets and inflexible software to do business forecast forecasting, instead presenting a dashboard-like approach in real-time through charts, simulations and continuous modeling.

Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment said in a statement: “We’re a bit like Minecraft for business strategy – with that kind of creative, organic potential for the user. Standard planning solutions are basically mechanical, treating a business like a machine with levers that you just push and pull.”

Ophelia Brown, partner at Blossom Capital, said: ‘Existing planning software was built around 20th-century models of how to do business. Pigment is a 21-st century platform that reflects the way successful companies need to work today – socially and environmentally conscious, proactively scanning the horizon for risks and opportunities, and capable of unlocking new opportunities in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.”

Pigment was founded in 2019 by Crespo, a former data analyst at Google and investor at Index Ventures, and Romain Niccoli, the former CTO and co-founder of Criteo – the ad-tech company which IPO’d on NASDAQ in 2013.

San Francisco-based construction startup Versatile is announcing today that it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Insight Partners and Entree Capital, along with existing investors Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Root Ventures and Conductive Ventures.

The round follows $8.5 million in funding, including a $5.5 million seed round that arrived in August of last year.

The URBAN-X accelerator alum has developed a piece of hardware designed to be mounted to a crane. From that vantage point, it’s capable of capturing and analyzing data across the construction site.

“You can only improve what you can measure, and at Versatile we are just scratching the surface of what we can do to create value for our users and use data to turn job sites into controlled manufacturing with fast feedback loops,” co-founder and CEO Meirav Oren said in a release tied to the news.

The company says it’s able to use that information to provide a picture of construction progress, with additional information on site materials, while targeting any potential redundancy in the space.

With around $10 trillion currently spent on construction each year, the industry is prime for some big-ticket investments. Particularly those startups that can promise more efficiency in the space.

The company says the round will be spent on accelerating the availability of its technology and developing additional AI components for users.

Bizay, a marketplace for small-to-medium-sized businesses allowing them to create highly customized products (such as merchandise), has raised a $38.6 million (€32 million) funding round. The Series C financing round was co-led by investors Indico Capital and the European Investment Bank, with “strong support” from Iberis Capital and existing investors including LeadX Capital Partners, Omnes Capital and Pathena.

This means Bizay has now raised a total of more than €54 million. The company previously raised a Series B financing round of €22 million. This new round will accelerate the development of further product expansion targeted at SMBs and reinforce Bizay´s operation supplying more than one million SMBs in 21 countries across Europe and America.

Bizay’s ideas is to become the ‘Amazon’ for SMBs in terms of merchandising, packaging, consumables, business essentials, decorations and uniforms, with good quality, at a fraction of the normal costs associated with these items.

Bizay´s CEO, Sérgio Vieira, said: “The current health crisis accelerated the shift to online ordering of customizable products at reduced prices. Our platform will be a key facilitator for businesses to recover at a faster pace. We are totally confident in achieving the goals that will allow us to enter a new level of global ambition”.

Speaking to TechCrunch Vieira added: “We are a software company, and our technology enables us to connect to industrial manufacturers that would usually work only for large corporations. We have no stock, we have no machines, no production. Using AI we aggregate multiple orders, and supply those orders using the network of industrial producers that we have in our marketplace. So we are able to offer these SMBs competitive prices for small individual orders. These industrial manufacturers would never normally supply SMBs because they are just too small.”

Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner at Indico Capital Partners, said: “Bizay is entering a new growth phase and this round will consolidate their presence across Europe and enable them to capture the opportunity that stems from the shift towards online ordering of personalized products for SMBs.”

Ultimate.ai, a virtual customer service agent builder, has closed a $20 million Series A round of funding, led by Omers Ventures with participation from Felicis Ventures and existing investors HV Capital, and Maki.vc — bringing its total raised to date to $25M+.

The European startup’s flagship claim for the data-ingesting bot-builder platform is it’s capable of automating up to 80% of customer support interactions.

The focus, as tends to be the case for all these customer service conversational AI plays, is freeing (human) support agents from dealing with dull, repetitive stuff — so they can apply their (less limited) skills to more complex, consultative or emotionally demanding customer queries.

When we last spoke to the Helsinki- and Berlin-based startup, back in 2018 for a $1.3M seed round, it described itself as a “language-agnostic” conversational AI — having started out with the hard (linguistic) challenge of Finnish — claiming that gave it an edge in a competitive space with customers in non-English speaking markets. (Though it did also tackle English too.)

