Year: 2020

With a pandemic raging across many parts of the world, many companies have customer service agents spread out as well, creating a workforce management nightmare. It wasn’t easy to manage and route requests when CSAs were in one place, it’s even harder with many working from home.

To help answer that problem Salesforce is developing a new product called Service Cloud Workforce Engagement. Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager for CRM Applications at Salesforce points out that with these workforces spread out, it’s a huge challenge for management to distribute work and keep up with customer volume, especially as customers have moved online during COVID.

“With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, Salesforce will arm the contact center with a connected solution — all on one platform so our customers can remain resilient and agile no matter what tomorrow may bring,” Patterson said in a statement.

Like many Salesforce products, this one is made up of several key components to deliver a complete solution. For starters, there is Service Forecast for Customer 360, a tool that helps predict workforce requirements and uses AI to distribute customer service requests in a way that makes sense. This can help in planning at a time with a likely predictable uptick in service requests like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, or even those times when there is an unexpected spike.

Next up is Omnichannel Capacity Planning, which helps managers distribute CSAs across channels such as phone, messaging or email wherever they are needed most based on the demand across a given channel.

Finally, there is a teaching component that helps coach customer service agents to give the correct answer in the correct way for a given situation. “To increase agent engagement and performance, companies will be able to quickly onboard and continually train agents by delivering bite-size, guided learning paths directly in the agent’s workspace during their shift,” the company explained.

The company says that Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will be available in the first half of next year.

Orbit, a startup that is building tools to help organizations build communities around their proprietary and open-source products, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Cassado. A number of angel investors, including Chris Aniszczyk, Jason Warner and Magnus Hillestad, as well as the a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund also participated, in addition to previous backers Heavybit and Harrison Metal.

The company describes its service as a “community experience platform.” Currently, Orbit’s focus is on Developer Relations and Community teams, as well as open-source maintainers. There’s no reason the company couldn’t branch out into other verticals as well, though, given that its overall framework is really applicable across all communities.

Orbit team: Patrick Woods, Nicolas Goutay, Josh Dzielak

As Orbit co-founder Patrick Wood told me, community managers have generally had a hard time figuring out who was really contributing to their communities because those contributions can come in lots of forms and often happen across a wide variety of platforms. In addition, the sales and marketing teams also often don’t understand how a community impacts a company’s bottom line. Orbit aggregates all of these contributions across platforms.

“There is a lack of understanding around the ways in which community impacts go-to-market and business value,” Wood told me when I asked him about the genesis of the idea. “There’s a big gap in terms of the tooling associated with that. Many companies agree that community is important, but if you put $1 in the community machine today, it’s hard to know where that’s going to come out — and is it going to come out in terms of $0.50 or $100? This was a set of challenges that we noticed across companies of all sizes.”

Image Credits: Orbit

Especially in open-source communities, there will always be community members who create a lot of value but who don’t have a commercial relationship with a company at all. That makes it even harder for companies to quantify the impact of their communities, even if they agree that community is an important way to grow their business and that, in Orbit’s words, “community is the new pre-sales.”

At the core of Orbit (the company) is Orbit the open-source community framework. The founding team of Wood (CEO) and Josh Dzielak (CTO) developed this framework to help organizations understand how to best build what the team calls a “high gravity community” to attracts new members and retains existing ones — and how to evaluate them. You can read more about the concept here.

Image Credits: Orbit

“We’re trying to reframe the discussion away from an extractive worldview that says how much value can we generate from this lead? It’s actually more about how much love can we generate from these community members,” Wood said. “Because, if you think about the culture associated with what we’re trying to do, it’s fundamentally creative and generative. And our goal is really to help people think less about value extraction and more about value creation.”

At the end of the day, though, no matter the philosophy behind your community-building efforts, there has to be a way to measure ROI and turn some of those community members into paying customers. To do that, Orbit currently pulls in data from sources like GitHub, Twitter and Discourse, with support for Slack and other tools coming soon. With that, the service makes it far easier for community managers to keep tabs on what is happening inside their community and who is participating.

Image Credits: Orbit

In addition to the built-in dashboards, Orbit also provides an API to help integrate all of this data into third-party services as well.

“One of the key understandings that drives the Orbit vision is that a community is not a funnel and building a community is not about conversions, but making connections; cultivating dialog and engagement; being open and giving back; and creating value versus trying to capture it,” A16Z’s Casado writes. “The model has proven to be very effective, and now Orbit has built a product around it. We strongly believe Orbit is a must-have product for those building developer-focused companies.”

