Year: 2020

Live TV is a staple of bars and restaurants, packing sports fans in during playoffs and convincing people to grab one more beer to finish off that late-night X-Files rerun before heading home. But the commercials are a pain. Taiv turns TV ads into opportunities by sensing when they start and immediately switching to the bar’s own promo content.

It’s one of those ideas that seems incredibly obvious in retrospect. With recorded TV you can sometimes skip ads, but it’s harder when they’re broadcast live. In that case the thing people tend to do is hit mute or change the channel — simple enough, but it seems like a waste and a chore for already busy staff. And of course the patrons don’t like ads, either.

Taiv founder and CEO Noah Palansky ran into this issue himself one day and saw an opportunity.

“I was sitting in a bar, the TV cut to commercial, and it showed an ad for, literally, another bar down the street,” he said, and what’s more it was advertising lower prices than what he was paying. “If they were showing me craft beers or events they had going on I’d be super into it, but instead it made me feel like I was getting ripped off.”

If it’s okay for bar owners to switch channels when ads come on, why not something that did that automatically? And instead of surfing for another game or show, why not just switch to pre-made content? It led him to found the company debuting today at Y Combinator’s (virtual) demo day.

Taiv installs hardware at the restaurant that sits between the live feed and the TV, analyzing the image so that it can instantly understand that a commercial has come on, and switch over to custom content before anyone even notices.

“We really feel strongly that what we’re doing helps businesses a lot,” Palansky said. “All it looks like on their end is they say, we just launched a promotion on chicken wings, or we have these new beers on tap. Kind of like restaurants have table toppers or pamphlets — it lets them spread awareness to people, but instead hurting their atmosphere, it helps. And we make all the content for them, automate it and include it.”

“The first thing that happens is that within a week people call and are like, ‘everyone has noticed this!’ One customer saw a 14 percent revenue increase,” he continued. “They’re a Greek restaurant and they had Greek beers, but no one ordered these. They said, ‘hey, we import these’ on the TV and alcohol sales went up 14 percent.”

The value seems obvious. But the execution puzzled me. Doing computer vision on a live stream and detecting when a commercial comes on is a deceptively difficult task — commercials don’t all look the same, and some look a lot like shows! How could they do it in just a few frames?

My first thought was that of someone who’s been burned too many times by AI startups. I asked whether there was a low-wage worker somewhere being paid to manually switch the content by watching every channel simultaneously.

Palansky laughed — because they had considered it. “Our first idea was that exact idea, we literally thought we could hire someone to sit in a room,” he said. “But we needed to be versatile and work with lots of stations, very local ones. If we only supported major broadcasts we’re limiting what customers could show.”

Co-founders (left to right) Jordan Davis, Noah Palansky, and Avi Stoller holding the Taiv hardware.

My second thought was that there was some kind of “tell” that the system could tap into, a watermark or secret “local affiliates, start rolling ads now” signal. Turns out that used to exist but doesn’t any more, or is wrapped up in strange copyright law.

“There are very strict laws about transmitting signals, even timing signals saying, it’s hockey now, now it’s a commercial. That’s been a surprisingly annoying part of the process,” Palansky said. “We’ve had to go through some really weird design constraints.”

Then I thought they must maintain a database of all known commercials and compare the first few frames to it. Nope. Turns out Taiv recognizes commercials pretty much the way we do.

“The vast majority of our algorithm is the same as how people recognize the difference between a hockey game and a commercial,” he explained. “We pull off a bunch of different heuristics and train models on each one. For example, looking at color balance. If you notice in a 30 second block that the color balance has shifted suddenly, it’s probably different content or a different scene. We use lots of those in combination, all in real time.”

The error rate is low, but even so the cost of those errors is very low — a few frames of a commercial shown, for instance. The system quickly recognizes when it’s made a mistake and will revert within a fraction of a second.