Two years on the startup’s marketing focus is broader; today it talks about its customer service automation platform as an “AI-first” ‘no code’ tool — sating it wants to empower b2c users to get the most out of AI by helping them design virtual agents that can usefully handle complex customer interactions.

ultimate.ai will hand-hold you through the process of building a super savvy customer service robot, is the pitch.

Co-founder and CEO Reetu Kainulainen claims it’s always been “no code and intuitive” — though there’s now a handy reference label to align what it’s doing with a wider b2b trend. (‘No code’ or ‘low code’ referring to a digital tool-building movement that aims to widen access to powerful technologies like AI without the need for the user to possess deep technical know-how in order to make useful use of them.)

 

“Everything we build is to guide users to creating the best virtual agents. The whole user journey — discovery, design, expansion — is all within ultimate.ai,” Kainulainen tells TechCrunch.

“In the past two years, we have been laser focused on building a very deep customer service automation platform — one that goes beyond simple FAQ answers in chat — and enables brands to design complex, personalized workflows that can be deployed across all digital support channels.

“We believe that customer service automation will be its own category in the future and so we are working hard to define what that means today.”

As an example, Kainulainen points to “one click” integration with “any major CRM” (including Salesforce and Zendesk) — which lets customers quickly import existing customer support logs so ultimate.ai’s platform can analyze the data to help them build a useful bot.

“Immediately, you are shown a breakdown of your most common customer service cases and the impact automation can have for your business,” he goes on, saying the platform shows templates and “best practices” to help the customer design their automation workflows — “tailored for your cases and industry”.

Once a virtual agent is live users can run A/B tests via the platform to check and optimize performance — and, here too, the promise is further hand-holding, with Kainulainen saying it will “proactively suggests new cases and data to improve your virtual agent”.

“Where we are very strong is in large-scale customer support organizations, who are looking for a holistic, advanced automation platform that can be managed and implemented by non-technical users,” he says.

“The bigger picture is that each of our competitors views the opportunity more narrowly than ultimate.ai does: Our best competitors are either focused on chatbots only, or otherwise limited to the ecosystem of their mother company. Our vision has always been the big picture: Of automation becoming one of the primary means of providing customer service.”

Having multilingual smarts remains an advantage, with ultimate.ai’s virtual agents able to handle interactions in over 20 languages at this point.

“Our market — the customer service automation market — has a lot of players,” Kainulainen goes on, name-checking the likes of Ada Support and Einstein Bots (Salesforce’s own solution) as key competitors.

“This is because it is new and, until recently, solutions were so early that there were virtually no barriers to entry. But the market has changed a lot in the last four years. There are now only a handful of players globally that are worth paying attention to and we are one of them.”

The 2016-founded startup is hitting the nail on the head for a growing number of customers — with close to 100 signed up to its platform at this point, including the likes of Deezer, Telia, Footasylum, and Finnair. Per Kainulainen, it works best for “b2c brands with large (and often repetitive) customer service volumes”.

“This is where automation can provide a huge impact from day one and really free up people to take on more creative and challenging work. We have a broad customer base of close to 100 great brands… and do particularly well in industries like retail/ecommerce, telecommunications and travel,” he adds.

It’s enjoyed a major growth spurt this year, as businesses of all stripes were forced to ramp up their attention to online customer interactions as the coronavirus pandemic became an engine for digital activity.

Customer retention has also risen in priority for many businesses, as a highly contagious virus and public health safety measures put in place to reduce its spread, flipped markets into recession — which Kainulainen points to as another growth driver.

Overall, he says it’s tripled ARR over the last 12 months (albeit, it was the same growth story last year too). Plus it’s tripled headcount to deal with the COVID-19 effect.

Now ultimate.ai is gearing up for fresh growth — saying it’s expecting major developments next year.

“COVID-19 has… prompted one of the most accelerated periods of change in the customer service industry,” says Kainulainen, predicting 2021 will bring “immense innovation” in the space — and that “booming” automation technologies will take “center stage”.

Of course it’s a convenient narrative for a customer service chatbot maker to tell.

But COVID-19 is clearly accelerating digital transformation of consumer focused businesses — a movement that, logically, pumps demand for smarter tools to handle online customer support. So those positioned to harness new momentum for customer service automation — by being able to offer an accessible, scalable and effective product (as ultimate.ai claims it does) — are sitting pretty in the middle of a pandemic.

“We believe that the best product will win this market,” adds Kainulainen. “We have a big vision for what we want ultimate.ai to be. Market maturity for our technology has accelerated massively in 2020, achieving in one year what could have probably taken five. We will capitalize on that by building more, faster.”