The company is already working with just under 150 companies and its users include the likes of  Postman, CircleCI, Kubernetes and Apollo GraphQL.

The company will use the new round, which closed a few weeks ago, to, among other things, build out its go-to-market efforts and develop more integrations.

Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding.

The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA Player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others.

Wellory founder and CEO Emily Hochman (who was previously the head of customer success at WayUp) told me that she struggled with dieting in college, to the point where she was risking chronic illness and infertility. As a result, she became determined to gain a better understanding of nutrition and her own health, eventually studying and becoming a certified health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

Hochman said that through Wellory, she wants to offer that same understanding to others, which she said has created a “managed marketplace” matching users with a licensed nutritionist, registered dietitian or certified health coach. Those coaches create a personalized plan for losing weight or achieving other health goals, then continue to provide feedback as users share photos of each meal and additional health data.

For example, she said that a customer who had just given birth and was interested in postpartum weight loss would get matched with a coach who specializes in that area.

“The thing that is so important is that we build personalized plans,” she added. “We don’t have anything that says, ‘At Wellory, we do these 10 things and that’s a standard diet.’ We’re actually going to help you learn how to make smart and healthy decisions.”

Wellory CEO Emily Hochman

Wellory officially launched in September, but Hochman said some beta testers have been using the service for nine, 10 or 11 months. She said early customers include people who are interested in weight loss, those who need nutrition advice due to chronic illness and “optimizers” who simply want to make sure they’re eating as healthily as possible.

She also noted that although customers usually sign up with a specific goal in mind, “once they hit their goal, because the power of a strong relationship, they say, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I was, let’s keep building, let’s make sure I can sustain this.'”

The app is available on iOS and Android and currently costs $59.99 per month. Hochman plans to introduce additional pricing tiers. and she said the funding will allow Wellory to expand the technology and marketing teams, and to explore new partnerships.

“As a data technology investor, we get approached by different types of wearable or diagnostic companies nearly every week,” said Jake Yormak of Story Ventures in a statement. “We love the category but what we saw in Wellory was a way to put a human coach at the center of understanding this health data. With nutrition as the wedge, Wellory has built a trusted relationship with people who affirmatively want to better understand and improve their wellbeing.”

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Late-breaking update: since the time of writing this Dear Sophie column, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White struck down two of the H-1B rules mentioned: increasing the prevailing wage and restricting the definition of “specialty occupation.” I’ll keep you posted on any further developments down the road, but for today, the entire nonimmigrant visa classification program is strengthened. Yay!

Dear Sophie:

The startup I am co-founding will be sponsoring my co-founder for a visa in the March 2021 H-1B lottery.

We’ve been so focused on building our startup that we haven’t kept up with all the recent changes. What are we supposed to do?

—Focused in Foster City

Dear Focused:

You are right on track as the time to start is now. In December, we usually kick off our H-1B planning and prep work with startups, companies, HR and people ops, employees and recruits for the spring lottery. Although there are a lot of recent proposals and changes, please go ahead now and initiate retaining counsel to put any and all potential candidates in the lottery.

Although there are several new rules slated to go into effect in December and early January, these are subject to potential removal by President-elect Biden and may also be the topic of a great deal of litigation, so we should proceed as usual. H-1B visas for specialty occupations are still available. In my recent H-1B podcast, I discuss what the 2021 lottery will look like and there’s a free H-1B guide for you to download. Same as before, you can also check out the podcast episode on What Makes a Strong H-1B Petition.

Looking into my crystal ball, the three new rules that may have the biggest effect on the H-1B process are:

• A new rule by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), which went into effect immediately when it was announced in October. That rule substantially increased the minimum wage that employers are required to pay to H-1B candidates. According to the Cato Institute, the average H-1B employer will have to increase wage offers to H-1B candidates by more than 30%. It’s not worth being concerned about this potential wage increase now as you don’t have to commit to a proposed wage for your future H-1B hire until your candidate is actually selected in the lottery and you prepare and file the full petition in Q2. And even then, the new wage wouldn’t take effect until the H-1B is approved and the earliest possible start date is October 1, 2021. So don’t let it scare you.

• Another rule proposed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in November seeks to replace the random H-1B selection process — or lottery — with a new selection process that would prioritize the selection of H-1B candidates based solely on the highest wages paid by the employers who sponsor them. It does not consider the experience of the candidate nor whether the candidate is a specialized worker in an in-demand field, such as medicine or research. Once again, we have no idea when and if this will actually go into effect. Although it sounds scary, it might actually be great for funded startups that need more predictability than a random lottery about whether key hires will be able to join the team.