Taiv provides the hardware and setup for free, charging the business based on how many signals are being analyzed. “It’s usually a few hundred bucks a month,” said Palansky, which sounds like a lot until you realize that businesses often pay well over a thousand a month for a commercial cable connection. And the benefits seem pretty tangible.

My last consideration was worry that Palansky would end up with the local TV equivalent of a horse’s head in his bed. Old media folks can be ruthless. But it turns out some are actually into it — the system could be used to provide customized last-mile ad delivery if it’s the network operating it.

Taiv has raised a $500K seed round led by Conexus Venture Capital Fund with participation from Y Combinator and Golden Opportunities. You can get in contact with the company for more details or a demo at Taiv.tv.

Varsity Tutors, the edtech company looking to connect students with tutors live and on-demand, is today releasing a free product called Virtual School Day for students and parents, as schools close across the globe due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Virtual School Day offers more than 20 hours of live, online classes across a variety of core subjects for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Each class is taught by one of Varsity Tutors’ expert tutors, who has experience both teaching the subject matter but also giving instruction virtually.

Core classes include K-12 math (from arithmetic to calculus), reading, literature, writing and K-12 science (biology, chemistry, physics), as well as a handful of other sessions. For example, Virtual School Day offers study hall sessions with expert tutors in math, science and English for students who want to focus on certain subjects.

Virtual School Day will also have special sessions for each age group, including The Story of Your Favorite Fairy Tales and Secrets of Staying Healthy for elementary students, The Science of Pandemics and Video Game Sound Design for middle schoolers, and History of the National Parks and Careers in Science for high schoolers.

Over the past year, Varsity Tutors has leaned hard into online classes. The company acquired Veritas Prep in January 2019 to expand further into online classes. Since launch, Varsity Tutors had been focused on one-to-one tutoring sessions, originally in person and, eventually, on-demand online through live video chat.

The company developed an app and added whiteboard functionality, doc editing and other tools to its tutoring suite.

With more than $100 million in funding, Varsity Tutors has been able to expand its product suite beyond tutoring to live, online courses as well as free test prep courses for SAT and ACT.

Here’s what Varsity Tutors Chief Academic Officer, Brian Galvin, had to say about Virtual School Day in a prepared statement:

The massive number of school closures presents a daunting challenge for both students and parents. While some schools are offering online education, most are sending kids home with minimal self-guided homework or no school resources at all. Parents are rightly worried about their students sliding academically, and having their kid’s time consumed by video games or other empty calorie entertainment. By providing free, high quality resources that enable students to maintain academic momentum during this difficult time, we hope to remove a key source of stress for families worldwide.

All Virtual School Day classes are in English and available internationally. Parents interested in checking it out can learn more at this webinar on Tuesday, March 17th at 8pm EDT.

We need to go hands-off in the age of coronavirus. That means touching fewer doors, elevators, and sign-in iPads. But once a building is using phone-based identity for security, there’s opportunities to speed up access to WIFI networks and printers, or personalize conference rooms and video call set-ups. Keyless office entry startup Proxy wants to deliver all of this while keeping your phone in your pocket.

“The door is just a starting point” Proxy co-founder and CEO Denis Mars tells me. “We’re . . . empowering a movement to take back control of our privacy, our sense of self, our humanity, our individuality.”

With the contagion concerns and security risks of people rubbing dirty, cloneable, stealable key cards against their office doors, investors see big potential in Proxy. Today it’s announcing here a $42 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from former funders Kleiner Perkins and Y Combinator plus new additions Silicon Valley Bank and West Ventures.

The raise brings Proxy to $58.8 million in funding so it can staff up at offices across the world and speed up deployments of its door sensor hardware and access control software. “We’re spread thin” says Mars. “Part of this funding is to try to grow up as quickly as possible and not grow for growth sake. We’re making sure we’re secure, meeting all the privacy requirements.”