The Series A funding will go on sales and marketing, with a planned market push in North America and a desire to go deeper throughout Europe, as well as being ploughed into further product development.

And while — clearly — not every potential b2c customer will be able to ‘automagic’ away 80% of their customer support pings, Kainulainen argues ultimate.ai can still offer a compelling sales pitch to businesses with more “consultative” customer support needs, where automation will only be able to play a far more limited role.

“There’s often a strong correlation between how consultative a customer service organization needs to be and how highly trained and experienced their team is. In other words, it is often the case that organizations with ‘lower bound’ automation potential also only need 10% automation to still drive a huge ROI,” he suggests.

“For example, one of our customers is a large national pharmacy group, where customer service agents are qualified pharmacists who provide prescription medical advice. Here, the goal isn’t to achieve a very high automation rate but rather to automate basic, repetitive processes to free up the pharmacists for more challenging tasks that better use their capabilities.

“For this customer, in addition to the automation of simple requests (which alone provides a huge value) our real-time answer recommendations help pharmacists respond faster and easier.”

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Omers Ventures managing partner, Jambu Palaniappan, dubbed the startup’s growth “truly spectacular”, as well as lauding its “world-class team” and founders “with a strong vision and unrivalled knowledge of AI”.

“There are numerous chatbot companies out there but ultimate.ai represents something much bigger because at its core is an automation company with massive potential,” he added. “We look forward to working with Sarah, Reetu, Jaakko, and Markus as they expand internationally and advance their deep product capabilities even further.”

“The customer service industry is undergoing an automation revolution. In ultimate.ai, we saw a vision that’s bold enough to lead the way,” added Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, in another supporting statement. “We believe that, just in the same way that category leaders have defined marketing and sales automation, ultimate.ai will do the same for customer service.”

Jambu Palaniappan, managing partner at Omers Ventures, will join the ultimate.ai board. Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, will join as an investor, alongside former head of Airbnb for Business Mark McCabe, and former EVP global sales of payment giant Adyen, Thijn Lamers.

China has pledged that it would be sharing its COVID-19 vaccines with other countries, especially those with which it has close ties. While the country is not ready to deploy its vaccines internationally, it is gearing up the infrastructure for mass distribution.

This week, Alibaba announced that it has struck a partnership with Ethiopian Airlines to introduce a cold chain capable of transporting temperature-sensitive medicines from China to the rest of the world. The air freight will depart from Shenzhen Airport, which Alibaba says houses China’s first cross-border medical cold chain facility, twice a week to countries via Dubai and Addis Ababa.

“As soon as the vaccines are ready, we will have the capabilities to transport them,” a Cainiao spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Shenzhen is the home base of SF Express, another major logistics operator in China that has also been working on storing and shipping vaccines.

The Alibaba route is carried out by the firm’s logistics arm Cainiao, which operates in over 200 countries and regions. It’s certified by the International Air Transport Association to fly Covid-19 vaccines, which normally need to be stored at low temperatures. Cabins will contain temperature-controlled monitors, for instance, and Ethiopia’s cargo terminal comes with facilities that can be adjusted between -23°C and 25°C, or -9.4°F and 77°F.

“The launch of the cold chain air freight has further bolstered our global logistics capabilities and allow us to offer a one-stop solution for the global distribution of medical products such as the COVID-19 vaccines,” said James Zhao, general manager of Cainiao’s international supply chain unit.

China is a major exporter of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s logistics giants, from Cainiao to SF Express, all promptly introduced programs specifically for shipping medical relief items.

Web Summit announced today that it will revive Rise, one of Asia’s largest tech conferences, in March 2022, moving it to Kuala Lumpur after five years in Hong Kong. It also announced a new event, called Web Summit Tokyo, that will launch in 2022, too.

The flagship Web Summit event is currently taking place as an online conference.

In November 2019, Web Summit announced it was postponing Rise to 2021 amid the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. Of course, this year has seen a series of other major event cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Web Summit is planning for the 2022 edition of Rise to be in-person, and has signed a new partnership with Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation. In a press statement, Web Summit and Rise co-founder and chief executive officer Paddy Cosgrave said, “This is not a goodbye to Hong Kong. We hope to return to the city in the future with a brand new event.”

Web Summit Tokyo, which will take place in September 2022, as part of its global expansion, which will also include events in Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre that year.

Web Summit has already announced plans to hold its flagship event as an in-person conference in November 2021 in Lisbon, Portugal.