• Finally, a rule proposed by USCIS in October requires an H-1B candidate to have a bachelor’s or higher degree specifically related to the specialty occupation the H-1B candidate is applying for and H-1B employers must show the position is directly related to the education degree. This for sure will be the subject of lots of litigation. If you’re hiring folks for professional or tech roles and you have funding to pay them, this isn’t really an issue, just an annoyance, and you can avoid questioning by doing a very thorough job on the original petition, which my firm specializes in.

So tips and tricks: I am recommending that everyone begin preparing based on the H-1B lottery in 2020 and to consult with an immigration lawyer to devise a strategy and discuss options. Your co-founder needs to remain in valid legal status if they are already in the United States. If your startup/co-founder is not selected to apply for an H-1B, check out 7 of the Most Startup Friendly Visas Explained for alternative options.

Your startup may want to explore whether it can bypass the H-1B visa altogether by sponsoring your co-founder for either an O-1A extraordinary ability visa, an EB-1A extraordinary ability green card or an EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card. If you would like to learn more, we will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, December 16 at 11 a.m. PST. We will have a special promotion and a freebie for those who attend. Register here!

If you proceed with pursuing an H-1B, make sure your startup has the appropriate corporate structure and documentation in place that demonstrates a valid employer-employee relationship exists between your startup and your co-founder. That includes making sure your co-founder will have a true employee relationship with the company and they will be hired, supervised and can be fired. Listen to my podcast episode on what startups should know about sponsoring their first H-1B candidate.

Your startup will need to register your co-founder for the H-1B lottery on March 1. The USCIS registration fee is only $10 so it’s easy to do it for everybody who might benefit. The registration process closes on March 20. If your startup is selected to apply for an H-1B on behalf of your co-founder, USCIS will inform your startup by March 31. Your startup will have until June 30 to submit its H-1B petition. Over the next few months, your startup and your co-founder can start assembling documents and evidence so that you’ll be ready if your startup/co-founder is selected to apply for an H-1B. If not selected in March, there may be a second digital lottery at the beginning of Q3 for any remaining H-1B visa slots.

I’ll continue to keep you and the other Dear Sophie readers informed on the latest changes to the H-1B lottery process here in this column, so stay tuned!

You got this — go for it!

Sophie

Have a question? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer here. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major podcast platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!

In the same week that Amazon is holding its big AWS confab, Google is also announcing a move to raise its own enterprise game with Google Cloud. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Actifio, a data management company that helps companies with data continuity to be better prepared in the event of a security breach or other need for disaster recovery. The deal squares Google up as a competitor against the likes of Rubrik, another big player in data continuity.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed in the announcement; we’re looking and will update as we learn more. Notably, when the company was valued at over $1 billion in a funding round back in 2014, it had said it was preparing for an IPO (which never happened). PitchBook data estimated its value at $1.3 billion in 2018, but earlier this year it appeared to be raising money at about a 60% discount to its recent valuation, according to data provided to us by Prime Unicorn Index.

The company was also involved in a patent infringement suit against Rubrik, which it also filed earlier this year.

It had raised around $461 million, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, TCV, Tiger, 83 North, and more.

With Actifio, Google is moving into what is one of the key investment areas for enterprises in recent years. The growth of increasingly sophisticated security breaches, coupled with stronger data protection regulation, has given a new priority to the task of holding and using business data more responsibly, and business continuity is a cornerstone of that.

Google describes the startup as as a “leader in backup and disaster recovery” providing virtual copies of data that can be managed and updated for storage, testing, and more. The fact that it covers data in a number of environments — including SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, virtual machines (VMs) in VMware, Hyper-V, physical servers, and of course Google Compute Engine — means that it also gives Google a strong play to work with companies in hybrid and multi-vendor environments rather than just all-Google shops.

“We know that customers have many options when it comes to cloud solutions, including backup and DR, and the acquisition of Actifio will help us to better serve enterprises as they deploy and manage business-critical workloads, including in hybrid scenarios,” writes Brad Calder, VP, engineering, in the blog post. :In addition, we are committed to supporting our backup and DR technology and channel partner ecosystem, providing customers with a variety of options so they can choose the solution that best fits their needs.”

The company will join Google Cloud.

“We’re excited to join Google Cloud and build on the success we’ve had as partners over the past four years,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO at Actifio, in a statement. “Backup and recovery is essential to enterprise cloud adoption and, together with Google Cloud, we are well-positioned to serve the needs of data-driven customers across industries.”