How does Proxy work? Employers get their staff to install an app that knows their identity within the company, including when and where they’re allowed entry. Buildings install Proxy’s signal readers, which can either integrate with existing access control software or the startup’s own management dashboard.

Employees can then open doors, elevators, turnstiles, and garages with a Bluetooth low-energy signal without having to even take their phone out. Bosses can also opt to require a facial scan or fingerprint or a wave of the phone near the sensor. Existing keycards and fobs still work with Proxy’s Pro readers. Proxy costs about $300 to $350 per reader, plus installation and a $30 per month per reader subscription to its management software.

Now the company is expanding access to devices once you’re already in the building thanks to its SDK and APIs. Wifi router-makers are starting to pre-provision their hardware to automatically connect the phones of employees or temporarily allow registered guests with Proxy installed — no need for passwords written on whiteboards. Its new Nano sensors can also be hooked up to printers and vending machines to verify access or charge expense accounts. And food delivery companies can add the Proxy SDK so couriers can be granted the momentary ability to open doors when they arrive with lunch.

Rather than just indiscriminately beaming your identity out into the world, Proxy uses tokenized credentials so only its sensors know who you are. Users have to approve of new networks’ ability to read their tokens, Proxy has SOC-2 security audit certification, and complies with GDPR. “We feel very strongly about where the biometrics are stored . . . they should stay on your phone” says Mars.

Yet despite integrating with the technology for two-factor entry unlocks, Mars says “We’re not big fans of facial recognition. You don’t want every random company having your face in their database. The face becomes the password you were supposed to change every 30 days.”

Keeping your data and identity safe as we see an explosion of Internet Of Things devices was actually the impetus for starting Proxy. Mars had sold his teleconferencing startup Bitplay to Jive Software where he met his eventually co-founder Simon Ratner, who’d joined after his video annotation startup  Omnisio was acquired by YouTube. Mars was frustrated about every IoT lightbulb and appliance wanting him to download an app, set up a profile, and give it his data.

The duo founded Proxy in 2013 as a universal identity signal. Today it has over 60 customers. While other apps want you to constantly open them, Proxy’s purpose is to work silently in the background and make people more productive. “We believe the most important technologies in the world don’t seek your attention. They work for you, they empower you, and they get out of the way so you can focus your attention on what matters most — living your life.”

Now Proxy could actually help save lives. “The nature of our product is contactless interactions in commercial buildings and workplaces so there’s a bit of an unintended benefit that helps prevent the spread of the virus” Mars explains. “We have seen an uptick in customers starting to set doors and other experiences in longer-range hands-free mode so that users can walk up to an automated door and not have to touch the handles or badge/reader every time.”

The big challenge facing Proxy is maintaining security and dependability since it’s a mission-critical business. A bug or outage could potentially lock employees out of their workplace (when they eventually return from quarantine). It will have to keep hackers out of employee files. Proxy needs to stay ahead of access control incumbents like ADT and Honeywell as well as smaller direct competitors like $10 million-funded Nexkey and $28 million-funded Openpath.

Luckily, Proxy has found a powerful growth flywheel. First an office in a big building gets set up, then they convince the real estate manager to equip the lobby’s turnstiles and elevators with Proxy. Other tenants in the building start to use it, so they buy Proxy for their office. Then they get their offices in other cities on board…starting the flywheel again. That’s why Proxy is doubling down on sales to commercial real estate owners.

The question is when Proxy will start knocking on consumers’ doors. While leveling up into the enterprise access control software business might be tough for home smartlock companies like August, Proxy could go down market if it built more physical lock hardware. Perhaps we’ll start to get smart homes that know who’s home, and stop having to carry pointy metal sticks in our pockets.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a number of additional measures being taken at a federal level in Canada to prevent further spread of coronavirus within the country. The most extreme is that Canada is closing its borders to non-citizens and anyone not holding permanent residence status, with the exception of U.S. citizens, though this won’t apply to commercial freight and cargo transportation necessary for doing business.

In addition to this border closure, all travellers, including Canadian citizens, who are exhibiting symptoms will be denied access when boarding flights, Trudeau said during a press conference on Monday.

“Let me be clear, if you’re abroad, you should come home. If you’ve just arrived, you must self-isolate for 14 days,” he said to close the conference, and added that even Canadians at home without symptoms should attempt to isolate and stay away from others as much as possible.

Trudeau was asked repeatedly what reasoning the Canadian government had for excluding U.S. citizens from this broad ban, especially given the ramp in cases in the country. He failed to really provide a substantive answer to the question, repeating often that the country’s strategy was based on what’s best for ensuring the health of its citizens at any given point, and that the strategy was evolving with new measures possibly being introduced frequently.

He did say that part of the reasoning for keeping the borders open to Americans was the integrated nature of the countries’ two economies, and seemed to indicate that there was still a possibility of an extension of the ban to U.S. citizens in future. “We’re not closing the door to any measure, everything is on the table,” he said.

The restrictions also don’t cover airline crew, as well as individuals working in a commercial capacity like truck drivers. Trudeau also announced that federal financial support would be available to Canadians looking to make it home from abroad, or to ensure their safety abroad if they’re not able to return because they’re exhibiting symptoms or otherwise unable to travel because of international border closures.

The World Health Organization (WHO) held a briefing today for media to update them on the current status of the global pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and called out worldwide efforts on what the agency’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom described as not an “urgent enough”  response in terms of fielding a truly comprehensive approach.

In prepared remarks to kick-off the media Q&A, Adhanom said that while to date we have “seen a rapid escalation in social distancing measures, like closing schools and cancelling spring events,” there still hasn’t been enough done on a global level in terms of “testing, isolation and contact tracing,” which he said formed the “backbone of the response.”

“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded,” Adhnom said. “And we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected. We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test. Test every suspected case. If they test positive, isolate them and find out who they have been in close contact with up to 2 days before they developed symptoms, and test those people too.”

The agency noted that it has shipped a total of 1.5 million tests to 120 countries thus far. The U.S. in particular has lagged behind its global peers when it comes to testing, with the country refusing the WHO tests offered and opting instead to develop its own CDC-developed tests, whose initial rollout met with mirrors. Based on data from last week, the U.S., even now that private lab tests are coming online to attempt to supplement the CDC-issued ones, the country is still far behind Japan, the UK, Italy, China, South Korea and many others when it comes to testing on a per capita basis compared to its population.

Adhanom went on to advise that all confirmed cases be isolated once identified, in health facilities if possible, but in either makeshift facilities set up for the purpose if that’s not an option, or for those with very mild symptoms, at home. He clarified this meant that care-givers treating people at home should wear a medical mask when they occupy shared space, and that the patient should both sleep separately and use a different bathroom.

“Once again, our key message is: test, test, test,” Adhanom said. “This is a serious disease. Although the evidence we have suggests that those over 60 are at highest risk, young people, including children, have died.”

He also pointed out that while we’re now seeing epidemics even in developed countries with advanced health care systems and institutions in place, facing significant challenges, there’s an even greater pending global threat as the pandemic spreads to low-income nations. Adhanom said that limiting impact among those vulnerable populations requires “every country and every individual to do everything they can to stop transmission.”

During the Q&A, Adhanom went further, noting that while the immediate threat still needs to be addressed, and addressed promptly, the COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed fundamental issues with our global approach to pandemic preparedness that we’ll need to address longer-term.

“Globally we have a very, very serious weakness in terms of preparedness,” he said. “While doing our best to suppress this pandemic, at the same time we have to think about planning for the future, for the long-term. Improving our preparedness, making sure that the world is better prepared.”

“It’s time to commit to invest in our weaknesses, and minimize our risk as a global community,” Adhanom continued. “No country can develop or strengthen its system and protect itself from outbreaks, epidemics or pandemics. The world is more intertwined than ever before – globalization cannot be reversed […] we need to make sure that we act in unison to build the global preparedness and the global resistance.”