Alphabet’s Loon has been using algorithmic processes to optimize the flight of its stratospheric balloons for years now – and setting records for time spent aloft as a result. But the company is now deploying a new navigation system that has the potential to be much better, and it’s using true reinforcement learning AI to teach itself to optimize navigation better than humans ever could.

Loon developed the new reinforcement learning system, which it says is the first to be used in an actual product aerospace context, with its Alphabet colleagues at Google AI in Montreal over the past couple of years. Unlike its past algorithmic navigation software, this one is devised entirely by machine – a machine that’s able to calculate the optimal navigation path for the balloons much more quickly than the human-made system could, and with much more efficiency, meaning the balloons use much less power to travel the same or greater distances than before.

How does Loon know it’s better? They actually pitted the new AI navigation against their human algorithm-based prior system directly, with a 39 day test that flew over the Pacific Ocean. The reinforcement learning model kept the Loon balloon aloft over target areas for longer continuous periods, using less energy than the older system, and it even came up with some new navigational moves that the team has never seen or conceived of before.

After this and other tests proved such dramatic successes, Loon actually then went ahead and deployed across its entire production fleet, which is currently deployed across parts of Africa to serve commercial customers in Kenya.

This is one of few real-world examples of an AI system that employs reinforcement learning to actively teach itself to perform better being used in a real-life setting, to control the performance of real hardware operating in a production capacity and serving paying customers. It’s a remarkable achievement, and definitely one that will be watched closely by others in aerospace and beyond.

This morning AgentSync, an insurtech startup focused on agent compliance management, announced a new funding round worth $6.7 million.

The financing event, led by well-known SaaS founder David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, included dollars from both Operator Collective and prior investors.

The new capital will help AgentSync move faster, with co-founder and  CEO Niranjan Sabharwal saying that it is pulling hires earmarked for next year into 2020. He added that this most recent fundraising cycle consumed far less time than the round that preceded it.

TechCrunch asked what the company is calling this round, which was raised via a SAFE note instead of as a priced equity investment. Sabharwal said that it could be called a Seed-Extension, which seems reasonable.

The new investment was raised at a cap of around 4x its previous conversion ceiling.

TechCrunch last covered AgentSync this August, when the startup announced a $4.4 million funding round. Akin to fellow early-stage startup Welcome, which announced a second 2020 raise earlier today, AgentSync managed to quickly raise again.

In AgentSync’s case, it’s not hard to parse why the company was able to: It’s growing very quickly.

According to an interview with Sabharwal, the company has seen its revenue scale 4x since the start of the pandemic, and 10x in the last year. The timeframes around those metrics are slightly relaxed, but the raw growth underscores that AgentSync is onto something.

Sabharwal founded the company with his spouse Jenn Knight and recently moved the company’s HQ to Denver from San Francisco.

AgentSync’s product, born out of a tool that Zenefits developed while rebuilding itself, helps insurance companies and other players in the insurance space ensure that agents are compliant (hence its name). And while that conceit might sound like a modest effort, it’s a complex effort given a multi-stakeholder environment, regulatory conditions, and an antiquated market.

The company saw strong initial traction, reporting $1.9 million ARR during its August round. Doing some mental math, if AgentSync was doing around $1 million ARR in March, it would be at around $4 million ARR today. That feels roughly correct, given the 4x-since-March metric, and the $1.9 million ARR datapoint from mid-Q2 2020.

According to Sabharwal, AgentSync now has more than $10 million in the bank, meaning that the startup is very well capitalized to continue scaling in the coming quarters. New investor Sacks is bullish about how large AgentSync could become, telling TechCrunch in an email that its “market is huge,” and that the “insurtech revolution is [still] in its infancy.”

But while AgentSync is growing quickly and has found reasonable product-market fit — 17% of its net ARR today was driven by what the company descried as net-organic expansion, to pick an example — it still has the hallmarks of an early-stage startup like inconsistent sales cycle length, according to several deals that the CEO detailed during an interview. However, the company recently hired a sales team after a period of time when Sabharwal was in charge of  selling; the company’s selling process should accelerate in coming quarters.

The CEO told TechCrunch that until recently he was selling AgentSync solo with no enterprise sales experience. If he could do it, he reasoned, others will be able to as well. Sabharwal serves as the startup’s CEO, while Knight is its CTO.

Closing, Insurtech is hot, meaning that AgentSync is growing amidst fertile market ground and investor interest. Another few quarters of similar growth and we could be hearing about its Series A.

Google News Showcase visitors will soon be able to read select paywalled articles at no extra charge.