WHO also reiterated and clarified the best actions that individuals can take to help contribute to the global effort to combat the spread of the virus. The organization’s COVID-19 Technical Lead Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infection disease epidemiologist, acknowledged that people are feeling afraid, and stressed the importance of hand-washing as one action that everyone can take to make a difference.

“Being scared is normal, what we need to do is channel that energy into something positive, and making sure that you know what you can do to protect yourself,” she said. What we do know that works in terms of your hands, and in terms of what you need to do, is washing your hands. We say this all the time. And it may not be the most exciting thing, but it’s the most important thing that you can do to protect yourselves.”

“Every single person who is washing their hands is helping themselves and others,” she continued, noting that everyone should “wash [their] hands as much as they possibly can.”

GitHub, the developer repository owned by Microsoft, made a little deal of its own this morning when it bought JavaScript packaging vendor npm for an undisclosed amount.

As GitHub CEO Nate Friedman wrote in a blog post announcing the deal, npm is a big deal in the JavaScript community. The company is the commercial entity behind the Node package manager, the npm Registry and npm CLI.

“npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month,” Friedman wrote.

As though anticipating developer angst about the change in ownership, Friedman promised that users would not notice a difference. “For the millions of developers who use the public npm registry every day, npm will always be available and always be free,” Friedman wrote.

He also promised to update the infrastructure behind the tool, improve the experience and keep up communication with the npm community. What’s more, he said the company would incorporate the npm tech into the GitHub platform.

“Looking further ahead, we’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it,” he wrote.

But it’s not just the free version, of course. There is a core group of paying customers too, and Friedman indicated GitHub would continue to support them.

He also stated that later this year when the registry is integrated more fully into the GitHub platform, paying customers would be able to convert their private npm packages to GitHub packages.

npm was founded in 2014, and raised almost $19 million on a $48 million post valuation, according to Pitchbook data.

Mattermost is pretty open about what it is: an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Slack . 

The team didn’t originally set out to build a messaging tool at all; they wanted to build video games. A few years and one huge pivot later, they’re powering messaging and collaboration for companies like Samsung, Daimler, SAP and Cigna — and they got there without ever actually having an office. All of Mattermost’s 100+ employees have been fully remote from the beginning.

I hopped on a chat with Mattermost CEO and co-founder Ian Tien to talk about how they decided to go full-remote before it was really a thing, what it takes to make a remote team successful and his hopes for the growing number of remote companies. Here’s our chat, edited lightly for brevity and clarity.

TechCrunch: Tell me a bit about Mattermost’s origin story. You didn’t originally set out to build a communication platform, right?

Ian Tien: Yeah! So, when we started incorporating the company, we were doing video games — we were doing an HTML5 game engine.

That’s what we were in Y Combinator as. We were SpinPunch, YC Summer ’12. Wade from Zapier was a batch mate, and it was like the batch that broke YC. It was like 84 companies. It was really big, but it had really great outcomes, that batch. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, we had Instacart, we had Lever, and Clever, and Rainforest and Boosted Boards. It was a great batch. 

We ran with the HTML5 video game business for a few years. Things weren’t, you know, growing tremendously, and we ended up sort of changing to open-source enterprise software.

Edtech has been a hot category for investors for some time. Surging demand for better classes globally from new entrants to the knowledge economy has pushed revenues to new highs. Now, coupled with the rapid propagation of coronavirus forcing dozens of colleges and universities to shut down and move entirely online, the sector is even further in the limelight.

New York-based Teachable rode that wave since its founding in 2013 as Fedora, creating a marketplace for teachers to sell their online courses and build up their own classroom businesses. I covered the startup’s $2 million seed round way back in 2015, and TechCrunch also covered the company’s $4 million series A in 2018.