That’s one of several announcements that the search giant made today about News Showcase, the program where it pays publishers (with $1 billion committed initially) to license their content for a new format in Google News. So far, Google News Showcase has launched in countries including Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, France, U.K. and Australia — in several cases, those are markets where it’s previously faced legal challenges and antitrust scrutiny.

Google says it will be paying participating publishers to provide “limited access to paywalled content for News Showcase users.” Those users will, however, still need to register directly with the publishers, which Google says will give them a way to build a relationship. (Facebook has also been experimenting with ways to present paywalled content, in its case by linking Facebook accounts to news subscriptions.)

The main News Showcase format is essentially story panel, and Google says it’s introducing a new panel allowing publishers to curate a daily selection of their most important stories. Those panels will be shown to users who follow those publishers.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also bringing the News Showcase to new devices and channels. It started out on Google News on Android and is now available on iOS as well, with plans to expand to the news.google.com website and Discover soon. And it says it has doubled the number of partners since the launch in October — the list of nearly 400 publishers participating in the program includes new names like Le Monde, Courrier International, L’Obs, Le Figaro, Libération and L’Express in France, plus Página12, La Gaceta and El Día in Argentina.

“As 2020 comes to a close, it is heartening to witness the progress of News Showcase and the enthusiasm from both publishers and readers around the world,” the company writes. “We will continue to engage and incorporate feedback as we build out features and grow the product to add to the future sustainability of our news partners.”

Today and tomorrow, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. the first annual, virtual event Sight Tech Global is streaming on TechCrunch. The event looks at how AI-based technologies are rapidly changing the field of accessibility, especially for blind people and those with low vision. Today’s programming includes AI giants Amnon Shashua and Kai-Fu Lee, as well as accessibility innovators from Waymo, Microsoft, Google, and more. Check out the event’s full agenda.

The Sight Tech Global project aims to showcase the remarkable community of technologists working on accessibility-related products and platforms. It is a project of the non-profit Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which is based in Silicon Valley. The Vista Center is the recipient of all donations and sponsorships.

This year’s event sponsors include: Waymo, Verizon Media, TechCrunch, Ford, Vispero, Salesforce, Mojo Vision, iSenpai, Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Eyedaptic, Verizon 5G, Humanware, APH, and accessiBe. Our production partners: Cohere Studio (design),  Sunol Media Group (video production), Fable (accessibility crowd testing), Clarity Media (speaker prep), Be My Eyes (customer service), 3Play and Vitac  (captioning).

A new $65 million investment led by the growth capital and public investment arm of Sequoia Capital will give Virta Health, a developer of a behavioral-focused diabetes treatment, a valuation of over $1 billion.

Virta’s approach, which uses a combination of approaches to change diet and exercise to reverse the presence of type 2 diabetes and other chronic metabolic conditions, has shown clinical success and attracted 100 health care payers to endorse the company’s treatments.

“We partnered with Virta for their ability to deliver unmatched health improvement and cost savings—two clear differentiators from other offerings on the market,” said William Ashmore, CEO of the State Employees’ Insurance Board of Alabama, in a statement. “Especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s vital that we provide our members the life-changing results Virta is known for delivering, through expert, virtual care delivered right to their home.”

The company said it would use the funding to expand sales and marketing efforts for its services as well as expand its research and development into other non-pharmaceutical therapies for metabolic conditions.

The financing came from Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Caffeinated Capital and brings the company’s total funding to over $230 million and gives it a $1.1 billion valuation, according to a statement.

Alongside Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Caffeinated Capital participated in the round, which brings total funding to more than $230 million and values Virta Health at over $1.1 billion.

Diabetes has long been an attractive condition for startups and has been the first target that companies focused on behavior changes to influence metabolic conditions aim to address. The reason why there are so many diabetes-focused businesses is because of the prevalence of the disease in the U.S. Almost half of adults in the U.S. suffer from obesity, pre-diabetes, or type 2 diabetes and the disease kills thirty people every hour. Diabetes also doubles the risk of death from COVID-19 infections.

Beyond the risks, the costs of treatment are skyrocketing. According to data from the American Diabetes Association released in March 2018, the total costs of treating diagnosed diabetes have risen to $327 billion in 2017 from $245 billion in 2012, when the cost was last examined.

“Given the scope of the metabolic crisis in the U.S. and globally, it cannot be understated how game-changing Virta’s results and care delivery are,” said Patrick Fu, managing partner at Sequoia Capital Global Equities, in a statement. “Virta’s technology-driven, non-pharmaceutical approach has fundamentally changed how diabetes is cared for, and our collective belief in what is possible for population health improvement. This is the future of chronic disease care.”