Now, I get to cover the company’s acquisition by Amsterdam-headquartered Hotmart, a global platform for online courses with deep penetration in the Brazil and global Portuguese and Spanish markets. Sources with knowledge of the transaction said that the acquisition was for around a quarter-of-a-billion dollars, which, if roughly true, would be well above Teachable’s last disclosed valuation of $134 million in 2018.

Teachable has seen prodigious GMV growth on its platform since launch. In total, CEO and founder Ankur Nagpal told me that the platform has driven half a billion in earnings for teachers on its platform, with nearly half of that sum coming in the past year.

That growth has also driven revenues to the bottom line. Unlike some online education marketplaces, Teachable is a SaaS revenue business, and teachers pay a monthly or annual subscription to sell and manage their classrooms (unless they are on the company’s “Basic” plan, in which a 5% revenue fee is also taken). Currently, its “Professional” plan is priced at $99 per month or $948 ($79/month) if billed annually, which includes unlimited students and five admin user accounts.

Nagpal said that the company hit $21 million in revenue in 2019, and is currently on a $25 million run rate, compared to $14 million in the prior year. The company is not profitable, but its losses were “under $2 million” according to him. The company states that over 20,000 students are taught every day across the classrooms on Teachable.

A photo of Teachable’s team. Photo via Teachable.

Explaining the rationale behind selling to Hotmart, Nagpal said that he liked the fact that Hotmart and Teachable have similar missions but very divergent markets, with Teachable focused on the English-language market and Hotmart proving competitive in the Portuguese and Spanish markets. “Synergistically, it just made a ton of sense … we instantly become one of the most valuable online education companies.”

Hotmart is a private company that’s approaching a decade in operation. The company recently received an infusion of cash from Singapore’s GIC and General Atlantic in disclosures last year. Teachable is a smaller company than its new parent, with offices in New York and Durham, North Carolina, but together, the combination of platforms, GMV, and revenues will likely make it a major competitor in the online course space.

Today, that market includes companies like Udemy, which has raised $223 million in venture capital since its founding a decade ago, and Pluralsight, which went public in 2018 on Nasdaq after raising $192 million in VC and is currently valued at approximately $1.40 billion (experiencing the same public market headwinds as every other company these days). Those VC fundraise numbers are from Crunchbase.

Teachable has never raised that level of VC dollars, which makes its exit look much more financially favorable than is typical for edtech companies. Crunchbase has a total of $12.5 million in VC across a couple of rounds, with lead investor Accomplice being one of the presumed major winners in the acquisition, along with Naval Ravikant and Learn Capital. Most of these investors will cash out, except with Accomplice taking a stake in Hotmart to continue its journey with Teachable.

In the other direction, Nagpal himself has also invested as part of Accomplice’s Spearhead fund, in which founders are given small checkbooks to seed invest in promising startups.

Teachable is not changing its branding, mission, or strategy, but hopes to use the leverage from a larger parent company to expand into more international markets and to cross-promote each other’s products. Nagpal will stay on as CEO of Teachable, reporting to the CEO and co-founder of Hotmart, João Pedro Resende.

Last night, slightly ahead of schedule, Verily launched its much-discussed coronavirus screening site. On the site, which is only available in parts of the Bay Area, users can describe their symptoms and Verily will then direct them to a testing site if necessary. After only a few hours online, though, the site has already run out of appointments.

“Appointments will continue to expand through this program as we scale capacity in the near future. Please check back later,” the site now says, but only after you’ve gone through most of the questionnaire.

It’s obviously not Verily’s fault that the state’s testing sites are at capacity and if anything, this proves the need for a service like this on a national scale.

Originally, in a press conference on Friday, President Trump said a site Google was working on was going to be the core feature of a national testing strategy. That story changed quite a bit over the weekend as Google and Verily clarified their efforts and it became clear that the White House overpromised, but Verily then launched its pilot site ahead of schedule on Sunday night.

We have asked Verily for more information and will update this post once we hear more.